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.The world we live in has been molded by the porn we watch—and you don’t have to look too hard to find it. Instagram models hawk their OnlyFans subscriptions, sex workers post “Day in My Life” vlogs, and the market for erotic romance novels is a gold mine. People’s interest in sex is a demand that has long been met with ready supply, but porn is not an inert product: As Americans feed the multibillion-dollar industry’s growth, it gives something back to American culture.Growing up as a teenager against the backdrop of the late 1990s, “what was obvious to my friends and to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a recent article. “There was no other kind, or none worth having.” I interviewed her about her upcoming book on pop culture and girlhood to understand how porn became the defining cultural product of our time.Stephanie Bai: You write that “we are all living in the world porn made.” Can you describe what that world looks like for women?Sophie Gilbert: One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. There’s a resurgence of the kind of offensive and dehumanizing behavior that we saw in popular culture during the 2000s, and this time it’s not being doled out by gossip bloggers and celebrity commentators, but by politicians and people with massive media platforms. And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty.So that’s one part of it. But when I wrote that sentence, what I was thinking about was how so much of porn has really enforced the idea that men should be catered to, in all aspects of culture. That concept is deep in the recesses of our imaginations, in ways we maybe don’t realize or can’t quite put into words.Stephanie: You detail the Y2K era of “porno chic,” when the overt sexualization of women became more mainstream in pop culture. Nowadays online, I’ve noticed more sex workers posting about their job and collaborating with popular influencers, including Logan Paul and David Dobrik. What do you think about the era of social-media sex-worker stars?Sophie: In lots of ways, this isn’t new—it mirrors what was happening in the 2000s, when there was a real receptiveness among sex workers and people in porn to talking openly about their experiences. We had a spate of memoirs then that exposed and deglamorized the industry; Sasha Grey went from porn films to starring in a Steven Soderbergh movie and landing a guest arc on Entourage. Even the kinds of things we’re seeing now with the porn actors Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips engaging in really extreme sexual stunts for kudos and fame—that was happening during the ’90s with Annabel Chong and Jasmin St. Claire.Stephanie: Not only does sex sell, but sexual openness is considered “empowering” now, as you wrote. I find that criticizing porn can be seen as a regressive take—anti–women’s liberation and prudish. To what extent has the “empowerment” narrative been used to hide or excuse some of porn’s more unsavory elements?Sophie: This was basically the point of the piece, and of my book—to try to understand why women of my generation were so easily persuaded that we couldn’t, or shouldn’t, push back against how we were being treated, both in media and in real life.I would never try to dictate what anyone chooses to do with their body or how they present themselves. My project was more about trying to open up pathways of analysis that might explain what happened in culture during this time. But the thread through my research was that any time the word empowering came up, it was inevitably being used to sell a product that was absolutely not about making women powerful. Wonderbras are still sold as being “empowering.” There was this very dark advertising campaign in 2007 for a torture-porn movie starring Elisha Cuthbert, who was depicted on posters being tortured and killed, and the film’s executive producer defended the movie as being a story of female “empowerment.” This is one of those terms that now make me instantly skeptical when I encounter it in the wild.Stephanie: Your essay mainly focuses on the consumption of porn in video and image form, but written or audio versions of smut (many of which are made by women) have become more popular with women in particular. When it comes to the ethics and effects of porn, is it important how porn is made, and who creates it?Sophie: Of course! I’ve written for this very magazine in the past defending romance novels as subversive portrayals of female desire, female agency, female humanity. There is nothing wrong with smut. The reason I think and write so much about porn as a form of culture is not because it’s explicitly sexual. It’s because much of it depicts and encourages very rote, regressive, cruel, and even violent treatment of women, and there’s no way that these elements haven’t changed us.About a year or so ago, I encountered this fascinating analysis by the social scientist Alice Evans, who argues that the status of women in a particular society can be predicted by examining how that society prizes romantic love. So it’s not surprising to me at all that so many women enjoy explicit romantic content—it’s gratifying their desires while also affirming that they are fully human and deserve to be treated as such.Stephanie: Some readers may come away from your story thinking that you’re staunchly anti-porn or anti–sex work. Is that how you would describe yourself?Sophie: It’s funny, because already I’ve been criticized both for being anti-porn and for not being anti-porn enough. I did figure this would happen; when writing this book, what I wanted was to be as thorough as I could in documenting and analyzing the era of porn proliferation, and then let people draw their own conclusions.Human beings have always wanted to and will always want to think about, watch, and imagine sex. There are also certainly people such as Erika Lust and Cindy Gallop, who are out there trying to broaden the ways sexual content can cater to women, and who are trying to treat porn performers ethically. My issue isn’t with porn as a concept so much as with how certain kinds of porn have come to be so impossibly dominant culturally, in ways that leave very little room for anything else.Stephanie: So what’s the antidote to a porn-addled culture?Sophie: Logging off? To come back to the point about romance, I do think stories that assert people’s humanity, their complexity and lovely strangeness, go a long way.Related: What porn taught a generation of women What happens when men prefer porn? Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: How the Trump administration flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia The coming economic nightmare Finally, someone said it to Joe Rogan’s face. Inside the fiasco at the National Security Council Today’s News A Milwaukee judge was arrested by federal officials and charged with two felonies for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest. Former Representative George Santos was sentenced to more than seven years in prison after being convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The Trump administration is reversing course by restoring the legal status of many international students whose visas were canceled in recent weeks. Dispatches Atlantic Intelligence: The greatest promise of generative AI is a cure for cancer—and some of the leading AI companies say that such a breakthrough could be achievable very soon, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Two books propose an intriguing argument—dreams, though beyond our conscious control, might be our purest expressions of free will, Boris Kachka writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic; Sources: serazetdinov / Getty; Heorhii Aryshtevych / Getty ‘All We Wanted to Do Was Play Video Games’By Spencer Kornhaber Mald is a blend of mad and bald. It’s video-gamer slang for getting so angry after suffering a loss that you pull your hair out. I learned the word by watching Twitch, the streaming platform that is famous for turning video games into a spectator sport—and that has, of late, become an important forum for political commentary. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic What would be worse than a recession? How to say no to a would-be autocrat “My near-future dystopia” Oklahoma is asking the Supreme Court to ignore history. “I’ve seen how this plays out for Ukraine.” Culture Break Eli Ade / Warner Bros. / Everett Collection Debate. Sinners (out now in theaters) has made a splash at the box office, but analysts want to focus on the money it isn’t making, David Sims writes.Check the price tag. For a lot of people, it’s getting too expensive to knit or fish, Tyler Austin Harper writes. What do we lose when we’re priced out of our hobbies?Play our daily crossword.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the end of disease is well on its way. Not because of oncology research or some solution to America’s ongoing doctor shortage, but because of (what else?) advances in generative AI.Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his AI research and the CEO of Google DeepMind, said on Sunday that he hopes that AI will be able to solve important scientific problems and help “cure all disease” within five to 10 years. Earlier this month, OpenAI released new models and touted their ability to “generate and critically evaluate novel hypotheses” in biology, among other disciplines. (Previously, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had told President Donald Trump, “We will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate” thanks to AI.) Dario Amodei, a co-founder of Anthropic, wrote last fall that he expects AI to bring about the “elimination of most cancer.”These are all executives marketing their products, obviously, but is there even a kernel of possibility in these predictions? If generative AI could contribute in the slightest to such discoveries—as has been promised since the start of the AI boom—where would the technology and scientists using it even begin?I’ve spent recent weeks speaking with scientists and executives at universities, major companies, and research institutions—including Pfizer, Moderna, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center—in an attempt to understand what the technology can (and cannot) do to advance their work. There’s certainly a lot of hyperbole coming from the AI companies: Even if, tomorrow, an OpenAI or Google model proposed a drug that appeared credibly able to cure a single type of cancer, the medicine would require years of laboratory and human trials to prove its safety and efficacy in a real-world environment, which AI programs are nowhere near able to simulate. “There are traffic signs” for drug development, “and they are there for a good reason,” Alex Zhavoronkov, the CEO of Insilico Medicine, a biotech company pioneering AI-driven drug design, told me.Yet Insilico has also used AI to help design multiple drugs that have successfully cleared early trials. The AI models that made Hassabis a Nobel laureate, known as AlphaFold, are widely used by pharmaceutical and biomedical researchers. Generative AI, I’ve learned, has much to contribute to science, but its applications are unlikely to be as wide-ranging as its creators like to suggest—more akin to a faster engine than a self-driving car.There are broadly two sorts of generative AI that are currently contributing to scientific and mathematical discovery. The first are essentially chatbots: tools that search, analyze, and synthesize scientific literature to produce useful reports. The dream is to eventually be able to ask such a program, in plain language, about a rare disease or unproven theorem and receive transformative insights. We’re not there, and may never be. But even the bots that exist today, such as OpenAI’s and Google’s separate “Deep Research” products, have their uses. “Scientists use the tools that are out there for information processing and summarization,” Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, a chemist at MIT who applies AI to material design, told me. Instead of Googling for and reading 10 papers, you can ask Deep Research. “Everybody does that; that’s an established win,” he said.Good scientists know to check the AI’s work. Andrea Califano, a computational biologist at Columbia who studies cancer, told me he sought assistance from ChatGPT and DeepSeek while working on a recent manuscript, which is now a normal practice for him. But this time, “they came up with an amazing list with references, people, authors on the paper, publications, et cetera—and not one of them existed,” Califano said. OpenAI has found that its most advanced models, o3 and o4-mini, are actually two to three times more likely to confidently assert falsehoods, or “hallucinate,” than their predecessor, o1. (This was expected for o4-mini, because it was trained on less data, but OpenAI wrote in a technical report that “more research is needed to understand” why o3 hallucinates at such a high rate.) Even when AI research agents work perfectly, their strength is summary, not novelty. “What I don’t think has worked” for these bots, Gómez-Bombarelli said, “is true, new reasoning for ideas.” These programs, in some sense, can fail doubly: Trained to synthesize existing data and ideas, they invent; asked to invent, they struggle. (The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)[Read: The man out to prove how dumb AI still is]To help temper—and harness—the tendency to hallucinate, newer AI systems are being positioned as collaborative tools that can help judge ideas. One such system, announced by Google researchers in February, is called the “AI co-scientist”: a series of AI language models fine-tuned to research a problem, offer hypotheses, and evaluate them in a way somewhat analogous to how a team of human scientists would, Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher at Google and a lead author on the paper presenting the AI co-scientist, told me. Similar to how chess-playing AI programs improved by playing against themselves, Natarajan said, the co-scientist comes up with hypotheses and then uses a “tournament of ideas” to rank which are of the highest quality. His hope is to give human scientists “superpowers,” or at least a tool to more rapidly ideate and experiment.The usefulness of those rankings could require months or years to verify, and the AI co-scientist, which is still being evaluated by human scientists, is for now limited to biomedical research. But some of its outputs have already shown promise. Tiago Costa, an infectious-disease researcher at Imperial College London, told me about a recent test he ran with the AI co-scientist. Costa and his team had made a breakthrough on an unsolved question about bacterial evolution, and they had not yet published the findings—so it could not be in the AI co-scientist’s training data. He wondered whether Google’s system could arrive at the breakthrough itself. Costa and his collaborators provided the AI co-scientist with a brief summary of the issue, some relevant citations, and the central question they had sought to answer. After running for two days, the system returned five relevant and testable hypotheses—and the top-ranked one matched the human team’s key experimental results. The AI appeared to have proposed the same genuine discovery that they had made.The system developed its top hypothesis with a simple rationale, drawing a link to another research area and coming to a conclusion the human team had taken years to arrive at. The humans had been “biased” by long-held assumptions about this particular phenomenon, José Penadés, a microbiologist at ICL who co-led the research with Costa, told me. But the AI co-scientist, without such tunnel vision, had found the idea by drawing straightforward research connections. If they’d had this tool and hypothesis five years ago, he said, the research would have proceeded significantly faster. “It’s quite frustrating for me to realize it was a very simple answer,” Penadés said. The system did not concoct a new paradigm or unheard-of notion—it just efficiently considered a large amount of information, which turned out to be good enough. With human scientists having already produced, and continuously producing, tremendous amounts of knowledge, perhaps the most useful AI will not automate that ability so much as complement it.The second type of scientific AI aims, in a sense, to speak the language of biology. AlphaFold and similar programs are trained not on internet text but on experimental data, such as the three-dimensional structure of proteins and gene expression. These types of models quickly apply patterns drawn from more data than even a large team of human researchers could analyze in a lifetime. More traditional machine-learning algorithms have, of course, been used in this way for a long time, but generative AI could supercharge these tools, allowing scientists to find ways to repurpose an older drug for a different disease, or identify promising new receptors in the body to target with a therapy, to name two examples. These tools could substantially increase both “time efficiency and probability of success,” Sriram Krishnaswami, the head of scientific affairs at Pfizer Oncology, told me. For instance, Pfizer has used an internal AI tool to identify two such targets that might help treat breast and prostate cancer, which are currently being tested.Similarly, generative-AI tools can contribute to drug design by helping scientists more efficiently balance various molecular traits, side effects, or other factors before going to a lab or trial. The number of configurations and interactions for any possible drug is profoundly large: There are 10⁶³² sequences of mRNA that could produce the spike protein used in COVID vaccines, Wade Davis, Moderna’s head of digital for business, including the AI-product team, told me. That’s dozens of orders of magnitude beyond the number of atoms in the universe. Generative AI could help substantially reduce the number of sequences worth exploring.“Possibly there will never be a drug which is ‘discovered’ through AI,” Pratyush Tiwary, a chemical physicist at the University of Maryland who uses AI methods, told me. “There are good companies that are working on it, but what AI will do is to help reduce the search space”—to reduce the number of possibilities scientists need to investigate on their own. These AI models are to biologists like a graphic calculator and drafting software are to an engineer: You can ideate faster, but you still have to build a bridge and confirm that it won’t crumble before driving across it.The ultimate achievement of AI, then, may just be to drastically improve scientific efficiency—not unlike chatbots already used in any number of normal office jobs. When considering “the whole drug-development life cycle, how do we compress time?” Anaeze Offodile II, the chief strategy officer at MSK, told me. AI technologies could shave years off of that life cycle, though still more years would remain. Offodile imagined a reduction “from 20 years to maybe 15 years,” and Zhavoronkov, of Insilico, said that AI could “help you cut maybe three years” off the total process and increase the probability of success.There are, of course, substantial limitations to these biological models’ capabilities. For instance, though generative AI has been very successful in determining protein structure, similar programs frequently suggest small molecule structures that cannot actually be synthesized, Gómez-Bombarelli said. Perhaps the biggest bottleneck to using generative AI to revolutionize the life sciences—making useful predictions about not just the relatively constrained domain of how a protein will fold or bind to a specific receptor, but also the complex cascade of signals within and between cells across the body—is a scarcity of high-quality training data gathered from relevant biological experiments. “The most important thing is not to design the best algorithm,” Califano said. “The most important thing is to ask the right question.” The machines need knowledge to begin with that they cannot, at least for the foreseeable future, generate by themselves.But perhaps they can with human collaborators. Gómez-Bombarelli is the chief science officer of materials at Lila Sciences, a start-up that has built a lab with equipment that can be directed by a combination of human scientists and generative AI, allowing models to test and refine hypotheses in a loop. Insilico has a similar robotic lab in China, and Califano is part of a global effort led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to build an AI “virtual cell” that can simulate any number of human biological processes. Generating “novel” ideas is not really the main issue. “Hypotheses are cheap,” Gómez-Bombarelli said. But “evaluating hypotheses costs millions of dollars.”[Read: A virtual cell is a “holy grail” of science. It’s getting closer.]Throwing data into a box and shaking it has yielded incredible results in processing human language, but that won’t be enough to treat disease. Humans designing science-boosting AI models have to understand the problem, ask appropriate questions, and curate relevant data, then experimentally verify or refute any resultant AI system’s outputs. The way to build AI for science, in other words, is to do some science.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.If you were judged on the basis of your darkest dreams, what could you be found guilty of? Moral debasement? Murderous intent? Desperate, cringey behavior? Thankfully, no one can spy on the sordid or embarrassing acts that may transpire in other people’s sleep. But two recently published books connect dream behavior to real-world implications. The reissued Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt, documents the dreams of Germans during Hitler’s rise in the 1930s; Laila Lalami’s novel, The Dream Hotel, imagines a woman who is incarcerated in part because of her nightmares. Together, these two very different works propose an intriguing argument: Dreams, though beyond our conscious control, might be our purest expressions of free will.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: Joan Didion’s books should have been enough What to read to wrap your head around the climate crisis Two murder mysteries’ surprising window into human genius Mario Vargas Llosa’s question for the Trump era Beradt’s dream catalogue, first published in 1966, shows how deeply the Nazis infiltrated the minds of ordinary Berliners: The city’s residents regularly reported being forced to sing songs or perform salutes in their sleep. In a recent essay about the book, my colleague Gal Beckerman was most interested in dreams of submission—scenarios in which Germans fiercely opposed to the Nazis might get a back massage from Hitler, or find him irresistibly charming at a party. Although Beradt interpreted these vignettes as reflections of “a deep wish to conform,” Beckerman, borrowing a little from Freud, suggests that such dreamers “might in fact be flirting with unfreedom subconsciously as a way of relieving this particular itch and fortifying themselves.”In The Dream Hotel, Lalami conjures a future in which a dystopian surveillance state monitors people’s dreams, sometimes using the data to incarcerate those whom it deems likely to commit crimes. This week, Lalami wrote for The Atlantic about how plausible her speculative scenario feels today in America, with eerie parallels in news reports of permanent U.S. residents being detained for long-ago infractions. Yet Lailami embarked on the novel well before Donald Trump even ran for president. “I was thinking instead,” she writes, “about the ever-more-invasive forms of data collection that Big Tech had unleashed. I wondered if one of their devices might target the subconscious one day.”Sara Hussein, the protagonist of The Dream Hotel, has dreams in which she poisons her husband or inadvertently pushes him off a bridge. Detained for “pre-crime,” she joins a cellblock of women incarcerated for similar reasons, people who are deemed dangerous by algorithms. The system of the novel is unfair in many ways, but its incursions into the unconscious feel most outrageous. Dreams are where private, unregulated impulses get to fight it out, freed from the imperatives of waking life and unhindered by the laws of society or reality. They are a medium through which humans can explore desires that are detrimental to themselves or others. If we were to act on every impulse or fear manifested there, chaos and anarchy would result. People would regularly show up to work in their underwear, betray or kill their lovers, miss most of their flights.The idea that dreams predict our behavior is plainly absurd—but so is the notion that they therefore do not deserve our attention. As Beckerman writes, they can help us register slow, subtle changes in life, such as a growing yearning for freedom, or the creeping emotional stress caused by what he calls “nascent authoritarianism.” That’s part of why the premise of The Dream Hotel is so frightening: If anyone were able to see and control our dreams, they’d thereby command our imaginations. Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann; Getty. They Dreamed of HitlerBy Gal BeckermanA newly reissued book documents the dreams of Germans living under the Nazis, charting totalitarianism’s power over the subconscious.Read the full article.What to ReadThe Great Derangement, by Amitav GhoshBroadly, Ghosh argues, the problems of climate change are created in the developed world yet are felt most acutely outside it. Ghosh, who has seen the ravaging effects of tornadoes and monsoons on his native Kolkata, builds his series of interlinked essays about the history and politics of global warming around a double-edged storytelling problem that he says prevents the people in rich countries from grasping the enormity of climate change. First, because our common narrative framework depends on the past, many people still consider warming through a speculative lens, failing to recognize the severity, and urgency, of superstorms and sea-level rise. And second, that framework also neglects to assess the past, because it leaves out how centuries of extraction and domination by wealthy, powerful countries have made it hard for formerly colonized nations to be resilient in the face of rising temperatures. That’s the “derangement” of his title: the inability of our stories to change as quickly as our world is.  — Heather HansmanFrom our list: What to read to wrap your head around the climate crisisOut Next Week📚 Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, by Michael Luo📚 The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey📚 Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, by John CassidyYour Weekend Read Ryan Young Ryan Coogler Didn’t Want to Hide AnymoreBy David SimsRyan Coogler: “Yeah. It was always there, bro. Gumbo is spicy. It’ll make your nose run if it’s done right. The vampire was always the spice. Gumbo has to hurt a little bit. If you serve me gumbo that doesn’t hurt a little bit, it’s not right. The vampires were always there, because so much music deals with the supernatural. So much of it’s about being haunted by ghosts or dealing with supernatural creatures or having a rabbit’s foot or a mojo bag. It deals with darkness. It’s dealing with the id. And I love horror cinema; I love horror fiction and the concept of the vampire—everything about it made sense for this movie when I really started to think about it. The fact that they have perspective, that they’ve been around for a long time. When Remmick hears Sammie sing, he knows what that music is. He knows what it can do.”Read the full interview.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.Explore all of our newsletters.

