Americans have plenty to worry about these days when it comes to infectious-disease outbreaks. This is the worst flu season in 15 years, there’s a serious measles outbreak roiling Texas, and the threat of bird flu isn’t going away. “The house is on fire,” Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at CUNY School of Public Health, told me. The more America is pummeled by disease, the greater the chance of widespread outbreaks and even another pandemic.As of this week, the federal government may be less equipped to deal with these threats. Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have hit public-health agencies, including the CDC, NIH, and FDA. The Trump administration has not released details on the layoffs, but the cuts appear to be more than trivial. The CDC lost an estimated 700 people, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 NIH staffers reportedly lost their jobs.Perhaps as notable as who was laid off is who wasn’t. The Trump administration initially seemed likely to target the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a cohort of doctors, scientists, nurses, and even veterinarians who investigate and respond to disease outbreaks around the world. Throughout the program’s history, EIS officers have been the first line of defense against anthrax, Ebola, smallpox, polio, E. coli, and, yes, bird flu. Four recent CDC directors have been part of the program.The layoffs were mostly based on workers’ probationary status. (Most federal employees are considered probationary in their first year or two on the job, and recently promoted staffers can also count as probationary.) EIS fellows typically serve two-year stints, which makes them probationary and thus natural targets for the most recent purge. EIS fellows told me they were bracing to be let go on Friday afternoon, but the pink slips never came. Exactly why remains unclear. In response to backlash about the planned firings, Musk posted on X on Monday that EIS is “not canceled” and that those suggesting otherwise should “stop saying bullshit.” A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.This doesn’t mean EIS is safe. Both DOGE and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s newly confirmed health secretary, are just getting started. More layoffs could still be coming, and significant cuts to EIS would send a clear message that the administration does not believe investigating infectious-disease outbreaks is a good use of tax dollars. In that way, the future of EIS is a barometer of how seriously the Trump administration takes the task of protecting public health.Trump and his advisers have made it abundantly clear that, after the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, they want a more hands-off approach to dealing with outbreaks. Both Trump and Kennedy have repeatedly downplayed the destruction caused by COVID. But so far, the second Trump administration’s approach to public health has been confusing. Last year, Trump said he would close the White House’s pandemic office; now he is reportedly picking a highly qualified expert to lead it. The president hasn’t laid out a bird-flu plan, but amid soaring egg prices, the head of his National Economic Council recently said the plan was coming. Kennedy has also previously said he wants to give infectious-disease research a “break” and focus on chronic illness; in a written testimony during his confirmation hearings, he claimed that he wouldn’t actually do anything to reduce America’s capacity to respond to outbreaks.The decision to spare EIS, at least for now, only adds to the confusion. (Nor is it the sole murky aspect of the layoffs: Several USDA workers responding to bird flu were also targeted, although the USDA told me those cuts were made in error and it is working to “rectify the situation.”) On paper, EIS might look like a relatively inconsequential training program that would be apt for DOGEing. In reality, the program is less like a cushy internship and more akin to public health’s version of the CIA.Fellows are deployed around the world to investigate, and hopefully stop, some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The actual work of an EIS officer varies depending on where they’re deployed, though the program’s approach is often described as “shoe-leather epidemiology”—going door to door or village to village probing the cause of an illness in the way a New York City detective might investigate a stabbing on the subway. Fellows are highly credentialed experts, but the process provides hands-on training in how to conduct an outbreak investigation, according to Nash, the CUNY professor, who took part in the program. Nash entered EIS with a Ph.D. in epidemiology, but “none of our training could prepare us for the kinds of things we would learn through EIS,” he said.In many cases, EIS officials are on the ground investigating before most people even know there’s a potential problem. An EIS officer investigated and recorded the United States’ first COVID case back in January 2020, when the virus was still known as 2019-nCoV. It would be another month before the CDC warned that the virus would cause widespread disruption to American life.More recently, in October, EIS officers were on the ground in Washington when the state was hit with its first human cases of bird flu, Roberto Bonaccorso, a spokesperson with the Washington State Department of Health, wrote to me. “Every single outbreak in the United States and Washington State requires deployment of our current EIS officers,” Bonaccorso said.EIS is hardly the only tool the federal government uses to protect the country against public-health threats. Managing an outbreak requires coordination across an alphabet soup of agencies and programs; an EIS fellow may have investigated the first COVID case, but of course that did not stop the pandemic from happening. Other vital parts of how America responds to infectious diseases were not spared by the DOGE layoffs. Two training programs with missions similar to that of EIS were affected by the cuts, according to a CDC employee whom I agreed not to identify by name because the staffer is not authorized to talk to the press.The DOGE website boasts of saving nearly $4 million on the National Immunization Surveys, collectively one of the nation’s key tools for tracking how many Americans, particularly children, are fully vaccinated. What those cuts ultimately will mean for the future of the surveys is unknown. A spokesperson for the research group that runs the surveys, the National Opinion Research Center, declined to comment and directed all questions to CDC.And more cuts to the nation’s public-health infrastructure, including EIS, could be around the corner. RFK Jr. has already warned that certain FDA workers should pack their bags. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that public-health officials inflate the risks of infectious disease threats to bolster their importance with the public; EIS fellows are the first responders that hit the ground often before public officials are even sounding the alarm bells.Ironically, the work of the EIS is poised to become especially pressing during Trump’s second term. If measles, bird flu, or any other infectious disease begins spreading through America unabated after we have fired the public-health workforce, undermined vaccines, or halted key research, it will be the job of EIS fellows to figure out what went wrong.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Some years ago, I had a friend who got into trouble on the internet. He was writing a book that took a strong stance on a controversial topic and had been talking about it on social media. He didn’t have a large following, but activists who opposed his view of the issue began to notice and decided that he needed punishing for wrongthink.Their angry invective about his work spread the conversation to people who anonymously and deliberately seek to offend and provoke others online—and these trolls began to abuse my friend relentlessly. “People are telling me to kill myself!” he told me, with desperation in his voice. He started worrying about being doxxed, or worse. “Do I need private security? Maybe I should move.”Out of curiosity, I asked my friend how much time he was then spending on social media, monitoring all the abuse. “Pretty much all day,” he said. This made sense to him because he felt the gravity of the situation demanded his full attention: A threat’s a threat, right? I made one simple suggestion: Delete the apps and stop interacting with social media for a week. He took my advice reluctantly, but over the next few days, he stopped thinking about the predicament so much. By the time he reopened the apps, he found that the trolls had largely moved on to new victims and targets.What my friend learned was that this harassment, which had seemed very real to him, could be erased almost completely by using two powerful weapons: perception and attention. What works in our internet-based culture can apply equally well to other areas of modern life. These two tools can help you eradicate problems that once seemed insoluble.