ESA / Hubble & NASA, L. KelseyDay 3 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Hubble Space Telescope brings us this nearly edge-on view of the lenticular galaxy NGC 4753. Lenticular galaxies have an elliptical shape and ill-defined spiral arms. NGC 4753 sits about 60 million light-years from Earth, and is believed to have merged with a nearby dwarf galaxy about 1.3 billion years ago, creating the distinctive wavy dust lanes around its nucleus.See the full advent calendar here, as a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.

Leading the Department of Health and Human Services seems, at first glance, like a dream job for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quite possibly America’s most infamous anti-vaxxer. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the agencies that play a central role in researching, reviewing, and recommending vaccines. But promoting his own vaccination views will likely be a long push for subtle changes—rulings that Americans may get vaccinated, rather than should—and he’s said, at least, that he’s not aiming to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” Based on his recent public statements, he appears much more interested in cutting down on America’s consumption of seed oils, and frozen school-lunch pizza. In nominating Kennedy to lead the health department, Trump is kneecapping one of the few bipartisan issues he campaigned on this election: improving the diet, and overall health, of Americans. If Trump truly wanted RFK Jr. to fulfill those parts of their pledge to “Make America healthy again,” he should have picked a different job for the would-be health secretary.Since endorsing Donald Trump for president, Kennedy has pledged that he will “get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” argued that the government must stop subsidizing the crops that make seed oils, and urged Trump to stop allowing people to buy soda with federal food benefits. The “Make America healthy again” agenda also advocates for more comprehensive pesticide regulation, and for regenerative agriculture, which aims to improve soil biodiversity and limit chemical inputs. Kennedy won’t be able to do any of this as the head of the federal health department.Trump has already signaled that the EPA, which has the power to crack down on pesticides, is off-limits, because RJK Jr. “doesn't like oil.” But Kennedy could have been an era-defining leader of the USDA, which regulates school lunches, doles out subsidies for oilseed crops, and sets rules for public-assistance programs including SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Before being nominated for HHS, RFK Jr. even posted an Instagram video filmed outside the Department of Agriculture, promising in the caption to enact the MAHA agenda “when @realDonaldTrump gets me inside the USDA.”At HHS, he’ll still have some influence over his favorite food-related issues, such as banning certain food additives. He’ll also have direct impact on the next round of federal dietary guidelines, which are due to be released in 2025. But HHS’s powers to change Americans’ food intake are either indirect or slow.To remove a food ingredient as health secretary, for instance, Kennedy would have to pressure the FDA to issue ingredient bans. Because Kennedy would oversee the agency, Marty Makary, Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner, would have to at least entertain that request, but even so, the agency would likely need years to pull any ingredient off shelves. Banning an ingredient requires significant science and legal justification. Earlier this year it banned brominated vegetable oil, a chemical added to certain sodas that has been banned in Europe and the United Kingdom for years. Right now, the agency relies on just a few people to do this kind of work. (The staff reviewing the safety of food additives is small enough that the head of the FDA’s food center recently boasted that he was able to add five full-time staffers.) Speeding up the office’s work—which includes policing new additives that food companies are regularly launching—would require more funding and cut against Trump’s pledge to limit government spending.But the negative effect of the food additives that Kennedy seems most worried about is felt by only a small subset of eaters. He has spoken, for instance, about a yellow dye known as tartrazine. He has claimed that the dye is tied to asthma, but a 2001 meta-analysis found that avoiding tartrazine “may not benefit most patients, except those very few individuals with proven sensitivity.” (Many of Kennedy’s other claims about the dye’s harms are highly debated among toxicology experts.) By contrast, a program to restrict soda in SNAP, as Kennedy has proposed, might require its own bureaucratic finagling at USDA, but could affect a significant portion of the 42 million people who use the program. Changes to school lunch, similarly, would affect some 28 million young people.  Putting RFK Jr. at HHS also doesn’t totally make sense as a political decision. Confirmation fights are less contentious when the nominee has bipartisan bona fides; few Democrats support most of Kennedy’s health-care views, and his historically liberal views on abortion could cost him some Republican votes. But plenty of liberals like his take on food and agriculture. As HHS secretary, RFK Jr. is also likely to be dragged into the politics of Trump’s mass-deportation plan, an issue he’s largely steered clear of, because Health and Human Services is in charge of caring for unaccompanied children who are apprehended for being in the United States illegally. Trump’s last HHS secretary, Alex Azar, quickly became what Politico called the “public explainer and punching bag for the migrant crisis.” While Azar was getting tongue-lashed by Congress in 2018, RFK Jr. was tweeting that the policy amounted to immigration officials “forcing beleaguered parents to make Sophie’s Choice at America’s borders.” Trump’s USDA secretary will have to navigate calls from the farm industry to spare agricultural laborers from the administration’s mass-deportation plan, but as health secretary, Kennedy will likely have to be the face of any policy detaining migrant children, or openly criticize his boss.The person Trump did pick to lead the Department of Agriculture—America First Policy Institute CEO Brooke Rollins—has much less obvious interest in its purview than Kennedy does. Beyond an undergraduate degree in agricultural development, she doesn’t have any direct agricultural experience that prepares her for the job, and her current organization’s related policy work seems focused on concern over U.S. agricultural land being purchased by China.Trump’s choice to nominate RFK Jr. for HHS seemed like a last-minute decision. After all, in late October, a co-chair of the Trump transition team promised that Kennedy would not be picked to lead the department, only for Trump to name him to that position two weeks later. Maybe it just resonated as a sound-bite to have the head of the “Make America healthy again” movement lead the health department. Maybe Trump wanted to stash RFK Jr. at an agency where he can’t actually do much harm to the big food companies that have historically allied with the Republican Party. Either way, the result is that RFK Jr.’s desires to improve our food supply—the parts of his agenda that have the most bipartisan appeal—will be stymied at HHS. Trump put Kennedy in the position where he will both face the most political friction and be least effective. RFK Jr. might try to nudge or influence Rollins to his way of seeing things, but the health secretary demanding that the agriculture secretary change farm and food policy is the equivalent of the governor of California urging the governor of Texas to change that state’s immigration policy. It just won’t happen.

Abortion policy in America is at a stalemate. Republicans will take control of Congress in January, ready to block any national protections—but with a slim majority, making a national ban unlikely. At the state level, pro-choice advocates have focused for the past two years on ballot measures to protect abortion rights. Most of those measures have passed; now there are only two states left that have severe restrictions, allow constitutional amendments, and haven’t already failed to pass constitutional protections.Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, U.S. abortion rates have held steady, or even risen. That’s in part because tens of thousands of women in states with extensive restrictions have ordered the two-pill medication-abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol, by mail. Many thousands more have sought out procedural abortions in states with more lenient rules, and that number may soon begin to rise more steeply. The pills don’t work in every scenario, many women who use them to circumvent restrictions fear being prosecuted, and a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of three conservative states seeks to both outlaw mifepristone for minors and prevent it from being mailed. Project 2025, a blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term created by people with close ties to his incoming administration, outlines a plan to have the FDA pull mifepristone from the market. (Trump himself has flip-flopped repeatedly on whether he might try curbing access to the pill.)Further restrictions on abortion pills could push more women to cross state lines to receive an abortion. That travel can cost thousands of dollars. Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a network of so-called practical-support groups has played a growing role booking and funding abortion-related travel. Their work is quieter than the fights in courts and legislatures, but perhaps as crucial to determining the future of abortion in America. As options for major policy changes winnow, this approach is likely to play an even more important role in maintaining access to abortion in the U.S.—and to attract more opposition. Abortion care, like virtually all medical treatment in America, has always been geographically fractured, with people in poor and rural areas traveling farther to reach services. A study published last month found that people who travel out of state for an abortion are more likely to face expenses that threaten their ability to pay for basic needs. The tighter restrictions get, and the more states put them in place, the greater the distance the average patient must cross, and the greater the average cost of doing so. Practical-support organizations might provide gas money, arrange airport pickups and drop-offs, or even fund the purchase of a winter coat if the travel involves a colder climate. Nancy Davis, a Louisiana resident, sought help from a group called the Brigid Alliance in 2022 when an ultrasound revealed at about 10 weeks that her fetus had acrania, a rare and fatal condition in which the skull does not fully form. Her doctor recommended ending her pregnancy, but abortion had just been banned in Louisiana, so Davis booked an appointment in New York. Brigid took care of the cost of plane tickets, a hotel, and food for Davis and her fiancé, as well as funding child care for her three kids at home. Megan Kovacs, a volunteer and board member with the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, told me that this level of logistical support is becoming more and more necessary.Until recently, practical-support organizations such as the Northwest Abortion Access Fund existed mainly to help, say, someone in rural eastern Oregon travel a few hours to a clinic in Boise, Idaho. But when Dobbs overturned Roe in 2022, aid organizations’ work became more in demand, more expensive, and more complicated, Marisa Falcon, the executive director of a hub for practical-support groups called Apiary, told me. A patient from Arkansas who has scheduled a procedure in Chicago, for example, might rely on a group in Illinois to book flights and hotels and another in Arkansas to drive them to the airport. Because of new restrictions in Idaho, the Northwest Abortion Access Fund spends more money sending patients from eastern Oregon to farther-away urban areas like Portland, as well as helping patients in Idaho leave the state. According to data that Kovacs shared with me, the organization spent an average of $585 on things like hotels and gas money per client in the two years before Dobbs; since Dobbs, the average is nearly $875. The number of clients seeking practical support has almost tripled.[Read: There’s no coming back from Dobbs]Support groups also told me that costs are rising because, as the number of clinics dwindles, appointment waiting lists are getting longer, so people wind up having abortions further into pregnancy. The longer a person waits to end their pregnancy, the more complicated and expensive abortion becomes; patients also take longer to recover. “What used to be a one-day activity is now a four-day activity where people need to leave their kids behind,” Falcon said. “Not only are the logistics more complicated, but it costs significantly more.”In the Dobbs decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that U.S. citizens have a “constitutional right to interstate travel,” including for abortions. But abortion opponents are nonetheless trying to prevent people from crossing state lines for care that they see as a threat to unborn life. In Alabama, for example, Attorney General Steve Marshall has said helping someone travel for an abortion is akin to a “criminal conspiracy.” Last year, Idaho outlawed helping a minor travel out of state for an abortion without parental permission. Tennessee passed a copycat law this year. So far both of these efforts have faced legal challenges, and similar bills introduced in other states have failed to advance. Texas has taken a different approach: Some local laws allow residents to sue anyone who assists a woman in traveling through their city or county to get an abortion in another state. At least one Texas man has already taken legal action against his former girlfriend, expressing an intent to file a wrongful-death suit against anyone who assisted her in allegedly pursuing an abortion out of state.Even if none of these legal efforts succeed, abortion opponents can try to limit the work of practical-support groups by restricting their funding. The organization representatives I spoke with said that the pace of their funding has not kept up with demand for their services. Some smaller groups simply don’t have enough money to meet demand. If abortion is further restricted—if, for example, mifepristone’s FDA approval is revoked, or if the lawsuit challenging it succeeds—demand for out-of-state travel will skyrocket again.[Read: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]Abortion support services rely mostly on donations, but some also receive funding from state or local governments. That government money has already become a target for anti-abortion groups seeking to curtail abortion travel. In 2023, for example, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion; in response, a state legislator introduced a bill that would withhold state funding from cities and counties that give money to practical-support groups. Last month, ballot measures protecting abortion rights passed in seven states, and legislators in some of them may attempt to repeat the Ohio strategy. Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for the anti-abortion group Students for Life Action, told me that the group opposes using any taxpayer funding for abortion travel and has already asked that Trump restrict the military’s funding of travel for service members seeking abortions.As travel plays a larger role in how Americans access abortions, it will also inevitably become a bigger target for abortion opponents. Practical-support groups told me that in recent years, abortion-rights advocates have focused on funding campaigns to pass legislation, leaving practical support groups short of the money necessary to serve a growing number of would-be travelers. People still need to travel or obtain medication to end their pregnancy in huge swaths of the country—even in places where abortion rights have notched recent victories. In Missouri, for example, a November ballot initiative made abortion legal, but a host of other laws could mean a long wait before abortions are widely available there. “Without abortion support organizations, people just won’t access abortion,” Serra Sippel, the executive director of the Brigid Alliance, told me. If advocates could wave a magic wand and reinstitute Roe tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a difference if people can’t get to a clinic—many of which no longer exist post-Dobbs. The most consequential fights, for now, may be the practical ones, even if they’re just about some gas money, a babysitter, and a winter coat.

Rebel forces swept into Aleppo on Saturday, capturing the city center in a lightning three-day offensive that seemed to show the slackening of Moscow’s grip on Syria. The symbolism was impossible to ignore: The Syrian regime’s brutal reconquest of that very city in 2016 had demonstrated Russia’s military effectiveness. Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preoccupied with Ukraine, and Aleppo has slipped from regime control.But Russia’s commitment to Syria has not actually wavered, and Russia is not really distracted. The advance of Syria’s rebels, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), reflects the degradation not of Russian attention but of the multinational ground forces supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Russia is not only not contemplating withdrawing from Syria—it looks poised to double down on its investment there, even if it has to rely on Iranian-backed forces and the cooperation of regional powers to do so.Syria is important to Moscow because intervening there in 2015 allowed Putin to reverse the narrative of Russian decline that had taken hold since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia would no longer be what then-President Barack Obama dismissed as a declining “regional power”—it was to be a decisive great-power patron of the Assad regime, and as such, it would rewrite the playbook of outside intervention in the Middle East. American-led interventions, such as the invasion of Iraq and the NATO campaign in Libya, shattered states and bred chaos. Russia would have the opposite effect, preserving Syrian sovereignty and regional order.[Graeme Wood: The fall of Aleppo was oddly familiar]To understand Russia’s military position in Syria, consider that when Moscow first intervened there, in September 2015, it did so with a surprisingly light footprint and a long-term plan to modernize and strengthen the Syrian military. Moscow deployed just 2,500 to 4,500 personnel to Syria at any given time, focusing on air power, air defenses, and special forces, while relying on Iran and its proxies to supply ground forces. Operating from Khmeimim Air Base, Russian tactical aviation supported ground operations. Long-range bombers in Russia, along with cruise missiles on Russian warships in the Mediterranean, targeted positions deep inside Syria. Moscow also contributed advanced air-defense systems including S-400s, S-300s, and Pantsirs, along with electronic-warfare capabilities.Moscow sent some special-operations units, military police, advisers, and artillery teams to Syria. But to retake territory from the rebels, it relied almost entirely on a network of Iranian-backed forces, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, the Afghan Fatemiyoun, the Pakistani Zeinabiyoun, and Hezbollah. Ultimately, the Kremlin sought to build the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) into a professional fighting force capable of independently securing Assad’s rule, and so it poured resources into modernizing the SAA’s command structures, improving battlefield coordination, and equipping units with advanced Russian weaponry.Russia’s approach appeared to be sustainable—even in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and adjusted its military presence in Syria accordingly. Moscow redeployed some aircraft and an S-300 air-defense system to Ukraine, but Khmeimim Air Base remained highly functional. More significant, the Kremlin drew down its minimal presence on the ground, relying more heavily than before on Iranian-backed forces, to whom it transferred some of its command posts.The invasion of Ukraine also changed Moscow’s Middle East posture in another way. Since getting involved in Syria, Moscow had delicately balanced the claims of Iran and Israel. In 2018, it agreed to hold Iranian forces about 50 miles off from the Golan Heights. The invasion of Ukraine began to shift this equilibrium, as Moscow’s reliance on Iranian drones for that war pushed it closer to Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance.”None of this seemed like a major problem for Russia until Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Then, as the conflict in Gaza spilled into the surrounding region, Israel escalated from targeting weapons depots in Syria to systematically eliminating high-value Iranian and Hezbollah assets and personnel there. Russia could no longer remain neutral regarding Israeli strikes while simultaneously deepening its reliance on Iranian-backed ground forces. The situation worsened as Israel’s Lebanon offensive degraded Hezbollah, which was, after all, one of the forces Moscow relied on to sustain the status quo in Syria.The gaps in Moscow’s strategy have now become apparent. When HTS first struck Aleppo, the speed and surprise of the advance left Moscow little time to coordinate with ground forces or organize effective air support at the scale needed to counter such a major offensive. And the collapse of regime defenses revealed that Russia’s long-term strategy to professionalize Assad’s military had failed: At the Kuweires air base, Syrian forces surrendered without resisting. They abandoned valuable assets, including helicopters, aircraft, and advanced air-defense systems.These setbacks will not drive Russia out of Syria, however. The Kremlin has too much at stake. It has already leveraged its Syrian intervention to rebuild its Middle Eastern influence, positioning itself as an essential mediator among Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, the United States, and Israel. Moscow has also secured lucrative economic contracts for the reconstruction of Syria.Given the stakes, Moscow will be compelled to adapt rather than withdraw. It will likely seek to strengthen military cooperation with Iran, including by finding a role for Iraqi militias and recruits in Syria. Reports indicate that this is already happening. Iran has also been recruiting on Telegram channels to replenish its Syrian brigades. These reinforcements may help offset Hezbollah’s losses, but they are unlikely to be as effective as the Russian- and Iranian-led campaign that carried out the Aleppo offensive in 2016.Russia will probably also try to negotiate with Turkey, which backs some of the rebel groups. Since Saturday, Moscow has uncharacteristically avoided criticizing Turkey over the rebels’ activities. This restraint suggests that Russia is preparing a diplomatic initiative—perhaps one that allows Russia to maintain its presence in some parts of Syria while accommodating Turkish interests in the northwest.Russia wouldn’t be seeking such an arrangement if it weren’t militarily weakened. Not only have Iranian proxy forces lost muscle; Syrian opposition forces have gained it. They are much better equipped and coordinated than they were in 2015. If they were to continue to Homs from their current position in Hama, they would effectively sever the Russian bases at Latakia and Tartus from Moscow’s modest deployments elsewhere in Syria.As consuming as the war in Ukraine has been for Russia, the Kremlin does not see it as superseding its Middle East ambitions. That’s because Syria is not just a military outpost. It is a cornerstone of Russia’s claim to great-power status, a theater where it can demonstrate its diplomatic reach and its counternarrative to Western interventionism. This explains why Russia continues to invest in Syria even as it fights a costly war in Ukraine. Moscow may adjust its tactics, but abandoning Syria would mean surrendering something far more precious than territory: Russia’s hard-won position as an indispensable power broker in the Middle East.