At each stage in the political and legal fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration has pushed back harder and dug in deeper.The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order. Officials insisted that the mistake could not be undone, disregarding a Supreme Court ruling instructing the administration to “facilitate” his return. Now the president and his advisers maintain, almost daily, that Abrego Garcia will never touch American soil again.[Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison]“He’s NOT coming back,” the White House has declared on social media, while repeatedly calling Abrego Garcia a dangerous criminal and a terrorist.But in the days after the administration first discovered its mistake, instead of trying to foreclose Abrego Garcia’s return, officials looked for ways to bring him home. They puzzled over the fragmentary evidence tying him to gang membership. And they worried about his safety in a prison where he could be targeted for attack.A lawsuit filed by Abrego Garcia’s family sparked urgent conversations among attorneys at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security who were involved in formulating the government’s response. Their discussion—which has not been previously reported—reflected serious concerns, at odds with the administration’s later statements, according to two people familiar with the conversations, as well as notes and memos I reviewed. Both people spoke with me on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter of ongoing litigation.These conversations show that U.S. officials initially sought to resolve Abrego Garcia’s case quietly and ensure his safety through the conventional diplomatic channels they’ve used in other cases involving a mistaken deportation. This time, though, their efforts were abruptly halted.Late last month, three days after Abrego Garcia’s family filed its lawsuit over his deportation, government attorneys began discussing how to undo the mistake and bring him back. In their conversations, officials went so far as to float the idea of having the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador make a personal appeal to the country’s president for Abrego Garcia’s return. But first, the State Department’s legal team wanted more information from DHS about his alleged role in the MS-13 gang. The thin evidence supplied in response was met with skepticism from the State Department lawyers. Abrego Garcia, who came to the United States illegally when he was 16 years old, was one of 23 Salvadorans deported on March 15. But his name had not appeared on an internal list of 10 gang members sought by President Nayib Bukele.Attorneys at DHS had other concerns. They were aware that, six years ago, a judge had granted Abrego Garcia protected status over fears that he could be targeted for violence should he be returned to El Salvador. That protection was still in effect and had been violated by the March 15 deportation. They wanted to know if U.S. diplomats could ask the Salvadoran government to keep him separated from Barrio 18 gang members who had threatened him in the past and might harm him.But as criticism of the administration over its mishandling of the case spread, White House officials took over the response and began striking a far more strident tone in their public statements. They swiftly turned an admission of bureaucratic error into a political opportunity—a chance to flex executive authority and test the judicial branch’s ability to restrain presidential power. Abrego Garcia’s deportation became far more than just the case of one man; it developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process. All the while, Abrego Garcia has remained in detention in El Salvador, unable to communicate with his lawyers or his family.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that there was an initial effort to return Abrego Garcia. “The Administration has always maintained the position that Abrego Garcia was the man we rightfully intended to deport because he is an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang Member,” she said in a written response to questions, adding that the administration is complying with court orders in the case.As the Trump administration resists the pressure to change course, legal proceedings continue. A conservative appellate-court judge issued a blistering opinion rejecting the government’s claims last week, and on Tuesday, the Justice Department said for the first time that U.S. officials had engaged in diplomatic negotiations over Abrego Garcia’s status. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers agreed Wednesday to a one-week pause on the case during closed proceedings whose records are under seal.[Stephen I. Vladeck: What the courts can still do to constrain Trump]Abrego Garcia, 29, was raising three children with his U.S.-citizen wife and working in construction during his time in the United States. While the administration has depicted him in public statements as a dangerous criminal, judges overseeing the case have chastised the government for not backing their claims with evidence in court.  “The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, the chief judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote last week. “Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.”Some U.S. officials doubted Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang ties from the beginning. In their discussions, State Department officials repeatedly asked DHS and ICE to explain how Abrego Garcia had been identified as an MS-13 member; his possible affiliation with the gang would be a factor in Bukele’s willingness to consider releasing him should the ambassador make a pitch, the officials pointed out. (When Bukele appeared with Trump in the White House on April 14, Bukele called the notion that he would return Abrego Garcia to the United States “preposterous.”)Abrego Garcia’s record had traffic violations but no criminal charges or convictions. Yet ICE officials told the State Department—falsely—that he had faced criminal charges. They pointed to records showing that Abrego Garcia had been suspected of human or labor trafficking after a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022. State police had referred the incident to federal authorities because Abrego Garcia had been driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland. Abrego Garcia had told officers that he was driving the group to a construction job and that the vehicle belonged to his boss. He was cited for driving with an expired license but not charged with human trafficking or any other crime.ICE said that Abrego Garcia was a member of an MS-13 group called the Western Clique, citing a 2019 report by a gang investigator in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The investigator who filed the report was suspended soon after and charged with misconduct in an unrelated sex-worker case. The document has not been treated as credible by the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit. The Western Clique operates in New York State; Abrego Garcia has never lived there.An ICE official who provided sworn testimony for a government court filing, Robert Cerna, explained the nature of the error that had mistakenly sent Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia’s protected status had not appeared on the flight manifest for the deportations. Cerna said that Abrego Garcia had been listed as an “alternate”—not one of the original passengers—and moved up the list because other detainees had been taken off the manifest. Under oath, Cerna referred to Abrego Garcia’s “purported membership in MS-13,” but he did not describe him as a confirmed gang member, gang leader, or terrorist.In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal, a protected status that prohibited his deportation to El Salvador. The judge found that, should he return, he would likely be targeted by Barrio 18. Abrego Garcia had arrived in the United States in 2011 to join his older brother, and said that he’d fled the Barrio 18 gang that was extorting his mother’s business.As DHS attorneys scrambled to respond to the lawsuit late last month, they wanted to minimize the government’s liability by seeking to have Abrego Garcia kept away from the gang. But by Monday, March 31, a week after his family filed suit, the Trump administration’s position had begun to harden. In its court filing, the Justice Department acknowledged that Abrego Garcia had been deported as the result of an “administrative error” but said that the government would not take steps to bring him back, arguing that the federal court could not tell the White House how to conduct foreign affairs. One of the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the brief that acknowledged the Trump administration’s error was subsequently fired for, in the words of Attorney General Pam Bondi, not “vigorously” defending Trump.Leavitt told reporters that Abrego Garcia was a leader of MS-13 who had engaged in human trafficking. Only a few days earlier, government attorneys had discussed how to keep Abrego Garcia safe until they could bring him back. Now the White House was denouncing him as a “terrorist,” saying that he would never return.As criticism of that stance spread, and federal courts sided against the administration, Vice President J. D. Vance, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Bondi, and other top Cabinet officials went on the attack. The White House went from calling Abrego Garcia’s deportation a “clerical error” to insisting that no mistake had been made at all.Miller, in particular, was determined to use the designation of MS-13 and other criminal groups as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” to supercharge deportations and bypass standard due-process protections. The White House’s evolving position fit the pattern of Trump’s second term, in which his administration has responded to mistakes by shrugging them off and refusing to take corrective action. Miller took charge of the White House’s messaging, castigating reporters who asked about the case. He also cheered on the administration’s escalating standoff with the judicial branch. After the Supreme Court directed U.S. officials on April 10 to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, Miller publicly claimed the opposite: that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the White House because the Court had acknowledged the president’s prerogative in managing foreign affairs. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.)[Read: Stephen Miller has a plan]Abrego Garcia was initially sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—a mega-prison from which, the Salvadoran government boasts, no one has ever been released back into society—as part of three planeloads of Venezuelan and Salvadoran detainees. He was transferred out of the facility earlier this month, according to Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who was allowed to meet with Abrego Garcia last week at a hotel in San Salvador.Attorneys for the U.S. government said the Bukele administration has told them that Abrego Garcia is being held at a lower-security facility “in good conditions and in an excellent state of health.”“With respect to any other communications, disclosing any diplomatic discussions regarding Mr. Abrego Garcia could negatively impact any outcome,” the Justice Department said on Monday in a court filing. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia say the Trump administration has the ability to ask for his return because Washington is paying El Salvador at least $6 million each year to imprison detainees sent by the United States. (Van Hollen said he was told that the amount is $15 million.)“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy,” Bukele wrote on social media last week, “he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife, recently told The Washington Post that she had moved with the couple’s three children to a safe house after DHS posted online a 2021 court document with the family’s address.Her attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, declined on Wednesday to discuss the agreement with the government, citing the court seal. “We remain focused on bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia home,” he told me in a text message. “We will not rest until he’s brought home.”*Illustration sources: Alex Wong / Getty; Marvin Recinos / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; courtesy of the Abrego Garcia family / Reuters.

On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable. “They were eating like this,” he said, gesturing at the feast his American hosts had laid out. He put an end to that, in addition to imposing other discomforts. Now, he says, his wife eyes his torso (softly rounded, like an overripe pear) and tells him he should consider a couple of weeks as an inmate himself.Many would like to see Ben-Gvir in prison for reasons other than dietary. He is the most right-wing and, by some measures, the most unpopular member of the Israeli cabinet—an embodiment of the fear among secular liberals that the country’s present and future belong to religious zealots who would rather brutalize Arabs than make peace with them. At every stage in his career, Ben-Gvir has favored Israeli expansion into land inhabited by Arabs, and he has favored the use of force to defend that expansion. He has, at various times, brandished weapons at Arabs and lionized Jewish terrorists, including Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Arabs as they prayed in Hebron in 1994. The government led by Benjamin Netanyahu needs the support of Ben-Gvir’s party, Otzma Yehudit, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to avoid falling apart. And that means that every time Ben-Gvir speaks—which he does often, and provocatively—he inspires fury and dread among those who think neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a future as long as Ben-Gvir can veto any measure that might lead to peace.[Read: Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power]Ben-Gvir doesn’t travel often internationally, perhaps because the only place where he is more unpopular than within Israel is outside it. He was received at JFK airport by Israeli hecklers and quickly proceeded to Florida. There he toured the state’s most enchanting sites: Mar-a-Lago, a Russian-owned gun shop, and a maximum-security prison in the Everglades. In New Haven, he said he supported President Donald Trump’s plan to clear out Gaza and develop it. He said Israel had much to learn from America and singled out the willingness to kill murderers as an attractive and enlightened American innovation. (Israel abolished the death penalty in 1954.)Ben-Gvir came to New Haven to address a gathering of Shabtai, a Jewish society whose members and guests are mostly Yale students and faculty. Yesterday’s Yale Daily News said the event was off the record, but no one asked any such condition of me, and in any case the event could not have been off the record, because it was was being recorded openly by the hosts and by Ben-Gvir’s people, and Ben-Gvir himself exhorted those present to tell others what he said.He sat down about six feet from me, and I passed the table’s bottle of mineral water so he could fill his glass. My gesture was rebuffed: sealed bottles only, please. Ben-Gvir has reportedly faced multiple assassination plots, including one last year that involved a rocket-propelled grenade. Death by San Pellegrino seemed improbable, but I cannot begrudge him his caution.Ben-Gvir gave a stump speech—a story of a political awakening, told so as to cause a similar awakening in his audience. Born in 1976, he grew up in a secular family, then embraced religion with unusual fervor. That fervor was reactionary from the start, a result of his outrage at the First Intifada and the alleged softness of Israel’s government when it consented to the creation and recognition of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords. Ben-Gvir had to pass through a gantlet of protesters to get in the building, and when he described his own raucous youth we could hear the protesters still thumping buckets and playing their vuvuzelas outside. I thought I detected a subtle smile. He has heard worse. He has been worse.In the 1990s, he said, he was arrested so many times that judges shifted from stern to paternalistic. Eventually one told him he should stop being a defendant and start being a lawyer. That judge, Ben-Gvir said, was Aharon Barak, the most distinguished living Israeli jurist and the architect of the legal system that Netanyahu’s government has been trying to dismantle, with Ben-Gvir’s enthusiastic support. Ben-Gvir took Barak’s advice and became a lawyer. “Every lawyer should spend some time in prison,” he said. He built a career defending other right-wing extremists accused of terrorism, arson, and other attacks.He mentioned repeatedly that he lives in Hebron, but never quite made clear to what extent his own extremism had led him to settle there, and to what extent living in the West Bank’s most contested city has made him extreme. The city, which is the burial site of the Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) prophet Abraham, is a rancorous labyrinth that carefully separates Jews and Arabs because when they mix, the results are unpredictable and often violent. It is therefore hellish for everyone. But the restrictions that mattered to him pertain only to Jews. “I can move freely around only 3 percent of Hebron,” he told the group. “An Arab can move around 97 percent of Hebron.” That, he said, is real “apartheid.” (Israelis are forbidden by military order from entering most of Hebron, because it is under control of the Palestinian Authority. But the presence of checkpoints and other restrictions sharply circumscribes the lives of Palestinians, even in areas they nominally control.)On Gaza, Ben-Gvir claimed credit for foresight, and said he had advocated assassinating Hamas leaders even before October 7. After October 7, he became less sentimental. He said Israel’s war in Gaza had been too meek. When asked whether there was any proper limit to the violence that could be inflicted there, he said vaguely that he preferred not to kill children. His obsession with the caloric intake of Palestinians—a running theme of his remarks—came up several more times, as he called for Israel to “bomb their food supply.” The wall behind Ben-Gvir at Shabtai’s headquarters had been covered with images of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7. Some of the hostages are now dead, and others were released malnourished. “If the hostages do not eat, neither will Hamas,” he said.Attendees pressed him on this point, and one said that seeing the images of gaunt Holocaust survivors made him particularly uncomfortable at the prospect of withholding food from civilians in war. An older attendee remarked that he had known actual ex-Nazis, and that the postwar friendship between America and former Axis powers suggested that Israel should find friends among Palestinians, rather than treat them all as permanent enemies.Ben-Gvir called concerns like these “naive,” and rather than distinguish Palestinian civilians from terrorists, he conflated them. He said the revelry after October 7, and the participation of ordinary people in the looting and violence, demonstrated that the distinction between the leadership of Hamas and ordinary Palestinians was illusory. He rejected any comparison between starving Jews after the Holocaust and starving Palestinians, and said that “the Jews did not rape anyone; the Jews did not kill anyone.”[Photos: Gaza on the brink of famine]The most direct question came from an attendee who wanted to know about Ben-Gvir’s attitude toward Baruch Goldstein. In 1995, when he was 18 years old, Ben-Gvir described Goldstein as his “hero” and dressed up as Goldstein for Purim. Until recently, Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of Goldstein prominently in his living room. He removed it in 2020, only after the center-right politician Naftali Bennett said that no politician would be welcome in his Knesset coalition who chose to decorate his home with Goldstein’s likeness. “For the sake of unity and a right-wing victory in the elections, I’m removing the photograph in my living room,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Facebook. In New Haven, he took a softer line for a more skeptical crowd. “People change,” he said. “I oppose what Goldstein did.” He framed his transformation as moral, and said he was not who he was when he was 17. Getting married and having six kids mellows a man out, he said. His whole answer took no more than a couple of minutes.I told Ben-Gvir that I found his contrition perfunctory and unconvincing, and I challenged him, if he was sincere, to prove it. I asked him to tell us all what it was like to idolize a murderer—and then to tell us what he would say to his younger self, or someone still in the thrall of a terrorist, to persuade him to give up violence and mellow out sooner rather than later.He couldn’t even bring himself to pretend. He just asserted that he had changed. “I’m sure you did things when you were 17 that you are not proud of,” he said. (He removed the portrait when he was 44.) And he said again that time and family make a difference—but he added not a word about the inherent value of human life, or the disgrace brought upon religion and country by someone who massacres civilians, especially in a moment of total vulnerability.The evening ended soon after, and when Ben-Gvir left the building, he reentered his milieu: a crowd of protesters, angry and loud. In the photos of his exit, he is flanked by security but unmistakably comfortable with the hullabaloo, even relishing it. He seemed more ready to confront a baying mob than to answer simple moral questions. The photos of him during this confrontation show him signing V for Victory, and looking happier and more energized than he’d looked inside.