[Read: The rise of the troll]What is, for you, the reality behind these lines you’re reading? Is it the ones and zeros that compose the computer code that makes these words visible on a screen? Or is what’s real the words themselves as linguistic signs with meaning? Or does the underlying reality reside in the concepts and ideas that the words evoke in your brain? For the philosopher Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology, the latter is the truth. What you experience may differ from some objective reality, but this is not relevant. The reality that matters, Husserl argued, is what you perceive.The next question, then, is where does that perception come from? According to the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman and his colleagues, “Our perceptual systems, like our limbs and livers, have been shaped by natural selection.” That is, you perceive what evolution has determined best aids your safety, survival, and gene propagation.For example, you might find a mushroom in the forest that is, objectively speaking, a fungus named Amanita phalloides. But to you—if you perceive it appropriately—the death cap is a source of deadly poison to be avoided at all costs. In this, and many things, relying on your perception as your reality is a very good thing.And yet, perception can also lead you astray. What you perceive might be based in error—a historical case in point being the belief common until the 19th century that tomatoes were poisonous. So you would have been perceiving them as dangerous, whereas they are, in fact, nutritious and delicious. Alternatively, you can be deceived or manipulated by malefactors—people who want you to fear something or someone to control your behavior, such as voting a particular way or following certain media. The trolling that messed with my friend’s head was akin to this.Finally, perception can be distorted by glitches in your brain. A case of this is the “rubber-hand illusion.” In a famous 1998 experiment, subjects watched a rubber hand being stroked by a paintbrush, while their own hand—which was behind a screen—was simultaneously stroked. They knew this was the case, but after 10 minutes, more than half of the subjects could not help perceiving the rubber hand as authentically part of their own body. As one participant put it, “I found myself looking at the dummy hand thinking it was actually my own.” Recent research by neuroscientists shows that this effect occurs because, in response to these contradictory stimuli, the brain regulates the primary motor cortex in a way that lowers the sense of connection with the actual body part and incorporates the alien body part.This brings us back to the perception created by social media, which is prone to all the distortions of objective reality listed above: They lead you to misperceive phantom threats as real ones, because even a single, remote person acting sociopathically can create the illusion of a troll army. Your brain naturally treats a threatening or abusive person on X the way it would treat the presence of a hostile intruder in your house. I don’t discount the chance in extreme cases that a cyber threat can turn into a real one, but the research about cyberbullying describes the harms as much more commonly psychological, not physical, in nature.[Read: The false equation of atheism and intellectual sophistication]The main weapon that online bullies and trolls possess is your brain—specifically, your brain’s tendency to create reality around the perception of a threat, because cyberabuse is the kind of menace that the limbic system was evolved to perceive: When that system is triggered by hostile action from a stranger, your brain instinctively thinks that your physical safety is at risk.Your first line of defense, then, is perception itself. Imagine I told you that you had the power to turn a scary, violent attacker on the street into a pathetic, broken little person staring all day long at his computer screen. That’s basically what you can do with a better grasp of how trolling works. Studies published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2014 found that bullies on the internet tend to possess psychopathic traits such as sadism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—the “Dark Triad” (or “Tetrad”) I’ve written about previously. Additional research has shown that they themselves are disproportionately cyberbullied; moreover, young-adult Dark Triads are also far more likely to be anxious, depressed, and suicidal than their population average. In real life, these bullying trolls are people you might pity more than fear.Just as you have some control over your perception, you also have control over your attention. If your perception of a social-media troll matched their actual psychological profile, your natural response to being trolled might change from engagement to avoidance tinged with compassion. If an obnoxious Dark Triad type tried to confront you in public—unlikely though that is, given their typical preference for hiding behind internet anonymity—you would almost certainly just cross the street to avoid any interaction. You can apply the same logic in the virtual world by recalling the internet adage “Don’t feed the trolls.” The point of trolling is to get a reaction, so refusing to engage starves the beast. My own way of practicing this is simply to ignore anyone who is anonymous online. Effectively, they don’t exist.If you do get sucked into a more serious internet conflagration—as my friend did—you might try a more systematic denial of attention and withdraw from your habitual platforms entirely for a time. I recommend a complete social-media cleanse of at least a week or two every year, regardless of whether you’ve encountered any digital predators. If you use that cleanse to delete the app, you rid yourself of the bothersome bullies as well.None of these private strategies eliminates the value of more collective interventions, of course. Internet psychopathy is a social nuisance that lowers life quality for most people in one way or another. The approaches I suggest here are the equivalent of soundproofing your house against nuisance neighbors. Taking your own defensive measures doesn’t preclude the passing of laws to protect the whole neighborhood from antisocial behavior. Social-media companies should find better ways to eliminate pathological behavior as well as protect free speech.[Read: The drunk-text decade]My friend made the internet trolls disappear from his life by resisting the default responses of his own brain: He deliberately changed his perception and withdrew his attention. Because this worked like a charm, it got him thinking: Were there other areas of his life where this strategy could work? After getting informed about alcohol use, he changed his perception of drinking and avoided engaging with the substance. He also decided to reevaluate what had been his favorite news organization; he then saw it in a much more skeptical light, so he withdrew his attention by unsubscribing. He has used the same technique to tackle various relationships and behaviors that he realized were toxic and holding him back. He says he feels free.The threats from trolls and cyberbullies are one thing, but not all threats should be ignored. If you feel a strange lump in your armpit, say, trying to perceive it differently or refusing to give it your attention is foolish and dangerous. A potential health emergency is unlikely to be something you can avoid, but in much of what happens in life, you probably have more control than you think. The strategic use of perception and attention can set you free too.