After Donald Trump’s reelection, a lot of women were angry: at the result, at what Trump’s return to office could mean for their lives, and at the many people who voted for him—especially the men. In the ensuing days, some of these women began suggesting, half-jokingly or in total earnest, a radical kind of recourse: a sex strike.Many of them cited South Korea’s 4B movement, in which women responding to what they describe as a damaging patriarchal culture have renounced not only sex with men but also dating, marriage, and childbirth. The idea of an American version drew a good deal of media attention—though not positive attention, for the most part. (“4B Is Not the Winning Strategy to Resist the Patriarchy People Think It Is,” a Time headline read.) It’s true that a 4B-style movement might never take off in the United States. For starters, it’s unclear what such a movement’s aim would be, or how it would effect political change here. (South Korea’s movement hasn’t exactly taken off either.) But a big shift is happening among straight American men and women—a parting of ways that began long before the election. Many people, perhaps women most of all, have been quietly turning away from heterosexual partnership.As a reporter covering modern dating, I’ve spoken with a lot of men and women who have reluctantly given up the search for love. I believe that people can have rich, fulfilling lives with or without partners; I also know that courtship has never been easy. But research supports the idea that, in recent years, the United States has seen a particularly pronounced crisis of faith in romance. The Pew Research Center, in an analysis of census data, found that as of 2019, 38 percent of adults were unpartnered—that is, not married or living with a partner—compared with 29 percent in 1990. In a survey Pew conducted that same year, half of single adults said they were not seeking dates. When Pew divided that result by gender, it found that 61 percent of single men said they were looking to date or find a relationship while only 38 percent of single women said the same.In other words, straight partnerships seem to be going out not with a 4B-style bang but with a whimper. And however subtle the shift might seem, it has huge implications for men and women: how they treat each other, whether they’re willing to trust each other, and how they’ll build their futures—together or apart.Years ago, the business journalist Jon Birger was working at Fortune when he noticed a trend. The men he knew seemed to have no trouble dating; they were all either coupled up or content being bachelors. His female friends and colleagues, meanwhile, “seemed to have everything going for them” but couldn’t find partners, he told me. They shared horror stories about their dates that he could hardly believe. He wanted to know what was going on—so he went looking for answers.That search resulted in his 2015 book, Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. His main takeaway was that college-educated women were competing for a shrinking number of similarly educated men, and that given this “man deficit,” they were facing a demoralizing dating scene. Starting in the 1970s, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men began to drop; more recently, the number of women enrolling in and completing college has surpassed the number of men to a significant extent. Many college-educated women look for partners who feel equal to them in terms of education or career ambitions—and simply can’t find them.[Read: Why does romance now feel like work?]But even if these women don’t prioritize dating a man with a degree or a prestigious job, many of the men without those credentials don’t want to date them. In the U.S. and elsewhere, Marcia C. Inhorn, a Yale anthropologist, told me, mainstream cultural tradition has encouraged women to engage in hypergamy: “marrying up to a slightly older man, somebody who’s more career advanced, makes more money.” Men, meanwhile, have tended toward hypogamy, marrying someone younger, less well off, and less academically accomplished. Those norms are still so ingrained that as more women have made advances at school and work, many men have held it against them. That women’s hard-earned achievements disadvantage them romantically is a dark irony.Men are feeling penalized too. Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, talked with young men while reporting his forthcoming book, Uncoupled, on the U.S. gender divide. Many discussed watching the women around them flourish, while the men themselves floundered. “If you look around the classroom,” Cox said, describing these men’s perspectives, “it’s their female peers who are killing it … They’re the leaders of all these clubs. They’re going to college at much higher rates. And then when they get to college, they’re doing much better.” Disparity in educational attainment is not men’s only point of grievance. They experience, for instance, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and report having fewer friends. Many men Cox has spoken with are aware of the ways some of their peers are faltering. At the same time, they’re hearing cultural conversations about “patriarchy and male advantage,” Cox told me, and they feel that those critiques are unfair coming from women they see as succeeding spectacularly.[Read: Misogyny comes roaring back]But those formidable young women aren’t having a good time either. Cox has heard from girls in high school whose boyfriends pressured them into sending nude photographs, which he said then got “passed around like trading cards.” He has heard from women who are constantly afraid of being sexually assaulted, or who find that the men they date always seem to expect sex but don’t seem interested in having a conversation. Inhorn similarly noted that in her discussions with women, “there was a lot of grimness, just about the way men treated women … a sort of gender despair.” Cox has found that both women and men believe that their gender disadvantages them. When so many men feel underappreciated and so many women feel mistreated, it creates a vicious cycle of resentment.Dating complete strangers probably doesn’t help—yet that’s how most people do courtship these days. The anonymity provided by apps precludes accountability: No mutual friends will find out if you acted like a jerk on a date. Birger told me that this can result in even worse behavior from some college-educated men, who might feel emboldened by having numbers on their side. (“Lopsided gender ratios turn some nice guys into monsters,” he wrote in Date-onomics, describing men who promised to text back and never did, who insulted women’s bodies, who cavalierly dumped people they were fond of because they were confident they could find other great options.) And without input from shared acquaintances—useful context for personality quirks, or reasons to empathize with someone else’s views—both men and women might be more likely to make snap judgments after only a date or two, and walk away.[Read: The people who quit dating]They might be quicker to judge based on political differences, for example—to see the other person as a proxy for a party or a principle, rather than as a complicated human being worth engaging in debate. A political gap between American women and men already existed before the election: Men have aligned more with the right and women with the left. In November, young voters seemed to diverge even more starkly based on gender. Cox told me he doesn’t believe that this will split a huge number of long-term couples. But he does think it will prevent a lot of new prospects from giving each other a chance.For those seeking romance, political differences might only worsen what was already a dispiriting state of affairs: In Pew’s 2019 survey, 75 percent of respondents said that finding a date in the past year had been difficult, and 67 percent said that their dating life wasn’t going well. Among the people who said dating had gotten harder in the past 10 years, women were twice as likely as men to say that it now involved more risk—both physical and emotional. In 2022, Pew found that women were 9 percent less likely than men to report positive experiences with online dating.As American women and men grow more discouraged, it’s not hard to imagine more straight people giving up on sex and dating—motivated not by allegiance to a cause or a group but by exhaustion and self-protection. If that happens, relationships, families, and communities will transform. In some ways, they’ve already started to.Women, for instance, are freezing their eggs at growing rates. Many commentators have assumed that the trend is the result of women prioritizing their careers, but Inhorn has found that the large majority would have children sooner rather than later if they could; they’re simply struggling to find a co-parent. For her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, she spent a decade interviewing more than 150 women undergoing the egg-freezing process, 82 percent of whom were single; of the 18 percent who were partnered, half felt that their relationship wasn’t stable enough for parenthood, and others did not believe that their partner was ready. Almost everyone’s reason for egg freezing, she told me, was “incredible frustration, sadness, anxiety surrounding partnership.” In fact, most women who freeze their eggs never use them, often because they don’t find a partner, Inhorn told me. Not everyone has the resources, the support, or, frankly, the desire for single parenthood.[Read: Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.]Even if a withdrawal from relationships isn’t initially meant to be political, it can still become so, Rosanna Hertz, a Wellesley College sociologist and the author of Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, told me. She refers to many “single by chance” mothers as “reluctant revolutionaries.” They end up on an unconventional life path only because the standard route—finding a heterosexual relationship and starting a family—didn’t work out, despite years of trying. (“They don’t get up one morning,” she told me, “and say, Gee, I’m sitting around in my pajamas. I think I’ll order sperm on the internet.”) But some connect with other women who have run up against similar challenges; then they begin to talk about their experiences publicly. And in this national moment, when pundits are panicking about low fertility and marriage rates, people who quit dating, opt out of parenthood, or have children on their own are making a political choice, whether they intend to or not.Women should have every right to build a meaningful future that doesn’t require men, and if society is slowly moving to acknowledge that idea, you might call that a silver lining to the gender divide. But however well those alternative paths might work for some individuals, they’re unlikely to heal the societal gender rift. And they won’t change the fact that many straight men and women still want to find love. Cox, the author of Uncoupled, told me that when you survey people, the majority say they would like a long-term, stable relationship. “The sad part for me,” he said, “is that I don’t think there’s a fundamental shift in desire”—only in outcome. The sentiment he hears is “Ideally, this would not be my life,” but finding a partner is “too difficult. It’s too hard. And I’m having a lot of negative experiences that I just don’t want to have.”When I mentioned that I’d been picturing straight American romance as disappearing with a quiet little whimper, he thought that sounded right. He also offered his own metaphor: a slow, almost-imperceptible shrug.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A couple of weeks ago, my kitchen started to smell like sewage. The garbage disposal began to drip. The dishwasher wouldn’t drain. The toilet bubbled when my kids emptied the kitchen sink.At first, I thought the root problem was the broken disposal. But we fixed that and the kitchen still stank. Maybe it was the dishwasher? No, the dishwasher was fine. Only then did I call a plumber, who immediately knew what the problem was: “Your drainpipe is clogged. We see it all the time.” A guy came over to bust the clog. Problem solved.I had a mental model of what was wrong in my kitchen, but my mental model turned out to be bad. That’s only natural: I’m a lawyer, and not a handy one. The plumber had a good mental model. He’d seen the same constellation of symptoms before. He made a sharp guess about the root cause, and he knew how to fix it.I thought about mental models when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy released an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making their first major statement about the soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In some ways, I liked what I read. I share their conviction that government has become too bureaucratized, rigid, and slow. I agree that radical change is needed.[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making the government efficient again]Musk and Ramaswamy smell the same crap that I do. But I fear they’ve got a bad mental model about what’s wrong. They think we’ve got too many civil servants—their equivalent of the garbage disposal. They aren’t paying nearly enough attention to the clogs in the drainpipe, including the finicky legal and procedural rules that will predictably frustrate their reform efforts. Unless they change what they’re up to, I doubt they’ll make much progress.In Musk and Ramaswamy’s telling, the chief problem with the administrative state is that it’s full of unelected mandarins who force their diktats down the throats of a reluctant public. Worse, those bureaucrats often act without legal authority from Congress. They adopt regulation upon regulation without regard to their costs, blithely unconcerned about the drag they’re placing on the economy.If that’s your model, going to war against the bureaucrats makes sense. And that’s what Musk and Ramaswamy aim to do—with, they seem to expect, the help of the Supreme Court. They promise to quickly rescind the regulations adopted by hyperactive officeholders. With fewer rules on the books, they say, there will be less need for bureaucrats to enforce them, providing a justification for “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”For support, they point to two recent Supreme Court cases, Loper Bright v. Raimondo and West Virginia v. EPA. In the first, the Court overturned the doctrine of Chevron deference. As a result, the federal courts will no longer defer to agencies when those agencies interpret ambiguities in the laws that they administer. In the second, the Supreme Court admonished the EPA after it adopted a creative approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Only Congress, the Court said, can resolve “major” economic or political questions.Musk and Ramaswamy believe that “these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.” They want to target “illicit rules” adopted in the prior, more permissive regime.Sure, agencies sometimes push the legal envelope. And those cases tend to attract headlines, which is why they shape our thinking about the administrative state. They are the exception, however; agencies have clear legal authority to adopt most of the rules they’ve adopted.A few days after Loper Bright came down, for example, the National Park Service banned bear baiting under a law telling it “to conserve … the wild life” of the parks. It’s very hard to see anything “illicit” about such a routine exercise of delegated power. The U.S. Code is full of delegations like this because Congress doesn’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to establish every detail of government programs. Instead, it writes general laws and instructs agencies to fill in the specifics. And agencies still get deference, even under Loper Bright, when they act within “the boundaries of th[eir] delegated authority.”That describes most of what agencies do. Last month, for example, the IRS adopted new rules about tax credits for new semiconductor facilities under the CHIPS Act. Why? Because Congress told the IRS to “issue such regulations” as needed to carry out the law. Last Wednesday, the National Marine Fisheries Service adopted a rule limiting the sardine catch in fisheries off the Pacific Coast. The agency had similarly unimpeachable legal authority to do so.Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of dumb rules. It’s just that most of those rules are squarely within their agency’s remit. Although that doesn’t make them any less dumb, it does mean that pointing to Loper Bright and West Virginia v. EPA won’t help get rid of them.What’s more, Musk and Ramaswamy get it backwards when they say that the cases give them extra powers to undo existing regulations. In fact, the cases constrain their authority. Imagine that an agency, for example, has an old rule on the books that is based on an interpretation of the law that DOGE dislikes. Before Loper Bright, the agency could have changed that interpretation so long as the new interpretation was also “reasonable.” The agency was free, in other words, to toggle between different ways of reading an ambiguous law.After Loper Bright, toggling is verboten. An agency that has already adopted the soundest interpretation of a law can’t change its mind. It’s stuck. If the agency were to try to adopt a new reading of the law—perhaps one that DOGE prefers—and to use that to justify rescinding the rule, the courts would stop the agency. Saying that Loper Bright gives DOGE flexibility is about as sensible as saying that handcuffs help when throwing a baseball.Much as DOGE might wish it were otherwise, rescinding a rule requires agencies to go through a cumbersome, multiyear rule-making process. Working to streamline that process would be a terrific mission for DOGE, and I hope Musk and Ramaswamy pursue it. Instead, they said that they’ll take a shortcut: The president will simply “pause the enforcement of those regulations” while they’re being reviewed.A unilateral pause won’t be as helpful as Musk and Ramaswamy seem to think. Many businesses, especially big businesses, have to certify their legal compliance to government agencies—most notably via financial reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where false certifications can trigger criminal penalties under Sarbanes-Oxley. Few will feel comfortable ignoring rules that are still on the books just because DOGE tells them they might someday be rescinded.What’s more, you need smart bureaucrats to make sure that rescissions hold up in court. Under settled law, established way back in the Reagan administration, “an agency changing its course by rescinding a rule is obligated to supply a reasoned analysis for the change.” Compiling that analysis requires technical skills that agency bureaucrats will have and that DOGE will lack. Slashing the federal workforce will thus work at cross-purposes to deregulation.Blanket nonenforcement is also, well, not so legal. As the federal courts have said, “An agency’s pronouncement of a broad policy against enforcement poses special risks that it has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.” When that happens, the courts—with review up to the Supreme Court—are likely to intervene.Will they? Musk and Ramaswamy seem to think that the Supreme Court will be a foot soldier in the war they hope to wage on the bureaucrats. Again, I think their mental model is off. Six of the justices are conservative, that’s true. It’s also true that those justices have reservations about the size and scope of the modern administrative state. In general, though, the Supreme Court’s preferred approach to keeping agencies in check has been to insist on procedural fastidiousness.That’s not a passing fancy or a political spasm. It’s a cornerstone of the conservative legal movement, which is committed to the view that the courts must stand as a bulwark between the excesses of federal agencies and the public. The justices may like Donald Trump’s policies, and they may go somewhat gentler on those policies than they did on Joe Biden’s. They are unlikely, however, to abandon their commitment to the scrupulous enforcement of procedural rules to cater to his whims.Wishful thinking also characterizes Musk and Ramaswamy’s approach to cost cutting. In their op-ed, they seem to appreciate that more than half of all government spending comes from entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. They likewise admit that only Congress—not DOGE—can shrink those programs. Nevertheless, they think they can make substantial headway because of “the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.”They’re right about the waste, fraud, and abuse. I hope they tackle it. The trouble is that, in their apparent mental model, making those cuts will be easy, because no one likes waste, fraud, and abuse. On that, they’re mistaken.For a characteristic example, look at how Medicare pays for drugs. When physicians dispense (say) a chemotherapy drug in an outpatient facility, they’re allowed by law to bill the government for 106 percent of the drug’s average sales price. Because 6 percent of a big number is more than 6 percent of a small number, physicians have a huge financial incentive to prescribe the most expensive drugs, even when a cheaper and equally effective alternative is available. That helps explain why Medicare drug spending has exploded, growing an average of 9.2 percent a year from 2008 through 2021.I’d call that wasteful. Would oncologists? Back in the Obama administration, Medicare proposed changing the statutory formula to make it mildly more sensible. Unusually, Medicare has broad legal authority, conferred in the Affordable Care Act, to do so by legal fiat. Nonetheless, the attempt fell victim to an intense lobbying campaign from hospitals and doctors.The point generalizes. The health economist Uwe Reinhardt called it the Cosmic Law of Health Care: “Every dollar of health spending is someone else’s health-care income, including fraud, waste and abuse.” If you really wanted to cut federal spending, you wouldn’t declare war on bureaucrats. You’d declare war on hospitals and physicians. Does DOGE have the stomach for that?If not, Musk and Ramaswamy’s claim that they will reduce government spending by “impoundment” won’t come to much. Their idea is that Trump could simply refuse to spend some of the billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated. A Nixon-era law called the Impoundment Control Act prohibits the president from doing so; Musk and Ramaswamy insist that the law is unconstitutional—and that the Supreme Court would agree.I wouldn’t be so sure. Trump’s allies have tried to build the legal case to support this constitutional argument, but it’s both untested and unpersuasive. Congress’s powers are at their zenith when it comes to federal spending on domestic programs. As early as 1838, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president can refuse to spend money as Congress has directed: “To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible.”In any event, if all of this spending is so unpopular, why not pass a law to cut it? Republicans will hold the White House and both chambers of Congress come January 20, and the Senate filibuster is no impediment to spending cuts. Yet going to Congress is not Musk and Ramaswamy’s style. They want to “driv[e] change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”That dismissive attitude toward Congress betrays the limited scope for DOGE’s reforms. It also replicates the problem they say they want to fix—that unelected people (like, ahem, Musk and Ramaswamy) are making law instead of elected officials. If they really believed what they’re saying—that “our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government”—Congress would be at the center of their plans, not an afterthought.DOGE may make progress on selected problems, of course. Musk and Ramaswamy are dead right, for example, that the civil service is in desperate need of fixing, and that Trump has an unusual degree of freedom to rethink it. The procedures that apply to federal hiring are Kafkaesque, and firing civil servants is next to impossible.Even there, however, Musk and Ramaswamy seem to care only about the firing part, and not about the hiring. That’s a problem. As the economist Tyler Cowen has written about the administrative state, “dismantling it, or paring it back significantly, would require a lot of state capacity—that is, state competence.” If Musk and Ramaswamy have ideas about how to bring the best and the brightest into government, they’re not sharing them.[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]Maybe Musk and Ramaswamy can pivot. Maybe they will be more creative, daring, and capable than I expect. For now, however, it looks to me like they are coming at the problem with the wrong mental model and a half-baked belief that they can achieve change through sheer force of will. I admire the ambition, and I share their concern about government dysfunction. But I fear they have no clue how to fix it.

Throughout American political history, two capable, qualified, experienced women have run for president on a major-party ticket. Both have lost to Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous misogynist ever to reach the highest office. But in 2024, what was even more alarming than in 2016 was how Trump’s campaign seemed to be promoting a version of the country in which men dominate public life, while women are mostly confined to the home, deprived of a voice, and neutralized as a threat to men’s status and ambitions.This time around, I wasn’t hopeful. I didn’t let myself entertain any quixotic notions about what having a woman in the most powerful position in the world might mean for our status and sense of self. I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.[Read: T]he end of American romanceFor Trump, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion was apparently only the beginning. Bolstered by that definitive Supreme Court win and flanked by a hateful entourage intent on imposing its archaic vision of gender politics on the nation, the Trump-Vance ticket seemed to outright reject ideas of women’s autonomy and equality. Theirs was a campaign of terminally online masculinity, largely designed for men, expressed in brutish terms of violence, strength, and power. Trump insisted, in one late campaign appearance, that he would be a protector of women, “whether the women like it or not.” The vice president–elect, J. D. Vance, was revealed to have personal disgust for child-free women, whom he had described as “cat ladies” and “sociopathic.” He’d also, on one podcast, affirmed that the entire function “of the postmenopausal female” was caring for grandchildren. The super PAC founded by Elon Musk, who has shown great enthusiasm for personally inseminating women, released an ad referring to Kamala Harris as a “C word.” (The ad, which was deleted a few days later, winkingly revealed the C to stand for “Communist.”) And on X, Musk himself reposted a theory that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making.” The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson excitedly compared Trump’s return to office to a strict father coming home to give his wayward daughter “a vigorous spanking.”None of this is new, necessarily. But as of this writing, men ages 18 to 29 have swung a staggering 15 points to the right since 2020, according to an Associated Press survey of registered voters. A few years ago, researchers at Penn State found that people’s alignment with the ideals of “hegemonic masculinity”—the celebration of male dominance in society and of stereotypically masculine traits—predicted their support for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Since then, our cultural environment has been flooded with ever more avatars of dopey machismo: steroid-ingesting, crypto-shilling, energy-drink-chugging bros; YouTubers and podcast hosts and misogynist influencers, all profiting wildly from the juvenile attention economy. The language that the Trump-Vance campaign used was intended to resonate with this audience, even if it sounded asinine to everyone else. (“Tampon Tim,” the right-wing social-media nickname given to Tim Walz for approving a measure that supplies period products to Minnesota public-school students, is an insult only if you’re 8 years old or terrified of women’s bodies.)[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]But the philosophy of the people soon to be in power isn’t informed just by emotionally stunted Twitch streamers and playground bullies. Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and conservative power broker who did more than anyone to further Vance’s post-law career and helped fund his bid for Senate, wrote in a 2009 essay that women getting the vote had doomed “capitalist democracy.” Trump’s ally and former aide John McEntee posted on X in October: “Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go.” For all the attention-getting antics of Trump’s extremely online contingent, his brain trust consists mainly of very wealthy, very powerful men who think women’s rights have simply gone too far. Forget the hope for a female president, or the fury at the fact that a charming, hardworking, genuinely inspirational candidate like Harris couldn’t break through all the accreted layers of American prejudice. What is going to happen to women now?Not all Trump voters embrace misogyny. And preliminary exit polling shows that a sizable minority of American women voted for him this time; in an economy that’s getting more precarious for every successive generation, both men and women may have been swayed by the promise of prosperity. Still, the teased enforcement of outdated gender roles has clearly connected with young men in particular. Among voters ages 18 to 29, the gender gap was striking: about 16 points, according to the AP.The Trump-Vance administration can’t obligate women to go back to the 1960s, though. It can’t force women out of the workforce. And it can’t mandate that women be subservient to men, sexually, romantically, or professionally. One has to wonder, then, what will become of the men who have been reared on Andrew Tate TikToks and violent gonzo porn devoted to women’s sexual degradation. The gender divide is about to grow into a chasm.In the U.S., 63 percent of men under 30 are currently single, compared with 34 percent of women in the same age group, according to the Pew Research Center. This suggests that women aren’t the only ones who may ultimately suffer from this coming rupture in American life. So, too, will the men who have been trained to see women as disgusting, untamable, fundamentally inferior to them.[“Good on Paper”: Are young men really becoming more sexist?]For all Vance and Musk purport to worry about birth rates, I’d argue that they have done more to dissuade women from having children than almost anyone else, by enabling the radicalization and isolation of Gen Z men. For thousands of years, marriage was a necessity for women—a means of financial security and social acceptance. This isn’t true anymore. Many women simply aren’t willing or remotely motivated to attach themselves to men who denigrate them, or to stay in abusive marriages for the sake of their children, as Vance once seemed to suggest that they should.In my own circle of friends, I see women living contentedly alone rather than settling for men who don’t respect them. I see intelligent, kind, high-achieving friends thriving in their community, spending their own money, appreciating culture, taking care of their own needs and taking care of one another. Within hours of the election result becoming clear, Google searches went up sharply for South Korea’s feminist protest movement “4B”—a social philosophy that advocates for women not to date, marry, have sex with, or have children with men. (South Korea currently has the lowest fertility rate of any country in the world.)[Anna Louie Sussman: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies]American conservatism has long fetishized motherhood in a way that made it proximate to power—mothers are lionized and even encouraged to seek political office, as long as it’s understood that they’re doing so on behalf of others. Sarah Palin, the first female vice-presidential candidate on a Republican ticket, tried to defang her own ambition by suggesting that she was just a hockey mom who got involved. But the kind of motherhood now being promoted on the right is much more passive, and powerless. It’s the kind modeled by the former Supreme Court clerk Usha Vance, who stands by silently while her husband weakly brushes off his racist fans’ attacks on his family. It’s also exemplified by the tradwives of TikTok and Instagram, who cater to the male gaze with their doe-eyed; paisley-smock-wearing; Kinder, Kirche, Küche performances of submissive domesticity.The gender dynamics of this moment cannot be a surprise to anyone. Since his arrival in politics, in 2015, Trump has made his thoughts on women abundantly clear. He’s propagated the idea that those of us who don’t flatter or agree with him are not just difficult but “nasty,” using the language of disgust to make women seem contaminated and morally reprehensible. He has shamed women for the way they look, for aging, for having opinions. (Those of us who have public personas online have experienced this sort of treatment too, and have seen it snowball with his encouragement.) None of this is in any way negated by his decision to make a woman his chief of staff, or to nominate women for key positions.Even before Harris officially became the nominee in 2024, Trump’s allies were attacking her in sexualized terms, subliminally linking female power to the so-called threat of unfettered female sexuality. Early in July, Alec Lace—the host of a podcast dedicated to fatherhood, if you can believe it—referred to Harris on the Fox Business channel as “the original Hawk Tuah girl,” a reference to a viral clip about oral sex. In August, Trump circulated a post on his social-media platform, Truth Social, that insinuated that Harris had performed sexual favors to establish her career in politics. In September, Semafor reported that a shadowy conservative network had been paying influencers to promote sexualized smears of Harris. In October, a billboard in Ohio briefly drew consternation for displaying a mocked-up image of Harris on her hands and knees, about to engage in a sex act. (It was paid for by a towing company.)The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.” On that front, the people have spoken. But women don’t have to play along.All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Gender War Is Here.”