The director Ryan Coogler’s new film, Sinners, had an impressive first weekend for an industry that’s been wanting good news. It topped the box office with $48 million nationwide, ahead of the Minecraft movie, 2025’s biggest earner domestically thus far. That sum stands as the highest opening gross for an original feature since the coronavirus pandemic upended Hollywood. Numbers aside, Sinners’ resonance with theatergoers should give both champions of inventive art and Hollywood writ large a reason to celebrate—especially after a recent spate of box-office disappointments. Audiences not only will still go to the multiplex, the ticket sales suggest; they’re also willing to see something that’s not part of a preexisting franchise.Viewers might not understand how well Sinners is doing from reading about it, though. Numerous stories about its debut have focused on why the movie’s distributor, Warner Bros., still can’t call the film a smash. The Hollywood Reporter deemed its price tag “relatively hefty for a genre movie.” A New York Times article noted that Sinners’ box-office success came with a “big asterisk,” and that “to make money, Sinners will need to attract substantial crowds in the weeks ahead.” Variety emphasized that, because Sinners cost “a staggering $90 million to produce,” the movie’s “profitability remains a question mark.” That skeptical framing raised numerous eyebrows, with even Ben Stiller—who didn’t work on the film—flagging it on social media: “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” he posted, referring to the film’s global box-office earnings.Of course, the job of entertainment-business reporters is to cover Hollywood, and companies’ financials are a vital part of that ecosystem. Profitability—the point at which a film’s investors begin to see returns—is also of the utmost importance to studio bigwigs, sometimes to movie-lovers’ chagrin. (The rule of thumb is that a studio will start recouping its spending when a film makes back double its budget, which includes production and marketing spend.) And it’s true that, for a non-franchise feature, a $90 million budget is significant. Yet the forcefulness of the conversation about Sinners is striking. Usually, such an unambiguous accomplishment—especially for a horror film, a polarizing genre with audiences—prompts a victory lap on Monday, when box-office figures are confirmed, and Coogler thanked “each and every one of you who bought a ticket” in a letter posted to social media. Much of the press about the film’s money-making potential, meanwhile, seemed intent on turning down the volume, taking what should be one of the year’s biggest cinematic success stories and focusing on the potential for failure instead of its concrete achievement thus far.[Read: Ryan Coogler didn’t want to hide anymore]There have been other, less grumpy interpretations of Sinners’ price tag: Deadline was more bullish, reminding readers that the film’s higher-end cost was “what it takes to be in business with auteurs who have delivered recent blockbusters on their resume.” Each of Coogler’s prior movies has been celebrated—most notably Black Panther and its sequel, which made a combined $2.21 billion worldwide. It should hardly be surprising, based on that track record, that Coogler’s new film inspired a bidding war among studios. In order to acquire Sinners, Warner Bros. even agreed to revert the rights back to the director after 25 years, an unusual (although not unheard-of) proviso.This filmmaker-friendly behavior seems to have spooked some members of Hollywood. A New York report published alongside Sinners’ release anonymously quoted multiple executives, who called Warner Bros.’ agreement with Coogler “dangerous”; one added that it “could be the end of the studio system.” Part of many studios’ revenue generation comes from licensing out their back catalog, and a hit such as Sinners could become a valuable asset. Another source worried that other A-list filmmakers would start to demand similar terms regarding ownership: “It’s bad for the business. It’s bad for filmmaking relationships.” But Coogler has said that he wanted the rights for symbolic reasons—that it felt important to him, as a Black director, to own his film about Black autonomy. The director shouldn’t have to justify the terms he secured for Sinners regardless; he got the best deal for himself in a competitive market for his services. That’s how the business is meant to work.The undercurrent to this kind of coverage is troubling: that Sinners was somehow not worthy of a large budget, or that Coogler didn’t deserve a creatively enriching deal. Perhaps these beliefs stem from the fact that the movie isn’t attached to a franchise; spending nearly $100 million on a known quantity tends to be a safer bet for a company. Or maybe it’s because some of the industry has become pessimistic about original, auteur-driven movies. Analysts have cited new, low-grossing features by Oscar-winning directors such as Steven Soderbergh (Black Bag) and Bong Joon Ho (Mickey 17) as evidence that supporting artier efforts comes with consequences. But the directors of such films aren’t unilaterally responsible for balancing the books; in the case of Sinners, given its current trajectory, worrying about the math doesn’t seem necessary.Nonetheless, even a genuine critical and commercial smash is no match for Hollywood’s financial anxiety. Major studios have grown gun-shy about funding anything remotely risky; even a risk well taken can prompt a knee-jerk, scornful reaction from not only the executives but also the press: The film could, even should, have done better. That bias is worth interrogating—except I doubt anyone in the boardrooms will bother to do that.[Read: Why the studios are risking everything]This money talk should not matter to the audiences who show up for movies like Sinners. But there’s a chance that they’ll start to think that it should, considering how much of the coverage revolves around costs and break-even points. Even seemingly guaranteed blockbusters, such as Marvel movies, have their box-office numbers scrutinized, as financials become a primary media talking point. The chatter about new movies is in danger of heading in the wrong direction: away from whether a movie is worth seeing, and toward whether a supposed underperformer can claw its money back. Sinners should clearly be understood as a hit, but the defeatist coverage threatens to warp moviegoers’ understanding of box-office success—and whether achieving it is actually possible.

When Representative Al Green of Texas started shouting and waving his cane around during Donald Trump’s address to Congress last month, pundits described the Democrat as causing a disruption, pulling a stunt, or peacefully protesting. In the wilds of online alternative media, another term was being used: malding.Mald is a blend of mad and bald. It’s video-gamer slang for getting so angry after suffering a loss that you pull your hair out. I learned the word by watching Twitch, the streaming platform that is famous for turning video games into a spectator sport—and that has, of late, become an important forum for political commentary. One of the most popular Twitch streamers right now is a 35-year-old World of Warcraft expert who goes by the name Asmongold and primarily streams under the handle zackrawrr. On the day after Trump’s congressional address, Asmongold kicked off his stream by telling his viewers he was excited to finish playing the new game Monster Hunter Wilds—and to sort through the fallout from Trump’s speech.He pulled up a TV-news interview in which Green explained that he’d interrupted the president to object to potential Medicaid cuts. Asmongold offered his view: Interrupting Trump was tantamount to “malding out,” which makes “people think you’re a fucking retard.”Asmongold, whose real name is Zack Hoyt, is a prominent member of a class of influencers that has been helping remake the American electorate. With an average of more than 2.2 million people tuning in to Twitch at any given moment—and clips of the top streamers regularly going megaviral on the wider internet—the platform is, as the journalist Nathan Grayson points out in the new book Stream Big, comparable in reach to “mainstream television networks like CNN and Fox during prime-time slots and major events.” (And that’s without counting other streaming venues, such as Kick and YouTube.) During last year’s campaign, the Trump camp courted the streamer Adin Ross in order to reach a young, largely male constituency that ended up helping decide the election.Trump’s second administration has made it even clearer how the culture of gaming—a pastime enjoyed weekly by 61 percent of adults, age 36 on average—is bleeding into American politics. The avowed Diablo 4 player Elon Musk explains DOGE’s activities with gaming terms such as speedrunning (beating a game way more quickly than its creators intended—or slashing government at a far faster rate than previously seemed possible). Musk recently beefed with Hasan Piker, the popular leftist Twitch streamer who has been enlisted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help rally opposition to Trump. He has also publicly feuded with Asmongold—after Asmongold criticized Musk for exaggerating his own gaming accomplishments (which is kind of like the 2020s equivalent of a politician fudging their golf handicap or war-zone experience).I’ve been dipping in and out of Asmongold’s channel for the past month to understand what it means for politics to be processed through the lens of video games. After all, how a society amuses itself tends to affect how it governs itself. The rise of TV, the media theorist Neil Postman famously argued, remade politics into visual entertainment, ruled by optics. Professional sports, it’s often said, primes people to view elections as a contest between rivals. The internet has inflated the importance of identity and authenticity, inviting campaigners to act like just another face in the social-media scroll. Gaming seems to be intensifying the effects of those three media and adding in something else: cynicism.Asmongold’s hair is scraggly and brown; his build is stringy; his eyebrows are given to vigorous wiggling. He likes to brag about not showering for months. Most of his streams start with him taking questions from his viewers, who provide a continuous river of comments in his Twitch chat room. The topics might include what he ate last night (possibly Taco Cabana), what he thinks of puzzle games (not a fan: “The reason why is I don’t want to think”), and whether he’s ever going to stream from the White House (“We’ll see what happens”). He then starts browsing the internet, sharing his screen with viewers while clicking among memes and news clips shared on Reddit and X. He’ll watch speeches and news segments in full, pausing every so often to add an “uh oh” or a “Let’s go!” or a longer bit of analysis.Before I started tuning in to Twitch—keeping it on in the background while sending emails or cleaning the house—I wondered whether its practitioners were just updated versions of old-media archetypes, such as the talk-radio host, football commentator, and news anchor. But Asmongold is less energetic and polished than those kinds of professionals; the feeling one gets is not of watching him but of watching with him. I sometimes felt a pang of nostalgia for middle-school hangouts with friends. A specific form of communication arises from a group of guys staring at the same screen: You murmur nonsense back and forth in a knowingly Neanderthal manner; it’s bracketed in irony, based less in thinking than reacting. He’s playing the role of a buddy on the couch.That said, he’s a buddy with a lot of opinions. Last year, he was temporarily banned from Twitch for saying that Palestinians were part of an “inferior culture” whose destruction he doesn’t mourn (he apologized); earlier this month, he attracted controversy for saying that transgender kids exist only because of adults’ mental illness (he doubled down on that one). But his style is far from the stridency of provocateurs such as Candace Owens and Newsmax’s Trump apologists. Instead, he’s detached or wryly amused. He comes off like a burned-out tutor hired to translate current events into gamerspeak for distracted teens. (For example, he said Trump’s tariffs were fixing “the loot council,” equating global capital to gold or treasures earned in a World of Warcraft raid.)Indeed, Asmongold’s foray into political commentary often seems to have been undertaken half-heartedly. The gaming world’s rightward drift can be traced back to the “Gamergate” controversy of a decade ago, when a vocal slice of gamers organized an angry backlash to game designers and journalists who had been trying to make the art form more diverse and inclusive. “All we wanted to do was play video games,” Asmongold said in a recent stream. “And then they had to put girls in video games. And so now we have to elect Donald Trump to stop that.” He was speaking in a sarcastic deadpan, but he was suggesting a truth about the particular brand of conservatism that has taken hold of numerous men lately: In many cases, it’s driven not by a committed belief system but by a tribal vendetta against, to use one of his favorite terms, the “retards” of the identity-focused left.That particular slur actually says a lot about Asmongold’s outlook. He presents himself as standing for opinions that are so widely shared, and so obvious, that disagreeing with him means you’re intellectually disabled (and, the logic of his usage would suggest he thinks, pitiful). He’ll often reiterate that he’s no partisan hack; unlike many elected Republicans, he’s in favor of universal basic income and a constitutional right to an abortion. “I place pretty much no values in principles or morality,” he said in one stream. “I think that these are top-down ideas that are given to you by the elites.” The professed disregard for ideology is, of course, hardly rare these days. Joe Rogan’s entire brand is freethinking. Even Trump likes to justify his decisions as being “common sense.”[Read: The game that shows we’re thinking about history all wrong]This sort of logic is perhaps why the term NPC, or non-player character, has become trendy on the right. In video games, an NPC is a computer-controlled ally or opponent, such as a blacksmith who sells the player gear and a goblin whom the player must slay. Their pool of dialogue is limited and their characterization thin; they have no real identity beyond how the player sees them. In recent years, Musk and many others have taken to calling their liberal opponents NPCs. Ironically enough, the diss suggests its own ideology: Politics isn’t a dispute among philosophical visions for a better world, or even a contest among constituencies for resources; it’s a quest for certain humans who matter to defeat people-shaped obstacles that don’t.In this schema, Trump is simply the man who’s rescuing the country from the rule of the brainless. Asmongold’s commentary about the president usually focuses not on whether any given decision by Trump is wise in its own right but rather on how the “average” or “normal” person is going to react. Asmongold has, for example, little particular insight about the economy: “I don’t really care about whether the tariffs are good or bad—I don’t give a fuck,” he said in one stream. But he seems to have schadenfreude about the distress the tariffs have caused. Over and over, he’s hammered at the idea that “normal people” don’t care about the stock market in the same way that the elites who are criticizing Trump’s policies do. Asmongold doesn’t agree with everything Trump does—but he clearly thinks that the president is scaring the right people.Sometimes I’d start to wonder what I was doing spending time listening to Asmongold at all. Then I’d notice that 60,000 people were watching live, or I’d go to his YouTube page and see that the viewership for any given clip from his streams ranges from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. He may sound like just some guy on the couch—but now he, and many other guys on the couch, have captured a slice of the voting public, and have ties to political figures of influence. Not all gaming streamers are alike; Piker, who’s been hyped as the potential “Joe Rogan of the left” in news coverage since the election, delivers heady Marxist theory and wonkish research on geopolitics in a tone of frat-boy exuberance. But Asmongold is the more popular figure, and he’s one member of a larger, right-leaning ecosystem.   Often while watching Asmongold, I thought about the video-game concept of “the meta.” It refers to shared knowledge among dedicated players about the best practices for succeeding in a game. Understanding the meta means approaching video games with a moneyball mentality; it means knowing, say, the optimal sword to use against a particular boss. Gamers play games for all sorts of reasons: to role-play, to challenge themselves, to kill time with friends. But digging into the meta means looking beneath a fantastical veneer—story, graphics, so on—to exploit the rules. To see the world in this way means discounting the ideas that ostensibly govern our society—ethics, beliefs, norms—and instead processing life as a struggle for dominance.The strangest thing about this view of politics is that it’s seductive enough, perhaps even addictive enough, to pull people away from the greatest distraction on Earth: video games. On the first day I tuned in to Asmongold, I was amazed to find that it took him a full five hours of chitchatting before he finally fired up Monster Hunter Wilds, a game about, well, hunting monsters. In combat, he frantically mashed buttons, hooting “Big dick!” whenever he was doing well. During cutscenes—videos advancing the game’s narrative—he talked over the dialogue, issuing summaries like, “So I have to kill the big thing, right?”I recognize his hypnotized, single-minded mentality from my own gaming experiences. After a certain amount of playtime, what’s on-screen stops looking like a coherent world and starts looking like inputs and outputs, challenges and rewards. And when you look up, reality feels like the screen.