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]Whether for-profit app companies are in fact trying to hinder people’s romantic game is questionable. Match Group keeps the details of its algorithms and strategies under lock, but a spokesperson told me that “the best scenario for us is for someone to find their partner using one of our products, and then tell other people about it … Our algorithms are designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility—not to keep people stuck in an endless loop.” And it’s not like companies need to worry about there being a finite supply of single people. You wouldn’t expect a therapist to undermine her clients’ treatment for the sake of income; plenty of people have problems that could use some talking through. Brutally, that 2024 paper determined that app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own “dating failures,” blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of “their own actions or attractiveness.” (I flinched.)Regardless, the fact that so many believe the theory suggests that modern dating isn’t working for a lot of people—and that for-profit matchmaking companies have, to a significant degree, lost the trust of their base. American romance isn’t exactly thriving, as I’ve reported: Some singles are quitting the apps, and others are quitting dating altogether. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date (rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute). What I wanted to find, really, was a site that doesn’t try to make money: a nonprofit dating app.A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Last fall, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government launched a dating platform, Tokyo Enmusubi, which uses AI to suggest matches—and which, according to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, cost $1.28 million to develop. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in 2023; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Terengganu, a region in West Malaysia, is developing an app too, which the local government said on Facebook is designed to “strengthen the family institution in the state.” If it sounds a little creepy for political leaders to be reaching into people’s intimate lives in this way—well, you might not be wrong.Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love. And governments may have less incentive to share users’ data with third parties, or to inundate them with sponsored profiles and advertisements, than some for-profit apps do.A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers. Many governments, by contrast, are accustomed to collecting data on their residents and might not hesitate to demand information from dating-app users—which, in some cases, could help ensure that people aren’t bots, catfishers, or scammers, and could help keep track of users in case of bad behavior. (Tokyo Enmusubi, for one, mandates that users provide a photo ID, proof of income, and even official proof of singlehood; it also asks them to sign a pledge promising that they’re looking to wed.)[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. They use AI and human moderators to detect suspicious activity, and have begun allowing, though not demanding, people to submit a selfie video in exchange for a mark showing that their profile is “verified.” Tinder users in the U.S. can run their own background checks on potential dates (for a fee, after two freebies), though the process requires people to enter information they might not have—including, for a criminal background check, an individual’s last name, city, and birth year. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.Of course, even if governments collect more information on individuals, one can’t assume that they will be earnestly invested in protecting their apps’ users. The Communist Party of China has been accused in recent years of censoring women’s accounts of gender-based abuse and of using sexual violence for political ends. When Iran launched the dating app Hamdam in 2021, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the NGO United for Iran, told Vice World News that the app “treats women like property,” matching them with bachelors and then keeping those couples “under the watchful and constant eye” of marriage counselors employed by the state. The administration decreed all other dating apps illegal.That’s the major underlying issue: Inevitably, a government platform will be shaped by political motivations. Imagine if South Africa’s government had created a dating app during the apartheid era, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me; it certainly wouldn’t have facilitated interracial relationships. And even if you trust your current leaders, power changes hands over time. A future state, Lundquist pointed out, might become more autocratic or fascist—and would have, thanks to its dating app, a trove of data on people’s romantic and sexual preferences.[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]Beyond all that, apps designed to boost birth rates serve only certain users. Lots of people aren’t looking to marry or have kids, or to find one person and then delete an app forever, Brunning told me. Anyone who’s queer or polyamorous or kinky, he said, or who wants to have casual sex, might be better served by commercial options. He’s not expecting to see a state app that “facilitates gay BDSM hookups” anytime soon.Even if the state were committed to guiding people to whatever kind of relationship they want, it might not be the right candidate for the job; no evidence suggests that governments know any better than commercial apps what makes lovers compatible. People also might hesitate to use a government dating app because, let’s face it: It’s not cool. Singapore’s Social Development Network, a governmental body that for many years held meetup events—singles’ cruises, tango-dancing sessions, speed dating—was initially called the Social Development Unit, and people joked that SDU stood for “Single, Desperate, and Ugly.” In 2023, the SDN, citing declining membership, announced that it would end its dating events and instead focus on funding other organizations’ initiatives. “Today,” a ministry spokesperson told Singapore’s The Straits Times, “there are better alternatives offered by the private sector, including online dating apps.”God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who’ve met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?[Read: The people who quit dating]Scientific knowledge might truly be a better incentive than financial gain—not only because people like Bruch and Gordon are invested in unlocking love’s mysteries, and because studies legally have to adhere to certain ethical guidelines, but also because the research community has norms around transparency. Unlike private companies, which generally fear helping out their competitors, or governments, which aren’t always open with their citizens, scientists tend to be eager to publish any findings of note. Revel’s website lists exactly what user data are collected and on what basis pairs are made. Bruch and Gordon plan to open the app to the whole University of Michigan community this fall; eventually, they intend to share their discoveries with other researchers and also with the app’s users, in hopes that doing so might illuminate a dating experience they know can be confusing and emotionally fraught.Making scientific advances and, in turn, ameliorating the pain of courtship: That’s a lofty aim, and also one that could take a lot of time to work toward. Not all single people want to play the long game in their own life; they might be less concerned with society’s collective grasp of human chemistry, or even with understanding their own romantic needs and tendencies, than with finding a partner—or a kiss, or a wedding date, or a threesome—right now.Perhaps more significantly, existing apps have already conditioned people to a new way of dating, and a not-for-profit platform is unlikely to reverse that. Scrolling through people on an app makes looking for love or sex feel like choosing products in a grocery store, Anil Isisag, a consumer researcher who studies dating-app user experiences, told me. An abundance of options, he said, “gives people the idea that there could be something better around the corner,” which is a solid recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. At this point, many people may be so deeply Tinder-brained that using a different product—or even meeting potential dates in person—wouldn’t change the way they think about courtship.Still, who’s running those platforms, and how transparent they are, matters a great deal. The people frustrated with dating apps aren’t all bellyachers who expect only romantic success; they just know that a consequential, incredibly personal part of their life is at the whim of a mysterious strategy, and they feel helpless. Perhaps, to empower them, app companies don’t need a flawless product. They just need to be more open, about both the workings of their algorithm and the fact that no algorithm can predict the coveted spark—not now, and maybe not ever.

Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.” Video of the moment rocketed across social media, serving as an early indicator of Trump’s enduring strength with his base, despite his recent felony convictions.Strickland went viral last week for a very different reason: opposition to the president and his plan to take over Gaza. “Man if Trump keeps this bs up I’m about to start waving a Palestinian flag,” the fighter posted on X. “American cities are shitholes and you wanna go spend billions on this dumpster fire. Did we make a mistake?! This ain’t America first.” Strickland’s lament racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.Strickland is far from the only one expressing buyer’s remorse. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the honeymoon is over; some of his backers are waking up next to the man they voted for and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake. With every policy he implements and offhand remark he makes, Trump is falsifying the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.In late January, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media personality on the American right, interviewed Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a generally pro-Trump publication. Basking in the glow of the inauguration, the two men enthused over what they described as Trump’s commitment to a new policy of American restraint on the world stage. “It is an actual choice,” Mills said. “We cannot do the border if we do the Middle East.” Carlson quickly concurred: “We have to reorient toward our own interests.” Eleven days after this conversation aired, Trump announced his Gaz-a-Lago gambit. Shortly after, Mills published and promoted a piece declaring, “Trump’s Apparent Gaza Scheme Endangers His Entire Legacy.”In February 2023, the Trump-curious journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that “the energy behind opposing American interventionism … is actually much more on the populist right than the populist left.” In February 2025, he is now asking, “How does Trump’s intensifying fixation on ‘taking over Gaza’ promote an America First foreign policy?”[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]And the problem is not just the Middle East. Again and again, the fantasies that fueled Trump’s candidacy are colliding with the reality of his presidency, and the result is already dispelling the illusions of many who advocated for him.“Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism,” wrote the pro-worker, pro-Trump commentator Sohrab Ahmari earlier this month, calling on Trump to fire his billionaire sidekick and arguing that “it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.” (Trump has not fired Musk.)On Monday, Zachary Levi, one of the few Hollywood celebrities who openly endorsed Trump, went on Fox to plead for the “truly good, working people that work for the government that are getting lost in the cracks” amid Musk’s purge of the civil service. And after Trump’s administration banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the heterodox Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy had enough. “I voted against compelled speech,” she wrote on X. “You can’t just rename a body of water and demand everyone go along with it and call us liars if we don’t. Nope. Miss me with that shit.” Her post garnered 10,000 likes and 1.4 million views.Of course, Trump was never a free-speech, pro-labor, anti-war paragon in the first place. Over the course of his political and business careers, he’s lobbed lawsuits at multiple media companies, reportedly stiffed contractors and customers, pushed tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, and continued American drone strikes and arms sales in the Middle East. But the outrage of some influencers who believed he’d further their causes is a warning: As president, Trump is no longer the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.Every candidate runs to some extent on the idea of their presidency rather than its reality, promising to be all things to as many people as possible. The brilliance of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan in 2008 was that it allowed voters to fill in the blanks afterward with whatever they most desired. But because Trump appears to have few, if any, core principles beyond retaining and expanding his own power, he was able to take this approach to the extreme. Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. And because Trump was out of office for four years, his supporters had the unusual opportunity to spin self-serving—and often mutually exclusive—narratives around the former president’s plans without the inconvenience of having to explain his actual policies.With Trump in the White House again, however, many of these pleasing fictions stand exposed. The president’s hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board has upset the promoters of his domestic agenda in the intelligentsia, while his Gaza proposal has left many of his neo-isolationist boosters scrambling—or sidestepping the subject entirely. The reality of Trump’s presidency can no longer sustain the fantasies that were projected onto his campaign.[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]Frankly, those who fell for these mirages should have known better. Trump is no conventional politician. He relies on instincts forged in the worlds of show business and real estate—an entirely transactional actor with an unparalleled penchant for self-promotion and flimflam. Attempts to fit him into a traditional ideological box will always fail, because he has never met a box he couldn’t sell for parts to the highest bidder. Attempts to cast him as a staunch proponent of American restraint or opponent of corporate greed do not reflect his pre-political career, never fit his first-term policies, and don’t describe his current ones. Rather, these bids to pigeonhole and appropriate Trump are best seen as efforts by intellectuals to impose order on what they don’t understand, or opportunistic attempts by ideologues to bootstrap their program to Trump’s ascendant brand.There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn’t and won’t.This is why the more Trump’s presidency progresses, the more support he will lose. Back in November, Phetasy, the Spectator columnist, said that she was “voting for Donald Trump, but not really for Donald Trump—I’m voting against the left and many of the things that they stand for.” In 2024, Trump benefited from this dynamic. But come the 2026 midterms, he will have provided voters like her, who have been burned by their illusions, with something new to vote against. The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. My mom and I picked our way to the front over sparsely filled plastic seats—the bleachers had a hollowed-out, cheerless feel—and settled in for the show, where a simulcast of Turandot played across a 1.2-million-pound jumbotron more familiar with instant replays and fan-cam footage. It was a spectacularly underwhelming experience.Most opera fans aren’t exactly awed by the beauty of the broadcast version, but the practice is still worthwhile, particularly as a way to increase accessibility to the art form (and, frankly, to keep it alive). Televising opera was first proved possible on the small screen in the 1940s—before that, it was broadcast to loyal audiences over the radio—and continues today through the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD and Live at Home programs, which stream performances to movie theaters and living rooms, respectively. The New York opera house has approximately 650,000 yearly visitors, but Live in HD opera streams reached nearly 1 million people last season. These programs hope to reach you even if you’re “on assignment in Antarctica.” It’s hard to argue with that.But as persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it. In 1983, the critic Lloyd Schwartz opined about “Opera on Television” for The Atlantic, calling it “virtually a self-contradiction: the most grandiose, elaborate form of entertainment this side of the Ringling Brothers (not always this side, either) diminished by the most intimate, reductive medium of transmission.”The Met telecast its first complete performance in 1948, collaborating with ABC to bring Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello to more than 1 million viewers. They brought the works: long-range shots, close-up shots (those front-row seats didn’t stand a chance!), and even the rare backstage moment. It was a success in many ways, but not enough to stop the critic John Crosby from noting that “the Metropolitan’s great roster contains some of the worst actors, and actresses on earth,” and that “by Hollywood standards,” the Met’s female performers “are not likely to drive Betty Grable out of the pin-up business.”Crosby understood that live audiences were willing to “overlook these failings,” and he predicted that television audiences might do the same. But imperfections may be harder for modern TV audiences, with their expectations of cleanly edited, smoothly run perfection, to ignore. Live audiences, however, understand that the most important component of an opera is not the acting or the visual charm of the soloists—Maria Callas comes around only once a century—but the singing. The composer David Schiff mused in The Atlantic in 1999 about what keeps opera magical in the age of movies: Opera combines storytelling and spectacle in ways that rarely achieve the state of fusion we take for granted at the movies. Only die-hard film fans go to a bad movie to catch a great cameo performance, but opera-lovers do the equivalent all the time, knowing that a few moments of vocal bliss are more important than an evening of credible acting or striking “production values.” Seeing the seams is part of live performance’s charm—it asks the audience to actively participate in the suspension of reality, as opposed to having it ready-made for them. Broadcast opera retains some of that immediacy, but without the magic of a live performance, it’s harder to forgive its failings.Watching the machinations of the orchestra down in the pit or waiting for the curtains to go up all serve to remind us that “we’re ‘at the opera,’” Schwartz wrote, “watching not only the work but an event, a document of a particular performance.” Knowing that you can experience a moment only once—and being unable to relive it—is a rarity in today’s world. Live opera reminds us that capturing also entails destroying, and that sometimes the ephemeral is meant to be just that.