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe police murder of George Floyd in 2020 brought radical ideas—such as defunding police or abolishing police departments altogether—into mainstream policy conversations. Activists highlighted instances of police brutality and the unjust treatment of unarmed citizens, right as violent crime began to skyrocket during the pandemic.In a New York Times op-ed from that year famously titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” the prominent organizer Mariame Kaba argued that police were not set up to go after “the worst of the worst” criminals, and that they spend most of their time “responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues.” Kaba also argued that the cost of this “safe” world was that racial minorities were kept “in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.” Kaba had lost faith in reform efforts that had failed to prevent deaths like Floyd’s, representing a growing perspective that policing and the criminal-justice system were making people less safe.But although a majority of Americans remain critical of the criminal-justice system, voters have recently backed so-called tough-on-crime ballot measures, such as one in California calling for harsher penalties for theft and drug crimes, and another in Colorado involving parole eligibility for violent offenders.So what do the data tell us about the connection between policing and safety?On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I asked that question to Jennifer Doleac, an economist and expert on criminal-justice policy who is the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a foundation focused on evidence-based policy making.The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Jerusalem Demsas: A little over a year ago, Gallup asked Americans to choose between two approaches to lowering the crime rate: first, direct more money and effort to go into addressing social and economic problems like drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health. Or option No. 2: more money and effort for strengthening law enforcement. Almost twice as many respondents chose “address social problems.”Now this is a bit of a false dichotomy. People didn’t have an option to answer “both,” and it is possible to invest in both of these. But there are monetary constraints, particularly for the local governments in charge of most policing. What this poll indicates is a widespread belief that the preferable crime-fighting strategy isn’t focused on policing.This is a complicated conversation. The question of whether police keep us safe raises many more questions before it can be answered: How are they keeping us safe? Safe from what? And, of course, who is “us”?[Music]My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Today’s guest is Jennifer Doleac, an economist and expert on criminal-justice policy who is currently the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a foundation focused on evidence-based policymaking.Jennifer has been working on these issues for years. And I asked her to come on the show to unpack what we know about the impact of policing on safety: Is it true that investments in social-welfare programs can make police obsolete, as many activists have called for in recent years? Does increasing the number of police officers actually make us safer?Here to answer those questions, and more, is Jennifer. Welcome to the show.Jennifer Doleac: Thank you so much for having me.Demsas: So before the pandemic, it seemed that crime rates were on this long-term secular decline, right? Since the ’90s, murder and violent crime were down significantly nationwide. Property crimes were down nationwide. It felt like we were maybe approaching utopia.We had a bunch of great conversations about, Oh, all the criminal-justice reform we can have now, given that crime rates are really low. More people were amenable to that. What explained that long-term decline, before we get into what happened during COVID?Doleac: We don’t really know, which I think then made the uptick during COVID more concerning. There are a bunch of different theories. One is: We did a bunch of things during the late ’80s and early ’90s in response to rising crime during that period. And so we hired a lot more police. Prison sentences got longer—all kinds of things. And so probably some combination of that worked, and crime started falling.But there are also other theories about, you know, there were dividends to the war on poverty that had happened during the ’60s, and the next generation was much better off. We took lead out of gasoline, and so lead exposure for young kids was much lower. And so when those kids grew up, they were less likely to commit crime. There’s just a whole bunch of stuff that probably combined to pay big dividends over time and contributed to that long-term decline that we saw in crime.Demsas: And can you draw out—this is one of my favorite things—the connection between lead and crime. How does lead impact criminality?Doleac: Yeah. I should be better at explaining this because I talk about it all the time, but I will caution that I’m not a scientist. The reason lead is so damaging is that it mimics calcium in the body. All of our receptors in the brain that look for calcium—basically lead latches onto those and crowds out the calcium. And so it affects brain development in that way.And then it winds up leading to more impulsiveness and aggression and learning disabilities. And so it winds up reducing educational attainment, and that itself could increase criminal behavior later if you have worse labor-market options. But because it increases impulsiveness and things of that nature, it increases violent behavior during the teenage years. And so we see an uptick in arrests for, especially, violent crime beginning for teens and into early adulthood.Demsas: If you were to make a bet, what sort of theories are most attractive to you? Because from my perspective, given that policing is super local in this country—we do have state troopers and things like that, but you just have all these different police departments all over the country—there’s tons of variation in the way that they’ll hire people and the policies that they have.Given that that’s true, and you still see this long-term secular decline, I’m kind of pulled towards these more non-police policy explanations for things than the ones that are referencing specific changes that departments may have made.Doleac: Yeah. I think that’s my hunch, too. I still think it’s probably a combination of stuff. We’re not going to find the one thing we did that led to this big decline.But I think overall, I’m really convinced by the evidence on lead exposure and the impact that lead exposure has on later criminal behavior—and so not necessarily research around the crime decline in the ’90s, but subsequent research and just exposure, in general. And so it’s compelling to me that that could have had a really big effect, as well as these other anti-poverty measures that we took.But I think you’re right that things like policing are very local, but they do respond and are funded heavily by the federal government. And so through COPS grants, for instance, the federal government put a lot of money into local communities to hire more police at that time. So there was this sort of grand experiment where we increased the amount of policing during that period. It wasn’t just one-off local decisions.So yeah, I think my hunch is the same as yours, that it’s probably the other stuff that was going on then that contributed the most. But I don’t think we can totally rule out that some of the crime-reduction measures we intentionally put in place were effective.Demsas: So I want to switch tacks here a bit because the thing that pushed me to invite you to come on the show, even though you’re someone I’ve been thinking about for a while to bring on, is you tweeted something, I think a couple weeks ago. And you wrote: “One of the most consistent research findings in the [criminal-justice] space is that hiring more police reduces crime. We need more and better policing, not less—and that will require more funding.”And this is, I think—depending on your media diet—either the most anodyne statement that could possibly be made, or it’s extremely controversial. I want you to walk us through, how do we know—when you say something is one of the most consistent research findings in this space, what are you drawing from there? What are some seminal studies that you point to or meta-analyses in this space that have pushed you to believe that hiring more police definitely is causally reducing crime?Doleac: Yeah. I love this research area both because I think the punchline is surprising to most people, and I always like telling people research that can change their mind, but also because the really strong causal research really changed the field’s perception of this area.So it used to be that we—just based on strictly correlational evidence—you regress crime on the number of police officers, and you look at the correlation between those two things, and there’s no negative correlation. So it looks like, maybe, police cause more crime. But it turns out that that’s not telling you the causal effect of crime, because places with more crime will tend to hire more police officers. And so you’ll get this positive correlation, but it doesn’t mean police are causing the crime. It’s because the crime is causing the police, basically.And so then the credibility revolution happened in economics, and people got really serious about looking for natural experiments that could distinguish correlation from causation and measure these causal effects. And suddenly, every study that is serious about measuring that causal effect using these natural experiments finds, consistently across a whole bunch of different contexts, that hiring more police, putting more police on the streets in various ways, reduces crime.And so the way that they’re doing this—there are, I would say, two broad buckets of these studies: One is looking at actual hiring of police officers. The natural experiment is that the federal government gives out COPS grants to enable local departments to hire more police. And so departments apply for this funding, and then some get it; some don’t. There’s some sort of ranking of applications, and the ones just over the threshold get the funding, and the ones just below don’t.And so using that kind of setup, you can look at the departments that just barely got the funding, compare them with the departments that just barely didn’t. And the departments that got the funding hire additional officers, so the money matters and is used for its intended purpose. And you see crime fall, especially violent crime. So that, I think, is very compelling evidence that hiring that additional officer reduced crime rates. That was really the only difference between those departments.The other bucket of studies—Demsas: I’m sorry—is that across all crime rates, or is it violent crime? What’s it looking at?Doleac: People look at all different crime rates. I think, overall across these types of studies, there are effects on both types of crime rates, but it’s most consistent and largest for violent crimes, especially homicide.I think, you know, one additional caveat there is that putting more police around could increase the reporting of crime. So you might wind up seeing, you know—there could be different effects that are canceling each other out for the reporting of theft, for instance. Maybe theft is falling, but it’s reported more often when it does happen, and so you get this more muted effect on net. Homicide is very consistently reported, and so it’s generally a really good measure of what’s happening with violent crime.Demsas: And what’s sort of the magnitude we’re talking about here, like, per police officer or whatever? What kinds of declines in violent crime are we seeing?Doleac: Okay. So the best estimate is that you prevent one murder a year for every 10 to 17 police officers that are hired.Demsas: Okay. So that’s pretty expensive.Doleac: It’s expensive, but also, I mean, murder is expensive, right? Murder is really costly. So I think most economists think of that as a pretty big effect.Demsas: Okay. And then the second bucket of studies?Doleac: The second bucket of studies is on how you allocate police officers, or thinking about police presence. And so for instance, there are a lot of randomized controlled trials of hotspot policing. So that’s where you would pick a bunch of higher-crime areas of a city, and you put police officers on this street corner, and you don’t put police officers on that street corner. And then you see what happens across the two street corners. And crime goes way down when the police officer is standing there.And so that, you know, is very consistent with an overall idea that what’s happening here is that police are deterring crime. Just the presence of having more police out and about is having a big deterrent effect on crime, because you’re increasing the probability that people will get caught, and people respond in a very consistently large way to that.Demsas: So I think that if we hadn’t seen really prominent instances of police brutality and political movements kind of form to respond to that, this would be probably a pretty widely accepted finding. But I think that there’s a sense that these sorts of findings miss the types of violence that police themselves might perpetrate. Is there research that looks into the question of how much police brutality increases when you have increased police officers, or is it the case that more police officers reduce the incidence of police brutality? Like, how do we see that effect kind of play out?Doleac: Yeah, we don’t have great evidence on this, because police use of force is not consistently measured. Even if it’s collected internally, it’s not consistently shared with researchers. And so I think there’s a lot of effort right now going into measuring that sort of outcome, but it’s been harder to get our arms around it because the data just isn’t as easily available as reported crime.But there have been a bunch of efforts to measure things like the effect of a police killing, for instance—especially what seems like an unjustified police killing if the victim didn’t have a weapon—on people who live in the local area, especially young people and young Black and brown people who live in the local area. And you see that, you know, educational attainment goes down. Interestingly, voting goes up, which is perhaps good news—people respond to that perceived injustice.But yeah, I think one big development over the last several years is that researchers have become much more serious about trying to quantify what the costs of different types of police behavior are so that we can compare them with the benefits. And I would say that, right now, the real policy and research frontier is figuring out ways to maintain the benefits that we get from policing while we mitigate the costs.Demsas: Can you help decompose the effect here a bit? Because I’m interested in the mechanism by which more police are reducing crimes. What are the pathways that this is happening? Is it the case that, you know, with the hotspots, is it just the visibility? They’re there, so people are like, All right, I’m just not going to do this right now, because a cop’s there, but I’m going to wait for the cop to be gone, or I’ll go somewhere else and commit a crime. Or are they really good at solving crimes, or what’s actually happening here?Doleac: Yeah. So there could be these two different channels, right? One is pure deterrence that you see—that there’s an increased probability of getting caught, and that is what you’re responding to, or you have this sense that you’re more likely to face consequences for your actions, and so you don’t commit the crime.The other one is incapacitation. And so that’s where, you know, the police are just arresting everyone who’s committing crime, and so there’s no crime anymore. And what studies consistently show is, using the kinds of natural experiments, that you hire—you get a COPS grant, and you hire more police officers—and so crime goes down, but arrests don’t go up. And so that is pretty consistent across all of these studies.And so that leads to a general conclusion that what really seems to be happening here is that police presence—I sometimes globally refer to it as almost like a scarecrow effect. Like, you just put a cop on a corner, right? And you do see sometimes in a lot of cities. Generally, cops hate doing this—but sometimes their job is just to sit in their car in a high-risk area of town just to kind of be there. But you know, they’re assigned to do that because it’s really effective.Demsas: My friends in New York sometimes will complain that, you know, NYPD in the subway is just sitting there scrolling on their phones, but is your sense then that those people are actually really helping to deter crime?Doleac: Probably. Yeah. I mean, maybe they would deter crime more if they looked like they were looking around instead of at their phone, but yeah, I think that’s the theory.Demsas: So there’s this well-established idea in the criminal-justice literature that certainty of punishment is effective at deterring crime. So it’s not about making someone go away for 20 years, but if they know they’re going to get caught for committing a crime, it reduces the likelihood that they’ll commit further offenses.How does that interact with something you once wrote, which is that the best available data from the U.S. suggests that two-thirds of people released from prisons will be caught again within three years? So if people who are caught, arrested, and punished are likely to reoffend, how does that interact with arguments that certainty of capture and punishment is what reduces crimes?Doleac: I’ve never thought about it in those terms, but I think my general reaction to that is that people are probably committing a lot of crime before they get caught again. And so the general problem is that right now, for most crimes, the probability that you’re going to get caught is actually very low.If you just look at clearance rates—which we could have a whole separate conversation about what clearance rates really measure, etcetera, but it’s basically the probability that the police are going to make an arrest for a particular type of crime—the highest category is homicide, which is about 50 percent nationally. It’s a coin flip whether or not you’re going to get caught for committing homicide. When you look at stuff like motor vehicle theft, it’s, like, 10 percent.And so there is lots of evidence that people are deterred much more by the probability of getting caught than the punishment. That is because most people who are on the margin of committing crime are just not that forward looking. And so it doesn’t matter what the consequences are in 10 years. You know, adding five years to an already-long sentence, people are thinking about tomorrow, maybe, right? And so increasing the swiftness and the certainty of consequences, even if the consequences are relatively limited, will have a much bigger effect on behavior than continuing to have it be, like, a 10 percent chance that you get caught, but if you do win that very unlucky lottery, then you go to prison for 10 years. It just isn’t affecting behavior.Demsas: I guess this theory kind of implies that people will commit crimes if they have the opportunity to commit crimes or that there is at least some subset of the population. Do you have sort of a generalized theory of why people commit crimes, and do we have a sense about that at the population level?Doleac: As an economist, I think people respond to incentives, and that’s kind of the core, right? But incentives aren’t entirely about punishment or the probability of going to prison in the same way that they’re not entirely about money, right? It can be about just disapproval, social disapproval, social norms. And so if everyone around you is following the law, then you’re more likely to follow the law because you want to be liked, and you want to be an accepted part of society.If, you know—we see this often in countries where paying your taxes is relatively uncommon; you feel like a sucker if you pay your taxes, and so no one pays their taxes. And so there is this element to which there are social norms that we want to maintain, because that winds up governing behavior often much better than having to actually go out and enforcing the law through force can.Demsas: And I think I asked you this question because I think that there is sort of an alternative theory of mind here, which is that crimes are essentially always committed because of need—that people are committing crimes because there is some sort of deprivation, either in their literal physical need, like hunger, or they need to steal clothes for themselves, or that’s what’s going on, or they don’t have an opportunity to make money in a legal way, and they found a better way of making money through illegal channels. How much purchase do you put into that sort of theory of criminal behavior?Doleac: I think it’s certainly a factor but, clearly, for some types of crimes more than others, right? So for revenue-generating crimes—robbery, theft, selling drugs—that totally is going to be part of the motivation. And so giving people other better options can be part of the solution. For crimes like homicide, assault—just this whole other category of crimes that are more crimes of passion, where there’s no money coming from it—there’s not a financial incentive. It’s not just because you’re poor. So it just becomes more complicated.Demsas: So I want to return to the original kind of framework of this conversation, which is around this question of the question of policing’s impact on crime. And I think one of the things that complicates this for me is: Back in 2020, I wrote this article when I was at Vox—well, actually, I think it’s 2021—but it was looking at a preprint by this Ph.D. student, Travis Campbell, who was an economist. Or he was a Ph.D. student in economics, and I think now he’s an economist. And he was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he found that the effect of BLM protests was a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers. So that was roughly 300 fewer police homicides in census places that saw BLM protests.But there’s a secondary effect that he also observes, which is essentially that there’s an increase in crime. And the way that I think that he would explain this, and the way that made the most sense to me, is that you see this increase in crime as a result of police officers—this is called the Ferguson effect—reducing their desire to kind of do their job. So either they’re somehow on strike, or they feel—maybe the most sympathetic version for them is that they feel—you know, worried about engaging in policing activities because of the backlash, or they feel kind of embarrassed or ashamed about their jobs now. They don’t really want to do them. And then the worst is it’s a kind of like an intentional F you to the public for being mad at them.And so that’s kind of like—I mean, you see kind of the wide range of that that exists. And it’s interesting because, I mean, the vast majority of BLM protests are nonviolent protests. We now know this from a lot of research. And so how do you think about this problem of largely nonviolent protests leading police forces to reduce their willingness to do the kinds of policing that reduce crime? Doesn’t that kind of feel like you can’t criticize the police, otherwise they’ll just stop reducing crime rates, you know?Doleac: Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely the taking their ball and going home kind of interpretation of that whole period. It does not make police look good; I agree. I don’t know that paper that you just mentioned, so I’m now eager to go read it. But there have been a bunch of papers looking at whether there does seem to be a Ferguson effect—that police backed off, reduced their effort, and basically what the impact on crime seems to be, and my general read is, similarly, that crime went up.So the reduction in effort was especially apparent with regard to low-level arrests, which actually doesn’t seem to matter very much. Like, that’s the kind of enforcement that maybe we do want police doing less of, right? Just arresting everybody for trespassing or disorderly conduct.But yeah, I mean, I think I agree that it is problematic if police essentially seem to be, like, holding communities hostage, saying, like, It’s our way or the highway. You know, You can’t criticize us, or we’re just not gonna enforce the law anymore.At the same time, the more generous interpretation here is that, you know, everyone wants to feel valued in their profession. And this is a hard and dangerous job. And suddenly, if the community that you are serving and protecting and putting your life on the line for every day is insulting you every time you turn the TV on or every time you go out in public, you maybe aren’t that excited to put your life on the line for them anymore.And that, you know, it’s still—most police departments across the country have a really difficult time hiring now. They’re all extremely understaffed. And that is forcing a lot of creativity about, like, Okay, well, what do we really need someone with a badge and a gun for, and where can we hire civilians to do some work? But given that we know that putting more police on the streets reduces crime, and given that I think we all would like for police chiefs to have the ability to hold their officers accountable and say, you know, If you’re behaving badly, I want to fire you, right, then we need a line out the door of other people who want to be cops.[Music]Demsas: After the break: the wild connection between air pollution and violent crime.[Break]Demsas: So you mentioned clearance rates earlier, and you said, you know, it’s about 50–50. That’s definitely true overall, but Pew Research from April, looking at FBI data, found that clearance rates for both violent and property crimes are at their lowest levels in at least 31 years. Police cleared roughly 37 percent of violent crimes they came across in 2022. Is your sense that this decline has to do with the Ferguson effect, or is something else going on here?Doleac: I think this is bigger than that. This has been a longer-term trend. People I talk to—I think it’s a combination of real changes in policing and perhaps less of a focus on solving crime and more of a focus on just being present, which maybe is by design. I think there’s also a potential positive spin on this, which is: If clearance rates are measured by just the probability that you’re making an arrest in a particular case, well, police officers can just go out and make an arrest. They can arrest somebody, right? It might not be the right person.What we want is them to arrest the right person. And as, especially, technology has improved over the past several decades, it has become much more difficult for police to get away with just arresting someone, right? Or a more generous way to put that is: It becomes much easier for police to get evidence that tells them whether this is the right person or not and prevents wrongful arrests and wrongful convictions.And so I would expect clearance rates to fall just because of that, but I don’t think we have any really rigorous studies of this—of how much should be attributed to that, and how much should be attributed to changes in types of investigations and policing. But this is something that, again, my team is talking to people all the time about. It turns out, you know, detectives in this country don’t get any real training. You get a bunch of training when you sign up as a new cop.Demsas: That’s just absurd. I can’t believe that. (Laughs.)Doleac: But there’s no detective training, right? So I’m having lots of conversations on the—Demsas: They just put you out on the street, and they’re like, Go solve crime?Doleac: They’re like, Figure it out. You’ve been a police officer for a while, and so now you’re usually promoted to be a detective. And so I’m having conversations with people now about, like, Okay, what if we started a detective school? What are some big, crazy ideas we could think of here to help people solve more crimes?Demsas: So one thing I want to get into here is how different the American experience is from the rest of the world and whether we can really even know if we have comparable analysis of this. Here in the U.S., of course, as we all know very well, crime increased. Was that an American phenomenon? And if so, why would that be?Doleac: I admit, I don’t pay as much attention as I used to to what’s going on outside of the U.S., because my job is now so focused on U.S. policy. My impression had been that crime went up everywhere during COVID. But even within the U.S., it was a very specific type of crime, right?In general, crime went down. It was really homicides and shootings that went up. So in most countries, there are not as many guns, and so you’re not going to have shootings go up. And guns are very effective at killing people, as you know. You maybe don’t see the big spike in homicides, but during that COVID period, people were just not out and about as much. And so if you’re at home, your house is not gonna be broken into. But for other types of crimes, you’ll see an increase. And so there was an increase in motor vehicle theft because maybe you aren’t using your car as much, and so someone can steal it more easily.What also seems to have happened—to the best of our knowledge, our best guess of what happened here—is that because people weren’t out on the street, you don’t have witnesses. You don’t have bystanders. You don’t have the Jane Jacobs–style eyes on the street to deter people from bad behavior.Basically, the only people who were out on the street were people who wanted to cause trouble. And so you wind up with more shootings, more homicides. And then that just became a vicious cycle where there’s retaliatory violence. And so even after the lockdowns ended and people were moving around again, you didn’t see homicides start to fall until a couple years later. So that seems to be what happened in the U.S.I think, again, similar to what was happening in the ’90s and afterwards, it’s really difficult to pin down the exact reason for any of these broad trends because there’s just so much else going on. I think of it as the crime equivalent of trying to guess what happens to the stock market. There could be lots of really good advice about how to make your business profitable, but that doesn’t mean you can tell me what’s going to happen in the stock market tomorrow. And it seems similar to me. Like, I can talk all day about what we should do to reduce crime. I cannot tell you what’s going to happen to crime rates next month.Demsas: So I want to steel man a bit the position of “defund the police” advocates, because many of the people who were arguing for cutting police budgets during 2020 were advocating redirecting those resources towards investments in social-welfare programs. And you have, in your research and work, pointed to many such programs that have welcome impacts on crime rates.But what I want to ask is: How do we weigh these things against one another, given that, of course, municipalities have limited budgets, right? You have this pretty robust finding that 10 to 17 more officers is reducing one murder a year. Are there similarly cost-effective social-welfare programs that can prevent violent crimes at the same rates as police? Or is this just complimentary, but you cannot actually achieve the same effect?Doleac: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge here with substituting completely is just the time horizon we’re talking about, right? So if the problem you’re trying to solve is gang violence that’s on your street right now, investing in K-12 education is not going to help, right? That’s a long-term solution. Or investing in lead abatement, right? That’s going to maybe reduce homicides 15 years from now, but it’s not going to be compelling to the community that is struggling right now.That, to me, was the biggest problem with the argument that we should just be shifting money from police to these other things. I think there’s lots of evidence that we should also be investing in these other things. So summer jobs for teens is one big example—lots of evidence that that reduces violent crime, not just during the summer, when people are working, but after the fact. Lead abatement, as I said, we’re looking at stuff like—there’s evidence that real-time exposure to air pollution can affect violence—Demsas: I think you tweeted out a study that was just so absurd. It was like, Short-term air pollution increases fatal accidents in real time. Like, air pollution—Doleac: Yeah. It’s crazy. It really makes you wonder or think about all the ways that air-pollution exposure is probably affecting our thinking and reasoning all the time that are not pushing us to commit a crime, right? But that’s a really extreme outcome. But yeah, there’s a study that I love that looks at a highway, and they say, If the wind is blowing the exhaust from the highway to the west one day, violent crime goes up over there. And if the next day it blows the exhaust to the east, violent crime goes up over there. And so it’s just like, Okay, let’s think about putting air filters in all the schools or something.Demsas: Do we have free will, Jennifer Doleac? (Laughs.)Doleac: Right. (Laughs.) Yeah. There’s lots of stuff that we can do that is outside the scope of the traditional criminal-justice system that would dramatically improve public safety. And I am 100 percent in favor of investing in all of those things. I think where it gets tricky, and thinking about the trade-off with policing—or to the extent to which these things are compliments or substitutes for policing—is going to depend on, in large part, what the time horizon is you’re thinking about.And so long term, yeah, it probably will help dramatically, and we probably could shift a lot of our criminal-justice spending from policing, but also especially prisons. I actually think a lot more about prison spending as being the target here, like shifting those resources to these other types of areas.Demsas: You mean shifting away from prison spending?Doleac: Away from prison spending. Right? I think there’s a really good argument here that if we invested in lead abatement, if we invested in summer jobs, if we invested in police, even—investing in, in general, those social investments, but also increasing the probability of getting caught—that’s our ticket out of mass incarceration, is my view.But so we could dramatically, long term, shift that spending to these other things. If we invest in these other things, we would see dividends in terms of reduced prison spending and perhaps also a reduced necessity for police spending. But in any given moment—I mean, even Norway has police, right? I don’t see a world where, because we’ve invested so fully in mental health and education and all the rest, there’s just no crime anymore. I think there’s always going to be crime, and I think there’s always going to be a need for police, but I think there are a lot of things we could do to reduce people’s propensity to commit crime.Demsas: So what are the ways that, when you’re reviewing literature here, you can actually reduce the negative externalities of policing, particularly when we’re talking about not just the most, you know, I think, well-known instances of police brutality that end in murder, but also ones where, I mean, often, when you have this pretty prevalent policing—foot policing, foot traffic, hotspot policing—it often means that there’s low-level harassment of people going on in that community.And you know, whether you call that harassment or you call that, you know, police are just checking in, like, What are you up to? What are you doing? I mean, you can characterize it how you want. But anyone who’s interacted with a police officer in a way where you’re being questioned about your daily life and goings-on—it can be kind of stressful.It can also make you feel like you’re being watched and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong, like you’re not supposed to be there. Often, they will just tell you to keep it moving or go somewhere else or do something different, even if you’re not breaking the law, and you need to just comply in order to not escalate the situation.So these sorts of things can be costly upon a population of people, even if it’s reducing crime rates overall. So are there ways of reducing that cost on society, or is that just a necessary part of what policing looks like?Doleac: I am very hopeful that it’s not a necessary part of what policing looks like. So I think this is a place that police departments are experimenting. Researchers are eager to test what different places are doing.There is an ongoing randomized trial of—basically a follow up to a previous RCT—procedural-justice training for police, so basically trying to train officers to think of the end goal of any interaction, that everyone involved to feel like they respect the outcome, even if they disagree with it. And so the intervention is largely around changing how police officers interact with their bosses in the department. So the boss sort of models this procedural-justice interaction for them, and then the idea is that they’ll go on and do that out in communities.And so there was an RCT several years ago in Seattle of this training, and it was on the small side, which is why they’re following up and doing another larger-scale RCT. But it did seem to reduce—I believe it looked at—use of force and some other bad things, and so generally seemed positive and seemed to have beneficial impacts. And so we’ll see in this larger multicity RCT if it continues to work.Another type of training that seems to be effective and that I’m eager to see replications of elsewhere is a situational decision-making training that was developed by some researchers in Chicago in partnership with the police department that’s based on cognitive behavioral therapy. So basically helping police officers—like anyone else in a high-risk, high-speed, high-pressure environment—avoid what they call “thinking traps,” and avoid jumping to conclusions, and just think about all the different options. And that seemed to reduce use of force, reduce arrests, and also reduce injuries of officers, so win-win all around. And so there are a bunch of other trainings like that that I think are being tried and just to just see what happens.I also think, you know, there are probably a lot of people that just should not be police officers, right? If you’re not cool under pressure, like, this is probably not the job for you. So my hunch is that a lot of the police killings that we see, especially the ones that make the news, I think a lot of them really are that, you know, the cop was genuinely afraid in the moment—not all of them, certainly, but, like, a large share. But if you’re that afraid in the moment, you probably shouldn’t have a gun.So there’s some combination here of training that could be effective, and we’ll figure that out, and then there’s probably an element of screening in terms of, like, Who should we be hiring? Who should we retain? How do we make sure that departments have the ability to discipline people when they do something wrong? But also just have the tough conversation with someone and say, You’re not a fit for this job anymore. You’re fired. So I think it’ll be a combination of those things, but I’m hopeful to see that go forward.Another bucket of potential interventions here that we haven’t talked about is technology.Demsas: Speeding cameras. Right.Doleac: And so, you know, I’ve thought a lot about, you know—it’s like putting surveillance cameras everywhere. Like, we could be like London, right, and have cameras everywhere. I’ve done research on DNA databases where people who are convicted of crimes, sometimes arrested for certain crimes, are added to a law-enforcement DNA database, which increases the probability that they’ll get caught if they commit another crime. And for all these kinds of interventions, you see a huge deterrent effect afterwards. People respond to that increased probability of getting caught.Now, people worry, then, about privacy costs, but I think there’s a real conversation to be had about whether the privacy cost of having a camera on every street corner is really worse than the social cost of having a police officer on every corner. I think there are a lot of communities that would probably prefer the camera, and it could have the same sort of effect.And so anyway, I think there’s a lot of opportunity here to just experiment with some different ways forward. And I think this is where all of the research and policy attention is in this space right now, is trying new things on these dimensions.Demsas: Yeah, I’ve been surprised at the conversation regarding traffic violations and cameras because, I mean, when you look at the research, you can basically eliminate racial disparities in traffic violations. If you turn it over to just automated cameras, Were you going over the speed limit? But they’re so unpopular, obviously. People do not like to use cameras. Someone once said to me, like, No, I want the cop to catch me. Doleac: (Laughs.) That’s funny. I mean, my general very cynical interpretation of that is that, you know, the main way that disparities come about is that police use their discretion in favor of, or to let the favored group off the hook. And so lots of white people are used to talking their way out of tickets, and you can’t talk your way out of a ticket from a speed camera, and so they don’t like it. But it is fair.Demsas: Yeah. There’s also a bizarre argument that some people use, which is just that there’s a racially disproportionate effect, because in places where there are highways, people are often going into minority neighborhoods because they’re placed near highways in less-desirable locations. And as a result, you might have more people who are Black and brown being caught by these cameras. And I’m like, Yeah, but that means those people are speeding through Black and brown communities. That’s who’s getting impacted by the speeding and getting pedestrian deaths and things like that. Like, that’s the whole argument.Doleac: Right. You’re trying to protect people in that community. And also, I mean, yeah. Exactly. It’s like, if you’re really worried about that, then put more cameras in the white communities. Just, I mean—just the answer to me seems to be more, not fewer.Demsas: And so, you know, there’s been a renewed interest in broken-windows policing, and I’m interested in your thoughts on the relationship between order-maintenance policing and, you know, violent crime. I think many people kind of think, like, I want cops to reduce murders. We don’t want more murders. We don’t want assaults. We don’t want sexual assault. Like, those sorts of things are really, really harmful.And I went back to the 1982 Atlantic article that I think is the genesis of the broken-windows policing in the public discourse, and there’s a passage that describes what this sort of thing looks like that I’m just going to read. And I want you to tell me whether you think that this sort of order-maintenance policing is really important for reducing crime. So it reads,The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.So almost none of these are laws. You know what I mean? Or some of these might be laws, but they’re not even being really enforced. Like, you’re not allowed to drink in public. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a paper bag or not. The idea that, like, lying down is somehow different for loitering than sitting up—I don’t know if that’s written in any codes or anything like that.But there is a sense in which I think a lot of people feel like there’s a general social disorder that they’re frustrated by and mad about, particularly in many cities. And I wonder: How much of policing is about this type of order maintenance, and what relationship does that order-maintenance policing have to do with the violent-crime rates that everyone’s concerned about?Doleac: This is a really tough question. I agree—it is one that is on everyone’s mind right now. My general sense is that this type of order maintenance is not directly related to crimes like homicide. I haven’t seen great evidence on that, though, so I could definitely be wrong about that. We do have growing evidence that the kind of low-level arrests—like arresting more people for disorderly conduct or using drugs in public or whatever else—that does not reduce index crimes, the more serious crimes. And so, you know, people are finding various natural experiments that affect the number of those low-level arrests that police make and that they don’t seem to be helpful for reducing more serious crime.That said, this broader type of disorder matters and definitely makes people feel unsafe and can contribute to a broader kind of vicious cycle where, you know, people just stay home, and then you have fewer eyes on the street, as Jane Jacobs said. And then that can increase crime. And so there is a way in which it can matter in the long term. But it also matters in the short term because it just makes people feel unsafe, even if they themselves are at relatively low risk of being the victim of a crime.And so, I mean, my team at AV has an advocacy component. And they all came back from this spring’s legislative session saying, you know, We had all these great ideas about how to reduce crime, and the only thing anyone wants to talk about is disorder. What do we do about disorder? And I think, in general, the research consensus is: We don’t want to go back to broken-windows policing.The conventional wisdom had been that that’s why crime fell in New York City. But that was during the early to mid to late ’90s, and crime fell everywhere. So it wasn’t just New York City. It wasn’t just broken windows. And so the consensus, I think, in the research literature is that broken-windows policing is not really helpful, in part because communities need to trust the police in order to cooperate with them.But all of that said, I think we’re in a period right now where we are reconsidering the ways we’ve handled disorder. I think the pendulum had swung a little too far toward leniency, you know, especially pre-COVID, due to that big crime decline and really ambitious criminal-justice reform. I think a lot of people were saying, Look—we don’t need any of this. Everything’s great. And as the pendulum swung too far left, people responded, and we got more of this disorderly behavior that makes people really uncomfortable.And so my hope is that we don’t swing all the way back to super “tough on crime.” But I think we just—we’d gone too far. And so we need to kind of find some middle ground, but we are definitely in a period of experimentation right now to figure out what some new answers will be.Demsas: Well, Jennifer, that’s a great place for our final question, which is: What is something you once thought was a good idea but ended up just being good on paper?Doleac: I love this question. So many things—I’ve tried so many things that didn’t work. But the first example that comes to mind is totally different from anything we’ve talked about, which is: Several years ago—I grew up with dogs, always wanted to have a dog, was finally at a place in my adult life where I was like, I’m ready to get a dog. And then I fostered a very sweet pit bull mix.Demsas: Okay.Doleac: And suddenly realized that it completely changed my life in ways that I was unprepared for.Demsas: Oh, interesting.Doleac: I was an academic. I got up every morning, was just in my head, like, to wander the coffee shop, spend most of the day there. And suddenly, I had this creature in my house that needed to be fed and watered and walked, and needed me around.Demsas: Yeah.Doleac: And it made me really sad how poorly this was going. And eventually, I decided this is just not going to work. And I had to give the dog back. And it was heartbreaking. But fast-forward to during COVID, and I was like, I need something, anything to think about other than work and Netflix. I know! I’ll get a dog. I remember how much work that is. And so then I adopted my adorable rescue pup, Chula, who is now an integral part of my life. So the revised version of the plan has been going very well. But yeah, the first version was definitely good on paper only.Demsas: Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.Doleac: Oh, thank you so much. This has been super fun.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is a done deal. The president has not only obviated the existing cases against Hunter; the sweep of the pardon effectively immunizes his son against prosecution for all federal crimes he may have committed over the course of more than a decade. This pardon is a terrible idea—“both dishonorable and unwise,” in the words of the Bulwark editor Jonathan Last—and, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday, it reflected Biden’s choice “to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of his country.”But it was also a tremendous strategic blunder, one that will haunt Democrats as they head into the first years of another Trump administration.The Constitution vests American presidents with the power to pardon anyone for crimes against the United States. (They cannot pardon people for offenses at the state level.) Usually, such pardons involve clemency for ordinary criminals; occasionally, they include distasteful personal or political favors to friends, allies, and in rarer cases, family. Donald Trump, however, has promised to start the process of issuing deeply controversial pardons the minute he gets into office.Perhaps most disturbing, he has said he’s going to start reviewing cases of the January 6 insurrectionists—whom he has called “warriors” and “hostages”—and to let many of them out of prison. Nothing will stop Trump from doing such things, nor will he pay any political price for such future pardons: All he ever cared about was winning the White House to stay out of jail, and he’s accomplished that mission.But the Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump World, and had Biden not pardoned his son, elected Republicans at every level would have had to answer for Trump’s actions without reference to the Bidens. They would have had to say, on the record, whether they agreed with Trump letting people who stormed the Capitol and assaulted law-enforcement officers out of jail. Although Trump would have remained beyond the reach of the voters, the vulnerable Republicans running for reelection might have pleaded with him to avoid some of the more potentially disgusting pardons.Forget all that. Joe Biden has now provided every Republican—and especially those running for Congress in 2026—with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about Trump’s pardons, past or present. Biden has effectively neutralized pardons as a political issue, and even worse, he has inadvertently given power to Trump’s narrative about the unreliability of American institutions. Biden at first promised to respect the jury’s verdict in Hunter’s gun trial, and vowed he would not pardon Hunter—and then said that because “raw politics” had “infected this process,” he had to act. And so now every Republican can say: When it comes to pardons, all I know is that I agree with Joe Biden that the Justice Department can’t be trusted to treat Americans fairly. I’m glad he finally saw the light.Some people see Joe’s pardon of Hunter as an act of mercy, an expression of a father’s love for a son who has been through the hell of addiction. I understand those arguments. (In 2020, I wrote about the relationship between Joe and Hunter.) I also know that many Americans believe that Hunter would have been targeted by the Justice Department next year as part of Trump’s carnival of revenge. I am less convinced about this, not least because Joe Biden could have waited until Hunter was sentenced for his federal crimes later this month and then commuted his punishments while fashioning a more limited pardon for other issues. Instead, the father gave the son a pass on any federal crimes committed during more than a decade of his life.And I fully understand that pleas about norms have little impact on Democrats who are tired of adhering to such quaint notions while Trump trashes them at will. It’s stomach-turning to watch Republicans criticize Biden for this pardon after Trump handed them out during his first term like a guy spreading around drink vouchers in front of a casino. And besides, some might say, who cares about norms and the rule of law if Trump is back in power? The Bidens should get what they can get while giving Trump the finger, shouldn’t they?I think anyone making these nihilistic arguments will come to regret them, but that’s a discussion for another day. In the meantime, I am more worried about the Hunter pardon as a practical political matter.Biden has now hobbled an effective case that his own party could have made going into 2026, even against Trump. Most people understand corruption, and though they may not care about it very much, they don’t like it shoved in their faces. Some of Trump’s pardons could have been politically damaging to Republicans: Just over a week ago, a poll found that 64 percent of Americans would object to pardoning those convicted for January 6–related offenses.But how do Democrats make that case now that Biden sounds so much like Trump when it comes to the justice system? Biden’s statement on the pardon had a kind of Trumpian, unspecific paranoia to it: “In trying to break Hunter,” the president stated, “they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”As Chait asks: “Trying to break Hunter? And his father? To what end?” This pardon has more than a whiff of panic around it, and if President Biden is unnerved about the outcome of a process controlled by his own Justice Department, how can any of us object to a future President Trump letting people out of jail based on the same fears? The reality, of course, is that Trump’s malevolent and trollish pardoning of various cranks and cronies is not in the same universe as an anguished father pardoning his son, but President Biden has now ensured that no one will really care much about the difference.Joe Biden is at the end of his career and angry at a political world that has made his son into an object of hate and ridicule. With the stroke of a pen, he saved Hunter and stuck it to everyone else—including, perhaps, the people who forced him to give up his campaign while Hunter was reportedly pleading with him to stay the course. Every parent can understand why he wanted to yell screw you into the wind before he headed out the door. Unfortunately, he may have also screwed many members of his own party in the process—and undermined the resolve they’ll need to defend the rule of law.Related: Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise (From March) Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: The end of Democratic delusions Ronald Brownstein: Why they lost A constitutional crisis greater than Watergate The great grocery squeeze Today’s News Trump announced on Saturday that he picked Kash Patel, a former public defender and Trump loyalist, to be the FBI director. The nomination would require ousting the Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray. Rebel forces opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad advanced over the weekend and took over Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city. French lawmakers introduced no-confidence motions against Prime Minister Michel Barnier; if successful, the vote could break apart his government. Dispatches The Wonder Reader: Minimizing gender disparities in housework means reconsidering some deeply held societal truths, Isabel Fattal writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Pixel-shot / Alamy; Reading Room 2020 / Alamy. America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a ReasonBy Yasmin Tayag Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest spin on MAGA, “Make frying oil tallow again,” is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions. Last month, Kennedy argued in an Instagram post that Americans were healthier when restaurants such as McDonald’s cooked fries in beef tallow—that is, cow fat—instead of seed oils, a catchall term for common vegetable-derived oils including corn, canola, and sunflower. Americans, he wrote, are “being unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils; in his view, we’d all be better off cooking with solid fats such as tallow, butter, and lard. In a video that Kennedy posted on Thanksgiving, he deep-fries a whole turkey in beef tallow and says, “This is how we cook the MAHA way.” Cardiologists shuddered at the thought. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A “radical” approach to reclaiming your attention When a telescope is a national-security risk The fall of Aleppo was oddly familiar, Graeme Wood writes. How to end the war in Gaza A new reckoning for nuclear energy Culture Break Thomas Le Clear / Smithsonian Take a picture. Would you pay $1,000 for a family photo? Some parents are shelling out money to capture the perfect image, Erin Sagen writes.Play. Wyna Liu, the editor of the New York Times game Connections, discusses her process and the particular ire her puzzles inspire.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Looking for your next read? Sign up for our Books Briefing newsletter, and on Wednesday you’ll receive our editors’ list of the 10 books that made them think the most this year.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan, J. GreenDay 2 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: This image shows the center of the Serpens Nebula, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera. The Serpens Nebula, located 1,300 light-years from Earth, is home to a particularly dense cluster of newly forming stars, some of which will eventually grow to the mass of our sun. Webb’s image of this nebula reveals a grouping of aligned protostellar outflows (visible in the top left). These jets are identified by bright, clumpy streaks that appear red, which are shock waves caused when a jet hits the surrounding gas and dust. Throughout this image, filaments and wisps of different hues represent reflected starlight from still-forming protostars within the cloud.See the full advent calendar here, as a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.

The iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, which tracks more than 90 large and mid-sized companies in South Korea, tumbled 6% to hit a 52-week low.

CFPB regulation meant to save consumers $10 billion a year has resulted in higher costs for some, as banks react by hiking interest rates and charging new fees.

Job openings totaled 7.74 million on the month, up 372,000 from September.

The deal, which is expected to close in mid-2025, comes during a boom for the private credit space.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is protected by the U.S. Secret Service, was not under threat during the shooting outside her Washington, D.C., home.

PSQ is a microcap stock with a market capitalization of only $72 million as of Monday's close.

The CDC said 104 people in 14 states were infected in the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's.

Famed British carmaker Jaguar revealed its new vehicle design direction Monday night with the introduction of an all-electric concept car called "Type 00."

Art Cashin was UBS' director of floor operations at the NYSE and a man The Washington Post called "Wall Street's version of Walter Cronkite."

Constellation Brands will sell its Svedka vodka brand to alcoholic beverage company Sazerac in the coming months.

Slowing sales and company-specific struggles have put pressure on Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which will report quarterly earnings this week.

Jim Cramer said Tuesday that Honeywell's partnership with Bombardier is "Exhibit A" for why Elliott's breakup push is correct.

While he made similar statements on the 2024 campaign trail, it was the first time that Trump had spoken about the deal since he won a second presidential term last month.

The debt-to-income ratio was the most common reason buyers were denied a mortgage, according to a report. Here's how to improve it.

If you're donating money on Giving Tuesday, you may score a bigger tax break by gifting profitable investments. Here's what to know.

Frontier Airlines next year will retrofit its Airbus jetliners to include two rows of first-class seats.

Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of Defense, was investigated in 2017 for an alleged sexual assault.

Trump has pledged to "end Biden's delays in federal drilling permits and leases that are needed to unleash American oil and natural gas production."