When Donald Trump took office in January, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that the economy had a 15 percent chance of entering a recession over the next 12 months. Today, with the world engulfed in a trade war, they see a 45 percent chance. J.P. Morgan puts the risk at 60 percent. Torsten Sløk, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm, believes that a contraction is pretty much guaranteed. The situation is unprecedented, at least in modern history. The last time the White House proactively tanked the economy—under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, who gutted the Second Bank and demanded payment for public lands in gold or silver—slavery was legal. The light bulb and antibiotics had not yet been invented, and the Federal Reserve did not exist.Recessions are miserable, in terms of businesses destroyed, start-ups abandoned, lifetime earnings depressed, and lives lost. Yet a downturn might be the least of the damage done by the second Trump administration. The White House’s confused policy aims and inane policy processes—as well as its disregard for the rule of law and common sense—are leading investors to dump American assets. Stocks, bonds, and the dollar are declining in tandem. The United States’ hegemony over the financial markets is at stake.[From the August 1985 Issue: Change in the banks]In the words of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the onetime French finance minister, the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency constitutes an “exorbitant privilege” for the United States, a privilege made more exorbitant by Treasury debt’s role as the world’s safe-haven investment. The country can borrow cheaply and power out of recessions quickly because of this privilege. Yet it depends on investors’ trust in American financial institutions and American governance. Trump’s trade war is making people question whether the United States deserves to have its privilege revoked.The world has hundreds of currencies in circulation, from the millennium-old British pound to days-old crypto scams. None operates quite like the dollar. The greenback is legal tender in the United States and many other countries and territories, including El Salvador and Ecuador. It is commonly accepted in dozens of others, including Somalia, Myanmar, and Bermuda. It is the money of international traders and financiers, as well as of tourists and drug traffickers.Indeed, nine in 10 foreign-exchange transactions involve the dollar. Imagine that you are a Norwegian importer seeking to purchase goods from a Vietnamese exporter. You might ask the Vietnamese company to accept kroner; the Vietnamese company might request that you send dong. But the transaction would be cheaper and easier using dollars as a “vehicle currency.” Trading kroner for dong costs more than trading kroner for dollars and dollars for dong, because the market for dollars is so liquid. Two in three cross-border corporate bonds are priced in dollars. Many commodities are priced in dollars. And because trade in dollars is so important to foreign countries, their central banks attempt to hold their currencies stable against it.American debt is no less important to the functioning of the global economy. Foreign companies hold Treasury bonds as collateral. Foreign governments buy and sell them to help manage currency fluctuations. Trillions of dollars of financial instruments are benchmarked to the price of American debt. When another country’s economy falters, its investors pile into Treasury bonds.This extraordinary thirst for American assets comes with some downsides. The strength of the dollar reduces demand for exports, which contributed to the deindustrialization of Detroit; Youngstown, Ohio; and other cities in the Rust Belt in the late 20th century. The global reliance on it puts the Federal Reserve in the position of acting as the central bank for the world, not just for the United States, opening “swap lines” to stave off currency crises during financial panics. The volume of American debt held by foreign capitals, most importantly Beijing, raises the prospect that a government could dump assets to damage Washington.[Annie Lowrey: Trump is flirting with economic disaster]Yet the exorbitant privilege is still a privilege. The strong dollar slashes the price of foreign imports for American families. Demand for Treasury bonds bolsters the U.S. stock market and reduces the cost of government borrowing. When a country like Greece or Argentina experiences a recession, its parliament often has to implement an austerity budget to avoid default; when the U.S. goes into a recession, its monetary and fiscal authorities print money, more or less. Dollar dominance also gives Washington leverage in trade deals and a unique capacity to cut terrorists and rogue states off from the world’s financial architecture using sanctions.The United States did not always have such privilege. Before the dollar and the T-bill, the British consol ruled the world, and before that, the German imperial bond, the Dutch rentin, and the Spanish juros, as the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff notes in his extraordinarily well-timed new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem. In the 1970s, some economists believed the Japanese yen might become the reserve currency; more recently, the Chinese renminbi has been suggested for the role. But the United States became a hegemon after the world wars, and has remained a hegemon since: its currency liquid, debt abundant, financial system sound, central bank skilled, markets open, contracts enforced, military power unparalleled, and political system responsive. But has, as Rogoff speculates, the era of the dominant dollar passed its peak?Even before Trump took office, a subtle shift was under way. The greenback’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves has fallen 9 percent in the past decade. Central banks have picked up more and more gold since the Great Recession. And dozens of countries are developing digital currency systems that could reduce their dependence on the dollar.Trump seems intent on supercharging the trend. The White House’s global tariff campaign has increased input costs for American firms and dampened the outlook for corporate earnings, erasing $6 trillion from the stock market in a matter of weeks. Companies are slowing down on hiring as consumers face a huge inflationary shock. (The price of shoes is expected to jump 87 percent, and the price of a used car by $3,000.) Forecasters expect a 1.1-percentage-point hit to GDP growth and a 0.6-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate this year, not accounting for the force of reciprocal tariffs or policy uncertainty.That uncertainty is acute. The White House has paused higher tariff rates on scores of countries for 90 days to give time for trade negotiators to work out deals. The process is not going well. Trade deals are notoriously slow to hammer out; negotiators for Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership engaged in 19 rounds of talks over three years. The Trump administration is in talks with more than 50 countries at once. It failed to reach an agreement with Japan last week, rattling the markets. Negotiations with leaders from the European Union have stalled. Trade officials in several countries have reported that they do not understand what the United States wants, and have been struggling to get their calls returned.  [Read: The tariff damage that can’t be undone]Business leaders are perplexed and paralyzed. Will the existing tariffs remain in place? Will the Trump administration implement additional trade barriers? Will foreign countries band together and pass tit-for-tat levies? Is a recession imminent or already here, if still invisible in the headline economic figures? Executives are struggling to figure out how much to invest, how many goods to stockpile, and how many workers to keep on.If the jobless rate increases as inflation ticks up, the country might find itself in not only a recession, but a stagflationary recession. Congress could pass a stimulus package to help support families and businesses, but that would lift prices. The Federal Reserve could raise interest rates to get prices down, but that would reduce employment. The scenario would be “challenging,” Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said earlier this month, with characteristic understatement. “We will continue to do everything we can.”The markets are not just pricing in the diminished outlook for American and global growth. They are pricing in the fact that the United States seems like less of a haven than it did three months ago. Trump is bullying the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and threatening to fire Powell, though he has since backed away from the threat. At the same time, the White House is ignoring the courts, impairing federal agencies, impounding congressionally authorized spending, and perhaps violating due process. It is antagonizing the country’s allies and imperiling the freedom and fairness of American elections. Runaway inflation seems more likely than it did before Trump was in office, as does the government defaulting on its debt payments. The policy-making process is in chaos.All of this has spooked the world’s investors. The bond market seized up after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, as some analysts wondered whether the Fed would have to step in to provide liquidity. The markets sank after Trump harangued Powell on social media. Yields on 10-year government bonds have climbed in recent weeks, and the dollar has fallen against the euro, the yen, and other currencies.This may, in fact, be exactly what some White House officials want. The country’s “economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade,” argues Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. “As global GDP grows, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the United States to finance the provision of reserve assets and the defense umbrella, as the manufacturing and tradable sectors bear the brunt of the costs.” The end of dollar dominance and the elimination of the country’s bilateral trade deficits will restore manufacturing employment and unleash growth, the theory goes.[David Frum: Trump needs someone to blame]Yet the U.S. economy flourished while such imbalances persisted, growing far faster than that of the EU or Japan over the past two decades. Analysts doubt it would flourish if Trump’s trade policies endure. The costs of tariffs to American businesses and consumers are likely to swamp their benefit to domestic exporters. “The broad use of tariffs fundamentally harms our industrial-policy goals,” Kimberley Clausing, an economist at UCLA, told me. “It makes it harder to make things in the United States, not easier,” she explained, because so many manufacturers rely on imported parts. Moreover, technological advances have slashed the number of workers needed for industrial production. There simply are not that many jobs to reshore.Plus, the end of dollar dominance will come with its own costs. The sinking dollar will reduce families’ purchasing power. Rising interest rates will dampen business investment, depress corporate earnings, inhibit the ability of Washington to engage in stimulus spending, and make it harder for Americans to purchase cars and homes. Meanwhile, the United States might become weaker in international negotiations, and less capable of sanctioning terrorists and drug cartels.This might not happen quickly or at all, if Trump ends the trade war and leaves the Federal Reserve alone. Millions of firms around the world are accustomed to transacting in dollars; markets for commodities and bonds are priced in dollars. There’s no ready alternative to the dollar and the Treasury bond; the EU remains fractious and China protectionist. But investors are not wrong that the United States has changed, and that American markets might be less safe and less secure in the future. And Americans might miss their exorbitant privilege when it is gone.

If any doubts remain that Benjamin Netanyahu aims to transform Israel into an authoritarian state, where the prime minister is above the law and dissent is presumed subversive, an eight-page affidavit submitted to the country’s supreme court this week should dispel them.Written by Ronen Bar, the embattled former head of the Shin Bet security agency, the document is testimony from the pinnacle of Israeli power. In legalese mixed with intimations of personal pain, Bar lists Netanyahu’s attempts to turn the Shin Bet into a secret police protecting the prime minister personally rather than the nation. He also details his refusals to accede to these demands.The message, which should be heard in other capitals where democracy is under attack, is that high officials can and must resist a self-coup—a bid by an elected leader to seize dictatorial powers.The open clash between Netanyahu and Bar began this winter. In late February, the Shin Bet, along with the police, had begun investigating allegations that top Netanyahu aides had financial ties to the government of Qatar, which funds Hamas. Less than three weeks later, the prime minister decided to dismiss the Shin Bet chief on the grounds of “loss of trust” in him. The cabinet unanimously rubber-stamped Bar’s firing.The prime minister appoints the head of the security service, but the post is nonpartisan—and this is the first time in Israel’s history that a Shin Bet director has been fired. Opposition parties, civil-society groups, ex-generals, and other citizens filed suit, asking the supreme court to block Bar’s dismissal. The attorney general (which in Israel is an independent legal position, not a cabinet member), Gali Baharav Miara, took their side, and the cabinet hired a celebrity private attorney to argue its case.[Read: Netanyahu’s other war]The court told Baharav Miara and Netanyahu to submit affidavits to back up their cases. On Tuesday, minutes before the court’s deadline, the attorney general’s legal team filed two statements from Bar: the eight-pager, addressed to the public as well as the court, and a longer secret one, with classified documents as supporting evidence to be seen by only the justices and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has received an extension until Sunday to file his testimony.Whatever Bar put in the secret document, the public one was immediately explosive. Netanyahu’s “loss of trust,” Bar asserted, was rooted in “an expectation of personal loyalty on my part to the prime minister.” One trigger for dismissal, Bar wrote, was the “Qatargate” probe—which followed on an earlier investigation of the same Netanyahu aides for leaking a top-secret military-intelligence document in an alleged bid to turn Israeli public opinion against a hostage deal.Both cases raised “most serious suspicions of grievous harm to national security.” The Qatar scandal, in particular, suggested the possibility that individuals “employed by a country supporting Hamas were to be found in the inner sanctum of Israeli decision-making,” Bar wrote. Dismissing the Shin Bet director in the midst of this investigation would send “a severely chilling message to the agency and to other investigative bodies.” This effect, Bar’s testimony implied, was one purpose of his firing.Another, he suggested, was tied to Netanyahu's trial on corruption charges. The Shin Bet, like the U.S. Secret Service, is charged with the personal protection of top officials. “The prime minister pressured me, unusually, again and again,” Bar wrote, to provide a determination that Netanyahu had to avoid public appearances and “exposure to missile attacks,” and so could not appear in court and testify. That, Bar asserted, would “not have made it possible to conduct the trial.” Netanyahu even had a document prepared, phrased as if Bar had written it, for the agency chief to sign.Bar refused. Netanyahu has been appearing on the witness stand.Though Netanyahu’s decision to remove Bar is recent, Bar’s statement suggests that tensions between the two men may go back as far as two years. Shortly after the current government assumed power in 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced a “judicial reform”—in fact, a constitutional revolution to free the government from constraints on its power. The plan set off a wave of protests, in which hundreds of thousands of people filled Tel Aviv streets weekly and held smaller demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s residence and other ministers’ homes.[Read: Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign]Netanyahu expressed “his expectation that the Shin Bet would act” against “citizens involved in protests,” provide information about activists, and investigate who was funding the demonstrations, Bar writes. In “more than a few cases,” Netanyahu raised the subject after a meeting had concluded, and after asking his military secretary and a stenographer to leave the room. Documenting every word exchanged between the prime minister and the Shin Bet director is reportedly an established practice, meant to prevent the abuse of the agency's powers.One of the agency’s tasks, Bar notes, is preventing subversion. But according to criteria set by the supreme court, subversion must involve secretive, illegal activity with the potential for violence. “I refused to use the Shin Bet’s powers … in a manner that could violate the right of legitimate protest,” Bar wrote.One conversation about the protests crystallizes Bar’s complaint—that Netanyahu wanted the Shin Bet to be loyal to him, not to democratic norms or the rule of law, and to act against his opponents. In it, Netanyahu raised the possibility of a constitutional crisis—a situation in which the government would defy the Supreme Court.“It was made clear to me,” Bar states, that in the case of such a crisis, “I must obey the prime minister and not the High Court.”The details of this exchange, Bar said, are in his secret testimony. Indeed, the key problem with his public affidavit is that so much of the evidence for his allegations remains out of public view.The Shin Bet chief’s sudden status as a hero of resistance to Netanyahu is pregnant with irony. Bar has repeatedly admitted that he shares responsibility for the intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to attack on October 7, 2023. Since then, he has also participated in top-level decision making about Israel’s response, including the war in Gaza, which has produced so much civilian death and suffering. And he waited until after his dismissal to speak out, which critics could see as raising questions about his motives.Moreover, the Shin Bet would be an unlikely candidate for a democracy prize. It enjoys wide powers of surveillance. With judicial permission, it can prevent suspects in security cases from meeting with their lawyers. It plays a crucial role in preventing terror attacks—but also in maintaining the occupation of the West Bank.Yet Bar’s professional record is precisely what makes the repetition of the word refuse in his affidavit a model for other state officials—in Israel, the United States, and other democracies under threat.Until Bar rose to the top of the Shin Bet, publishing his name—like that of any other agency staffer—was illegal. Even in his affidavit, he seems uncomfortable putting himself at the center of the issue: “It is not with an easy heart that I have put this account before the court,” he wrote. “I have served the State of Israel for nearly 35 years … I am not accustomed to legal proceedings.”Bar is an establishment man, the product of a hierarchical organization built on anonymity and loyalty to the state. Had he accepted Netanyahu’s claim to be the state, Israel would be closer to dictatorship. But he rejected that claim.[Read: Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out]Six hours after Bar’s document was released, Netanyahu posted a response on social media. Nearly half is devoted to shifting all blame for October 7 to Bar, absolving himself. The prime minister claims that Bar started the Qatargate investigation after he knew he’d be fired, as an effort to prevent this.Netanyahu denies that he tried to postpone his trial, and he accuses Bar of failing to deal with incitement in 2023. He does not address the charge that he asked Bar to obey him, rather than the supreme court, in a showdown. But only on Sunday, when he files his affidavit, will it be clear which claims he is willing to make under potential penalty of perjury.The supreme court could render a decision on whether Bar remains in office, and for how long, based on technical issues. But Bar explicitly asks the court to make a decision on principle—a “judicial determination of the essence of the role” of the Shin Bet director. In either case, if the justices overturn or delay Bar’s dismissal, the next question will be whether Netanyahu will obey the decision or ignite a constitutional showdown—and, in the latter case, how the public responds, and what side other government officials take.Bar’s stand is not sufficient in itself to stop a self-coup. But in a conflict between a leader and a democratic system, he has demonstrated where the allegiance of public officials must lie.

Mourners of Pope Francis gathered at the Vatican, scenes from the the second weekend of Coachella 2025, a humanoid-robot half-marathon in China, a wildfire in Nebraska, a “Big Wheel” Easter race in San Francisco, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

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Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

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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.

Man, it Shoughed to be Shedeur Sanders Friday night. Wait. You haven’t heard of Tyler Shough? Welcome to the party. The last name is pronounced “Shuck,” by the way. He’s 25 years old, a strapping 6-foot-4 dude from Chandler, Ariz. Shough played college ball for seven seasons and three schools, a road that weaved through Oregon, Texas Tech and Louisville. He only appeared in more than seven games in a season once, though — last fall, when he threw for 3,195 yards, 23 touchdowns and six interceptions. And he was the only quarterback taken early in the second round of the 2025 NFL Draft. And the third QB selected overall. As Coach Prime might say: Aw, Shoughs. Cam Ward? Gone. Jaxson Dart? Gone. Shough? Gone. Jalen Milroe? Gone, snapped up by Seattle with pick No. 92. Dillon Gabriel? Tapped by the Browns at No. 94. Shedeur, Mel Kiper’s “best available,” remained on the board through 9 p.m. MT on Friday, through two whole rounds and most of the third. The Cleve passed on CU’s best-ever passer five times. The Giants passed on him three times, and even traded up late in the first round to draft a QB — Dart — who wasn’t him. Shedeur heard his name called dozens of times during ESPN’s draft coverage. Just not by anybody at the podium in Green Bay. Day 3? Mercy me. Related Articles Keeler: Shedeur Sanders will be better NFL QB than Jaxson Dart, first-round slide or not Keeler: Avalanche, Jared Bednar somehow found way to ruin Gabe Landeskog Night at Ball Arena Keeler: Why is CU Buffs QB Shedeur Sanders’ NFL draft stock all over the place? It’s less about Deion Sanders than some might think. Keeler: Avalanche needs Gabe Landeskog back for Game 3 to teach Stars’ Mason Marchment some manners Renck vs. Keeler: How bad are Rockies? Like ’62 Mets? ’24 White Sox? Did Deion Sanders put a tariff on Cleveland? Is there a trade war between Boulder and the Meadowlands? On one hand, you feel sorry for No. 2 as he slid. And slid. And slid. Nobody throws for 134 passing touchdowns and 14,347 yards over four college seasons if they’re all hat and no cattle. On the other hand, you wonder if Shedeur got some questionable advice from those who should’ve known better. The Sanders Family guard their trust and value control. Of the narrative. Of perceptions. Of a football program. It’s made Coach Prime one of the top 10 highest-paid college football coaches in the country and turned his CU Buffs into must-see TV. Deion Sanders single-handedly made the Buffs a national brand, albeit one tied inextricably to his own. Yet here’s the thing about the NFL, and about NFL front offices in general: They don’t give a hoot. Nothing and nobody is bigger than the Shield. Well, except Tom Brady. Until you win in the league, the league calls the shots. A player can get the type of clout to dictate terms at the next level — but they’ve got to go out and play well enough to earn it first. Shedeur didn’t throw at the combine. He didn’t run at the combine. He didn’t participate in the Senior Bowl. His advisers followed their CU playbook: We’re doing this on our terms. We’re going to change the draft game, too. In Boulder, it’s worked like a charm. The NFL wasn’t interested. “The postgames where you’re throwing your teammates under the bus,” Ourlads.com analyst Dave Syvertsen told me earlier in the week, “that wouldn’t fly in the NFL. Especially when your dad’s not in the locker room with you.” Deion has been Shedeur’s coach for as long as anybody can remember. Again, it’s worked out so far. But no pro coach knows with 100% certainty what happens to Shedeur when things hit the fan on a football team where the buck doesn’t stop with his dad. “To me, it seems like, if I had to point to one thing, it’s the Nebraska loss (last fall) early in the year, where he immediately threw his offensive line under the bus,” Syvertsen continued. “That was a huge red flag for me. And that was (one) to a lot of people.” More people than we’d figured, apparently. Something sure as heck was said to somebody. Maybe several somebodies. Like Nikola Jokic, ex-CU Buffs great Travis Hunter made everybody around him better. But I also spent two years watching Shedeur dice defenses without No. 12 raising Cain on the perimeter. In four games in which Hunter played a few or no snaps in 2023, Sanders threw for 10 scores with two picks while averaging almost 280 passing yards. In two games last fall with limited or no Travis: five scores, three picks and 319 passing yards per game. Everybody remembers the beatdown in Oregon. But have you already forgotten how Shedeur matched Caleb Williams, drive for drive, while Hunter was in sweats? On the flip side, Shedeur spent Thursday night watching the first round from a custom-made room with his “Legendary” brand emblazoned everywhere. Which, in hindsight, was probably not the ideal public rebuttal against anonymous coaches who threw shade his way. You know a story’s got legs when Donald Trump decides to weigh in on social media. The president went to his Truth Social app to call NFL teams “STUPID” in all caps for not taking Shedeur. He then praised Deion for two sentences before declaring that Shedeur “has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is all set for Greatness. He should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN. Good luck Shedeur, and say hello to your wonderful father!” Shedeur was not picked immediately. It should also be noted that Trump loves to needle the NFL, as it’s one of the country clubs that repeatedly rejected his membership. The real-estate mogul/TV personality reportedly made a play for the Baltimore Colts in the ’80s and, more recently, took a run at the Bills. Like Coach Prime, our Commander-in-Chief rarely forgets a slight. Alas, as a football pundit, he’s got only a slightly better batting average than Kiper does right about now. One of the last times Trump went to bat this strongly for a rookie quarterback was in 2014, and that QB was … Johnny Manziel. Oy, vey. “Teams are making a big mistake not taking Johnny Manziel,” then-citizen Trump posted to then-Twitter on May 8 of that year. “He is going to be really good (and exciting to watch).” Manziel was neither really good nor exciting to watch in the NFL. It’s not all gloomy at the Champions Center: Shedeur’s old running mate Travis Hunter found a nice landing spot as the No. 2 pick overall to Jacksonville. You wouldn’t wish a Jaguars life on anybody, but Jacksonville’s got at least things four things going for it that’ll help the two-way wonder, in theory: 1) Proximity to his extended family in Florida; 2) a young, good (ish) QB in Trevor Lawrence to find him the rock; 3) a faceless, “meh” franchise that has nothing to lose and should happily let him play wherever he wants; and 4) a comparatively small media market. The Jags need a star, need a face. Heisman Hunter ticks both boxes immediately. Sanders could be that face, too. But as of 9 p.m. Denver time Friday, Shedeur, the golden arm with the diamond watch, was still on the clock., still waiting while his draft stock Shoughed wind. And you wonder how much of the last four months, in hindsight, he would do all over again. Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.