It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation. (The past four years, during which pandemic-induced inflation outpaced tuition growth, are an exception to the trend.) With this pace of increase, it’s no wonder that people think college prices are out of control.[Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school]But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.Higher education might not be cheap—many families still get far less financial aid than they need, and the cost of attendance can rise unpredictably from year to year—but it is clearly getting cheaper. A mix of factors appear to be behind the trend. Increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students, David Deming, a political-economy professor at Harvard, told me. State appropriations have rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, which accounts for 70 percent of all discounts, Adam Looney, an economist at the University of Utah who wrote the Brookings study, told me.Most of the researchers I spoke with predicted that net prices would keep falling over the next few years. The number of 18-year-old high-school graduates is expected to peak this year, followed by a long decline. This will reduce demand for college and force institutions to compete even harder with one another for applicants.College is getting more affordable: That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. think that universities charge everyone the same amount, according to a 2023 survey by the Association of American Universities. And, even as college costs fall, a recent poll found that 44 percent of people think that their state’s public-college tuition is likely to increase in the next year. (Twelve percent thought it would decrease, and the rest predicted no change.)One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more. (For low-income students who are admitted, elite universities, which draw on their enormous wealth to offer generous need-based aid, are almost always the most affordable option.) Another study found that low-income students were less likely to apply to a school when it raised its sticker price, even if those students would have qualified for a full ride based on their financial need. More unfortunate still, sticker shock can lead students to forego college entirely.In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment, even though the so-called college wage premium still far outstrips the cost of attendance.[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]When researchers tell people how much more they stand to earn if they graduate from college, their study subjects are more likely to apply. Clearly, colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price. But, given the opacity of the system, just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college. Some research suggests that it would be more effective for schools to commit up front to one price for the full four years, something they are loath to do. “You have to fix knowledge, but then also make some promises to students that, not only is this real, but we’re not going to switch up on you after a year or two—which, to be frank, many universities currently do,” Zach Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton, told me.As colleges prepare for a tough enrollment picture, they can’t afford to push students away. And yet higher education’s weird pricing model is probably not going anywhere. After all, colleges haven’t found a better way to get the funding they need for financial aid. “I remember 30 years ago, people saying: ‘This can’t go on. They can’t keep doing this,’” Baum, the Urban Institute fellow, told me. “And they do. And they have to because if you charged everybody the same price, that price would simply be too high for many people.” In other words, it might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsMay 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?[Music]Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.Rosin: Every year?Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.[Music]Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.[Break]Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.[Music]Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent of what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.”  [David Frum: A cautionary tale for Trump appointees]In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes.This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.Vance, a prominent member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania, and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling the Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives have been disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say that it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence mixed with malignity]Trump made this new policy even clearer during a press conference on Tuesday, when he made a series of false statements about Ukraine that he later repeated in social-media posts. No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s. No, Zelensky is not a “dictator”; Ukrainians, unlike Russians, freely debate and argue about politics. But because they are under daily threat of attack, the Ukrainian government has declared martial law and postponed elections until a cease-fire. With so many people displaced and so many soldiers at the front line, Ukrainians fear that an election would be dangerous, unfair, and an obvious target for Russian manipulation, as even Zelensky’s harshest critics agree.I can’t tell you exactly why Trump chose to repeat these falsehoods, or why his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once made a TikTok video of herself repeating them, or why they directly echo the Russian propaganda that has long sought to portray Zelensky, along with the nation of Ukraine itself, as illegitimate. Plenty of Republicans, including some I met in Munich, know that these claims aren’t true. American allies must draw a lesson: Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whomever he wants—Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. Zelensky knows this already: It was he who originally proposed giving Americans access to rare-earth metals, in order to appeal to a transactional U.S. president, although without imagining that the concession would be in exchange for nothing. Zelensky is trying to acquire other kinds of leverage too. This week he flew to Istanbul, where the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reaffirmed his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, in defiance of the U.S.Europeans need to act in the same spirit and acquire some leverage too. At the start of this war, international financial institutions froze $300 billion of Russian assets, mostly in Europe. There are sound legal and moral arguments for seizing these assets and giving them to Ukraine, both to reconstruct the country and to allow Ukrainians to continue to defend themselves. Now there are urgent political reasons too. This is enough money to impress Trump; to buy weapons, including American weapons; and to spook the Russians into fearing that the war will not end as quickly as they now hope.Europeans also need to create, immediately, a coalition of the willing that is prepared to militarily defend Ukraine, as well as other allies who might be attacked in the future. Deterrence has a psychological component. If Russia refrains from attacking Lithuania, or indeed Germany, that is in part because Putin fears a U.S. response. Now that the U.S. has become unpredictable, Europeans have to provide the deterrence themselves. There is talk of a defense bank to finance new military investment, but that’s just the beginning. They need to radically increase military spending, planning, and coordination. If they speak and act as a group, Europeans will have more power and more credibility than if they speak separately.Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change unfolding, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create.

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.“Hey, can I help you?” asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.Nearby, a frazzled IT staffer was rushing past, attempting to find a way to carry out the bidding of the newcomers.“Are you okay?” an onlooker asked.“This is not normal,” the staffer replied.Similar Trump-administration teams had moved into the U.S. Agency for International Development the previous weekend to, as DOGE leader Elon Musk later wrote on his social network, feed the $40 billion operation “into the woodchipper.” A memo barred employees from returning to the headquarters building but made no mention of the other USAID offices, allowing some civil servants one last look at their desk before the guidance was revised.“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” one USAID staffer told us.A second USAID employee said she had the same experience, finding signs “of activity overnight.” Her brochures and folders had been moved around. Panera cookie wrappers were left on her desk and in the trash can nearby, she said.“It’s like the panopticon,” one USAID contractor told us, recalling a prison designed to let an unseen guard keep watch over its inhabitants. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”The contractor said that she had placed her government laptop in her closet at home, underneath a pile of clothes, in case DOGE was using it to listen to her private conversations. She said that other colleagues were so paranoid, they had discussed stowing their laptop in their refrigerator.Over at the Department of Education, the new strike force invited sympathetic witnesses to cheer their arrival. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who had been appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as trustee of a Florida college, posted photos like a soldier on the front: the door of the building, a picture of the secretary of education’s office. “Such a cool vibe right now,” he wrote. “And everyone is waiting for the opening moves.”Donald Trump wanted to act fast upon his return to power. He was determined to fundamentally change the institutions that had so effectively constrained him during his first term. “I am your retribution,” he had promised on the campaign trail. This time he would be seemingly everywhere at once, the only public notice coming in unverified claims made by social-media accounts overseen by Musk and through leaks by the workforce that bore the brunt of the assault.Undefined and hard to track, DOGE has claimed to be a new government department but operates more as a disembodied specter. Some of its emissaries, including Musk, have insisted that they don’t work for DOGE at all, but for the White House directly as “special government employees.” Much of the cost savings that Musk has touted as DOGE victories on social media have been carried out by other appointees.Over the first month of Trump’s new term, patterns have nonetheless emerged as a small crew of Musk’s young technologists work their way through the federal workforce. This new unit has trained its initial attention on the key punchers who make the government work, executing Musk’s belief that by controlling the computers, one could control the entire federal bureaucracy. They’ve mapped systems, reworked communication networks, and figured out the choke points. Instead of taking command of the existing workforce, Trump’s new team has pressured them to disperse, firing those who were probationary, offering buyouts to others, and subjecting many others to 15-minute interviews in what many felt were juvenile tests of their worth.The