Ash Xu once thought she'd grow up to be a software engineer. Instead, the 22-year-old is fresh off directing her first TV commercial.

Parents who struggle to say "no" to their children could be doing them disservice in the long run, according to child psychologist Becky Kennedy.

After feeling disappointed by her dream job, one millennial decided to retire early. She's happy with her choice: "I'm very good at doing nothing and relaxing."

Kai Cenat, a 22-year-old live streamer, completed a so-called subathon on Saturday, streaming 24 hours a day for the entire 30 days of November.

Gov. Gavin Newsom's special legislative session to safeguard California from potential "federal overreach" from the incoming Trump administration begins Monday.

Elon Musk's pay package granted in 2018 was the largest compensation plan in U.S. history for a public company executive.

General Motors plans to sell its stake in a $2.6 billion electric vehicle battery cell plant in Michigan to its joint venture partner LG Energy Solution.

Homeowners associations, or HOAs, are becoming more common. The biggest complaint among current owners is the cost, report finds.

Intel announced Monday that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired from the company, effective Dec. 1.

Microsoft was accused of unfairly overcharging customers of rival cloud companies including Amazon, Google and Alibaba Cloud in a U.K. lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller cited recent data indicating that progress on inflation may be "stalling."

The motion will be debated at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, expected to be followed by a vote later in the evening.

The CDC said 104 people in 14 states were infected in the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is protected by the U.S. Secret Service, was not under threat during the shooting outside her Washington, D.C., home.

Job openings totaled 7.74 million on the month, up 372,000 from September.

Frontier Airlines next year will retrofit its Airbus jetliners to include two rows of first-class seats.

The deal, which is expected to close in mid-2025, comes during a boom for the private credit space.

Investors awaited data this week that will offer insights about the strength of the U.S. economy.

Famed British carmaker Jaguar revealed its new vehicle design direction Monday night with the introduction of an all-electric concept car called "Type 00."

General Motors plans to sell its stake in a $2.6 billion electric vehicle battery cell plant in Michigan to its joint venture partner LG Energy Solution.

Art Cashin was UBS' director of floor operations at the NYSE and a man The Washington Post called "Wall Street's version of Walter Cronkite."

Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of Defense, was investigated in 2017 for an alleged sexual assault.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller cited recent data indicating that progress on inflation may be "stalling."

Shares of Super Micro Computer surged more than 30% after a special committee ruled it found "no evidence of misconduct" at the embattled AI server maker.

Intel announced Monday that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired from the company, effective Dec. 1.

Despite a looming ban, TikTok is making inroads in e-commerce, poaching both talent and sellers from Amazon.

Norway has shelved plans to open a vast ocean area at the bottom of the Arctic for commercial-scale deep-sea mining.

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has unexpectedly resigned from the automaker amid increasingly "different views" between the executive and the board of directors.

Elon Musk seeks to block OpenAI from changing its business structure, and discouraging deals to back competitors like xAI.

Ferrari is thought to be a special case among Europe's automobile sector even as many car giants come under pressure from the threat of U.S. tariffs.

The personal consumption expenditures price index was expected to show inflation at 2.3% in October.

Donald Trump Jr., the son of President-elect Donald Trump, said "the need for drones is obvious" as he joined the advisory board of Unusual Machines.

Meta, Rabbit and Bee AI are offering Black Friday deals for their devices that incorporate AI, but there aren't many other generative AI gadgets on the market.

While the drop in rates wasn't exactly huge, there was a fair amount of pent-up demand among homebuyers.

A small landlocked country in the heart of Europe appears to be uniquely exposed to President-elect Donald Trump's "America First" economic agenda.

OpenAI on Tuesday introduced a new $1.5 billion tender offer, a continuation of its recent $6.6 billion funding round, led by SoftBank, CNBC has learned.

Workday called for a 25% adjusted operating margin in the current quarter, below Wall Street's estimate of 25.5%.

Dell is a top vendor for computers required to develop and deploy artificial intelligence, especially computers based around Nvidia chips.

Federal Reserve officials expressed confidence that inflation is easing and the labor market is strong, allowing for further interest rate cuts albeit at a gradual pace.

Constellation manufactures all of its beers, including Modelo and Corona, in Mexico.

Automakers like General Motors and Stellantis have major production presences in Mexico and could take a hit from tariffs.

• Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

• DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

• 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Jamie Foxx remains hospitalized in Georgia nearly a week after his daughter revealed the actor experienced a "medical complication," a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN on Monday.

A 13-year-old in Ohio has died after "he took a bunch of Benadryl," trying a dangerous TikTok challenge that's circulating online, according to a CNN affiliate and a GoFundMe account from his family.

Pizza guy delivers more than a pie, taking out a fleeing suspect. CNN's Jeanne Moos shows him putting his best foot forward.

Netflix is officially winding down the business that helped make it a household name.

Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT could lead to a "turbocharging" of consumer harms including fraud and scams, and the US government has substantial authority to crack down on AI-driven consumer harms under existing law, members of the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.

Gobbling up too many refined wheat and rice products, along with eating too few whole grains, is fueling the growth of new cases of type 2 diabetes worldwide, according to a new study that models data through 2018.

At some middle and high schools in the United States, 1 in 4 teens report they've abused prescription stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder during the year prior, a new study found.

CEO Tim Cook personally welcomed customers to the new Apple store in Mumbai as the tech company opens its first retail stores in India. CNN's Vedika Sud reports.

Senate Democrats railed against Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday amid reports that the Supreme Court conservative failed to disclose luxury travel, gifts and a real estate transaction involving a GOP megadonor, but their plan to investigate the conservative jurist remains unclear.

• Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich denied detention appeal in Moscow • Putin visits Russian troops at military headquarters in Kherson • Watch moment WSJ journalist appears in Russian court

Two Russian men who claim to be former Wagner Group commanders have told a human rights activist that they killed children and civilians during their time in Ukraine.

CNN panelists react to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis floating the idea of building a competing theme park next to Disney World in Orlando.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he hopes to replace Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee with Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and aims to set up a floor vote on the issue this afternoon, which Republicans are expected to block.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to Wall Street on Monday to deliver a fresh warning that the House GOP majority will refuse to lift a cap on government borrowing unless Biden agrees to spending cuts that would effectively neutralize his domestic agenda.

The US has sensitive nuclear technology at a nuclear power plant inside Ukraine and is warning Russia not to touch it, according to a letter the US Department of Energy sent to Russia's state-owned nuclear energy firm Rosatom last month.

Atiq Ahmed, a former lawmaker in India's parliament, convicted of kidnapping, was shot dead along with his brother while police were escorting them for a medical check-up in a slaying caught on live television on Saturday. CNN's Vedika Sud reports.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration amended the terms of its emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer and Moderna bivalent vaccines on Tuesday, allowing people ages 65 and older and certain people with weakened immunity to get additional doses before this fall's vaccination campaigns.

Maine authorities have detained a person of interest and continue to investigate after two shooting incidents that appear to be connected left at least four people dead and three others injured, state police said.

• Delta Air Lines reports record bookings for summer travel • Air France and Airbus acquitted in trial over 2009 plane crash

Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who has been cleared to resume football activities, said Tuesday his cardiac arrest during an NFL game in January was caused by commotio cordis.

Polish pilot Lukasz Czepiela made history after landing a plane on a helipad at the top of a 56-story hotel in Dubai.

The top US Navy admiral ardently defended a non-binary sailor on Tuesday amid some criticism from Republican lawmakers, saying he is "particularly proud of this sailor."

The Fulton County District Attorney's office said some fake electors for Donald Trump have implicated each other in potential criminal activity and is seeking to disqualify their lawyer, according to a new court filing.

High speed trains have proved their worth across the world over the past 50 years.

It's April 18, the official deadline to file your federal and state income tax returns for 2022. (It is also, apparently, National Animal Crackers Day for those who celebrate.)

It's a surprising fact that's often overlooked in the immigration debate.

Tuesday is Tax Day in America, one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will finally end their procrastination, file their federal returns, and hope for a refund from the IRS. But for many of the nation's wealthiest, it's just another Tuesday.

There are many ways to explore the seven mountains that surround the picturesque UNESCO World Heritage city of Bergen on Norway's fjord-studded west coast. The newest, however, might well be record-breaking.

A German artist has rejected an award from a prestigious international photography competition after revealing that his submission was generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has found two of three ships that sank in the same Lake Superior storm more than a century ago, locating one in 2021 and the other in 2022.

What does intimacy look like for seniors? There's no end to sex scenes and other steamy content featuring the young and unwrinkled, but past a certain age, popular culture largely draws a blank — or treats sex as a punchline.

China's economy is off to a solid start in 2023 following its emergence from three years of strict pandemic restrictions.

• Four out of the five US metro areas with the lowest unemployment are in Florida. Here's why • Opinion: The overlooked problem with raising the retirement age for Social Security

McDonald's, which has been focusing on upgrading its core items to boost sales, is rolling out a series of changes designed to improve its signature burgers.

Shares of Google-parent Alphabet fell more than 3% in early trading Monday after a report sparked concerns that its core search engine could lose market share to AI-powered rivals, including Microsoft's Bing.

The ruling earlier this month by a Texas federal judge to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration's approval of a drug that is used frequently for medication abortions, is very personal for me.

On Monday, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee — chaired by Donald Trump ally Rep. Jim Jordan — is set to hold a field hearing in New York City called "Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan." A statement bills the hearing as an examination of how, the Judiciary Committee says, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's policies have "led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents."

In 1917, British analysts deciphered a coded message the German foreign minister sent to one of his country's diplomats vowing to begin "unrestricted submarine warfare" and seeking to win over Mexico with a promise to "reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona" if the US entered the world war. When it became public, the Zimmerman Telegram caused a sensation, helping propel the US into the conflict against Germany.

Four years ago, almost to the day, the people of Sudan were celebrating a revolution after overthrowing longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. Now the East African country faces the possibility of a complete collapse similar to the chaos we see today in Yemen or Libya.

Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

After the shock came the aftershocks, the power vacuum, and perhaps most significantly and impressively, the laughs, as "Succession" pivoted to face life after Logan Roy, in an episode that finally put the HBO show's title into full flower.

Of the many dark gifts Showtime's eerie hit series "Yellowjackets" serves up for us, the juiciest this season is by far the music.

Jeremy Renner is continuing his recovery after his devastating snowplow accident in January, and recognizing those who've helped him along the way.

"Barry" has taken chances from the very beginning, which is certainly true of a fourth and final season that picks up where the third left off, with its hitman-turned-wannabe actor getting arrested. That paves the way for an even darker season that accentuates the show's ensemble aspect while leaning a little too heavily on blurring lines with flights of fancy.

Police are searching for a 17-year-old girl reported missing in Denver who was last seen Friday, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Aubrey Ivery was last seen around 9 a.m. Friday in the 4500 block of Frankfort Way in Denver, according to a CBI missing Indigenous person alert. The block where she was last spotted is in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, near Interstate 70. Ivery, a Black and Indigenous teenager affiliated with the Oglala Sioux tribe, is described as 5-foot-7-inches tall, weighing 145 pounds and having dark brown hair and brown eyes, according to the alert. Anyone with information about Ivery or her whereabouts should call 911 or the Denver Police Department at 720-913-2000. This is a developing story and will be updated.  Related Articles Crime and Public Safety | Colorado Springs police sergeant intimidated girl who accused him of inappropriate contact, affidavit says Crime and Public Safety | Motorcycle rider killed in crash with semitrailer in Commerce City Crime and Public Safety | Suspected dog-napper throws Commerce City puppy out window of moving car Crime and Public Safety | Lakewood officers kill man with gun outside Best Buy, police say Crime and Public Safety | 5 hospitalized after 3-car crash in Denver’s Marston neighborhood Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge dismissed the gun case against Hunter Biden on Tuesday after President Joe Biden issued a sweeping pardon for his son. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika closed the case the week before Hunter Biden was to be sentenced. He could have faced up to 25 years in prison, though as a first-time offender he likely would have gotten far less time or avoided prison entirely. Related Articles National News | Some Democrats — including Gov. Jared Polis — are frustrated over Joe Biden pardoning his son National News | Biden pardons his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to National News | Is Rep. Yadira Caraveo to blame for fentanyl crisis? A closer look at campaign ads in Colorado’s 8th District race National News | Gabe Evans, a former police officer, seeks moderate path to Congress — while trying to sidestep Trump minefield Prosecutors opposed dismissing the case, arguing in court documents that a pardon shouldn’t wipe away the case “as if it never occurred.” Hunter Biden was convicted on three felonies after he lied on a federal form to purchase a gun in Delaware by saying he wasn’t a drug user in 2018, a period when he has acknowledged being addicted. The Justice Department special counsel is also opposed to dismissing a case filed in California after he failed to pay $1.4 million in taxe s. A federal judge in Los Angeles hasn’t yet ruled in that case. The president’s Sunday decision to go back on previous pledges and issue his son a blanket federal pardon for actions over the past 11 years has sparked a political uproar in Washington, drawing criticism from many Democrats as well as Republicans and threatening to cloud Biden’s legacy as he prepares to leave office on Jan. 20. Hunter Biden was originally supposed to strike a plea deal with prosecutors last year that would have spared him prison time, but the agreement fell apart after Noreika questioned unusual aspects of it. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

By BRIDGET BROWN NEW YORK — It’s almost that time of year: Spotify is gearing up to release its annual Wrapped, personalized recaps of users’ listening habits and year in audio. Spotify has been giving its listeners breakdowns of their data since 2016. And each year, it’s become a bigger production — and internet sensation. Spotify said its 2023 Wrapped was the “biggest ever created,” in terms of audience reach and the kind of data it provided. So, what will 2024 have in store? Here’s a look at what to know ahead of this year’s Spotify Wrapped. What exactly is Spotify Wrapped? It’s the streaming service’s annual overview of individual listening trends, as well as trends around the world. Users learn their top artists, songs, genres, albums and podcasts, all wrapped into one interactive presentation. The campaign has become a social media sensation, as people share and compare their Wrapped data with their friends and followers online. Past iterations have provided users with all kinds of breakdowns and facts, including whether they’re among an artist’s top listeners, as well as a personalized playlist of their top 100 songs of that year to save, share and listen to whenever they’re feeling nostalgic. Spotify also creates a series of playlists that reflect national and global listening trends, featuring the top streamed artists and songs. In 2023, Taylor Swift was Spotify’s most streamed artist, unseating Bad Bunny who had held the title for three years in a row. Each year has something new in store. In 2019, Wrapped included a summary of users’ streaming trends for the entire decade. Last year, Spotify matched listeners to a Sound Town based on their artist affinities and how it lined up with those in other parts of the world. When is the expected release date? So far, the streaming platform has kept the highly anticipated release date of Wrapped under … er, wraps. In past years, it’s been released after Thanksgiving, between Nov. 30 and Dec. 6. Each year, rumors tend to swell on social media around when Spotify stops collecting data in order to prepare their Wrapped results, and this year was no exception. Spotify quickly squashed those presumptions, assuring on social media that “Spotify Wrapped doesn’t stop counting on October 31st.” A representative for Spotify did not respond to a request for comment on when the company stops tracking data for Wrapped. Where can I find my Spotify Wrapped? When Wrapped is released, each user’s Spotify account will prompt them to view their interactive data roundup. It can be accessed through the Spotify smartphone app, or by logging on to the Spotify website. Wrapped is available to users with and without Premium subscriptions. What else can I learn with my Spotify data? There are a handful of third-party sites that you can connect your Spotify account to that will analyze your Wrapped data. How Bad is Your Spotify is an AI bot that judges your music taste. Receiptify gives you your top songs on a sharable graphic that looks like, yes, a receipt. Instafest gives you your own personal music festival-style lineup based on your top artists. How NPRCore Are You assesses how similar your music taste is to NPR Music’s. What if I don’t have Spotify? Other major streaming platforms such as Apple Music and YouTube Music have developed their own versions of Wrapped in recent years. Apple Music’s Replay not only gives its subscribers a year-end digest of their listening habits but monthly summaries as well — a feature that helps differentiate itself from the one-time Spotify recap. That’s released at the end of the calendar year. YouTube Music, meanwhile, has a similar end-of-the-year release for its listeners, as well as periodic seasonal releases throughout the year. It released its annual Recap for users earlier this month. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

As someone who cares deeply about the future of our planet, I converted my 1963 home in Boulder from gas to all electric. The install went smoothly, the problem was the 7 ½ month ordeal Xcel Energy put me through to disconnect the gas. First, Xcel had no simple form for canceling gas service due to electrification. Next, Xcel contacted me saying it would charge $5,333 for disconnecting. Xcel only stopped attempting to charge me when front page articles featuring my story and that of others who were penalized in this way for discontinuing gas service appeared. The next day, Xcel came to remove my gas meter, and I was not charged.  However, the saga didn’t end here. Just as some patients who lose a limb continue to feel phantom pain, Xcel began charging me for phantom gas — estimated charges of up to $100 per month because it could no longer read the meter that Xcel had removed. I was threatened with collection action because I refused to pay for gas that I was not, and could not possibly be, using. Finally, when I called the customer service line to pay my bill, the automatic system put me on hold saying, “You must talk to an agent about reconnecting [to gas].” Any private company in a competitive market would not survive such poor customer service. But Xcel is not a private company. Xcel is a “regulated monopoly.” That means we customers have no choices if we are in Xcel’s exclusive franchise territories. Our utility system allows Xcel to make profits by building infrastructure and then receiving a guaranteed rate of return on that infrastructure through customer rates. Consequently, it is no surprise to read that Xcel is planning to add about $22 billion of capital investments in Colorado and that customer rates will increase up to 2.5% per year. Here is the frustrating part. The new cleaner resources that Xcel is planning to build, such as solar and wind, are actually less expensive to build and run than the old infrastructure they are replacing, such as coal plants. A private company would probably switch simply to save money.   And if a private company had made poor previous investment decisions by building now nonprofitable resources, that company would eat the losses, not its customers who have the option of leaving and going to a competitor without penalty. Instead, Xcel is forcing its customers to eat the costs of its poor decisions while its shareholders have seen steady increases in profits over the last years — with over 10% increase in gross profits between 2021 and 2022. Xcel should not be able to charge its captive customers for reduced consumption of its product.  A private company would not have this option, and the high guaranteed rate of return set by the PUC protects Xcel from market risks.  Private companies would salivate for a similar return-rate cushion. Related Articles Opinion Columnists | Colorado regulators consider another utility’s rate hike request in affordability test case Opinion Columnists | Once Xcel’s last coal plant in Colorado closes, is nuclear energy an option to replace its jobs, electricity? Opinion Columnists | Monthly gas bills will rise after Xcel Energy wins OK of $130M hike in revenue Opinion Columnists | Colorado snowstorm cut power to more than 52,000 homes, thousands without power Sunday morning Opinion Columnists | Colorado’s first major winter storm of the season drops nearly 3 feet of snow, closes most major highways In addition, our legislature should change the more-than-a-century-old exclusive monopoly franchise that Xcel enjoys. It might have been prudent when electricity was generated and distributed one-way — from a large power plant to customers. But we are in a new era where two-way, or bidirectional, power is the norm. Technological advances allow customers to generate their own electricity with solar panels and use home batteries or EVs for back-up. Xcel and other large utilities have stood in the way of maximizing the CO2 and cost savings these technologies can provide. Could our current cellphone service and all that our cellphones provide have been possible if AT&T were still limiting customers to only the choice of a traditional or Princess phone? Instead of allowing Xcel to invest more and more in large infrastructure and to charge its captive customers more and more, our legislature can open up the system for new approaches such as neighbor-to-neighbor power sharing, microgrids, and virtual power plants.  We need to introduce more free-market structures allowing innovation that will accelerate carbon emission reductions and empower customers to have more. K.K. DuVivier is the John A. Carver Jr. Chair in Natural Resources Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more. To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A Coloradan is among three mountain climbers from the U.S. and Canada missing after they failed to return from a planned ascent of New Zealand’s highest peak, Aoraki, authorities said Tuesday. The Americans — Kurt Blair, 56, from Colorado and Carlos Romero, 50, of California — are certified alpine guides, according to the website of the American Mountain Guides Association. A statement by New Zealand’s police did not name the Canadian climber, citing the need to notify his family. The men flew to a hut partway up the mountain on Saturday to begin their ascent and were reported missing on Monday when they did not arrive to meet their prearranged transport after the climb. Searchers hours later found several climbing-related items believed to belong to the men, but no sign of them, police said. Blair, from Durango, was a beloved fixture of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains who came from a proud family of mountain adventurers, according to a memorial post from the Silverton Avalanche School. He became a certified mountain guide in 2022, his colleagues at the school said. “I couldn’t have done it without my Dad, Robert Blair Jr., taking me into the mountains and showing me the ropes and my grandfather, Robert Blair Sr. who made a number of first ascents in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in the 1930s,” Blair wrote in an old Facebook post celebrating his career. According to his Facebook page, beyond his day-to-day of guiding people through the San Juans, Blair spent his life traveling the world and summiting famous mountain peaks, including Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, Kyajo Ri, Washington’s Northern Cascades and Denali[ in Alaskacq comment=”cq” ]. “Anyone who shared time with Kurt in the mountains knows that his calm demeanor and positive presence ran counter to the rough edges and sharp tongues so often exemplified by the hardscrabble ranks of mountain guides,” the Silverton Avalanche School wrote in its memorial post. “He was the nicest guy you’d ever share a rope or trail or skin track with, and his humility, competence and polite nature made him a client and student favorite.” Blair leaves behind a loving family, including two sons, and a mountain community that stretches across Colorado and beyond, the school said. Related Articles Colorado News | Neurodivergent rocket scientist from Colorado has climbed the highest peak on every continent Colorado News | Colorado alpinist dies challenging unclimbed face of Himalayan peak Colorado News | Take a (steep) hike through local history on Mount Sanitas in Boulder Colorado News | Colorado man survives losing both legs in wood-chipper accident Colorado News | How a Colorado Parkinson’s group uses climbing to help stave off effects of the disease Search efforts did not resume Tuesday due to deteriorating weather conditions on Aoraki, also known as Mount Cook, with heavy rain and snow forecast. Operations were unlikely to begin again until conditions improved, expected to be on Thursday. The Silverton Avalanche School said search and rescue authorities think the climbing group took a fatal fall from high up on the peak. Aoraki is 12,218 feet high and is part of the Southern Alps, the scenic and icy mountain range that runs the length of New Zealand’s South Island. A settlement of the same name at its base is a destination for domestic and foreign tourists. The peak is popular among experienced climbers. Its terrain is technically difficult due to crevasses, avalanche risk, changeable weather and glacier movement. More than 240 deaths have been recorded on the mountain and in the surrounding national park since the start of the 20th century. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