Friends, family, community members and police are searching for a Denver hair stylist who went missing after leaving her University Hills apartment nearly two weeks ago. Jax Gratton, 34, was last seen around 10 p.m. April 15 in the 4200 block of East Iliff Avenue, according to the Denver Police Department. Her friends realized something was wrong when she didn’t show up for appointments with multiple clients, said Brandy Carey, a manager at Solera Salon Suites. Gratton rents a studio at the company’s North Broadway location. Gratton’s parents reached out to her fellow stylists after not hearing from her, and Carey accessed her work computer to find that the last appointment she checked out was on April 12. Gratton’s friends and family are worried for her safety, particularly because she left medicine, makeup and her beloved cat behind. “She would never leave Madame Franchesca,” Carey said. “That’s her baby.” Gratton’s mother, Cherilynne Gratton-Camis, started worrying something was wrong when her daughter didn’t call her on Easter. Gratton never misses a holiday or birthday phone call, Gratton-Camis said, and she talks to her mom about everything. “She has had a very rough life being transgender, but she has survived and I’m so proud of her,” Gratton-Camis said. “If she’s out there, alive, she’s going to make it through this.” Word of Gratton’s disappearance spread quickly through Denver’s LGBTQ community and more than 300 people have joined a Facebook group Carey started Thursday to help find her friend. Related Articles Missing, endangered Westminster teen found safe More people died in police chases in this Denver suburb than in the state’s biggest cities Law enforcement makes second arrest in 2024 case of an Idaho Springs dog breeder’s murder Missing, endangered Western Slope teen thought to be in Denver found safe 14-year-old boy reported missing from Erie found safe The outpouring of support and concern for Gratton is “hauntingly beautiful,” Carey said. “I don’t think any one of us, on a day-to-day basis, understands how many people care about us,” she said. Gratton is described as white; 5 feet, 8 inches tall; and 150 pounds with red hair and blue eyes. Anyone with information about her whereabouts should call the Denver Police Department at 720-913-2000 and reference case #25-5001497. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day. Jax Gratton, 34, was last seen in the 4200 block of East Iliff Avenue on April 15, 2025. (Courtesy of the Denver Police Department)

After passing on a glut of early-round receiver talent, Denver finally swung on a wideout in the third round of Friday night’s NFL draft. Denver selected Illinois receiver Pat Bryant with pick No. 74, a new vertical threat entering Sean Payton and the Broncos’ offensive plans for 2025. He’s a ready-made fit in sheer frame for Payton, at a big-bodied 6-foot-2 and 204 pounds. “They know all my attributes,” Bryant said Friday night on a conference call with reporters. “They know what I can do on the field. So my main focus in getting to Denver, man, is just do my job, and help the team win.” Those attributes make for an interesting bag of traits, as Bryant was clocked at a 4.61-second 40-yard dash, second-slowest of all 39 receivers at the NFL combine. He could be a legitimate red-zone target for Denver, though, with a 37.5-inch vertical leap. And he’ll bring a steady set of hands for second-year quarterback Bo Nix, as he recorded just one drop in 78 targets last season, according to Pro Football Focus. “I mean, that’s how I am as a receiver, man,” Bryant said. “My main focus, when the ball is in the air — it’s mine, and I’m better than the man that’s in front of me.” He’s a steady blocker, too, expressing a simple philosophy to media Friday: “You block, you get the rock.” The Broncos jumped up from an original No. 85 third-round slot to No. 74 after a maddening flurry of pick-swaps, the dust settling after dangling their second-round slot to the hungry Carolina Panthers and Detroit Lions. After sliding down to No. 60 and landing their running back in UCF’s RJ Harvey, a number of potential draft needs still lay on the board for Denver: tight end, wide receiver, defensive line. Tight ends, in particular, flew off the board faster than many anticipated, as a glut of second-tier options like LSU’s Mason Taylor, Oregon’s Terrance Ferguson and Bowling Green’s Harold Fannin Jr. went in the second and third rounds. And Texas tight end Gunnar Helm sat, waiting, at No. 74, a Cherry Creek High product who previously told The Denver Post it’d be a “great honor” to play for the Broncos. And Denver, ultimately, opted for a different kind of receiving threat, as Bryant will join Courtland Sutton and a glut of young receivers come 2025. Pat Bryant, Illinois Round/pick: 3rd/74 Age: 22 Height/weight: 6-foot-2, 204 pounds College: Illinois Hometown: Jacksonville, Florida Notable: Bryant was a staple for Illinois and coach Bret Bielema for multiple seasons. He saw his production increase each year of his college career, culminating with 54 catches for 984 yards and 10 touchdowns in 2024. He caught 17 total touchdowns over his final two seasons. Not straight-line fast, clocking a 4.61-second 40-yard dash at the combine. He’s known for being a quality route runner and a willing blocker. According to The Athletic, Bryant had just one drop on 78 targets in 2024.

The truth has set them free from misconceptions and delusion. Don’t bother pretending Nuggets. The Los Angeles Clippers have revealed your problems. It was never just the coach and general manager. It is the players. And the bench. The Nuggets, even if they escape the first round, are not good enough. Entering Game 4, they should be embarrassed. If not quit, they looked mentally checked out in Game 3, playing the victim, the weight of injuries and dysfunction swallowing their season. This has become a miserable matchup. The Nuggets need to be on the Autobahn. And this series is being played in a school zone. Clippers coach Tyronn Lue and assistant Jeff Van Gundy are outclassing interim coach David Adelman. They determined after the opener that even if they let Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray score, no one else could beat them. Their theory is correct, showing how playoff basketball is a flat-out different sport than the regular season. Here is how bad things have gone. The Nuggets have three transition points in their past seven quarters. That is unthinkable for a team that lives off fastbreaks, that relishes turning games into a pop-a-shot. Worse, the Nuggets reserves remain ghosts in uniform. They were outscored 31-6. Adelman talked Friday about switching rotations, using different people to jumpstart the offense. But what played out in Game 3 was symbolic of the regular season, of what is wrong with this team and why Aaron Gordon (his calf is not hurting again), Michael Porter Jr. (his left shoulder is killing him) or Jamal Murray (his max contract kicks in next season) must be traded this offseason. This roster demands reconstruction. The NBA has evolved since Denver won its title. It is impossible to contend for a championship when they don’t shoot a lot of 3s and cannot defend behind the arc. Mix in a lack of physicality, and here we are. Related Articles Renck: Sean Payton sends shock waves in draft, becoming a Land Barron Renck: Broncos Country, trust Sean Payton to do right by Bo Nix in NFL draft Renck: Nuggets accept blame for loss. But Nikola Jokic’s stats tell sobering truth. Renck vs. Keeler: How bad are Rockies? Like ’62 Mets? ’24 White Sox? Renck: Russell Mania is maddening. But Nuggets don’t win without Westbrook The Nuggets, whether they win another game in this series or not, have been exposed. And that is the simple truth. On the Rox: Criticism of the current Rockies is not piling on the rock pile. They boast the fourth worst winning percentage since their inception in 1993 at 38%. Their road average is the lowest of all-time at .238. It is obvious the Rockies need a fresh set of eyes across the board with a new team president, manager, scouts and general manager, knowing there will not be a change in ownership. Power outage: The idea of the Avs getting only seven shots in six power plays in a Game 3 loss to the Stars is unacceptable. Putting Gabe Landeskog on the unit should help. The Avs are not winning this series without dramatic improvement in man advantages. Sanders’ slide: Shedeur Sanders’ slide is the result of evaluation and projection. NFL scouts viewed him as an undersized, athletically limited, average-armed prospect who processes well. That is closer to Brock Purdy, apparently, than Cam Ward. Sanders did not help himself by bombing at least one team interview. Everything matters this time of year. And some of his actions created the impression that he will have difficulty playing for someone besides his father. Sanders can prove everyone wrong. But this was not how he wanted to begin his pro career, climbing straight uphill. Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.

Five picks later, and the kid from Littleton might’ve wound up in his own backyard. Five picks later, and Terrance Ferguson might’ve stuck back in Denver, and had a merry reunion with Bo Nix as the Broncos’ matchup-nightmare tight end of the future. On Friday night, though, as the top tier of tight ends slid off the board early into Day 2, the Los Angeles Rams and general manager Les Snead sat pretty at No. 46 — and snapped up Ferguson, just ahead of a temporary Broncos second-round slot at No. 51. It’s not Denver. And the Rams concealed their hand from even Ferguson himself, holding just one formal interview with him with one member of the organization at the NFL combine, the tight end said on a conference call with Rams media Friday. But it’s a cushy landing spot for Ferguson, who’ll continue his journey from Littleton in a high-powered Rams offense well-suited to take advantage of his talents. Los Angeles needed a big-bodied safety valve at tight end for veteran quarterback Matthew Stafford, with no Rams TE eclipsing 300 yards in 2024 and veteran mainstay Tyler Higbee coming off an injury-riddled season. “I think I bring a lot of things,” Ferguson said Friday. “Versatility, as being the biggest, being able to stretch the field and create mismatches with linebackers or safeties. But, also be able to put my nose on somebody, you know?” The 6-foot-5 Ferguson was a four-sport — yes, four-sport — athlete at Heritage, playing football, basketball, track and field and lacrosse. After racking up 472 yards in a six-game COVID-shortened season his senior year, he exited high school as the top-ranked player in Colorado in the class of 2021, according to 247 Sports. He spent four years at Oregon, catching six touchdowns from Nix in 2023 before finishing with 591 yards for the 13-1 Ducks in 2024. For a stretch, it seemed as if Denver might target the hometown kid. Ferguson met with the Broncos at the combine and took a local visit in March. He waited for the call on Day 2 at his house in Denver, as he told Rams media Friday, with the same family that had supported his journey from Colorado. But Ferguson will head to sunny Southern California, as offensive-genius head coach Sean McVay will attempt to shape him into the next great pass-catching NFL tight end. And he’ll get to tandem with 37-year-old Stafford, in a moment of serendipity for the young Ferguson. His little brother Philip, the Heritage product said Friday, grew up a massive fan of both the Detroit Lions and Stafford. And after the Rams snagged Ferguson, Philip delivered his brother a message. “(You) get to play with the G.O.A.T,” Philip told Terrance.

The Broncos found themselves a running back. They selected Central Florida running back R.J. Harvey with the 60th overall pick of the NFL draft on Friday evening. Harvey ran for nearly 1,600 yards and 22 touchdowns in 2024 for the Knights and has been productive for the past three seasons. In 2023, he rushed for 1,416 yards and 16 touchdowns. Harvey in three seasons also caught 61 passes for 720 yards and four touchdowns. “That call was the most joyful moment of my life,” Harvey said after getting picked. “It’s a blessing. I’m just so excited.” Harvey is an Orlando native, but he didn’t go to local UCF right away. Instead he started his career at Virginia as a quarterback after playing the position throughout high school. He grew up idolizing not famous running backs but Kyler Murray, Lamar Jackson and Michael Vick. Harvey said UCF recruited him out of high school as a running back, but instead wanted to try to play quarterback first. Eventually, he made his way back home, settled into his new position and became one of the most productive backs in the country. “I”m happy I made the right move,” Harvey said. Before taking Harvey, Denver traded back twice, first from No. 51 to No. 57 and then to No. 60. In trades with Carolina and Detroit, the Broncos also moved up 11 slots in the third round to No. 74, 11 spots in the fourth to No. 111 and added a fourth-rounder at No. 130. They gave up one of their sixth-round picks, so they remain at seven selections in the draft overall. The pair of trade-backs came after the Broncos watched Ohio State running backs Quinshon Judkins and TreVeyon Henderson get drafted in the first handful of selections of the second round. So, too, did wide receivers Jayden Higgins (Iowa State) and Luther Burden (Missouri). Then former Denver assistant general manager Darren Mougey swooped in and took LSU tight end Mason Taylor at No. 42 overall. Another tight end came off the board at No. 46 when the Los Angeles Rams selected Terrance Ferguson, the Littleton native and former teammate of Broncos quarterback Bo Nix at Oregon. The Broncos had prioritized finding at least one running back in this draft class and Harvey said he’s excited head coach Sean Payton, who has had a series of dynamic backs over his head coaching career, has confidence in him. “It means everything,” Harvey said. “He has a great reputation of having great running backs and I’m just excited to get into his system and do whatever I can to help my team win, move the ball down the field and get touchdowns.” RJ Harvey, UCF Round/pick: 2nd/No. 60 Age: 24 Related Articles Illinois WR Pat Bryant selected by Broncos with 74th overall pick in NFL Draft Former Heritage star Terrance Ferguson drafted by L.A. Rams in second round Sean Payton, Broncos orchestrate flurry of pick swaps to target middle rounds in NFL draft Broncos’ first-round pick Jahdae Barron is proven leader, versatile DB, and ‘best friends’ with Matthew McConaughey Best available NFL draft Day 2 prospects for Broncos: Quest for running back continues in second round Height/weight: 5-foot-8, 205 pounds College: UCF Hometown: Orlando, Florida Notable: Harvey put up huge production across the last two seasons at UCF, running for 2,993 yards and 38 touchdowns combined in 2023 and 2024. He profiles, potentially, as the playmaker in space that Payton and the Broncos have been searching for at running back, running a 4.40-second 40-yard-dash at the NFL combine. Harvey was a dual-threat quarterback in high school, not moving full-time to running back until his freshman year at Virginia. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

The true honey hole of this year’s NFL draft, as Broncos head coach Sean Payton so effusively put it Thursday night, lay in the second round. But the Broncos, evidently, didn’t find a sweet enough fit at No. 51. As time ticked away on Day 2 in Green Bay, with a slew of top skill targets flying off the board, the Broncos elected to move back from their second-round slot in a flurry of pick-swaps with the Carolina Panthers, ultimately moving back to No. 57. In return, they moved up 11 spots in both the third and fourth rounds, a slight bump up in a class that’s been widely bemoaned for its lack of top-tier options but praised for its sheer depth. But they weren’t done. In subsequent minutes, Payton and Denver dangled that No. 57 to Detroit, as the Lions pounced to move up three spots and push the Broncos down to No. 60. And the Broncos ended up landing another prized fourth-rounder for their trouble, sending away a late-rounder in return. Deep breath. Let’s recap. Denver started the evening with picks No. 51 (second round), No. 85 (third round), No. 122 (fourth round) and No. 208 (sixth round). After making a deal with Panthers and leveraging with Detroit, they ended up with No. 60 (second round), No. 74 (third round), No. 111 (fourth round), and No. 130 (fourth round). Thusly, the Broncos essentially elected to drop nine spots in the second round and jettison a sixth-rounder to move up in the third and fourth and add another fourth-rounder — a solid value that hones in at the meat of this year’s draft class. They wound up taking UCF running back RJ Harvey at No. 60, who was widely slated as more of a mid-round fit. A source confirmed to The Post that the Broncos’ brass felt comfortable moving back from No. 51 knowing Harvey would be available nine picks later. Payton and general manager George Paton, already, had elected against trading up and selling the farm for theorized fits like Ohio State RB TreVeyon Henderson, who went at No. 38 to the New England Patriots. Other potential Day 2 fits, like LSU tight end Mason Taylor or Oregon tight end Terrance Ferguson, had long flown off the board. And no obvious skill-position fit had fallen into Denver’s lap at No. 51. Related Articles Illinois WR Pat Bryant selected by Broncos with 74th overall pick in NFL Draft Former Heritage star Terrance Ferguson drafted by L.A. Rams in second round Central Florida RB R.J. Harvey selected by Broncos with 60th overall pick in NFL draft Broncos’ first-round pick Jahdae Barron is proven leader, versatile DB, and ‘best friends’ with Matthew McConaughey Best available NFL draft Day 2 prospects for Broncos: Quest for running back continues in second round “Now in the stretch tomorrow and in the next two rounds, there are a lot of football players that would be, as you went around the league, would have similar grades,” Payton said on Thursday. Denver, evidently, had similar enough grades on a second-round crop to feel comfortable moving back and targeting the middle rounds, their first draft trades in this 2025 cycle a jumbled but ultimately calculated approach. After the Broncos maneuvered to No. 60 and No. 74 on Day 2, they’ll now sit with a total of four picks on Day 3: Two fourth-rounders (No. 111 and No. 130) and two sixth-rounders (No. 191 and No. 197). Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

Five people were taken to the hospital Friday after a three-vehicle rollover crash in Aurora, police officials said. Related Articles Colorado traffic deaths drop as enforcement of new hands-free phone law ramps up Colorado lawmakers advance bill allowing chain-assist vendors to set up along highways to ease winter traffic More people died in police chases in this Denver suburb than in the state’s biggest cities RTD vows to end slow zones soon, but thousands of riders have abandoned light rail trains Seven RTD light rail trains derailed last year. The investigations remain secret. The crash occurred near East 38th Avenue and Windsor Drive, Aurora police said on social media. Three people had serious injuries and two had minor injuires. East 38th Avenue is closed for the crash investigation, according to the Aurora Police Department. This is a developing story and may be updated. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