full impact of the blitz will not be known for months, when the courts and Congress decide where to push back—if at all. But the scale and speed of the transformation now taking place across the executive branch is likely to leave a deep mark. The civil service is built on the caution that comes from layers of rules, with the knowledge that the American people directly depend on the services provided. Reliability, however creaky, is typically paramount. Musk’s broader operation started from the opposite premise: Radical action was the only responsible course. The improperly fired could be rehired. The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced. The courts might overturn their actions, but that is a problem for another day. Make change happen, and rebuild the smashed shards later, if necessary.This story is based on interviews with more than 25 current and former government workers, most of whom requested anonymity to avoid retribution or public targeting. They told the story of a chaotic few weeks when DOGE and its allies infiltrated their offices, with an endgame that is still being written. The first month of Trump’s second term may be the start of a government transformation on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, fundamentally remaking the powers of the president under the emerging authority of digital data systems. Or it could be the start of a constitutional crisis and the fracturing of the government systems upon which Americans rely.The White House maintains that the DOGE transformation is being done securely, in full compliance with the law. “DOGE has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told us in a statement. “Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people, and their obstructionist efforts will fail.”Pushback within the government has already started to emerge. A top GSA engineer resigned this week when faced with orders to turn over root access to Notify.gov, the system that government agencies use to send text messages to citizens, because the file contained personal information, according to an internal message we obtained.Outside observers have been watching with increasing anxiety, worried that the rush for change and the blunt-force methods will break something important that will hurt people who need services and take years to put back together.“You are controlling technology pipelines, which is the modern-day equivalent of blocking the highway. You are controlling any in and out flow,” Ayushi Roy, a former technologist at the General Services Administration who now teaches digital government at the Harvard Kennedy School, told us. “You have to know where the breaker is and what the right order of switches is to turn the thing back on. I don’t know that they know where all the breakers and the mains are for this house yet, and they are letting go of all the people who do know.”Democrats like to call him “President Musk”—following polling that shows the world’s richest man is less popular than Trump, and holds powers that even one in five Republican voters disapprove of. But White House officials, who lionize Trump for a living, dismiss the attack as a fundamental misunderstanding.Musk is not the architect of the plan, they say, but its executor. Conservatives spent decades fantasizing about shrinking government down to the size at which it could be drowned in the bathtub. Musk’s big innovation is finding ways to get that done.Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025 and the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out the mission shortly after the election, back when Musk was still getting used to his guesthouse at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. Vought called for a return to a pre-Watergate mindset—“a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.” There would be three prongs of the attack, he told Tucker Carlson during a November 18 podcast.First, “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” Vought said, giving the president complete control of the executive branch to impose his will. Second, the courts must be provoked to smash the idea that Congress directs spending. “Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can’t spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren’t ever meant to be forced to spend it,” Vought said, dismissing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which basically decrees the opposite. Third, the protections of the civil service must end, making nearly all of the federal workforce at-will employees.This is where Musk entered under the banner of cost reduction, a useful side effect of the larger project. His major contribution, repeated to Trump and his advisers down at Mar-a-Lago, was to reject thinking about government as a lawyer would—a collection of institutions bound by norms, laws, and rules, and controlled by policy and decree. The bureaucracy does not easily bend to white papers. “The government runs on computers” soon became a mantra repeated by Trump’s advisers, who found themselves in awe of his enthusiasm and speed, even as they expressed annoyance at having to constantly clean up his messes, according to two people familiar with the discussions.Musk began wearing a T-shirt around the White House that said Tech Support to drive home the point. “One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk told Fox News in a joint interview with Trump on Tuesday.His team focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control.“He is kind of going after the nerve center of government,” said Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the Technology Institute at the AFL-CIO. “It looks like he’s using data and IT systems as a backdoor way to gain considerable discretionary power without normal, legal oversight.”Musk recruited loyalists. They started with the data sets, the programs deep in the bowels of the government. They abided by no official hierarchy, and many of his employees worked out of a large conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, their backpacks strewn about. Steve Davis, DOGE’s unofficial chief operating officer, was a former SpaceX engineer who once owned Mr. Yogato, a D.C. frozen-yogurt shop where customers could win discounts by singing a song.The targets of DOGE takeovers were often among the most obscure outposts of the federal government. But each had something that Musk’s allies needed. In previous changes of government, the employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, the paymaster of the federal government, had waited months for the new administration to even discover their existence. Now they found themselves fielding questions from Musk’s team during the transition about how things worked.The General Services Administration, long thought of as the government’s landlord, took on new importance as the repository of massive data sets—about grants, contracts, even the personal identity-verification cards that control access to federal buildings and workstations. The DOGE team sought access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System at the IRS, a point of entry for the tax-record master file and similar systems at the Social Security Administration.Technologists who watched the work from the inside wondered if Musk had plans to impose new AI tools on the federal machine. They speculated about plans to create a massive “data lake” that connected the disparate bits and bytes of the federal government into one giant system. New Trump appointees tried to gain access to a U.S. Treasury system to stop payments from USAID, rather than simply ordering the agency to stop spending—a test case, perhaps, for mastering 23 percent of the U.S. GDP, the scale of the federal government, from a single keyboard.Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed as director of Technology Transformation Services at GSA, suggested a broader plan in an all-hands meeting on February 3 that was recorded and later shared with The Atlantic. “We want to start implementing more AI at the agency level and be an example for how other agencies can start leveraging AI,” he said, providing AI-powered coding assistants and federal contract analysis as examples. The ambitions raised security concerns. Government systems are hardened against outside attack but remain vulnerable to insider threats, veteran federal employees warned. Centralizing data could raise the risk.“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”Without a master AI at hand, the Trump team has worked agency by agency. One of the first tasks when they arrive is to get a full list of its contracts and grants, a person familiar with the process told us. “They are kind of like freelance henchmen,” observed the departed technologist who has been speaking with current officials directly interacting with DOGE. “They are going on little missions that Elon and Steve Davis are telling them to go on.”Trump appointees have sometimes asked agency leaders for a one-line description of every contract, as well as who is responsible for it. Then they go through the list, highlighting contracts that they think might contradict one of Trump’s executive orders or require additional scrutiny. Those singled out then get put in different batches, by category, before ending up on the secretary’s desk, for a final determination.The process is error-prone. Employees at CFPB warned the newcomers that the telephone hotline for consumer complaints, operated by a contractor, was mandated by law. But for one day last week, it went offline, infuriating people on the inside of the frozen agency. It was reinstalled a day later. In other cases, the cuts sparked congressional backlash from key Republican members, forcing reconsideration.At the Treasury Department, one of the Trump team’s first steps was simply to print out Government Accountability Office reports and go through them line by line, implementing the GAO’s recommendations for cutting spending and more, said a person familiar with the methods. The new team could also search whole contract data sets for supposedly “woke” words such as equity and diversity to target their cuts.But the promise of digital supremacy can go only so far. Trump’s advisers encountered systems of what the incumbent engineers called “spaghetti code,” the product not of any grand design but of decades of revisions under new administrations and legal edicts.Multiple agencies have as many as 20 to 30 different versions