Nik Bonitto warned people that he could play in coverage. Denver’s edge rusher played safety during his senior season at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. And even though his experience at defensive back was minimal, Bonitto was certain he could cover if called upon. An opportunity to showcase those skills came about in the second quarter against the Browns on Monday night. Browns quarterback Jameis Winston thought he had a wide-open Jordan Akins for a check-down throw in the flat. Instead, Bonitto anticipated the pass perfectly, snatching the ball and sprinting the other way for a 71-yard touchdown to give Denver a 21-10 lead with less than two minutes to go in the second quarter. “I’ve been trying to tell people I used to play safety back in the day and people are surprised,” Bonitto said. “… When I saw a chance to break on the ball, I kind of just went and did that.” Last week against the Raiders, Bonitto inserted himself in the Pro Bowl conversation, becoming the first Bronco since 2018 to record double-digit sacks in a single season. In Denver’s 41-32 win over the Browns, Bonitto made a case for being an All-Pro by shining in the national spotlight. Denver’s defense wasn’t great. The Broncos had busted coverages and communication issues, resulting in a back-and-forth game against the three-win Browns. However, Bonitto managed to step up despite Denver’s defensive struggles, recording a sack and a season-high six pressures on 28 pass rushes, according to Next Gen Stats. Postgame, Bonitto had cameras and microphones pressed to his face while being showered with questions. Still, the large crowd of reporters surrounding Bonitto couldn’t drown out outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper’s praise for his teammate. The Broncos had always known Bonitto could be an elite defender. But in prime time, the entire nation witnessed a star in the making. “That (expletive) cold. … Fifteen is crazy,” Cooper said, with his voice echoing throughout the locker room. The former Oklahoma standout has 11 sacks and 43 pressures with four games left this season. He has recorded at least four pressures on four different occasions. In three seasons, Bonitto has 20.5 career sacks, tying outside linebacker Bradley Chubb for the seventh-most sacks by a Bronco in a three-year span. The Broncos were quick to say that Monday wasn’t their best defensive effort. Denver allowed 552 yards of total offense while wide receiver Jerry Jeudy picked apart his former team’s secondary, exploding for 235 yards and a touchdown on nine catches. But even amid a lackluster performance, the Broncos defense once again found a way to win. Bonitto had one of Denver’s three interceptions against Winston, who also threw for 497 yards and four touchdowns. On his pick-six, Bonitto reached a max speed of 19.88 seconds — the 2nd-fastest speed by a linebacker as a ball carrier this season, according to NFL’s Next Gen Stats. “I thought I ran faster but I’ll take it,” said Bonitto, who recorded the third-longest interception return for a touchdown by a Broncos linebacker and the longest since Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Randy Gradishar in 1980. Related Articles Denver Broncos | Keeler: Jerry Jeudy on Broncos Country boos: “I wanted to hear it louder” Denver Broncos | After wild MNF win vs. Browns, Broncos believe special season is brewing: “We’re playing for something”  Denver Broncos | Broncos WR Courtland Sutton stumps for CU Buffs’ Travis Hunter to win Heisman Trophy: “The kid is special” Denver Broncos | Broncos report card: Trying to make sense of a nutty Monday night Broncos win Denver Broncos | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos outlast Cleveland Browns 41-32 in NFL Week 13 With the game on the line late in the fourth quarter, Ja’Quan McMillian made a play of his own. The nickel cornerback leaped and intercepted Winston’s throw to wide receiver Elijah Moore along the sideline. The nickel cornerback fell on his back but immediately bounced back up and burst down the sideline for a 44-yard score, extending Denver’s lead to nine points and essentially putting the game away for good. The two pick-6s marked the fifth time in Broncos history the team recorded multiple interception returns for a touchdown in a game. The last time Denver did so was in 2018 against Arizona. “I just kept telling the guys, ‘I’m going to make a play.’ I just felt it all game,” McMillian said. “When you see your teammate make another play, you want to make a play as well.” When Cleveland threatened to score in the closing seconds, inside linebacker Cody Barton picked off Winston in the end zone, giving Denver’s eighth victory of the season one final exclamation point. “No matter what the situation is, we’re going to find a way to win and that’s what we did,” Bonitto said. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

WASHINGTON — Kash Patel has been well-known for years within Donald Trump’s orbit as a loyal supporter who shares the president-elect’s skepticism of the FBI and intelligence community. But he’s receiving fresh attention, from the public and from Congress, now that Trump has picked him to lead the FBI. As he braces for a bruising and likely protracted Senate confirmation fight, Patel can expect scrutiny not only over his professed fealty to Trump but also for his belief — revealed over the last year in interviews and his own book — that the century-old FBI should be radically overhauled. Here’s a look at some of what he’s proposed for the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. How much of it he’d actually follow through on is a separate question. He’s mused about shutting down the FBI’s Washington headquarters The first FBI employees moved into the current Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters 50 years ago. The building since then has housed the supervisors and leaders who make decisions affecting offices around the country and overseas. But if Patel has his way, the J. Edgar Hoover Building could be shut down, with its employees dispersed. “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Patel said in a September interview on the “Shawn Ryan Show.” “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.” Such a plan would undoubtedly require legal, logistical and bureaucratic hurdles and it may reflect more of a rhetorical flourish than a practical ambition. In a book last year titled, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” he proposed a more modest reform of having the headquarters moved out of Washington “to prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.” As it happens, the long-term fate of the building is in flux regardless of the leadership transition. The General Services Administration last year selected Greenbelt, Maryland, as the site for a new headquarters, but current FBI Director Christopher Wray has raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the site selection process. He’s talked about finding ‘conspirators’ in the government and media In an interview last year with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel repeated falsehoods about President Joe Biden and a stolen election. Related Articles Politics | Some Democrats — including Gov. Jared Polis — are frustrated over Joe Biden pardoning his son Politics | Editorial: Denver’s mayor was wrong to threaten armed conflict to protect immigrants Politics | Trump pick Kash Patel must prove he’ll restore public faith in the FBI, a leading GOP senator says Politics | Coloradans who sought to bar Donald Trump from the ballot now reckon with his return to office Politics | Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said. The same applies for supposed “conspirators” inside the federal government, he said. It’s not entirely clear what he envisions, but to the extent Patel wants to make it easier for the government to crack down on officials who disclose sensitive information and the reporters who receive it, it sounds like he’d back a reversal of current Justice Department policy that generally prohibits prosecutors from seizing the records of journalists in leak investigations. That policy was implemented in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland following an uproar over the revelation that the Justice Department during the Trump administration had obtained phone records of reporters as part of investigations into who had disclosed government secrets. Patel himself has said that it’s yet to be determined whether such a crackdown would be done civilly or criminally. His book includes several pages of former officials from the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies he’s identified as being part of the “Executive Branch Deep State.” Under the FBI’s own guidelines, criminal investigations can’t be rooted in arbitrary or groundless speculation but instead must have an authorized purpose to detect or interrupt criminal activity. And while the FBI conducts investigations, the responsibility of filing federal charges, or bringing a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government, falls to the Justice Department. Trump intends to nominate former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as attorney general. He wants ‘major, major’ surveillance reform Patel has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s use of its surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and in his “Shawn Ryan Show” interview, called for “major, major reform. Tons.” That position aligns him with both left-leaning civil libertarians who have long been skeptical of government power and Trump supporters outraged by well-documented surveillance missteps during the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. But it sets him far apart from FBI leadership, which has stressed the need for the bureau to retain its ability to spy on suspected spies and terrorists even while also implementing corrective steps meant to correct past abuses. If confirmed, Patel would take over the FBI amid continued debate over a particularly contentious provision of FISA known as Section 702, which permits the U.S. to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence. Biden in April signed a two-year extension of the authority following a fierce congressional dispute centered on whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data. Though the FBI boasts a high compliance rate, analysts have been blamed for a series of abuses and mistakes, including improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Patel has made clear his disdain for the reauthorization vote. “Because the budget of FISA was up this cycle, we demanded Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House, where the Republicans did? They bent the knee. They (reauthorized) it,” Patel said. In his book, Patel said a federal defender should be present to argue for the rights of the accused at all FISA court proceedings, a departure from the status quo. He has called for reducing the size of the intelligence community Patel has advocated cutting the federal government’s intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency. When it comes to the FBI, he said last year that he would support breaking off the bureau’s “intel shops” from the rest of its crime-fighting activities. It’s not clear exactly how he would intend to do that given that the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations form a core part of the bureau’s mandate and budget. Wray, who’s been in the job for seven years, has also recently warned of a heightened threat environment related to international and domestic terrorism. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller faced down calls from some in Congress who thought the FBI should be split up, with a new domestic intelligence agency created in its wake. The idea died, and Mueller committed new resources into transforming what for decades had been primarily a domestic law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering institution equally focused on combating terrorism, spies and foreign threats. Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official who served as the U.S. government’s national counterintelligence executive, said he disagreed with the idea of breaking out the FBI’s “intel shops” and viewed it as a way to defang the bureau. Doing so, he said, “makes the bureau less effective at what it does, and quite frankly, it will make the intelligence community less effective at what it does.” Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Jerry Jeudy is a boo-liever in Broncos Country again. “I loved it,” the Cleveland Browns’ WR1 and 2020 Broncos first-round draft pick said late Monday of the catcalls from Denver fans while his old team pulled out a wacky, wild 41-32 win. “They only boo you when they know that something’s gonna happen, and there’s something great in you.” He was great, wasn’t he? Jeudy finally played his way into the Broncos record book on Monday Night Football. He finally lived up to all that hype. Only it happened while he was wearing another uniform, repping another team, another town. His 235 receiving yards broke Terrell Owens’ 16-year-old NFL record for the most by a league wideout against his former franchise. Dude was motivated. Laser-focused. Consistent. On a national stage, the former Alabama wideout was everything Broncos Country wanted him to be. And wasn’t. Not here, anyway. The Broncos version of Jeudy, the one traded away this past March, drifted like a leaf in the breeze. One step forward. Three steps back. Flashes of absolute game-changing, field-flipping brilliance. Followed by weeks of anonymity, peppered by pouting and social-media finger-pointing. “A lot of fans didn’t really rock with him because they don’t feel like he was productive here,” his old teammate, Broncos safety P.J. Locke, told me after the game. “But, hey, it is what it is. He’s balling out now, you know, and that (Broncos time is) in his past.” Jeudy always had that dawg in him, as the cool kids say. He just needed a match for the pilot light. A reason to give a darn. The guy who almost single-handedly sent Sean Payton circling another parking lot came out on the Browns’ first play of the evening — a 44-yard jaunt over the middle — and never left. Related Articles Sports Columnists | Broncos OLB Nik Bonitto shines in national spotlight in win over Browns: “Fifteen is crazy” Sports Columnists | After wild MNF win vs. Browns, Broncos believe special season is brewing: “We’re playing for something”  Sports Columnists | Broncos WR Courtland Sutton stumps for CU Buffs’ Travis Hunter to win Heisman Trophy: “The kid is special” Sports Columnists | Broncos report card: Trying to make sense of a nutty Monday night Broncos win Sports Columnists | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos outlast Cleveland Browns 41-32 in NFL Week 13 The Broncos hit Week 13 averaging 2.6 “explosion” passes (20 yards or more) allowed per game. Jeudy had three of them, all by himself, by the first three minutes of the fourth quarter — a groove helped by no Riley Moss and all that hate. “Did you hear the boos every time you touched the ball?” a reporter asked Jeudy. “I heard it,” he replied. “That was a lot of boos, huh? It sounded like it. What that means is, a lot of catches, too.” Nine, to be exact. Revenge was a dish served lukewarm, though, as Broncos Country got treated to the full Jameis Winston Experience — 497 passing yards, four touchdowns and three picks, two of which were returned for scores. “I’m mad it was against us,” Locke, Jeudy’s teammate from 2020-23, offered with a smile of grudging admiration. “(Jerry isn’t) supposed to do that against us. I’m happy for him, though … he’s coming back to the Broncos and I know he had a little chip on his shoulder.” Yeah, just a little. No. 3 — he’ll always be No. 10 to us — told longtime Cleveland reporter Tony Grossi last week that he wanted to “go back up there and whip their (backsides). “… (Four) years is a long time to be patient. I’m not going to say they didn’t get me the ball for (four) years. Some years I had a few drops, like my rookie year. Other years there were a whole bunch of circumstances I can’t control.” We could argue revisionist history all day, but what would be the point? Broncos Country was promised CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson and got inconsistent football instead. As my colleague Troy Renck pointed out over the weekend, Payton vs. Jeudy was one divorce that looks as if it’s turned into a win for both sides. Jeudy’s putting together a Pro Bowl season with Winston, the QB partner he’s always wanted. The Broncos are putting together their first playoff team since 2015. “I don’t have (anything) towards them,” Jeudy said of his old squad. “At the end of the day, it is football. It’s competitive, everybody will have (that) juice when it’s time to play. Everybody wants to be great. Everybody wants to win. “That’s it, that’s all. No beef, nothing. Everybody just wants the best thing for themselves.” Locke, meanwhile, spoke of Jeudy late Monday with the affection of a long-lost brother, and old college roommate. “He actually had to block me on a play and I stepped on his toe,” the Broncos defender recalled with a laugh. Locke then leaned over to the bag between us and showed me one of his shoes, pointing to the cleats on the bottom. “Because I’ve got these seven-stud cleats, and that hurts,” he continued. “So my feet (got) set into the ground, and I stepped on him with my toe.” “Dang, bigfoot,” Jeudy told Locke. “Yeah, don’t be trying to block me,” Locke replied. “Go run some routes, bro. You ain’t supposed to be blocking. You ain’t (some) crack blocker, man.” Locke laughed again. “But I also told him I’m super-proud of him,” the Broncos safety said. “I’m happy for him. He’s showing it … and I think he’s one of the best receivers in the league.” He’s still one of the best when it comes to hamming it up. Jeudy’s celebration and Nestea plunge into the end zone after toasting Levi Wallace in the third quarter was pure theater. Jeudy sensed the moment and put it in a camel clutch, egging on the Empower Field faithful like a veteran pro wrestling heel. “I heard the boos,” Jeudy explained, “and I wanted to hear it louder.” They only boo when they care. When it hurts. When something great finally comes out, but for somebody else. “Hey, man, look, (those) emotions were running high,” Locke said. “It’s Monday Night Football, he was balling.” He was breaking records. Just … not the way John Elway drew it up four years ago. “God had a different plan for him,” Locke said. “He still did it. Just in a different way.” Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

Although meteorological winter started on Saturday, this week in Denver may feel more like fall, according to the National Weather Service. Dry, sunny skies are forecast for Tuesday through the weekend, when the next snow is expected to fall in Denver. Denver will see temperature highs in the mid-50s and low-60s throughout the week, with the warmest weather arriving Tuesday and Saturday afternoon, NWS forecasters said. Tuesday’s temperatures are forecast to peak around 60 degrees in the city, according to forecasters. While that’s nearly 10 degrees under the record, set in 2010, it’s also 14 degrees above a normal Dec. 3. Light winds will blow through Denver in the afternoon this week, maxing out around 6 mph. Denver’s Saturday temperatures will also peak around 60 degrees, NWS forecasters said. The second-warmest day of the week will be 15 degrees above the average on Dec. 7 and 10 degrees under the record, set in 1906. A snowstorm moving into Colorado later this week could hit Denver on Sunday and continue into Monday, according to NWS forecasters. Related Articles Weather | With temps as low as -27, these were the coldest places in Colorado on Black Friday Weather | Colorado snow totals for Nov. 28, 2024 Weather | Hit-and-miss snowstorm blankets Front Range in white ahead of Thanksgiving Weather | 16 Colorado ski areas get two feet of snow or more — just in time for the holiday weekend Weather | More than 640 flights delayed, canceled at DIA as snow spreads from mountains across metro Denver The severity of the storm and how much snow will fall remains unknown. Regardless of how much snowfall Denver gets, it’ll be a chilly few days. Forecasters said the storm will push temperature highs back down into the 30s, with overnight lows in the 20s. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

HOUSTON — Houston’s Azeez Al-Shaair was suspended by the NFL without pay for three games Tuesday for repeated violations of player safety rules following his hit to the head of Jacksonville’s Trevor Lawrence, which led to a concussion. Al-Shaair’s punishment was announced by NFL vice president of football operations Jon Runyan. In his letter to Al-Shaair, Runyan noted that he has had multiple offenses for personal fouls and sportsmanship-related rules violations in recent seasons. Back in the starting lineup after missing two games with a sprained left shoulder, Lawrence scrambled left on a second-and-7 play in the second quarter of Houston’s 23-20 win on Sunday. He initiated a slide before Al-Shaair raised his forearm and unleashed on the defenseless quarterback. Related Articles NFL | Texans’ Azeez Al-Shaair apologizes for hit on Jaguars’ Trevor Lawrence that led to concussion NFL | Violent hit on Jaguars QB Trevor Lawrence ‘has no business being in our league,’ coach says NFL | Keeler: CU’s Travis Hunter closes Heisman Trophy case with thrashing of Oklahoma State: “There’s no argument at this point” NFL | Renck & File: NBA deserves ratings decline for focusing on Joel Embiid, Bronny and not Nikola Jokic NFL | NFL Picks: Two big-time AFC matchups among playoff contenders set Week 11 stage Lawrence clenched both fists after the hit — movements consistent with what’s referred to as the “fencing response,” which can be common after a traumatic brain injury. He was on the ground for several minutes as teammates came to his defense and mobbed Al-Shaair. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

Losing a smartphone or tablet stuffed with your life’s details can be a nightmare, but your privacy may also be at risk in less obvious situations — like if you leave your unlocked phone unattended or if the children know your tablet’s passcode. While apps for financial or medical matters typically require their own passwords (and Apple’s Photos and Google Photos can hide specific pictures), the latest versions of iOS and Android offer new tools for further shielding sensitive content on your device. Here’s a quick overview. Securing iOS apps Apple’s iOS 18, released in September, now includes the ability to lock apps that don’t already require a passcode, Face ID or Touch ID to open them. Apple notes that look-alike siblings and children could bypass Face ID, so use a secret passcode if that’s a concern. To lock an app, find it on the iPhone’s or iPad’s home screen (or in the App Library) and press your finger on its icon. In the pop-up menu, select “Require Face ID” or the security method you normally use. Tap “Require Face ID” again when prompted. To open that app going forward, you’ll need to unlock it. To remove the lock from an app, press down on its icon and select “Don’t Require Face ID” from the menu. If locking is not enough, you can also now hide specific apps (and not just entire home-screen pages). While Apple’s default iOS apps can’t be hidden, you can put the invisibility cloak on the ones you have downloaded from the App Store. Just press your finger on an app’s icon, choose “Require Face ID” and tap “Hide and Require Face ID” from the menu. Hidden apps won’t show up in searches or provide notifications. They appear as blank icons in a folder at the bottom of the App Library screen. Tap the Hidden folder to authenticate and unlock it so you can use the apps. (Alternatively, open Settings, select Apps and scroll to the bottom to see the Hidden Apps menu.) To make a hidden app visible again, find its icon in one of these places, press on it and choose “Don’t Require Face ID.” You may have to manually add it back to your home screen from the icon’s pop-up menu. Securing Android apps Tools included with Android phones vary based on the system version, the device manufacturer and the wireless carrier. Many of these combinations can hide and lock apps, so check your settings for options. For example, many Samsung Galaxy devices have a “Hide apps on Home and Apps screens” option. And most Galaxy models can lock sensitive apps in the Secure Folder, which can be found in the security settings. Once you follow the steps to enable the Secure Folder, you need to supply a passcode or another digital key to get to the items stored within it. In its Android 15 system released last month, Google added a “private space” feature, which allows you to install apps into a digital vault that requires a password or another authentication to open. Once you set it up, you can switch between using apps in your private space and those in your regular collection. Google’s Android Help site has a lengthy guide to setting up and using a private space. But to get started, go to the Settings app, tap “Security & Privacy,” scroll down and select “Private Space.” Related Articles Technology | Three years after opening, X Denver residents say the party is over Technology | Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration Technology | Three businessmen set to join Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Technology | Caretaker for Aurora apartments finds more code violations than crime Technology | Colorado drivers start worker-owned ride-hailing platform to compete with Uber, Lyft You need to unlock your device with your authentication method to proceed. Tap the “Set Up” button to be guided through the steps for configuring the private space, which includes creating (or signing into) a separate Google Account and installing apps into it. This action walls off those applications from the rest of the device — and keeps that data from syncing with your main Google Account. You must choose a way to unlock the private space (like fingerprint recognition or a PIN), which can differ from your main device lock. Keep in mind that apps stop running when the private space is locked. Google advises that apps that use the phone’s sensors to track information (like medical data) or that run in the background are not suitable for stashing in a private space. Once you have established your private space, you can find it by scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the All Apps screen. Tap the lock icon to open or close the private space. If you really want invisibility, tap the gear icon and choose the option to hide the private space when it’s locked. To find it yourself, enter “private space” in the Android search bar. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