In one of the pivotal moments of their lives, a series away from another march through the College Football Playoff, Jahdae Barron assembled his Texas Longhorns defense in a second overtime and delivered a message. Play your game, Barron told them, as Longhorns safety Michael Taaffe recalled months later. There’s a reason you’re in this spot. Everything that we do happens for a reason. Keep playing your game, and trust one another. It brought them up, Taafe reflected. It settled them down. And on a third-and-8 in January’s CFP quarterfinal, Texas defensive back Andrew Mukuba stepped in front of a toss from Arizona State’s Sam Leavitt and fell to the turf with a game-sealing interception. “A lot of stuff for him is like, yes, the versatility on the field,” Taafe told The Denver Post of longtime friend and teammate Barron. “But, the versatility as a leader and being able to connect with different people on the team to get his voice across … that’s something I’ll always remember.” That voice still carried on Friday, even after Barron traded five years of Texas burnt orange for Broncos orange a day after the franchise selected him with pick No. 20 of Thursday’s NFL draft. In his introductory news conference in Denver, the cornerback addressed Broncos Country and media alike with measured confidence, the same beyond-the-tape maturity that enamored head coach Sean Payton and general manager George Paton. With mother Techonia Davis and siblings watching from the side, Barron spoke to media of family-taught lessons on “treating everybody the same, whether it’s the janitor or the president,” the same leadership versatility that endeared him to Texas faithful. That included, apparently, one Texas-fanatic actor who wrote on Twitter Thursday that Barron was a “great young man.” “I’m best friends with, like, Matthew McConaughey,” Barron smiled to media. The on-field versatility, though, is the reason the Broncos shocked the NFL world and snatched Barron up in the first round, despite all public indications connecting Denver to the skill positions for months. Two years ago, as recounted by Texas’s assistant director of player development, Michael Huff, Barron sat down and immersed himself in studying the mental side of every defensive slot. Corner. Nickel. Dime. Linebacker. Safety. He took snaps at nearly every alignment in a breakout 2024 season at Texas, as Longhorns defensive passing-game coordinator Terry Joseph — cousin of Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph — occasionally trotted Barron out in a hybrid linebacker-DB “star” role. “He put me there, just understanding I was very savvy,” Barron said Friday. “I can manipulate blocks, just with my eyes.” His film study turned the game into “chess,” before his 4.39 speed could take over. He won the Jim Thorpe Award after picking off five passes in 2024, given annually to the best defensive back in college football. His arrival in Denver suddenly presents the Broncos with a heap of secondary questions. Perhaps he’ll challenge Ja’Quan McMillian at slot corner? Or maybe he will play outside next to Pat Surtain II? Either way, Barron’s far from a “one-trick pony,” as Huff put it. Related Articles Illinois WR Pat Bryant selected by Broncos with 74th overall pick in NFL Draft Former Heritage star Terrance Ferguson drafted by L.A. Rams in second round Central Florida RB R.J. Harvey selected by Broncos with 60th overall pick in NFL draft Sean Payton, Broncos orchestrate flurry of pick swaps to target middle rounds in NFL draft Best available NFL draft Day 2 prospects for Broncos: Quest for running back continues in second round “The combination of him — whether he’s outside, opposite of Pat, whether he’s at the nickel, or wherever he’s at like a free safety — I feel like he really can do it all,” Huff said. Beyond scheme questions, the infrastructure is there for Barron to thrive immediately in Denver, a five-year collegiate player praised widely for his maturity. He’d chatted with both quarterback Bo Nix and Surtain since hearing his name called, Barron recounted Friday, the Texas product adding he’s watched Surtain’s game. He’ll get to join a slew of former Longhorns, Barron calling newly-signed quarterback Sam Ehlinger “my G.O.A.T. growing up.” And he’ll work to “master” any role in the secondary he’s given, Barron said Friday. “I want to thank Broncos Country just for having me,” Barron said in his opening address. “I’m gonna give you everything I got, day in and day out. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — In keeping with the Clippers’ nautical theme, David Adelman acknowledged Friday that Game 4 will be “all hands on deck” for the Nuggets. Adelman hinted at possible rotation changes during a 10-minute off-day session with reporters at the team hotel. Denver is dealing with several injuries, including Michael Porter Jr.’s shoulder sprain, Russell Westbrook’s left foot inflammation, Aaron Gordon’s lingering calf soreness and even Nikola Jokic’s mysterious right elbow affliction. Westbrook is questionable to play on Saturday (4 p.m. MT) in Game 4 of the first-round series. “They checked him out this morning. … So we’ll kind of gauge that as we go,” said Adelman, Denver’s interim coach. “And if Russ plays or doesn’t play, we’re gonna take a look at our rotation. We may play different people. See who can impact the game with how (the Clippers) are guarding and how we’re trying to guard.” Adelman used an eight-man rotation at the start of the series, with Jalen Pickett playing limited minutes as the third player off the bench. Over the course of the series, though, the Nuggets have also tried to steal a few minutes with DeAndre Jordan at backup center. They introduced Julian Strawther in the second half of Game 3 while trailing by double digits, but the second-year shooting guard went scoreless in 11 minutes. Hunter Tyson and Zeke Nnaji also checked in for garbage time. Vlatko Cancar and Dario Saric are the last remaining players who have not have not appeared in a game yet this series. Related Articles ‘Embarrassed’ by Clippers in Game 3, Nuggets ‘need to attack,’ Nikola Jokic says Michael Porter Jr. played at “20 or 30%” with shoulder injury in Nuggets’ Game 3 loss Nuggets 3-pointers: Michael Porter Jr. plays hurt and it shows as Denver fades in L.A. Clippers crush Nuggets in Game 3 as Intuit Dome makes playoff debut How to watch Nuggets vs. Clippers Game 3 in Denver after controversial NBA TV broadcast decision “No one’s 100% right now,” Adelman said. “Aaron’s not 100%. Nikola’s not 100%. Just like the Clippers. All their guys have ailments at this part of the season. Michael (Porter) is one of our guys. He’s a mainstay here. If he’s available to play, he will play.” Adelman said the Nuggets took collective accountability for the fact that “we sucked” in Game 3 — a 34-point loss at Intuit Dome. “If we win this game, it puts the series in a three-game series,” he said, “which you want, knowing you have two games at home.” Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.

Boom Technology, the Colorado company working on building the next generation of supersonic jets, has chosen to develop and test its engines of the future just 30 miles north of its Centennial headquarters — at the Colorado Air and Space Port near Watkins. Adams County commissioners this week approved a five-year lease with Boom. The company has pledged to invest $3 million to $5 million over the next year to improve and upgrade the site on the space port’s east side where it will do its testing. Adams County owns the Colorado Air and Space Port, formerly known as Front Range Airport. “We’re absolute thrilled that Boom has chosen Adams County,” Lynn Baca, who chairs Adams County’s Board of Commissioners, said Thursday. “It’s really Boom’s investment in our community that puts us at the forefront of aerospace and Adams County’s commitment to advancing next-generation transportation technologies.” Boom made news earlier this year when its XB-1 jet became the first independently developed aircraft to break the sound barrier, tearing through the air tens of thousands of feet above California’s Mojave Desert. The demonstrator aircraft, a prelude to the company’s commercial jet — dubbed the Overture — accelerated to Mach 1.05 within about 11 minutes of taking off, according to the company and a live video of the test flight. Late January’s test flight was another step toward reviving supersonic commercial travel, which went defunct with the grounding of the Concorde jet more than two decades ago. Boom CEO Blake Scholl has said publicly that the Overture will debut in 2029, with tickets priced from $4,000 to $5,000 for a 3½-hour flight from New York to London. The company says its plane will have a top speed of 1.7 times the speed of sound, or about 1,300 mph, and carry between 65 and 80 passengers. The specter of revived supersonic travel across the globe convinced American Airlines in 2022 to commit to buying 20 Overtures from Boom. The year before, United Airlines committed to purchasing 15 of the aircraft, which will built in North Carolina. A Boom spokesperson on Thursday confirmed the lease with Adams County but said the company didn’t have anything more to say about it immediately. Jeff Kloska, executive director of the Colorado Air and Space Port, also confirmed the arrangement but declined to say more. According to a presentation shown at the commissioners’ meeting on Tuesday, Boom plans to station 10 to 15 engineers and technicians in Adams County to perfect the Overture’s engine, dubbed Symphony — a turbofan engine with a 35,000-pound thrust. The new deal with Boom is not unfamiliar territory for the Colorado Air and Space Port. The same space Boom is moving into was previously leased to Reaction Engines, a British aerospace company that was doing similar research and development for the last seven years. Reaction Engines shut down late last year after running into funding problems. Adams County said it ended the lease with the company last month. Related Articles Officials: Boom aims to build supersonic jets in North Carolina Centennial-based Boom Supersonic unveils new airplane expected to travel at 2 times the speed of sound Centennial’s Boom Supersonic partners with Japan Airlines on orders, $10M investment “It’s a big deal,” said Morgan Alu, director of international business development and special projects with the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation and staff lead of the Colorado Space Coalition. “That capability near a runway is great for the state.” Alu said being so close to population centers, Boom can “access engineering talent” while still roaring its test engines at high decibels without disturbing anyone near the remote space port. According to a new report from the Colorado Space Coalition that focuses on an 11-county region along the Front Range, the aerospace industry employs 56,910 people across 2,260 companies, with an average annual wage of $147,840. “We’re on the cutting edge,” Baca said. “To be on the horizon in that next step in space travel is an exciting adventure to be on.” Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, California. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs. This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a Scandinavian accent, and I offered to shake hands. As our palms met, it said: “I have a firm grip.” When the home’s owner, a Norwegian engineer named Bernt Børnich, asked for some bottled water, the robot turned, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with one hand. Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and writing computer code. Now humanoids, machines built to look like humans and powered by AI, are poised to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Børnich is CEO and founder of a startup called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. His startup is among the dozens of companies planning to sell humanoids for homes and businesses. Investors have poured $7.2 billion into more than 50 startups since 2015, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks the tech industry. The humanoid frenzy reached a new peak last year, when investments topped $1.6 billion. That did not include the billions that Elon Musk and Tesla, his electric car company, are pumping into Optimus, a humanoid they began building in 2021. Entrepreneurs like Børnich and Musk believe that humanoids will one day do much of the physical work that is now handled by people, including household chores like wiping counters and emptying dishwashers, warehouse work like sorting packages, and factory labor like building cars on an assembly line. Simpler robots — small robotic arms and autonomous carts, for instance — have long shared the workload at warehouses and factories. Now companies are betting that machines can tackle a wider range of tasks by mimicking the ways that people walk, bend, twist, reach, grip and generally get things done. Because homes, offices and warehouses are already built for humans, these companies argue, humanoids are better equipped to navigate the world than any other robot. The push toward humanoid labor has been building for years, fueled by advances in both robotic hardware and AI technologies that allow robots to rapidly learn new skills. But these humanoids are still a bit of a mirage. Internet videos have circulated for years showing the remarkable dexterity of these machines, but they are often remotely guided by humans. And simple tasks like loading the dishwasher are anything but simple for them. “There are many videos out there that give a false impression of these robots,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Though they look like humans, they aren’t always behaving like humans.” Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M Neo said “Hello” with a Scandinavian accent because it was operated by a Norwegian technician in the basement of Børnich’s home. (Ultimately, the company wants to build call centers where perhaps dozens of technicians would support robots.) The robot walked through the dining room and kitchen on its own. But the technician spoke for Neo and remotely guided its hands via a virtual reality headset and two wireless joysticks. Robots are still learning to navigate the world on their own. And they need a lot of help doing it. At least for now. “I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible.” I first visited 1X’s offices in Silicon Valley nearly a year ago. When a robot named Eve entered the room, opening and closing the door, I could not shake the feeling that this wide-eyed robot was really a person in costume. Eve moved on wheels, not legs. Yet it still felt human. I thought of “Sleeper,” the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy filled with robotic butlers. The company’s engineers had already built Neo, but it hadn’t learned to walk. An early version hung on the wall of the company’s lab. In 2022, Børnich logged on to a Zoom call with an AI researcher named Eric Jang. They had never met. Jang, now 30, worked in a robotics lab at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and Børnich, now 42, ran a startup in Norway called Halodi Robotics. A would-be investor had asked Jang to gather some information about Halodi to see if it was worth an investment. Børnich showed off Eve. It was something he had dreamed of building since he was a teenager, inspired — like many roboticists — by science fiction (his personal favorite: the 1982 movie “Blade Runner”). Jang was entranced by the way that Eve moved. He compared the Zoom call to a scene in the sci-fi television drama “Westworld” in which a man attends a cocktail party and is shocked to learn that everyone in the room is a robot. “I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible,” Jang said. The would-be investor did not invest in Halodi. But Jang soon convinced Børnich to join forces. Jang was part of a Google team teaching robots new skills using mathematical systems called neural networks, which allow robots to learn from data that depicts real-world tasks. After seeing Eve, Jang told Børnich that they should apply the same technique to humanoids. The result was a cross-Atlantic company they renamed 1X. The startup, which has grown to around 200 employees, is now backed by over $125 million in funding from investors that include Tiger Global and OpenAI. “All of this is learned behavior.” When I returned to the company’s lab about six months after meeting Eve, I was greeted by a walking Neo. They had taught it to walk entirely in the digital world. By simulating the physics of the real world in a video-game-like environment, they could train a digital version of their robot to stand and balance and, eventually, take steps. After months spent training this digital robot, they transferred everything it had learned to a physical humanoid. If I stepped into Neo’s path, it would stop and move around me. If I pushed its chest, it stayed on its feet. Sometimes, it stumbled or did not quite know what to do. But it could walk around a room much like people do. “All of this is learned behavior,” Jang said, as Neo clicked against the floor with each step. “If we put it into any environment, it should know how to do this.” Training a robot to do household chores, however, is an entirely different prospect. Because the physics of loading a dishwasher or folding laundry are exceedingly complex, 1X cannot teach these tasks in the virtual world. It has to gather data inside real homes. When I visited Børnich’s home a month later, Neo started to struggle with the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door. The robot’s Wi-Fi connection had dropped. But once the hidden technician rebooted the Wi-Fi, he seamlessly guided the robot through its small task. Neo handed me a bottled water. I also watched Neo load a washing machine, squatting gingerly to lift clothes from a laundry basket. And as Børnich and I chatted outside the kitchen, the robot started wiping the counters. All of this was done via remote control. Even when controlled by humans, Neo might drop a cup or struggle to find the right angle as it tries to toss an empty bottle into a garbage can under a sink. Though humanoids have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, they are still not as nimble as humans. Neo, for instance, cannot raise its arms above its head. Neo can also feel a little creepy, like anything else that seems partly human and partly not. Talking to it is particularly strange, given that you are really talking to a remote technician. It’s like talking to a ventriloquist’s dummy. “What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination.” By guiding Neo through households chores, Børnich and his team can gather data — using cameras and other sensors installed on the robot itself — that show how these tasks are done. Then 1X engineers can use this data to expand and improve Neo’s skills. Just as ChatGPT can learn to write term papers by analyzing text culled from the internet, a robot can learn to clean windows by pinpointing patterns in hours of digital video. Most humanoid efforts, including Musk’s Optimus and similar projects like Apptronik and Figure AI, are designing humanoids for warehouses and factories, arguing that these tightly controlled environments will be easier for robots to navigate. But through selling humanoids into homes, 1X hopes to gather enormous amounts of data that can ultimately show these robots how to handle the chaos of daily life. First the company must find people who will welcome an early version of a strange new technology into their homes — and pay for it. 1X has not yet set a price for these machines, which it manufactures at its own factory in Norway. Building a humanoid like Neo costs about as much as building a small car — tens of thousands of dollars. To reach its potential, Neo must capture video of what happens inside homes. In some cases, technicians will see what happens in real time. Fundamentally, this is a robot that learns on the job. “What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination,” Børnich said. “It is going to be a really bumpy road, but Neo will do things that are truly useful.” “We want you to give us your data on your terms.” When I asked Børnich how the company would handle privacy once the humanoids were inside customers’ homes, he explained that technicians, working from remote call centers, would only take control of the robot if they received approval from the owner via a smartphone app. He also said data would not be used to train new systems until at least 24 hours after it was gathered. That would allow 1X to delete any videos that customers did not want the company to use. “We want you to give us your data on your terms,” Børnich said. Using this data, Børnich hopes to produce a humanoid that can do almost any household chore. That means Neo could potentially replace workers who make their living cleaning homes. But that is still years away — at best. And because of growing shortage of workers who handle both house cleaning and care of elders and children, organizations that represent these workers welcome the rise of new technologies that do work in the home — provided that companies like 1X build robots that work well alongside human workers. “These tools could make some of the more strenuous, taxing and dangerous work easier and allow workers to focus on things that only human workers can offer,” said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents the country’s house cleaners, home-care workers and nannies. Soon, Neo began cleaning the towering windows on the side of the house. Then as I turned back to Børnich, I heard a crash on the kitchen floor. After an electrical malfunction, Neo had fallen over backward — fainting dead away. Børnich picked the robot up as if it were a small teenager, carried it into the living room and laid it down on a chair. Even passed out, Neo looked human. Other humanoids I’ve met can be intimidating. Neo, under 5 1/2 feet tall and 66 pounds, is not. But I still wondered if it could injure a pet — or a child — with a fall like that. Will people let this machine into their homes? How quickly will its skills improve? Can it free people from their daily chores? These questions cannot yet be answered. But Børnich is pressing forward. “There are a lot of people like me,” he said. “They’ve dreamed of having something like this in their home since they were a kid.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Last spring, when my wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, we started a list of baby gear — a rite of passage for parents. The difference with our list, or so I thought, was that it would contain only the best stuff because it was vetted by me, a tech columnist with 20 years of experience testing products. After our baby arrived in the summer, I learned I was wrong. It turns out there is no best baby gear, because what worked for other parents often didn’t work for us. Even though I had picked a top-rated stroller, its wheels were inadequate for our neighborhood’s pothole-riddled streets. The electronic bottle warmer listed as a must-have by many Redditors was too slow at heating up milk for our vocal newborn. The Snoo, the $1,700 robotic bassinet with a cult following, did nothing to lull our little one to sleep. Now past the sleepless nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I wound up with a well-rested, content child. What helped, in part, was pivoting to a different approach with baby gear, analyzing our particular problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them. My highs and lows with baby tech may not be every parent’s experience. But the lessons I learned from my misadventures, from internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable. Here’s what to know. Upgrading knowledge triumphs over fancy gizmos, including Snoo. When our daughter was first born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet I bought from another parent through Facebook Marketplace. But when she turned about 3 months old, she began loudly protesting naps. That made me consider the Snoo, the chicly designed white bassinet that automatically sways and plays sounds to soothe a fussy baby. Among parents, the Snoo is a polarizing product not just because of its price ($1,700, or $160 a month for rental). Several of my friends with the privilege of owning one called the device a godsend that saved them from the brink of insanity. Others said their child hated it. I had read the book about soothing newborns written by the Snoo’s creator, Harvey Karp, so I wanted to give it a shot. Fortunately, a friend lent me a Snoo. I downloaded a companion app and paid a $20 subscription for access to some of its extra perks, including a rocking motion that mimicked the bumps and jostles of riding in a car. My baby was initially unfazed when we strapped her in. But when she started crying and the bassinet reacted by swaying and playing white noise, she cried even louder. After a few weeks of experimenting, we reverted to her old-school bassinet. A spokesperson for Happiest Baby, the company behind Snoo, said it was ideal to acclimate babies to the product as soon as they were born because it simulates the movements and sounds a baby experiences inside a mother’s womb. However, the company advertises Snoo as suitable for babies up to 6 months of age, and my daughter fit this criterion. The tech that eventually helped? E-books. One late night, I downloaded a $14 e-book by a pediatrician about infant psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my 3-month-old was fighting sleep and how to anticipate when she would need a nap. We tried the book’s methods, and within a few weeks my baby began napping regularly and sleeping through the night. Knowledge is more powerful — and cheaper to access — than a fancy bassinet. The best tech are those that help parents with broken brains. My wife and I found the most useful baby tech to be smartphone apps that helped us process information in our sleep-deprived state. The free app Huckleberry, a tool for parents to log bottle feedings, diaper changes and sleep durations for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the baby’s needs with each other when we took turns working shifts. It also provided useful data for our pediatrician. Also helpful was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s free Milestones app, which shows a checklist of a child’s expected developmental milestones at each age, such as learning to roll at 6 months. When she was about 7 months old, our daughter began to crawl. We could no longer take our eyes off her, so we shifted to consuming more parenting literature through a different medium: audiobooks. Single-task baby tech is unnecessary Lots of popular baby tech are gadgets that serve a single purpose. The $60 Hatch Rest, a night light that plays white noise, is a product on many parents’ lists of must-haves for helping babies sleep. The $250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that can alert you to a baby’s movements and cries, is another. So is the $50 Philips Avent electronic bottle warmer, which heats up a bottle of refrigerated milk with the press of a button in a few minutes. I received all of those products as gifts through our registry. Though I liked using them, I ultimately realized other products I already owned could accomplish the same tasks. Nanit Webcam Price: $250 It had an impressive set of features for monitoring our baby, including a tool that automatically detected what time I put her to bed and what time she woke up. But that feature required the camera to be mounted on a tall tripod against a wall to get a bird’s-eye view of the crib, which was unfeasible with the layout of our bedroom. We used the Nanit just like any webcam for periodically checking on the video feed of our child in her crib. That could also be done with any general-purpose security camera, like the $100 indoor Nest Cam. Hatch Rest’s Night Light Price: $60 Our baby slept better in pitch dark, so the Hatch Rest, the colors of which can be changed through a smartphone app, proved unhelpful. (Maybe when our daughter is older she will appreciate that the light can be set on a timer so it illuminates when it’s time for her to wake up.) We used only the feature for playing white noise. When we traveled, we used a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, making a dedicated sound machine superfluous. Philips Avent Bottle Warmer Price: $50 Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M Initially it seemed useful, but every caregiver for our daughter, including relatives, my wife, myself and now our nanny, stopped using it. We each independently realized that a metal coffee mug partly filled with hot water from the sink was faster. This is not to say that any of the aforementioned products won’t work well for another parent. But the problem with the premise of the best baby gear is that it requires any two infants to be alike, which is rarely the case. It’s best to get to know your baby before starting a list, rather than the other way around. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