President-elect Donald Trump will return to power next year with a raft of technological tools at his disposal that would help deliver his campaign promise of cracking down on immigration — among them, surveillance and artificial intelligence technology that the Biden administration already uses to help make crucial decisions in tracking, detaining and ultimately deporting immigrants lacking permanent legal status. While immigration officials have used the tech for years, an October letter from the Department of Homeland Security obtained exclusively by The Associated Press details how those tools — some of them powered by AI — help make decisions over whether an immigrant should be detained or surveilled. One algorithm, for example, ranks immigrants with a “Hurricane Score,” ranging from 1-5, to assess whether someone will “abscond” from the agency’s supervision. The letter, sent by DHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Eric Hysen to the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law, revealed that the score calculates the potential risk that an immigrant — with a pending case — will fail to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The algorithm relies on several factors, he said, including an immigrant’s number of violations and length of time in the program, and whether the person has a travel document. Hysen wrote that ICE officers consider the score, among other information, when making decisions about an immigrant’s case. “The Hurricane Score does not make decisions on detention, deportation, or surveillance; instead, it is used to inform human decision-making,” Hysen wrote. Also included in the government’s tool kit is a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial matching and can track an immigrant’s specific location. Nearly 200,000 people without legal status who are in removal proceedings are enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, under which certain immigrants can live in the U.S. while their immigration cases are pending. In exchange, SmartLINK and GPS trackers used by ICE rigorously surveil them and their movements. The phone application draws on facial matching technology and geolocation data, which has been used before to find and arrest those using the app. Just Futures Law wrote to Hysen earlier this year, questioning the fairness of using an algorithm to assess whether someone is a flight risk and raising concerns over how much data SmartLINK collects. Such AI systems, which score or screen people, are used widely but remain largely unregulated even though some have been found to discriminate on race, gender or other protected traits. DHS said in an email that it is committed to ensuring that its use of AI is transparent and safeguards privacy and civil rights while avoiding biases. The agency said it is working to implement the Biden administration’s requirements on using AI, but Hysen said in his letter that security officials may waive those requirements for certain uses. Trump has publicly vowed to repeal Biden’s AI policy when he returns to the White House in January. “DHS uses AI to assist our personnel in their work, but DHS does not use the outputs of AI systems as the sole basis for any law enforcement action or denial of benefits,” a spokesperson for DHS told the AP. Related Articles Technology | Three years after opening, X Denver residents say the party is over Technology | How to add extra security layers to your phone or tablet Technology | Three businessmen set to join Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Technology | Caretaker for Aurora apartments finds more code violations than crime Technology | Colorado drivers start worker-owned ride-hailing platform to compete with Uber, Lyft Trump has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. Although he has proposed invoking wartime powers, as well as military involvement, the plan would face major logistical challenges — such as where to keep those who have been detained and how to find people spread across the country — that AI-powered surveillance tools could potentially address. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not answer questions about how the incoming administration plans to use DHS’ tech, but said in a statement that “President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation” in American history. Over 100 civil society groups sent a letter on Friday urging the Office of Management and Budget to require DHS to comply with the Biden administration’s guidelines. A spokesperson for OMB said that agencies must align their AI tools with the guidelines by December 1, and that any extensions or waivers of that deadline will be publicly disclosed next month. Just Futures Law’s executive director, Paromita Shah, said if immigrants are scored as flight risks, they are more likely to remain in detention, “limiting their ability to prepare a defense in their case in immigration court, which is already difficult enough as it is.” SmartLINK, part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of the private prison company The GEO Group. The GEO Group also contracts with ICE to run detention centers. ICE is tight-lipped about how it uses SmartLINK’s location feature to find and arrest immigrants. Still, public records show that during Trump’s first term in 2018, Manassas, Virginia-based employees of BI Inc. relayed immigrants’ GPS locations to federal authorities, who then arrested over 40 people. In a report last year to address privacy issues and concerns, DHS said that the mobile app includes security features that “prohibit access to information on the participant’s mobile device, with the exception of location data points when the app is open.” But the report notes that there remains a risk that data collected from people “may be misused for unauthorized persistent monitoring.” Such information could also be stored in other ICE and DHS databases and used for other DHS mission purposes, the report said. On investor calls earlier this month, private prison companies were clear-eyed about the opportunities ahead. The GEO Group’s executive chairman George Christopher Zoley said that he expects the incoming Trump administration to “take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” “In GEO’s ISAP program, we can scale up from the present 182,500 participants to several hundreds of thousands, or even millions of participants,” Zoley said. That same day, the head of another private prison company told investors he would be watching closely to see how the new administration may change immigrant monitoring programs. “It’s an opportunity for multiple vendors to engage ICE about the program going forward and think about creative and innovative solutions to not only get better outcomes, but also scale up the program as necessary,” Damon Hininger, CEO of the private prison company CoreCivic Inc. said on an earnings call. GEO did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, CoreCivic said that it has played “a valued but limited role in America’s immigration system” for both Democrats and Republicans for over 40 years. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Ryan Branin wants to be part of something different. For the past eight years, the 29-year-old has driven for Uber and Lyft. And like a growing movement of drivers, he’s fed up with his take-home pay constantly changing depending on criteria far beyond his control. He’s fed up with surge pricing. He’s fed up with supporting big tech over his local economy. “A lot of people are tired of every aspect of their lives being controlled by an algorithm,” Branin said. Enter the Drivers Cooperative of Colorado. For the past two years, a group of drivers have been building their own platform to compete with the ride-hailing giants. The difference? It’s owned by each and every one of them. “People think poor people can’t own technology,” said Minsun Ji, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, a business incubator that helped the cooperative get off the ground. “That’s not the case.” More than 4,000 drivers have downloaded the app since its soft launch in August, motivated by a platform built by drivers, for drivers. As opposed to Uber and Lyft, where companies take a large percentage of every ride, the Drivers’ Cooperative guarantees drivers 80% of each fare. The remaining 20% goes to the cooperative. Another key difference: No surge pricing. A ride home from the bar won’t be jacked up just because it’s late at night. “Surge pricing screws passengers,” Branin said. “It’s price-gouging. I don’t like screwing people over to make my living.” Ji spearheaded the project in June 2022 after consulting for a New York drivers’ cooperative — the nation’s first ride-hail app of its kind. Her task: expanding this model to other cities across the country. When she took the executive director job with Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, Ji told the board she had one condition: She would be starting a drivers’ co-op in Colorado. Soon after, she took her first trip to Denver International Airport to recruit drivers. “They were super excited,” Ji said. “They said, ‘We cannot wait.'” The Drivers Cooperative Colorado launched their new ride-share platform during an event at the west steps of the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Sept. 25, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) A group of local foundations provided the bulk of the start-up funding for the endeavor, including the Colorado Health Foundation, the Denver Foundation and the Rose Community Foundation. The co-op launched a crowd-funding campaign this fall and will continue to solicit grants from local foundations and loans from socially responsible investors. More than 10,000 riders have downloaded the app thus far, and Ji said the cooperative hopes to attain a 10% market share within three years. “This is revolutionary,” said state Rep. Stephanie Vigil, a Colorado Springs Democrat who, in 2022, became the first gig app driver elected to the Colorado legislature. The governance structure consists of a board of four drivers, plus one seat held by the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center. The first election is set for April. Isaac Chinyoka, the cooperative’s director of operations, said he feels pride knowing that the organization promotes upward social mobility. He’s heartened that all the money invested in the company will go to drivers and not C-suite executives. “I’ve never felt this sense of belonging before,” he said. The app comes three years after New York City drivers started the first cooperative of its kind. That venture — founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver — specializes in paratransit and non-emergency medical transportation. It didn’t have an on-demand option. Thus, the Colorado cooperative represents the first on-demand ride-hailing platform in the United States owned by drivers. The Drivers Cooperative Colorado launched their new ride-share platform during an event at the west steps of the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Sept. 25, 2024. Abdullahi Samatar, a Somali refugee, who moved to Denver three years ago and has worked for the two major ride-share companies, is excited to drive for Drivers Cooperative Colorado, where he feels he’ll have more of a voice in his work environment. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) Related Articles Business | More protections for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash drivers in Colorado as Gov. Jared Polis signs bills Business | Colorado’s gig app drivers nearing a breaking point. And this newly elected lawmaker is one of them. Business | Colorado Democrats make new push to give Uber, Lyft and DoorDash drivers more transparency over their rides Colorado drivers — along with their counterparts across the country — in recent years have gone on strike for better wages and more transparency from companies like Uber and Lyft. They say the companies are taking a higher percentage of the fares than they used to, making it harder to earn a living wage. The companies’ algorithms, meanwhile, are opaque, critics say, leading drivers to be uncertain of how much they might make in a given week. State lawmakers this session passed dual bills designed to increase transparency for delivery and ride-hail drivers. The bills mandate ride-hail companies divulge how much of the ride’s cost will go to the company versus the driver. The legislation also makes sure drivers know the destination and expected compensation for a ride before they accept it. Drivers in September gathered on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol to mark the official launch of what they hope will be a nationwide worker-owned movement. “We are the drivers’ cooperative,” they chanted. “Colorado proud!” Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

DirecTV is calling off its planned acquisition of Colorado-based rival Dish after the offer was rejected by bond holders at that company. The deal was reliant on Dish bond holders agreeing to trade in the debt they held for debt in the new company, a swap that would have cost them about $1.6 billion, collectively. The retreat by DirecTV this week may end a years-long effort by the company to acquire both Dish and Sling after it announced the bid in September. DirecTV was looking to acquire Dish TV and Sling TV from its owner, Englewood-based EchoStar, in a debt exchange transaction that included a payment of $1, plus the assumption of approximately $9.8 billion in debt. The deal was contingent on several factors, including regulatory approvals and bondholders writing off debt related to Dish. “While we believed a combination of DirecTV and Dish would have benefited all stakeholders, we have terminated the transaction because the proposed exchange terms were necessary to protect DirecTV’s balance sheet and our operational flexibility,” DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow said in a statement. The prospect of a DirecTV-Dish combo has long been rumored, and reported talks resurfaced over the years. And the two almost merged more than two decades ago — but the Federal Communications Commission blocked the deal valued at the time at $18.5 billion deal, citing antitrust concerns. Related Articles Business | DirecTV may pull the plug on purchase of Colorado-based Dish Network Business | Colorado-based EchoStar cuts Dish Network and Sling loose so Boost Mobile can move forward Business | DirecTV buys Colorado-based Dish as satellite rivals hunker down against onslaught of streaming services The pay-for-TV market has shifted significantly since. As more and more consumers tune into online streaming platforms, demand for more traditional satellite entertainment continues to shrink. DirecTV says that it will continue to invest in next-generation streaming platforms and offer new packaging options while integrating content from live TV alongside direct-to-consumer services. AT&T purchased DirectTV for $48.5 billion back in 2015. But in 2021, following the loss of millions of customers, AT&T sold a 30% stake of the business to private equity firm TPG for $16.25 billion. The termination of the deal doesn’t impact TPG’s acquisition of the remaining 70% stake in DirecTV from AT&T for about $7.6 billion, which is expected to close next year. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through its dominant search engine after a court found it had maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade. The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine. The proposal comes after the Justice Department and a coalition of 38 states, including Colorado, filed lawsuits alleging Google used anticompetitive contracts and practices to maintain its monopoly. “Google’s illegal monopolization of search and search advertising has harmed consumers, thwarted innovation and undermined the competitive marketplace,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement Thursday. “It’s critical that the judge mandate effective remedies that address the harms to competition and provide consumers with the benefits of an open and fair marketplace. We will continue to press for and oversee the necessary remedies to Google’s monopolistic conduct.” A sale of Chrome “will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing. Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct. The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores how severely regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished following an August ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that branded the company as a monopolist. The Justice Department decision-makers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year might not be as strident. The Washington, D.C., court hearings on Google’s punishment are scheduled to begin in April and Mehta is aiming to issue his final decision before Labor Day. If Mehta embraces the government’s recommendations, Google would be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final ruling. But the company certainly would appeal any punishment, potentially prolonging a legal tussle that has dragged on for more than four years. Besides seeking a Chrome spinoff and a corralling of the Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to ban Google from forging multibillion-dollar deals to lock in its dominant search engine as the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also ban Google from favoring its own services, such as YouTube or its recently-launched artificial intelligence platform, Gemini. Regulators also want Google to license the search index data it collects from people’s queries to its rivals, giving them a better chance at competing with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google would be required to provide more transparency into how it sets the prices that advertisers pay to be listed near the top of some targeted search results. Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, lashed out at the Justice Department for pursuing “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology.” In a blog post, Walker warned the “overly broad proposal” would threaten personal privacy while undermining Google’s early leadership in artificial intelligence, “perhaps the most important innovation of our time.” Wary of Google’s increasing use of artificial intelligence in its search results, regulators also advised Mehta to ensure websites will be able to shield their content from Google’s AI training techniques. The measures, if they are ordered, threaten to upend a business expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year. “The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” the Justice Department asserted in its recommendations. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.” It’s still possible that the Justice Department could ease off attempts to break up Google, especially if Trump takes the widely expected step of replacing Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who was appointed by Biden to oversee the agency’s antitrust division. Although the case targeting Google was originally filed during the final months of Trump’s first term in office, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s ruling against Google. Working in tandem with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Kanter took a get-tough stance against Big Tech that triggered other attempted crackdowns on industry powerhouses such as Apple and discouraged many business deals from getting done during the past four years. Trump recently expressed concerns that a breakup might destroy Google but didn’t elaborate on alternative penalties he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman that Trump nominated to be the next U.S. Attorney General, has previously called for the breakup of Big Tech companies. Gaetz faces a tough confirmation hearing. This latest filing gave Kanter and his team a final chance to spell out measures that they believe are needed to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a breakup in a preliminary outline of potential penalties. But Kanter’s proposal is already raising questions about whether regulators seek to impose controls that extend beyond the issues covered in last year’s trial, and — by extension — Mehta’s ruling. Banning the default search deals that Google now pays more than $26 billion annually to maintain was one of the main practices that troubled Mehta in his ruling. It’s less clear whether the judge will embrace the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome needs to be spun out of Google, and the recommendation that Android should be completely walled off from the company’s own search engine. Related Articles Business | Denver judge weighs fallout of passwords leak as Secretary of State Jena Griswold promises investigation Business | How to use images from your phone to search the web Business | Want to talk to a dead loved one? A CU researcher is teaming with Google to study AI-powered “generative ghosts” Business | Lakewood police arrest teenager in connection with high school bomb threat Business | When AI fails the language test, who is left out of the conversation? “It is probably going a little beyond,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. “The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale.” Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified during last year’s trial, asserted the Justice Department is simply doing what needs to be done to rein in a brazen monopolist. “Undoing Google’s overlapping and widespread illegal conduct over more than a decade requires more than contract restrictions: it requires a range of remedies to create enduring competition,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement. Trying to break up Google harks back to a similar punishment initially imposed on Microsoft a quarter century ago following another major antitrust trial that culminated in a federal judge deciding the software maker had illegally used his Windows operating system for PCs to stifle competition. However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent many experts believe will make Mehta reluctant to go down a similar road with the Google case. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A year ago, TikTok’s e-commerce business in Indonesia was thriving. With its viral videos, TikTok had become a worldwide phenomenon, and it was translating its influence into a powerful new revenue stream by letting users buy and sell things while its videos played. Indonesia was a critical market and the first place where TikTok rolled out this feature. The app, owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, had about 130 million users, nearly as many as it had in the United States. Since its launch here in 2021, TikTok Shop had become one of the most popular places for Indonesians to buy things online. Then one day, TikTok said it was removing Shop from its app in Indonesia. The government declared that social media platforms would no longer be allowed to process online payments. TikTok was forced to abruptly halt its e-commerce operations. Some Indonesian officials argued that TikTok was so popular it threatened to monopolize online shopping, while others said it didn’t have the right license. TikTok’s defenders in the industry said the government was acting on behalf of TikTok’s competitors in Indonesia. The government’s edict did not name TikTok. It didn’t need to. No other app blended social media and e-commerce the way TikTok did. Dealing with official scrutiny is familiar terrain for TikTok. The government in India, once home to the app’s largest audience, banned TikTok in 2020 as payback for a violent border dispute with China. In the United States, TikTok is facing a possible ban that could begin as soon as January after spending years fielding concerns about its influence and security. But the threat in Indonesia had the potential to deal an especially devastating blow to ByteDance’s ambitions to make a lot of money with e-commerce. ByteDance wanted TikTok to repeat the success of its sister app, Douyin, whose live video shopping business in China topped $200 billion in transaction value in 2022. New restrictions in Indonesia could inspire neighboring countries to take similar action, said Jianggan Li, the CEO of Momentum Works, a consultancy in Singapore. “This is a market they can’t afford to lose,” Li said. TikTok executives scrambled for a way to continue to offer e-commerce. Word spread through the Indonesian tech community that TikTok was looking for a local company to team up with. And within weeks, it was ready to buy a stake in Tokopedia, a former startup that had become one of Indonesia’s main e-commerce platforms. TikTok wanted Shop back online by Dec. 12, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. Related Articles Technology | Three years after opening, X Denver residents say the party is over Technology | How to add extra security layers to your phone or tablet Technology | Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration Technology | Three businessmen set to join Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Technology | Caretaker for Aurora apartments finds more code violations than crime That date had been one of the biggest days for deals on e-commerce platforms in China for years, and the trend had caught on in Indonesia. In recent years, the government promoted it as a day for buying from small businesses. Over a dinner in late October, executives from both companies outlined the contours of the deal. TikTok made clear that getting it done by Dec. 12 was “nonnegotiable,” the people said. Teams from both companies worked around the clock. They repeatedly ran the proposed structure by the government. TikTok Shop restarted as a pilot program under government supervision on Dec. 11. As it had before, Shop appeared as a tab within the TikTok app. But now it was decked out with Tokopedia’s logo and signature green branding. The deeper change was on the back end. When a shopper clicked “Buy,” the checkout process ran on Tokopedia’s system. TikTok Shop was still part of a social media platform. But to satisfy the government, the transaction took place on infrastructure built by an Indonesian e-commerce company. Tokopedia was a key player in Indonesia, one half of the Indonesian tech conglomerate GoTo. The companies behind GoTo spent years developing payment and delivery technology that made it possible, in a country of 270 million people and 17,000 islands, to buy things online and receive them in a day or two. The deal integrated these systems with TikTok Shop. “Combined with the content and experience on TikTok, that’s unique,” said Farras Farhan, a senior analyst at Samuel Sekuritas, an investment firm in Jakarta. TikTok received majority ownership of Tokopedia, which paid TikTok for the right to operate TikTok Shop in Indonesia. GoTo kept just under a quarter of Tokopedia’s shares, and was promised a cut of profits from future TikTok Shop sales. TikTok paid $840 million and said it would invest further, up to a total of $1.5 billion, in the combined entity. Melissa Siska Juminto, 36, spent 12 years at Tokopedia building its e-commerce system. After the deal, TikTok brought her into a new role as the president and director of TikTok e-commerce and Tokopedia. On a recent afternoon, she walked the glass halls of Tokopedia Tower, 50 stories above traffic-choked Jakarta. She explained that the tie-up with TikTok made sense to both sides: TikTok had financial resources, and Tokopedia had spent years getting Indonesians hooked on shopping online. So far, TikTok Shop and Tokopedia’s merged e-commerce operation, which some sellers and delivery drivers call by the nickname Shopedia, is still finding its feet. “We’ve never learned as much as in the past six months,” she said. The episode was a jolt to everyone involved. ByteDance has cut a significant portion of the people working on its e-commerce operations in Indonesia. The government said its new rules for e-commerce were intended to protect small businesses. But the businesses that sold goods on TikTok Shop were caught off guard by the sudden interruption. Some struggled to get by without income they relied on. Agata Pinastika Kenastuti runs a children’s clothing shop in a Jakarta suburb. She had stocked up on new inventory days before TikTok announced that Shop would shut down. “When I found out, I cried for three days,” she said. Sellers reopened their stores on TikTok Shop to find a more competitive marketplace. Last year, TikTok Shop had about 6 million merchants. Now there are 23 million merchants who are able to work easily across TikTok Shop and Tokopedia. In interviews, six sellers said it had been difficult to regain the number of viewers, and therefore paying customers, that they had before TikTok Shop shut down. Edri, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, has a stall on the fifth floor of Jakarta’s Pasar Tanah Abang, the largest textile market in Southeast Asia. He said he was selling about 30 pairs of jeans a day on TikTok Shop these days — down from about 100 before the shutdown last October. Edri said it had become harder to attract viewers to his livestreams, which he taped among neatly folded piles of denim while his assistant smoked clove cigarettes off camera. TikTok’s experience with the Indonesian government over Shop is probably not the last time its e-commerce business will come under scrutiny. In Malaysia, where TikTok Shop held nearly 20% of the e-commerce market last year, officials say they are mulling rules for the platform. And the Indonesian government isn’t done regulating the e-commerce industry, Rifan Ardianto, a director at the Ministry of Trade, said in an interview. Last month, Indonesian officials said they had asked Apple and Google to block the Chinese fast-fashion platforms Temu and Shein from app stores in the country. TikTok Shop is available in eight countries, including the United States and Britain. But the rest are in Southeast Asia, where its transaction value topped $16 billion last year. If the app is banned in the United States, TikTok will depend even more on Southeast Asia to keep its e-commerce ambitions alive, said Li at Momentum Works in Singapore. “They’ll have to evaluate what they have and Southeast Asia is something they already built,” he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

There are now artificial intelligence programs that scan MRIs for signs of cancer, Apple AirPods that work as hearing aids and devices that decode the electrical blips of the brain to restore speech to those who have lost it. Medical device technology is now deeply entrenched in many patients’ health care and can have a stunning impact on their lives. As advancements become more tangible to millions of Americans, regulation of the devices has commanded increasing attention at the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Michelle Tarver, a 15-year-veteran of the agency, is stepping into that spotlight at a critical time. She is taking the reins of the FDA’s device division from Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, who forged deep ties with the device industry, sped up the pace of approvals and made the agency more approachable to companies. Some of those device makers were represented by Shuren’s wife and her law firm, posing ethical conflicts for him that continue to draw scrutiny. More broadly, congressional lawmakers and consumer advocates have become increasingly concerned about the device industry’s influence over the sprawling division, which has a budget of about $790 million and a staff of 2,500. Device safety and standards for agency approvals of products as intimate as heart valves or neural implants will be at the forefront of the division’s mission in the coming years. Among the issues Tarver will encounter: Brains, computers and Elon Musk Few devices will require such intense oversight as one of the most breathtaking technologies in development: brain-computer interfaces that dip into the surface layers of the brain to decode its electrical noise — and return function to people who have lost it. Researchers from a number of teams have demonstrated the capability to restore the voice and speech of a California man with ALS, to enable a paralyzed man to walk and to help a man who is paralyzed below the neck to play Mario Kart by simply thinking about steering left or right. The medical device division is playing a crucial role in this field by authorizing and overseeing trials that evaluate the devices’ safety and effectiveness and, at some point in the future, deciding whether they can be sold. Perhaps no company developing a device is more high-profile than billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink. It is developing the brain-computer device that enabled an Arizona man to play video games with his mind. Neuralink is also beginning work on a device that Musk hopes could restore vision. Musk has emerged as a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump’s, rallying crowds on the campaign trail and donating about $118 million toward Trump’s election. He has also criticized the FDA during campaign events, railing incorrectly about the agency’s failure to approve a drug that cured a friend’s mother’s brain cancer. It turns out that the drug Musk named had been approved in 2021, as STAT news first reported. Related Articles Technology | Three years after opening, X Denver residents say the party is over Technology | How to add extra security layers to your phone or tablet Technology | Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration Technology | Three businessmen set to join Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Technology | Caretaker for Aurora apartments finds more code violations than crime “Overregulation kills people,” Musk told an audience in Pittsburgh in October, going on to say that “simply expediting drug approvals at the FDA, I think, will save millions of lives.” Neuralink has already received the green light from the agency to implant its device, which is inserted in a quarter-width hole bored into the skull, in a second patient. Depending on the outcome of the presidential election, Musk could gain considerable sway across several federal agencies overseeing his businesses, including Tesla, SpaceX and presumably Neuralink, which could give him leverage over competitors. The weight of industry influence Another agency critic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has joined the Trump campaign and publicized his opposition to many of the FDA’s regulatory duties. He has been exceptionally vocal about the agency’s funding, denouncing the agreements that funnel billions of dollars in industry money into the agency. He is not wrong: So-called industry user fees make up about half the FDA’s budget. In two years, Tarver is expected to take the lead in the next set of high-stakes negotiations that determine how the FDA spends billions of dollars collected from the drug and device industries that the agency regulates. The negotiations have grown in importance to the FDA, with industry funds now providing $362 million or nearly half of the device division’s budget of $790 million, and an overall payment that amounts to nearly half of the agency’s annual budget of $7.2 billion. The process is akin to the Olympics of policymaking for the FDA, culminating in agreements that must by passed by Congress to keep the agency running. The funds support the hiring of hundreds of agency employees who are assigned to maintain a brisk pace of product reviews. The arrangement has its supporters, who note that the money allows the FDA to be competitive in hiring scientists who can keep up with the rapid flow of innovation in biotechnology and other fields. But it has also drawn criticism over concerns that it puts the FDA to work for largely for-profit industries and compromises the agency’s efforts to protect public health. Lingering ethics issues Those concerns loom a bit larger as Tarver steps into the post of the outgoing device division director, Shuren. He has overseen and taken part in the negotiation process with a legal client of his wife’s often at the bargaining table, The New York Times found. An investigation by the Times published in August found that Shuren failed to follow agency ethics rules in some instances when his work overlapped with that of his wife, Allison, a prominent lawyer at the Washington, D.C., office of Arnold & Porter. The findings prompted lawmakers to seek a review by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. One of Allison Shuren’s clients in recent years has been Alcon, a giant in eye care that makes medical devices, including lenses implanted in the eye and lasers used in eye surgery. During user-fee meetings in 2021, Alcon executives negotiated with the FDA on behalf of two medical device trade groups representing hundreds of companies. It was the only company that sent two representatives, even though it is far smaller than some others — such as Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson — that were at the table. Jeffrey Shuren negotiated in person with Alcon and other companies in 2016, agency records show. After each cycle of talks, Shuren presented the agreement to Congress, according to agency transcripts of his testimony. Federal ethics laws bar officials from working on government matters where a spouse has a financial interest that affect one company or a discrete group. The FDA has said that Shuren has “not participated in matters specific to Alcon.” Asked about whether the agency had concerns about the potential for ethical and financial conflicts given Shuren’s involvement in the talks, the agency declined to comment. the Shurens did not respond to requests for comment. Steven Smith, an Alcon spokesperson, did not respond directly to questions, saying that “uncompromising commitments to patient health and safety and corporate integrity guide every action we take.” Ethics experts said that even if Jeffrey Shuren weren’t focused on Alcon-specific policies, he should have considered the appearance of bias in favor of a spouse’s client during a wide-ranging negotiation. “A federal official’s job is to instill trust in government,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former federal ethics lawyer. Agreements reached in the deal-making in recent years include an FDA commitment to decide approvals on 95% of low- to moderate-risk devices within 90 days. Another agreement led to a Third Party Review program that allows outside companies to make initial product device approval decisions that are finalized by the agency. The ballooning field of AI The rapid clip of product authorizations has brought the division under scrutiny in the most traditional quarters of medicine and in the most advanced. Harvard University researchers recently reviewed dozens of cardiology device recalls and found that the FDA had deemed many of the devices to be of moderate risk, although they turned out to be deadly. An editorial by Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a former federal health official and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, accompanied the article and called on the FDA to place safety over speed. The FDA said it disagreed with an assertion in the study that devices similar to those already marketed need to be thoroughly tested in people. Doctors and researchers vetting agency-cleared AI programs have also found the agency’s review records lacking. As they consider using such tools in patient care, a lot of answers they seek about how the programs work are nowhere to be found in agency approval records. A vast majority of those programs are considered low or moderate risk, and hundreds have been authorized under the agency’s 510(k) program, in which products are typically authorized in 90 days. They include software programs meant to spot cancers and other problems on MRIs, CT scans and other images. Researchers from Stanford University published a study in October noting that a vast majority — 96% of nearly 700 — of AI programs authorized by the FDA had no information about race or ethnicity, “exacerbating the risk of algorithmic bias and health disparity.” The agency said the publicly released summaries criticized in the study were merely brief descriptions that did not reflect the extent of staff reviews that can amount to thousands of pages about the software programs. Researchers from Mass General Brigham and elsewhere published a report concluding that information from the FDA about the performance of certain programs was too sparse to justify using in medical practice. Still, the promise of AI in health care has generated sky-high interest, and the FDA has discussed its use in drug development and employing it internally to catch “cheating” in product applications, Dr. Robert Califf, the agency’s commissioner, said in a speech at a conference in Las Vegas in October. Jeffrey Shuren has often said the regulatory framework for medical devices was developed for technology dating to his grandmother’s time, nearly 50 years ago. At that Las Vegas venue, Califf acknowledged the agency’s limitations in regulating the vast reach of AI programs, including how they function when they are broadly deployed. Evaluating the scope of AI programs extends far beyond the agency, he said. “It’s so bad,” he said. “If you said, ‘Well, the FDA has got to keep an eye on 100% of it,’ we would need an FDA two to three times bigger than it currently is.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 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Over the summer, Laura Marciano, a researcher at Harvard University, interviewed 500 teenagers for a continuing study investigating the link between technology and loneliness. The results were striking. For several weeks, the teenagers, who were recruited with the help of Instagram influencers, answered a questionnaire three times a day about their social interactions. Each time, more than 50% said they had not spoken to anyone in the past hour, either in person or online. To put it another way, even though the teenagers were on break from school and spending plenty of time on social media apps, most of them were not socializing at all. Americans now spend more time alone, have fewer close friendships and feel more socially detached from their communities than they did 20 years ago. One in 2 adults reports experiencing loneliness, the physiological distress that people endure from social isolation. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic late last year. Ever since, scholars and psychologists have accelerated research into whether technology is contributing. The rise of smartphones and social networking apps has forever changed social norms around how we communicate. More personable interactions such as phone calls have been superseded by text messages. When people broadcast their lives on TikTok and Instagram, they may not be representing themselves in a genuine way. “It’s hard to know who’s being real online, and it’s hard for people to be themselves online, and that is a recipe for loneliness,” Murthy said in an interview. He concluded that loneliness had become an epidemic after reviewing scientific studies and speaking with college students last year, he said. I went down a rabbit hole for the past few months reading research papers and interviewing academics about tech and loneliness. (Many studies focused on how younger people used technology, but their conclusions were still relevant to older adults who used the same tech.) The consensus among scholars was clear: Although there was little proof that tech directly made people lonely (plenty of socially connected, healthy people use lots of tech), there was a strong correlation between the two, meaning that those who reported feeling lonely might be using tech in unhealthy ways. The correlation was rooted in three main behaviors: — On social media apps such as Instagram, many fell into the trap of comparing themselves with others and feeling that they were lagging behind their peers. — Text messaging, by far the most popular form of digital communication, could be creating a barrier to authentic connection. Related Articles Technology | Three years after opening, X Denver residents say the party is over Technology | How to add extra security layers to your phone or tablet Technology | Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration Technology | Three businessmen set to join Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Technology | Caretaker for Aurora apartments finds more code violations than crime — And, perhaps unsurprisingly, some people who felt lonely also exhibited addictive personalities — in this case, to streaming videos — that kept them indoors. Here’s what to know and what to do with your tech if you’re feeling lonely. The dangers of making comparisons on social media One of the most comprehensive research efforts on tech and loneliness to date, led by Marciano and her colleagues, was a review that aggregated data from 30 studies published during the coronavirus pandemic exploring tech use and the mental health of adolescents. Most studies found that social media was linked to loneliness — specifically, when people made unfavorable comparisons of themselves with others online. Online and offline, people naturally compare themselves with others, a behavior that psychologists call social comparisons. Social comparisons can manifest online in many different ways. One way could be counting the number of likes, comments and reshares that your posts get compared with those of your friends. It could be comparing your body with the body of a beauty or fitness influencer. For parents, it could be monitoring your newborn’s development compared with that of other infants. When people feel they are behind others in life, it can be isolating. Social comparisons aren’t always bad. In academic and work settings, for example, many past studies have shown that comparing yourself with other high performers can motivate you to do high-quality work. So the solution isn’t simply to stop comparing ourselves with others online, said Chia-chen Yang, a professor of educational psychology at Oklahoma State University. Yang led a study in 2018 that surveyed nearly 220 college freshmen about what they liked and disliked when using apps such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The study concluded that the interactions that caused the most distress were comparisons of a judgmental nature evoking envy, in which people viewed others as being more popular, having more fun or looking prettier. Social media stirred up more positive feelings among students browsing posts from people who shared useful information online. That could include a friend posting about getting a scholarship or a great deal on a used car, inspiring you to make similar decisions. “I don’t have to see other people as enemies — I can see them as informants in my life,” Yang said. “That type of comparison is not detrimental.” But judgmental comparisons that induce envy and “FOMO” (fear of missing out) may be more prominent on social media because the apps were designed to encourage people to compete with and seek validation (i.e., likes and reshares) from their friends by publishing only the most glamorous facets of their lives. Yang said she had interviewed students who deleted posts if they didn’t get a certain number of likes because it hurt their self-esteem. In response to backlash from activists and researchers about the harms of social comparisons, Meta added controls inside its apps several years ago, including an option to hide the number of likes and shares from posts. I recommend turning it on if you feel bothered: In the app’s settings, scroll down to “What you see” and tap on “Like and share counts” to turn on the setting to hide the engagement. A Meta spokesperson referred to a blog post by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, stating that reactions to hidden likes were mixed. “Not seeing like counts was beneficial for some, and annoying to others, particularly because people use like counts to get a sense for what’s trending or popular, so we’re giving you the choice,” Mosseri said. Instagram also has a tool to “favorite” accounts so that they surface at the top of your feed, which could be useful for focusing on the right people and accounts. But a more helpful step may be to do some self-reflection. “If you feel bad about yourself after browsing a lot of social media posts, maybe it’s time to pause for a few hours or a few days,” Yang said. Maybe we text too much Dozens of studies found that one-on-one digital communications, including messaging, phone calls and video calls, were associated with the most positive mental health effects, including decreased feelings of loneliness. But an overreliance on text messaging, which superseded phone calls as the most-used communication method on phones many years ago, could contribute to loneliness if people weren’t genuinely connecting with one another. An overwhelming majority of teenagers primarily communicate through text messaging, and they have also reported feeling connected with others when they were on “the same vibe,” according to Marciano’s research. They also said some text interactions — like a friend’s taking a long time to respond to a message — stoked anxieties and feelings of loneliness. In addition, very few teenagers — about 2% — used video calls, Marciano said. Therein lies a potential problem. It’s difficult to imagine how people could sense vibes and authenticity through typed messages, which lack the context and social cues of face-to-face interactions. “How can you feel on the same frequency with someone if you don’t communicate properly?” Marciano said. Lonelier people could consider shifting to richer forms of communication. Instead of sending a text message, consider a video call or, at minimum, send a short audio message so that a friend can hear your voice. And by all means, take advantage of the tools in social networking apps that help you meet others in person. Murthy lamented that the tradition of wishing someone a happy birthday had devolved over time, from a phone call to a Facebook wall post and now to the abbreviation “HBD” sent via a text message. “I can’t underscore just how powerful it is to have a few moments of authentic interaction with somebody where you can hear their voice and see their face,” he said, adding, “There is tremendous benefit that comes to each of us from being able to show up for each other.” Binge-watching isn’t helping During the pandemic, researchers also homed in on whether binge-watching, or streaming shows back to back for long blocks of time, was linked to loneliness. An academic review of multiple studies concluded that adults who binged programs tended to experience depression, anxiety and, to some extent, loneliness. Dr. Marc Potenza, a Yale professor and addiction expert who worked on the review, said that although the binge-watching studies focused on streaming apps such as Netflix, it was important to note that other types of apps, including TikTok and Instagram’s Reels, encouraged a similar type of infinite viewing. People with mental health problems may engage in binge-watching as a coping mechanism for stress and other negative emotions, Potenza said. There are also obvious consequences to physical health that can harm mental health: being sedentary for too long, losing sleep and not going out to engage with others. “It consumes a lot of time,” Potenza said. “They may procrastinate and not address other concerns, which may lead to more anxiety.” It may feel good temporarily, but it’s probably not helping. I recommend taking steps to turn off features that enable this behavior, such as Netflix’s ability to automatically play the next program. In the app’s settings, click manage profiles, select a profile and toggle off “autoplay next episode,” and then click done. TikTok and Instagram’s Reels include screen-time tools in their settings that show reminders about how much time you’ve spent scrolling, although those tools can be ineffective because the reminders are easy to ignore. I suggest temporarily deleting the apps when scrolling feels problematic. Netflix declined to comment. Spokespeople for Meta and TikTok said their apps automatically set screen-time limits for teenagers. Looking ahead The relationship between technology and loneliness is a moving target because tech and its users are constantly evolving. Emily Weinstein, a social scientist who has studied how teenagers use tech, said that just as we begin to understand our relationship with our apps and devices, younger people find other ways to be anxious online and new outlets to cope with loneliness. A teenager could feel distressed if you commented with fewer fire emoji on his or her Instagram photo than you did on another person’s photo, she said. And many are rapidly experimenting with chatbots using generative artificial intelligence that can replace human companions, raising new concerns. “Teens are telling us things like, ‘That robot actually listens to me — people are mean and judge you, but gen AI tools don’t,’” she said. “I’m wondering what that’s going to look like.” Murthy said that during his cross-country listening tour at college campuses last year, the dining halls were eerily quiet, as students busily typed on their phones. He said a conversation with a student at the University of Washington resonated with him. “He said, ‘It’s not the culture for people to talk to each other anymore, so how are we supposed to connect?’” Murthy recalled. “His point was that even when you’re walking to class, everyone is occupied, but then they’re looking at their phone. It feels intrusive to say hello to someone.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

By DAVE COLLINS The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax, the families announced Thursday. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers. The sale price was not immediately disclosed. Jones confirmed The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars in a social media video Thursday and said he planned to file legal challenges to stop it. An email message seeking comment was sent to Infowars. It was not immediately clear what The Onion planned to do with the conspiracy theory platform, including its website, social media accounts, studio in Austin, Texas, trademarks and video archive. The Chicago-based Onion did not immediately return emails seeking comment Thursday. Sealed bids for the private auction were opened Wednesday. Both supporters and detractors of Jones had expressed interest in buying Infowars. The other bidders have not been disclosed. Related Articles Business | Green Dragon closing 17 dispensaries, grow facility in Colorado, CEO says Business | Denver’s Infinite Monkey Theorem is closing after 15 years Business | Walgreens adds stores in Aurora, Denver to closing list Business | South Broadway tries to hold on to its funky vibe as beloved small businesses leave Business | Used bike retailer The Pro’s Closet shuttering after raising $90 million The Onion, a satirical site that manages to persuade people to believe the absurd, bills itself as “the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events” and says it has 4.3 trillion daily readers. Jones has been saying on his show that if his detractors bought Infowars, he would move his daily broadcasts and product sales to a new studio, websites and social media accounts that he has already set up. He also said that if his supporters won the bidding, he could stay on the Infowars platforms. Relatives of many of the 20 children and six educators killed in the shooting Jones and his company for defamation and emotional distress for repeatedly saying on his show that the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax staged by crisis actors to spur more gun control. Parents and children of many of the victims testified that they were traumatized by Jones’ conspiracies and threats by his followers. The lawsuits were filed in Connecticut and Texas. Lawyers for the families in the Connecticut lawsuit said they worked with The Onion to try to acquire Infowars. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS NEW YORK (AP) — As money continues to pour into crypto following Donald Trump’s reelection last week, bitcoin has climbed to yet another record high. The world’s largest cryptocurrency topped $89,000 for the first time, briefly peaking at $89,995 early Tuesday, according to CoinDesk. Bitcoin’s price oscillated throughout the day, but is still up more than 27% over the last week — standing at about $88,288 as of 5 p.m. ET. That’s part of a rally across cryptocurrencies and crypto-related investments since Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Analysts credit much of the recent gains to an anticipated “crypto-friendly” nature of the incoming administration, which could translate into more regulatory clarity but also leeway. Still, as with everything in the volatile cryptoverse, the future is hard to predict. And while some are bullish, others continue to warn of investment risks. Here’s what you need to know. Back up. What is cryptocurrency again? Cryptocurrency has been around for a while now, but has come under the spotlight in recent years. In basic terms, cryptocurrency is digital money. This kind of currency is designed to work through an online network without a central authority — meaning it’s typically not backed by any government or banking institution — and transactions get recorded with technology called a blockchain. Bitcoin is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, although other assets like Ethereum, Tether and Dogecoin have gained popularity over the years. Some investors see cryptocurrency as a “digital alternative” to traditional money — but it can be very volatile, and reliant on larger market conditions. Why are bitcoin and other crypto assets soaring now? A lot of the recent action has to do with the outcome of last week’s election. Trump was previously a crypto skeptic, but changed his mind and embraced cryptocurrencies during this year’s presidential race. He has pledged to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet” and create a “strategic reserve” of bitcoin. His campaign accepted donations in cryptocurrency and he courted fans at a bitcoin conference in July. He also launched World Liberty Financial, a new venture with family members to trade cryptocurrencies. Crypto industry players welcomed Trump’s victory, in hopes that he would be able to push through legislative and regulatory changes that they’ve long lobbied for. And Trump had previously promised that, if elected, he would remove the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, who has been leading the U.S. government’s crackdown on the crypto industry and repeatedly called for more oversight. “Crypto rallied as Election Day progressed into the night and as it became increasingly clear that Trump would emerge victorious,” Citi analysts David Glass and Alex Saunders wrote in a Friday research note, pointing to larger industry sentiment around Trump being “crypto-friendly” and a potential shift in regulatory backing. But even before the post-election rally, assets like bitcoin posted notable gains over the past year or so. Much of the credit goes to early success of a new way to invest in the asset: spot bitcoin ETFs, which were approved by U.S. regulators in January. Inflows into spot ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, “have been the dominant driver of Bitcoin returns from some time, and we expect this relationship to continue in the near-term,” Glass and Saunders noted. They added that spot crypto ETFs saw some of their largest inflows on record in the days following the election. In April, bitcoin also saw its fourth “halving” — a preprogrammed event that impacts production by cutting the reward for mining, or the creation of new bitcoin, in half. When that reward falls, so does the number of new bitcoins entering the market. And, if demand remains strong, some analysts say this “supply shock” can also help propel the price long term. What are the risks? Crypto assets like bitcoin have a history of drastic swings in value — which can come suddenly and happen over the weekend or overnight in trading that continues at all hours, every day. In short, history shows you can lose money as quickly as you’ve made it. Long-term price behavior relies on larger market conditions. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, bitcoin stood at just over $5,000. Its price climbed to nearly $69,000 by November 2021, in a time marked by high demand for technology assets, but later crashed during an aggressive series of Federal Reserve rate hikes aimed at curbing inflation. Then came the 2022 collapse of FTX, which significantly undermined confidence in crypto overall. At the start of last year, a single bitcoin could be had for less than $17,000. Investors, however, began returning in large numbers as inflation started to cool — and gains skyrocketed on the anticipation and then early success of spot ETFs. While some crypto supporters see the potential for more record-breaking days, experts still stress caution, especially for small-pocketed investors. “Investors should only dabble in crypto with money that they can be prepared to lose,” Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, said last week. “Because we’ve seen these wild swings in the past.” What about the climate impact? Assets like bitcoin are produced through a process called “mining,” which consumes a lot of energy. And operations relying on pollutive sources have drawn particular concern over the years. Recent research published by the United Nations University and Earth’s Future journal found that the carbon footprint of 2020-2021 bitcoin mining across 76 nations was equivalent to the emissions from burning 84 billion pounds of coal or running 190 natural gas-fired power plants. Coal satisfied the bulk of bitcoin’s electricity demands (45%), followed by natural gas (21%) and hydropower (16%). In the U.S., the Energy Information Administration notes that crypto mining across the country has “grown very rapidly over the last several years,” adding that grid planners have begun to express concern over increases in related electricity demand. Preliminary estimates released by the EIA in February suggest that annual electricity use from crypto mining probably represents between 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption. Environmental impacts of bitcoin mining boil largely down to the energy source used. Industry analysts have maintained that clean energy has increased in use in recent years, coinciding with rising calls for climate protections from regulators around the world. _________ AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report from London.