By NAA ADORKOR CUDJOE, Associated Press KOFORIDUA, Ghana — Charles Owusu Aseku has traveled across Ghana and beyond in search of care for the large growth of tissue called a keloid on his neck since 2002. The 46-year-old was growing increasingly frustrated after two unsuccessful surgeries and a trip to South Africa that ended with just a consultation. Aseku was preparing for yet another medical trip until late February when he joined others in the first trial of 3D telemedicine technology in Ghana powered through computer screens in the back of a van. Those behind the initiative, developed by Microsoft’s research team in partnership with local doctors and researchers, say the remote assessment will help provide medical consultations for patients awaiting surgery or after an operation, in a region where the doctor-to-patient ratio is among the lowest in the world. The project builds on earlier trials in Scotland and now works as a portable system with enhanced lighting and camera upgrades. Once inside the van, cameras will capture a 3D model of each patient and the image is then projected onto a large computer screen. Multiple doctors can join the consultation session online and manipulate the 3D model to assess the patient. “The idea behind the van is to allow it to travel to those remote villages that don’t have specialized care … to perform a pre or post-surgical consult,” said Spencer Fowers, principal software developer and 3D-telemedicine project lead at Microsoft Research. The initiative also gives patients the opportunity to have multiple opinions. Aseku’s session had doctors from Rwanda, Scotland and Brazil, an experience that he said gave him hope. “I see a lot of doctors here and I am very happy because experience will come from each of them and maybe they will find a solution to my problem,” the 46-year-old said. Researchers hope the trial at the Koforidua Regional Hospital, in Ghana’s eastern region, is the start of a wider project that could expand the service and explore new use cases. Recent years have seen growing use of telemedicine, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say such digital tools can benefit patients in Africa the most because there are so few specialist doctors for the continent’s 1.4 billion people. George Opoku, 68, was referred to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in the capital Accra — nearly 100 kilometers away from the Koforidua hospital, which is much closer to his home — where he had first gone to seek care for sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that develops in the bones and soft tissues. Upon hearing about the 3D telemedicine trial, his doctor decided to register him for the process, saving him the extra expenses and stress of long-distance travel. “This time I had to sit in a van and to introduce myself and condition to not only one doctor but several of them. I was able to answer all their questions and I am hopeful that they will discuss and cure me of my condition,” Opku said. “I feel well already and I am hopeful.” A key challenge for the project is the lack of stable internet access, a common problem in remote parts of Africa. At the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, the technology is helping patients in need of plastic surgery. An inadequate number of plastic surgeons means that patients often have to consult with different doctors during each visit. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M Dr. Kwame Darko, consultant plastic surgeon at the hospital and one of the principal investigators on the project, said that 3D telemedicine could give patients the chance to be seen by multiple doctors during one session. The 3D technology could make a difference if replicated in Ghana and elsewhere, according to Dr. Ahensan Dasebre, chief resident doctor at the National Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Burns Centre at Korle-Bu, who was not part of the project. “We are already behind in terms of how many doctors are available to care for a certain number of the population,” he said. “If somebody is in a remote part of town where he doesn’t have access to these specialized services, but needs it, the referring doctor could actually use this telemedicine thing to get access to the best of care.” Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

A Manhattan judge rejected a majority of motions by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss parts of a lawsuit accusing the tech companies of swiping stories from The Denver Post, the New York Times and other newspapers to train their artificial intelligence products. The Post, its affiliated newspapers in MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, the Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of stealing millions of copyrighted news stories to benefit popular AI products like ChatGPT. Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein’s ruling Wednesday preserves the core elements of the lawsuit, which will now go forward to trial. While Stein rejected efforts to dismiss claims related to statute of limitations, trademark dilution and stripping content management information from the content in question, he dismissed CMI claims against Microsoft along with a secondary CMI claim against OpenAI, and one other unfair competition claim against both defendants. The judge dismissed additional claims for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times. “We get to go forward with virtually all of our claims intact, including all of the copyright filings,” Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for The Daily News and the Times, said. “It’s a significant victory, albeit a preliminary stage of the case.” A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said “hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on ChatGPT to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and to solve hard problems. We welcome the court’s dismissal of many of these claims and look forward to making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.” Microsoft and OpenAI don’t deny they depend on copyrighted material, instead arguing that it’s under their rights to do so under the fair use doctrine. Under that doctrine, the use of copyrighted materials are permitted under certain circumstances, including using the materials for educational purposes. The Post and affiliated newspapers filed the suit in 2024, challenging that notion, alleging the companies “simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely.” “This decision is a significant victory for us,” said Frank Pine, executive editor at MediaNews Group. “The court denied the majority of the dismissal motions filed by OpenAI and Microsoft. The claims the court has dismissed do not undermine the main thrust of our case, which is that these companies have stolen our work and violated our copyright in a way that fundamentally damages our business.” The Post brought its suit alongside its sister newspapers, MediaNews Group’s The Mercury News, The Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press; and Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Pine also addressed recent efforts by Big Tech to lobby the Trump administration to weaken copyright protections. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M “OpenAI lobbying the government to loosen copyright laws to make their thievery legal is shameful and un-American. They have a $150 billion valuation for a product they acknowledge could not have been built without the copyrighted content they stole from journalists, authors, poets, scholars and all manner of creatives and academics. Makers pay for their raw materials, and good businesses bolster their communities by creating economies and industries, not by destroying them.” Microsoft and OpenAI are accused in the litigation of harming the newspapers’ subscription-based business model by misappropriating journalists’ work and providing it for free. The cases allege that the AI models also risk tarnishing reporters’ reputations by sometimes misstating their reporting or attributing it to others. The papers are seeking unspecified damages, restitution of profits and a court order forcing the companies to stop using their materials to train chatbots. “We look forward to presenting a jury with all the facts regarding OpenAI and Microsoft copying and improper use of the content of newspapers across the country,” Lieberman said. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

JUBA, South Sudan — After being gang-raped by armed men while collecting firewood, the 28-year-old tried in vain to get help. Some clinics were closed, others told her to return later and she had no money to access a hospital. Five months after the assault, she lay on a mat in a displacement camp in South Sudan’s capital, rubbing her swollen belly. “I felt like I wasn’t heard … and now I’m pregnant,” she said. The Associated Press does not identify people who have been raped. Sexual assault is a constant risk for many women in South Sudan. Now one aid group is trying to bridge the gap with technology, to find and help survivors more quickly. But it’s not easy in a country with low connectivity, high illiteracy and wariness about how information is used. Five months ago, an Israel-based organization in South Sudan piloted a chatbot it created on WhatsApp. It prompts questions for its staff to ask survivors of sexual assault to anonymously share their experiences. The information is put into the phone while speaking to the person and the bot immediately notifies a social worker there’s a case, providing help to the person within hours. IsraAID said the technology improves communication. Papers can get misplaced and information can go missing, said Rodah Nyaduel, a psychologist with the group. When colleagues document an incident, she’s notified by phone and told what type of case it is. Tech experts said technology can reduce human error and manual file keeping, but organizations need to ensure data privacy. “How do they intend to utilize that information, does it get circulated to law enforcement, does that information cross borders. Groups need to do certain things to guarantee how to safeguard that information and demonstrate that,” said Gerardo Rodriguez Phillip, an AI and technology innovation consultant in Britain. IsraAID said its data is encrypted and anonymized. It automatically deletes from staffers’ phones. In the chatbot’s first three months in late 2024, it was used to report 135 cases. When the 28-year-old was raped, she knew she had just a few days to take medicine to help prevent disease and pregnancy, she said. One aid group she approached scribbled her information on a piece of paper and told her to return later to speak with a social worker. When she did, they said they were busy. After 72 hours, she assumed it was pointless. Weeks later, she found she was pregnant. IsraAID found her while doing door-to-door visits in her area. At first, she was afraid to let them put her information into their phone, worried it would be broadcast on social media. But she felt more comfortable knowing the phones were not personal devices, thinking she could hold the organization accountable if there were problems. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M She’s one of tens of thousands of people still living in displacement sites in the capital, Juba, despite a peace deal ending civil war in 2018. Some are afraid to leave or have no homes to return to. The fear of rape remains for women who leave the camps for firewood or other needs. Some told the AP about being sexually assaulted. They said there are few services in the camp because of reduced assistance by international aid groups and scant government investment in health. Many can’t afford taxis to a hospital in town. U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to freeze USAID funding during a 90-day review period is exacerbating the challenges. Aid groups have closed some services including psychological support for women, affecting tens of thousands of people. Technology isn’t widely used by aid groups focused on gender-based violence in South Sudan. Some organizations say that, based on survivors’ feedback, the ideal app would allow people to get help remotely. Stigma surrounding sexual assault further complicates efforts to get help in South Sudan. It’s especially hard for young girls who need to get permission to leave their homes, said Mercy Lwambi, gender-based violence lead at the International Rescue Committee. “They want to talk to someone faster than a physical meeting,” she said. But South Sudan has one of the lowest rates of mobile access and connectivity in the world, with less than 25% of market penetration, according to a report by GSMA, a global network of mobile operators. People with phones don’t always have internet access, and many are illiterate. “You have to be thinking, will this work in a low-tech environment? What are the literacy rates? Do they have access to devices? If so, what kind? Will they find it engaging, will they trust it, is it safe?” said Kirsten Pontalti, a senior associate at Proteknon Foundation for Innovation and Learning, an international organization focused on advancing child protection. Pontalti has piloted two chatbots, one to help youth and parents better access information about sexual reproductive health and the other for frontline workers focused on child protection during COVID. She said technology focused on reporting abuse should include an audio component for people with low literacy and be as low-tech as possible. Some survivors of sexual assault say they just want to be heard, whether by phone or in person. One 45-year-old man, a father of 11, said it took years to seek help after being raped by his wife after he refused to have sex and said he didn’t want more children they couldn’t afford to support. It took multiple visits by aid workers to his displacement site in Juba before he felt comfortable speaking out. “Organizations need to engage more with the community,” he said. “If they hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have come in.” ___ For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse ___ The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

According to Margo Harrison, the 1911 invention of Midol was the last time a new period pain product hit the market. That was until last week, when her company, Wave Bye, launched its line of supplements to promote cycle regularity and help curb bleeding and cramps. “(Women) are not trying to be superhuman,” the OB-GYN said. “They just want to feel normal.” Wave Bye, which Harrison founded in 2023, sells a “backbone” daily supplement called Bye Irregularity to make periods more predictable. Those are intended to treat several symptoms, including potential migraines, fatigue and irritability that come from premenstrual syndrome. Once you know your schedule, the company’s period-specific products, called Bye Cramps and Bye Bad Cramps, are more effective, she said.  They prevent messengers from telling the uterus to contract and bleed, she added. “You need to take the supplement every day to regulate your cycle, and then what differentiates our (other) products is they need to be taken two days before bleeding,” Harrison explained. “If you block symptoms two days before, you totally change the period experience.” Other medications and remedies are sparse, Harrison said. Though women will use Midol and Tylenol for relief, those pills target the brain rather than the uterus directly, she said. There are also gummies on the market for PMS, but she added that there’s nothing like Wave Bye’s two-pronged, premenstrual attack on irregularity and period pain using its Vitamin E-based product. Heating pads and relief patches only do so much, too, Harrison added. She hopes that Wave Bye can be a more encompassing approach to the menstruation problem about half the population manages for decades of their lives. The company sells the products in four bundles — each for different severities of symptoms – on its website. They cost between $70 and $80 on a monthly subscription, with one-time purchases and three-month and 12-month packs also available. Harrison is also in negotiations to sell Wave Bye at yoga studios and health shops including Bridget’s Botanicals in Littleton. The company also offers revenue sharing or discount opportunities for health care professionals such as OB-GYNs and nurses. “There’s no benefit from bleeding just to bleed. If you cut your hand, are you supposed to just let it keep bleeding? You’re not getting any benefit from not turning off the faucet,” Harrison said. “It’s not necessarily bad – it’s meant to support a pregnancy. But we want to reduce period pain and bleeding and make that period experience better in order to give people their time back.” Harrison was a clinical researcher at Columbia University and the University of Colorado Anschutz, focusing on pregnancy in poor countries. She then went to consult VC-backed women’s health firms three years ago. Through that and her work as an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains over the last two-and-a-half years, she saw the need for Wave Bye. “I’d have patients sit up from an abortion and hear them say, ‘Well, at least that was less painful than my period,’” she said. “People get gaslit, and the OB-GYNs don’t deal with period pain until it’s really profound. It feels like there’s this gap. They just do what their moms or friends or community are doing.” Wave Bye has so far raised $300,000 out of what Harrison hopes is an $875,000 round. Most of that is angel funding, she said, along with one Denver-area institutional investor. She hopes to close the round in the next couple of months. The money will mostly be used to develop another product, which Harrison said will likely take at least two years, and continue work on a yet-to-be-released app to help users schedule their doses. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M Wave Bye already saw some traction from a small batch of users late last year, so Harrison is confident sales will take off now that her business is officially off the ground. Of the 25 units Wave Bye has sold, she said about half came from three- and 12-month purchases. “If people trust the product,” she said, “they’re gonna get more.” Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

After a few years of writing what she called a “niche newsletter for Washington insiders,” political journalist Tara Palmeri decided she wanted to reach a wider audience. A much wider audience. She’s taking her reporting to YouTube. Palmeri said she is leaving the startup Puck to strike out on her own, focusing much of her effort on the streaming giant. She joins a slew of other journalists who have left news organizations to build their own businesses around podcasts and newsletters. But in politics, the most successful of these independent media stars have strong views and clear allegiances. Conservative hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly remain atop the podcasting charts, and anti-Trump media collectives are rapidly growing; two of them, The Contrarian and MeidasTouch, each have more than 500,000 newsletter subscribers, many of them paid. That is not Palmeri. “I’m not on a crusade,” said Palmeri, 37, the type of political journalist who proudly abstains from voting in elections while she’s covering them in order to maintain objectivity with her audience. “I’m not sold on either party, and that’s why I don’t really have a lot of friends.” In her new venture, Palmeri wants to speak to audiences from the underdeveloped territory of “the middle,” she said, without a political agenda. “There isn’t really anyone there yet, and I want to try.” In focusing on YouTube, Palmeri is also taking a slightly a different tack from many of the journalists who have recently left media companies — whether voluntarily or through layoffs or firings — to release their own content, typically on Substack. (Although she will have a Substack newsletter, too.) YouTube says its viewers want more long-form news analysis, especially via podcasts. It recently announced having more than 1 billion monthly podcast listeners, outpacing any other media platform. (Watching and listening to podcasts is an increasingly fuzzy distinction.) Palmeri is part of a program meant to support “next generation” independent journalists on the platform with training and funding. But whether “news influencers” like Palmeri can succeed at the same scale of popular partisan commentators is still untested. Many people say they want more unbiased news. Do they really? Adam Faze, an emerging-media guru known for producing TikTok shows who is informally advising Palmeri, said he wasn’t aware of other political journalists approaching YouTube quite like her. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M “Not with her access,” he said. Piers Morgan has been successful, Faze pointed out, but his YouTube channel is largely reminiscent of his cable news days, with cacophonous cross-talking panels and a green-screen cityscape backdrop. “I don’t want you to go to this YouTube page and think, ‘I could have watched that on a cable channel,’” Palmeri said. She aspires to “speak like a normal person,” rather than a news anchor, and also “be more gritty.” Palmeri takes pride in her grit. She often describes herself as “feared and fearless” — a daughter of New Jersey whose parents did not go to universities. Her zeal for scoops has made her variously unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans and occasionally other journalists. Before Puck, while working for Politico, Palmeri reported on an investigation into a gun owned by Hunter Biden, a story that she said had “ostracized” her from her newsroom. In 2021, a deputy White House press secretary resigned after telling Palmeri that he would “destroy” her for reporting on his relationship with an Axios journalist who had covered the president. An old-school tabloid sensibility drives Palmeri, who in her 20s door-knocked a couple of White House gate-crashers for The Washington Examiner and chased a “cop-killer” in Cuba for The New York Post. On her new Substack, The Red Letter, she plans to include blind gossip items, Palmeri said. “She has a cadence that makes you feel like you’re just talking to a girlfriend” rather than a journalist, said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who encouraged Palmeri to go independent. This disposition can prove “a little dangerous,” Harris added: “All of a sudden you realize you’ve given up the state secrets.” In November, at a cocktail party in Washington, a former congressional staff member approached this reporter with the warning not to trust Palmeri, who was also at the party. (“I love that,” Palmeri later said.) Palmeri has at times struggled to fit in while working at more traditional newsrooms, such as ABC News, where she spent about two years as a White House correspondent — the first of which she appeared infrequently on the air. “I’ve always felt like there’s never really been a place that I’ve been at home,” she said. After ABC, she hosted investigative podcasts for Sony about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and the wealthy family of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. She intends to continue making podcasts; her current show, “Somebody’s Gotta Win,” an election collaboration between Puck and Spotify’s The Ringer, is set to end in April, she said. Puck, which she joined in 2022, was more suited to her self-driven (and self-promotional) streak than any other employer. “We’re kind of renegades,” Palmeri said, crediting Puck with helping find her voice. “It was the closest place I had gotten to me writing directly to an audience, but it was still edited in a style that was not me,” she said. The tone was more “elite and impressive” than her natural voice; one example she offered was the frequent use of the word “indeed.” To go independent, she is giving up her $260,000 base salary at Puck and funding her new venture with her savings. The dining table of her one-bedroom New York City apartment in brownstone Brooklyn has become her recording studio. With an initial grant from YouTube, Palmeri bought about $10,000 worth of equipment, and tested and hired editors. (She and YouTube both declined to disclose the size of the grant.) In return, she has committed to publishing about four videos per week. Investors are also interested in Palmeri, she said, though she has not decided whether or when to take their money. She would prefer to accept “squeaky clean” funding from both ends of the political spectrum, she said: “This is a trust business.” She has also considered a new line of credit or a small-business loan. “I’m willing to bet on myself,” Palmeri said. “There’s no one over me telling me, ‘This is the headline, this is the angle.’ You don’t like it? It’s me. There’s no one else to blame.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LONDON — If you’ve got a smartphone, you probably spend too much time on it — checking Instagram, watching silly TikTok videos, messaging on WhatsApp or doomscrolling on X. It can be hard to curb excessive use of smartphones and social media, which are addictive by design. Reducing your screen time is often more than just a matter of willpower, especially for younger people whose brains and impulse control are still developing. If you’re a phone addict who wants to cut down on the hours a day spent looking at your device, here are some techniques you can try to free up more IRL time: Delete apps An easy first step is getting rid of any apps you’ve been wasting time on. Over the past year, I’ve deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from my phone because I wanted to use them less. Now and then I’ll have to go the app store and reinstall one because I need to do something like post a photo I took on my phone. (Sometimes I’ll transfer the photo to my laptop and then post it to the web from there, but usually, it’s too much hassle.) The danger with this approach is that if you do reinstall the app, you won’t bother deleting it again. Use built-in controls Both iPhones and Android devices have onboard controls to help regulate screen time. They can also be used by parents to regulate children’s phone usage. Apple’s Screen Time controls are found in the iPhone’s settings menu. Users can set overall Downtime, which shuts off all phone activity during a set period. If you want a phone-free evening, then you could set it to kick in from, say, 7 p.m. until 7 a.m. The controls also let users put a blanket restriction on certain categories of apps, such as social, games or entertainment or zero in on a specific app, by limiting the time that can be spent on it. Too distracted by Instagram? Then set it so that you can only use it for a daily total of 20 minutes. The downside is that the limits aren’t hard to get around. It’s more of a nudge than a red line that you can’t cross. If you try to open an app with a limit, you’ll get a screen menu offering one more minute, a reminder after 15 minutes, or to completely ignore it. Android users can use turn to their Digital Wellbeing settings, which include widgets to remind users how much screen time they’ve had. There’s also the option to create separate work and personal profiles, so you can hide your social media apps and their notifications when you’re at the office. Don’t be distracted There are other little tricks to make your phone less distracting. I use the Focus mode on my iPhone to silence notifications. For example, If I’m in a meeting somewhere, I mute it until I leave that location. Android also has a Focus mode to pause distracting apps. Change your phone display to grayscale from color so that it doesn’t look so exciting. On iPhones, adjust the color filter in your settings. For Android, turn on Bedtime Mode, or tweak the color correction setting. Android phones can also nag users not to look at their phones while walking, by activating the Heads Up feature in Digital Wellbeing. Block those apps If the built-in controls aren’t enough, there are many third-party apps, like Jomo, Opal, Forest, Roots and LockMeOut that are designed to cut down screen time. Related Articles Globeville office owners say lender was ‘hyperaggressive, if not hostile’ State rep’s solar firm is bankrupt, will liquidate the last of its assets Denver permitting is ‘worst in the western U.S.,’ caused foreclosure, exec says Worried about recent Wall Street turmoil and its effects on your retirement or investments? The Denver Post wants to hear from you. Renovated Mediterranean-style Cherry Hills mansion lists at $6M Many of these apps have both free and premium versions with more features, and strongly push you toward signing up for a subscription by minimizing the option to “skip for now” on the payment screen. I tested out a few on my iPhone for this story. To try out Opal, I reinstalled Facebook so I could block it. Whenever I tapped the Facebook icon, Opal intervened to give me various inspirational messages, like “Gain Wisdom, Lose Facebook,” and tallied how many times I tried to open it. To get around the block, I had to open Opal and wait through a six-second timeout before requesting up to 15 minutes to look at Facebook. There’s an option to up the difficulty by increasing the delay before you can look again. Jomo, which I used to restrict my phone’s Reddit app, worked in a similar way: tap the Unlock button, which took me to the Jomo app, where I had to wait 20 seconds before I could tap the button to unlock Reddit for up to 10 minutes. The OneSec app takes a different approach by reminding users to first take a pause. The installation, which involves setting up an automation on the iPhone’s Shortcuts, can be confusing. When I eventually installed it for my Bluesky app, it gave me a prompt to run a shortcut that wiped my screen with a soothing purple-blue and reminded me to take a deep breath before letting me choose to open the app — but in practice it was too easy to just skip the prompt. The Android-only LockMeOut can freeze you out of designated apps based on criteria like your location, how many times you’ve opened an app, or how long you’ve used it. The obvious way to defeat these apps is simply to delete them, although some advise users to follow the proper uninstall procedure or else apps could remain blocked. Use external hardware Digital blockers might not be for everyone. Some startups, figuring that people might prefer a tangible barrier, offer hardware solutions that introduce physical friction between you and an app. Unpluq is a yellow tag that you have to hold up to your phone in order to access blocked apps. Brick and Blok are two different products that work along the same lines — they’re squarish pieces of plastic that you have to tap or scan with your phone to unlock an app. The makers of these devices say that software solutions are too easy to bypass, but a physical object that you can put somewhere out of reach or leave behind if you’re going somewhere is a more effective way to get rid of distractions. What about stashing the phone away entirely? There are various phone lockboxes and cases available, some of them designed so parents can lock up their teenagers’ phones when they’re supposed to be sleeping. Yondr, which makes portable phone locking pouches used at concerts or in schools, also sells a home phone box. See a therapist Perhaps there are deeper reasons for your smartphone compulsion. Maybe it’s a symptom of underlying problems like anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression or low self-esteem. If you think that’s the case, it could be worth exploring therapy that is becoming more widely available. One London hospital treats “technology addiction” with a plan that includes dealing with “discomfort in face-to-face time” with other people, and exploring your relationship with technology. Another clinic boasts that its social media addiction treatment also includes working on a patient’s technology management skills, such as “setting boundaries for device usage, finding alternative activities to fill the void of reduced online interaction, and learning how to engage more with the physical world.” Downgrade your phone Why not trade your smartphone for a more basic one? It’s an extreme option but there’s a thriving subculture of cellphones with only basic features, catering to both retro enthusiasts and people, including parents, worried about screen time. They range from cheap old-school brick-and-flip phones by faded brands like Nokia to stylish but pricier devices from boutique manufacturers like Punkt. The tradeoff, of course, is that you’ll also have to do without essential apps like Google Maps or your bank. ___ Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip. 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LAMAR — The land runs deep in southeastern Colorado. For Bob Bamber, the connection goes back to his great-great-grandfather, who homesteaded north of Pritchett, a tiny Baca County town of barely 100 people not far from the Oklahoma state line. So the 44-year-old rancher took notice when he found out that a portion of the 10,000 acres of ranchland he and his father own and lease in neighboring Prowers County had been placed in a zone designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a potential high-voltage electric transmission corridor. And he got agitated. “It’s an emotional reaction because of that family connection,” said Bamber, bouncing in his truck along dirt roads that slice through prairie dotted with cedar trees, yucca and prickly pear cactus. “It sounds cliche, but you are part of the land out here.” His worry echoes that of his over-the-fence neighbor. Val Emick fears that a transmission corridor, with towering pylons marching from New Mexico into three rural Colorado counties — Baca, Prowers and Kiowa — could disturb a fragile short-grass prairie landscape in the state’s far-southeast corner, lowering land values and disrupting ranching and farming operations that span generations. “You go out seven days a week, and you build it and want to pass it down to your kids and your grandkids — it seems unfair,” said Emick, who has lived in the same house south of Lamar for 35 years and runs a cow-calf operation on some 5,000 acres. “And they come in with that threat.” That threat is eminent domain — the power the government has to condemn and take land for public uses, like the construction of highways and other infrastructure. It must pay fair market value to the property owner for the land. No determination has been made about the use of eminent domain to accommodate electric transmission lines as part of the Energy Department’s National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors initiative, or NIETC. But people in this part of the state have fresh and raw memories of the specter of condemnation that hung over the U.S. Army’s plan to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, northeast of Trinidad, nearly 20 years ago. After both of Colorado’s U.S. senators expressed opposition to involuntary land sales for the expansion, the idea was scuttled in 2013. “The biggest concern we have is eminent domain,” Prowers County Commissioner Ron Cook recently told The Denver Post inside the county courthouse in Lamar. “We’ve got third- and fourth-generation farmers and ranchers running these properties, and we sure don’t want them run off their land.” The concern over the NIETC proposal brought a crowd out to the same courthouse last month. Some in the room, including Cook, said they had only recently learned of the project. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from the federal government. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert joined the meeting via video link and told the attendees she would push back hard on the corridor designation. In an email to the Post this month, the Republican congresswoman said she reached out to newly confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fellow Coloradan, and got the public input period for the project extended from mid-February to April 15. In a Feb. 10 letter to Wright, Boebert said what was started under the Biden administration should be looked at again, with an option for the agency under President Donald Trump’s new administration to “shut this project down.” “We can all agree that access to reliable energy is important for the health and prosperity of rural Coloradans, but that doesn’t mean we need to be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach dictated by D.C. bureaucrats who have failed to include community leaders in this process,” she said. Rancher Bob Bamber drives out to check on a few of his cattle at his family’s ranch outside Lamar on March 10, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) “Very important corridor” for grid The NIETC program, which Congress authorized in 2005, tasks the Department of Energy with identifying areas of the country where transmission is lacking. It’s charged with determining where infrastructure is “urgently needed to advance important national interests, such as increased electric reliability and reduced consumer costs,” according to the program’s website. Impacts from a compromised electric grid include more frequent and longer power outages and higher prices for energy due to a lack of capacity to move lower-cost electricity from where it is produced to where it is needed, the website says. So far, no NIETC corridors have been established in the United States. Click to enlarge The Post asked the Department of Energy for comment via multiple phone and email requests but received no response. The department’s latest designation effort began last May with the release of a list of 10 possible transmission corridors, based on a National Transmission Needs Study that was completed in 2023. That list was winnowed in December to three corridors, including what is known as the Southwestern Grid Connector — which would run up the eastern edge of New Mexico, scrape the western edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and pierce the southeast corner of Colorado. The other two NIETC corridors being considered are in the Lake Erie portion of Pennsylvania and across parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska. The Department of Energy says the Southwest Grid Connector could be anywhere from three miles to 15 miles wide, though the ultimate transmission line built would cover far less land. The corridor, the government says, is designed to follow existing transmission line rights-of-way for parts of its path. “It’s a very important corridor,” said Adam Kurland, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in federal energy policy. “It’s probably the one that adds the most value to the grid.” The Southwestern Grid Connector would help link the nation’s eastern and western interconnections, Kurland said, and would provide the ability “to exchange more power and serve a national grid.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the eastern interconnection operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains while the western interconnection covers states west of the Rockies. “There’s very limited transfer between these two interconnects,” Kurland said. “There’s a lot of value for doing that, for reliability of the grid and for resilience against weather systems. You could more easily move power and supply power where it’s needed.” An abandoned car rusts in a field near the area where the federal Department of Energy is proposing to expand the electric grid, stretching from southern New Mexico into southeastern Colorado, south of Lamar, on March 10, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) More data centers, fewer coal plants Grid Strategies, a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the company, are power-hungry data centers and manufacturing facilities. A study that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden participated in last fall concluded that the U.S. transmission system — consisting of a half-million miles of power lines — will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers. And a 2024 report by the nonprofit North American Electric Corp. determined that about half the continent was at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years. That risk comes as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity increases. In Colorado, coal plants across the state have been shut down in recent years as worries about their climate-warming emissions escalate. All are expected to close by the end of 2030. “The more transmission we build, the more flexibility and resilience we create,” said Mark Gabriel, the president and CEO of the Brighton-based electric cooperative United Power. For eight years, Gabriel headed the Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells and conveys electricity across 17,000 miles of transmission lines to 15 western and central states. “As coal goes away, we still need to move electrons,” he said. “How do we meet a growing demand at the same time we’re closing down generator resources?” The state’s future demands on electric power are ambitious. While campaigning for his first term in office, Gov. Jared Polis said he wanted all of the power on Colorado’s electric grid to come from renewable energy sources by 2040. Rules adopted by Denver and the state aim to eventually make buildings all-electric. And Colorado, with its goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030, recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold. “You want to have a diverse portfolio of generation resources, and that portfolio is helped by more transmission,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t (achieve that) unless we have projects like this, and others, constructed.” Rancher Val Emick works on her family’s ranch outside Lamar on March 10, 2025. Emick repurposes old wind turbine blades, seen in the background, to help shield her animals from the wind. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) Farmers lament lack of “bargaining power” But it’s how projects are constructed that matters to Steve Shelton, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher who lives about 10 miles south of Lamar. He grows wheat, corn and sorghum on 20,000 acres. Shelton, 69, was on the other side of the transmission debate about 15 years ago, when he joined neighboring ranchers in exploring deals with a wind farm near Kit Carson to string electric wires across land in the state’s southeast corner. “We had some farmers who said ‘No,’ and we’d have to find another path or sweeten the pot,” he said of the effort, which eventually fizzled out. With the shadow of eminent domain in the mix this time, Shelton said, “you have no bargaining power.” “They would get the development rights or the easement, and the farmer and rancher would have no income off of that,” he said. The county’s fiscal health would also be impacted by a condemnation action by the government, said Prowers County Commissioner Roger Stagner, who served as mayor of Lamar for a decade. Taking land off the tax rolls would not only hit the county’s $41 million annual budget but would also have a ripple effect on the local economy, he said. Boebert, in her Feb. 10 letter to the energy secretary, said the contemplated Southwestern Grid Connector would “affect approximately 325,000 acres of private land in Baca, Prowers and Kiowa counties in Colorado.” There are fewer than 20,000 residents combined in the three counties. “Everything revolves around agriculture. If you’re going to take out that much land, it can affect the entire county,” Stagner said. “If there’s no alfalfa grown on that ground, that farmer doesn’t spend as much in town. That’s a big concern for us.” Bamber, the Prowers County rancher, says he has no issue with the deployment of energy infrastructure across his property, so long as it’s done with full disclosure and landowner input. In fact, he and Emick, his neighbor, host dozens of wind turbines on their acreage that power the Twin Buttes wind farm. “We’ve been able to live with the wind farm because they’ve compensated us,” Bamber said. “We’ve made the tradeoff for the money.” Lease agreements they hammered out with the wind energy company to use their land made the deal palatable, Emick said. “There was no hiding anything,” she said. A small windmill pumps water into a stock tank for Val Emick’s cattle at her family’s ranch outside Lamar, Colorado, on March 10, 2025. Large wind turbines in the background generate electricity. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) Broken trust, uncertain future With the NIETC process already in the third of four phases, Cook is frustrated and befuddled that he and his fellow commissioners didn’t catch wind of the project before late January. That uncertainty has been a driving force behind much of the resistance to it among his constituents. “That is what we’re struggling with — we have no idea how this is going to end up and what they’re going to do with it,” he said. The Department of Energy describes the third phase of the designation process as the “public and governmental engagement phase.” During this period, the agency will decide the level of environmental review that applies to each NIETC project. It will conduct any required reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The agency conducted a webinar on the latest developments with the Southwestern Grid Connector in mid-January. And it issued a news release about the latest phase in December. But many in southeast Colorado think the federal government could have done a better job of outreach to local officials and property owners. Related Articles Can Colorado’s electric grid keep up as coal plants close and data centers open? Demand fueled by electric vehicles, rooftop solar drives Xcel Energy’s $5B plan for system upgrades 80% of new cars and trucks for sale in Colorado would need to be electric by 2032 under new rule Some take hope in the success of opponents in Kansas last year who eliminated the Midwest-Plains and Plains-Southwest NIETC corridors that were part of the original 10 first proposed in the spring. U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, who represents that state’s 1st Congressional District, issued a statement in December after the Kansas transmission corridors were dropped. “Kansans made it clear from the very beginning that we were not interested in the federal government seizing our private land,” Mann said, adding: “I’m glad our voices were heard in stopping this federal overreach.” Boebert, in her letter to the energy secretary last month, cited Kansas’ resistance and urged the agency to “reconsider and halt further actions on current NIETC designations in Colorado initiated by the previous administration.” That’s the right call, Bamber said. “I’d like to see it just stopped — the trust is broken,” he said. “We’re an afterthought and we should have been partners in this.” Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.