of code, sometimes decades old, a person familiar with the process told us. So even when one of Musk’s allies masters a system, the team cannot simply replicate it across the government. Musk has expressed disbelief at some of the government’s antiquated programs and the challenge of centralizing command and control. Speaking in the Oval Office last week, he described the process of manually retiring government employees using paperwork stored in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania, marveling that the “time warp” system restricted how many bureaucrats could retire each month.Government veterans, who have spent decades toiling in the mines of government data, looked on knowingly. “If they are targeting the computer systems, when are they going to realize that the computers don’t work?” a veteran federal technologist asked us. “There are so many systems strapped together or held together by duct tape or literal humans. There are limitations to what you can do with a systems-first approach.”Some of the engineers at the U.S. Digital Service, a strike team of technologists where Musk embedded his new operation, dared to harbor initial optimism that Musk could build something better. On January 20, USDS had projects running in at least 15 different federal agencies, including improving online passport applications and helping the Department of Veterans Affairs upgrade its app.But it soon became clear that they were not invited to this new party. There would be two teams, the newcomers and those already there.Within weeks of Trump’s arrival, the new technology leadership was telling federal employees to consider a modest buyout offer that arrived in an email titled “Fork in the Road,” an echo of a similar offer Musk had written to staffers when he took over Twitter.  “In recent years, priorities have shifted from efficiency to ideology, and the agency has strayed from its mission,” Stephen Ehikian, the acting director of the GSA and a former Salesforce executive, wrote in an email to staff on Inauguration Day. Under his leadership, GSA could expect a “return” to “making government work smarter and faster, not larger and slower.”“It was different in tone from anything I’ve heard from a government official,” one GSA worker told us. “It was very much: ‘You all have been slacking off, and we’re going to stop that.’”  Probationary employees, including veterans of government service who had just taken new roles, were targeted as the easiest to dismiss, in many cases regardless of their qualifications. In at least one instance, a federal technology employee never received notice of apparent termination, the person said. The official’s computer and email were disabled. A supervisor thought initially that there might be an IT glitch. The word from human resources was to wait. Then the paychecks stopped.Federal coders and product managers found themselves called into 15-minute interviews with the Musk newcomers, who were sometimes young enough to be their children and had a fraction of their experience. Employees received calendar invites to virtual meetings with nongovernment email addresses, were given only hours’ notice, and some were first asked to fill out a form describing recent “wins” and “blockers.”The questions hit the same points across agencies, typically with variations on the wording—a request for a greatest-hits list of what employees had done, a probing of their capabilities. “Like, what’s your superpower?” a young Musk acolyte asked in an interview with one GSA employee, according to a recording obtained by The Atlantic. Some got quick coding tests. Others reported hearing questions that sounded like loyalty tests about what they thought of DOGE.The uncertainty and chaos has left thousands of federal employees wondering what comes next and whether it will make more sense.Last Wednesday, when a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling allowed the “Fork” buyout program to proceed, Department of Energy employees received an email at 7:18 p.m. alerting them of the ruling and saying they had until 11:59 p.m. that evening to make a decision about whether to resign, according to a copy of the email provided to us.At approximately 8 p.m., Energy Department staff received another email saying that “the Deferred Resignation Program is now closed” and that any resignations received after 7:20 p.m.—just two minutes after the initial email went out—would not be accepted.One Energy Department employee told us that he’d been on the phone with fellow department staff, everyone agonizing over what to do, when the second email came in saying that, despite the midnight deadline, the window had already shut. He later told us that resignations had, in fact, been accepted until midnight.The amateurish errors caused unnecessary chaos and scrambling in an already uncertain time, leaving many government employees wondering if casual cruelty was as much the point as the government overhaul itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

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

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

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

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

Paramedics took two people to the hospital Thursday morning after a four-car crash shut down Colorado 93 in both directions west of Denver. The crash happened on the northbound highway at about 6:12 a.m. Thursday, south of West 56th Avenue at mile marker 2, according to a news release from the Colorado State Patrol. Colorado 93 is closed in both directions between Spyderco Way in Golden and 64th Avenue Parkway near Arvada, Colorado Department of Transportation officials said. Cameras in the area of the crash at 9:30 a.m. showed multiple cars resting on both shoulders of the two-lane highway and debris scattered across the lanes. The highway remains closed for the crash investigation and cleanup. Related Articles Crashes and Disasters | Colorado road conditions: Snowy roads cause crashes, closures on parts of I-70, U.S. 6 Crashes and Disasters | Snowmobiler buried, rescued after avalanche near Vail Pass Crashes and Disasters | At least 1 dead, 2 injured in Denver crash involving pedestrian Crashes and Disasters | Man hit by 2 cars, killed in crash on U.S. 36 north of Denver Crashes and Disasters | Sunday morning crashes shut down parts of I-25 near Monument, Fort Carson Southbound drivers are being rerouted at 58th Avenue and northbound drivers are being rerouted at Colorado 58, state patrol officials said in the release. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Another wave of snow is headed for Colorado as the streak of below-freezing temperatures continues across the state, according to the National Weather Service. Downtown Denver and the Denver International Airport are forecast to see between 2 and 5 inches of snow Thursday night and Friday morning, NWS forecasters said. Other snow forecasts include: Up to 5 inches in Aurora, Brighton, Castle Rock, Centennial, Littleton, Northglenn and Parker Up to 6 inches in Broomfield, Highlands Ranch and Lakewood, and along U.S. 40’s Rabbit Ears Pass Up to 7 inches in Arvada and Golden and at Floyd Hill Up to 8 inches at the Eisenhower and Johnson Tunnels, Loveland Pass, Vail Pass, Copper Mountain and Keystone Ski Area Summit Up to 10 inches in northern Colorado’s Park Range Mountains, including Mount Zirkel, and Jefferson County’s Coal Creek Canyon Up to 12 inches along Berthoud Pass and Rollins Pass, mountain passes in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver Most of the southern Front Range, foothills and western suburbs of Denver will see between 3 and 7 inches of snow, according to a NWS Winter Weather Alert. Snow will start as early as 3 p.m. Thursday and continue through 8 a.m. Friday, forecasters said in the alert. The winter weather could make both the Thursday evening and Friday morning commutes “hazardous.” Denver will see warmer weather Thursday than Wednesday, when the morning cold hit record lows, but temperatures aren’t expected to rise above freezing, forecasters said. Related Articles Weather | Westminster activates emergency cold weather shelter through Thursday Weather | Denver weather: Record-breaking cold hits city early Wednesday Weather | Colorado snow totals for Feb. 19, 2025 Weather | At least 618 flights delayed, canceled at DIA amid light snow and single-digit temps Weather | Colorado road conditions: Snowy roads cause crashes, closures on parts of I-70, U.S. 6 The streak of below-freezing weather started at 5 p.m. Sunday and is forecast to break at about 11 a.m. Friday, according to NWS forecasters. That’s nearly 115 hours of frigid temperatures. Temperatures across parts of the Eastern Plains, which remained dangerously low Thursday morning and aren’t expected to rise above 15 degrees during the day, will remain below-freezing until about 3 p.m. Thursday, forecasters said. The worst weather will hit the northeastern plains, especially along the Colorado border. Though forecasters said no snow is expected, windchill temperatures will feel as cold as minus 6 degrees during the day and minus 10 overnight. Temperature highs will return to the mid-50s Saturday in Denver and climb into the 60s by Monday, with warmer and sunny weather expected through at least Wednesday. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Retail Writer NEW YORK (AP) — Walmart delivered another year of strong sales and profits as its competitive prices became a strong magnet for inflation-weary shoppers. Yet, uncertainty about the state of the American consumer and the potential impact of tariffs have seeped into expectations for 2025. The financial outlook from nation’s largest retailer, which has thrived amid stubborn inflation, delivered a jolt across the retail sector. Walmart sees per share profit over the next year coming in as much as 27 cents below analyst projections, a notable shift that sent company shares down more than 6% at the opening bell. Its sales outlook was also mild, potentially a reflection of challenges ahead as consumers pull back on spending and President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and other countries threaten the low-price model that is the core of Walmart’s success. FILE – Shown is a Walmart location in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) During an interview with The Associated Press Thursday, Walmart’s Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said shoppers remain resilient while cautious, but there is no apparent change in behavior related to tariffs. There is more uncertainty about what lies ahead and Rainey said Walmart’s measured guidance reflects that. “We are one month into the year, and there’s a lot that we don’t know,” Rainey said, citing the new tariff increases. Walmart did not incorporate tariffs into its financial outlook, but Rainey acknowledged that the company’s isn’t immune to their impact. “We’re going to work really hard to keep prices low for our members and customers,” Rainey said. “We will do the things that we can.” That means being nimble with sourcing. Walmart, for example, is exploring new sourcing for microwave ovens given increased tariffs on aluminum and steel. But Rainey said some goods may have price increases. Related Articles Business | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Business | Joann store liquidation sales: What to know Business | Apple unveils a souped-up and more expensive version of its lowest priced iPhone Business | Australian-based fitness studio FS8 opens first Colorado location in Denver Business | Americans’ confidence in air travel safety dips slightly after Washington plane crash: new poll Tariffs in the headlines have fueled concern and some more shopper retrenchment in Walmart’s Mexico business, Rainey said. Walmart has built in hedges against some tariff threats. Two-thirds of Walmart’s merchandise is sourced in the U.S., with groceries driving much of that. Groceries account for roughly 60%, of Walmart’s U.S. business. Still, Walmart shares took a hit, and other big retailers fell, too. Walmart is among the first major U.S. retailers to report financial results and the numbers can provide a hint as to the mood of the American shopper. Over the past year Americans have focused increasingly on necessities rather than big TVs, furniture or appliances. They’ve become much more discerning because of higher costs for credit as well as for groceries. Walmart has flourished in that environment. It’s gained market share, notably among households with incomes over $100,000. Walmart’s online offerings and paid membership, Walmart +, have also drawn wealthier customers “We have momentum driven by our low prices, a growing assortment, and an eCommerce business driven by faster delivery times,” said CEO Doug McMillon. “We’re gaining market share, our top line is healthy, and we’re in great shape with inventory.” Still, Walmart could be faced with challenges with the new tariffs carrying more economic risks than during Trump’s first term. If Americans are hit by a new wave of price increases, economists say, and with 70% of the U.S. economy driven by consumers a broad pullback in spending would have ramifications beyond Walmart’s sales. Government data last week revealed a sharp drop in January retail sales as cold weather kept more Americans indoors. But it was a much bigger drop than economists expected and the biggest in a year. Walmart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, reported earnings of $5.25 billion, or 65 cents per share, in the quarter ended Jan. 31. That compares with $5.49 billion, or 68 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings per share for the most recent quarter was 66 cents. Sales rose 4.1% to $180.55 billion in the quarter. Analysts expected 65 cents per share on sales of $180.07 billion, according to FactSet. For Walmart’s U.S. division, comparable store sales — which include online and stores open for the past 12 months — rose 4.6% in the U.S., a bit lower than the 5.3% in the previous quarter. The retailer had a 4.2% jump in the U.S. in the second quarter and 3.8% in the first quarter. Global e-commerce sales rose 16% in the latest quarter, notably slower than the 27% increase in the third quarter. Walmart expects first quarter earnings per share of between 57 cents and 58 cents, well below the 64 cents Wall Street was expecting, and for the year. Walmart projects earnings per share in the range of $2.50 to $2.60. That’s also off the $2.77 that analysts are predicting, according to FactSet. It forecast a 3% to 4% increase in quarterly sales or between $166.35 billion and $167.97 billion. That is also a bit light, with analysts expecting sales of $167.05 billion. Walmart expects annual sales to rise between 3% and 4%, or between $667.57 billion and $674.05 billion. That too falls short of the $708.72 billion that Wall Street projected.

A Greeley man convicted of first-degree murder in the death of an 18-month-old girl was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday. Andy Serrel Carter, 29, was arrested in July 2021 after police say he severely beat Emorie Goodro while babysitting her. Carter was dating Emorie’s mother at the time. Emorie was airlifted to Children’s Hospital Colorado and later died of blunt force injuries to her head and brain, according to the 19th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. Carter was convicted of first-degree murder by a Weld County jury on Tuesday, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole under Colorado law. In a statement, Chief Deputy District Attorney Arynn Clark described Emorie as a cherished, healthy and happy child. “It’s impossible to quantify the pain that this family has endured. It’s also impossible to quantify the happiness Emorie brought to people. This family now has a life sentence of their own as they move forward and have to live without this absolutely precious and perfect little girl,” Clark said. Carter’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment. Related Articles Crime and Public Safety | Aurora dentist tried to pay inmate $20k to kill detective in wife’s murder case, DA says Crime and Public Safety | Fort Lupton man arrested on suspicion of murder in shooting outside Adams County adult club Crime and Public Safety | Denver saw declines in homicides and shootings in 2024 — but domestic violence surged Crime and Public Safety | Boyfriend convicted of first-degree murder of Aurora woman Crime and Public Safety | CBI: Woman accused in Boulder County crash death had THC in system This is a developing story and may be updated. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Free art + Casa Bonita = tasty fun Artists are paying tribute to Casa Bonita, including in this piece from Rachel Suter, at NEXT Gallery this month. (Provided by NEXT Gallery) Through March 2. One of Colorado’s most playful art outings is showing right now at NEXT Gallery in Lakewood’s 40 West Arts District, which is hosting its 8th Casa Bonita Art Show. This time around, the gallery asked artists to imagine what the iconic 50-year-old restaurant might look like in another 50. “The year is 2074,” NEXT explained. “What is the status of Casa Bonita? Still pink? Still beloved? Still iconic? Still standing?” Hours are 5 to 9 p.m. Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, at 6501 W. Colfax Ave., inside the 40 West Arts Hub. There are free kids activities Feb. 21-22, and an awards show will take place on Feb. 28. Admission is free. Visit nextgallery.org or 40westarts.org for more. — John Wenzel Party your pants off Saturday. Strip down and lace up for a good cause this weekend as Cupid’s Undie Run comes to Denver. The event, which first hit the pavement in the Mile High City in 2013, raises funds for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. It also aims to raise awareness about neurofibromatosis (NF), a group of genetic disorders that cause tumors to grow on nerves throughout the body. Participants are encouraged to wear pantless costumes for a party at Stoney’s Bar & Grill, 1111 Lincoln St., which includes a “brief” run at 2 p.m.; festivities are noon to 4 p.m. Registration is $45 at cupids.org/#register. — Tiney Ricciardi A visitor examines an artifact from the “Angkor: The Lost Empire of Cambodia” exhibit, which opens in Denver on Friday, Feb. 21. (Jamie Pham, provided by Denver Museum of Nature & Science) “Lost” Cambodian treasures at DMNS Opens Friday. More than 100 intricate carvings, sacred sculptures and ancient relics — many of them on display outside of Cambodia for the first time — will grace a new exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science starting this weekend. “Angkor: The Lost Empire of Cambodia” includes Khmer artifacts such as sculptures, tools and religious items “that provide insight into the empire’s history and spirituality,” along with hands-on and interactive experiences for adults and kids, the museum wrote. Included with museum admission: $26 for adults, $21 for kids, and $23 for seniors. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at 2001 Colorado Blvd. Call 303-370-6000 or visit dmns.org for more. — John Wenzel Arvada Winterfest will feature lion and dragon dances this year from the Colorado Asian Cultural Heritage Center. (Provided by Danielle Dascalos PR) Arvada Winterfest Saturday. This weekend’s warmer temps mean a slightly less wintry Arvada Winterfest, but that won’t stop anyone from enjoying free live cultural performances from the Colorado Asian Cultural Heritage Center and Rocky Mountain Indian Chamber of Commerce (think dancing, drums and more). Kids and adults can also enjoy free storytelling at the Arvada Library and live ice sculpting, as well as a beer garden, food trucks, craft vendors and more items for purchase. The fest runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22, in Olde Town Square, 5726 Olde Wadsworth Blvd. in Arvada. Parking is limited, so attendees are encouraged to park in the Olde Town Parking Hub or use alternate modes of transportation. For more information, visit arvadaco.gov/winterfest or oldetownarvada.org/events. — John Wenzel Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

As congressional Republicans look to slash government spending by more than $1 trillion, Colorado health care and political leaders are ringing the alarm over what that could mean for Medicaid in the state. “These cuts would impact millions of Americans (and) thousands of people in my congressional district in order to pay for a huge tax cut for billionaires,” U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat, said during a press conference Wednesday. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee has asked several committees to reduce their spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. The request to the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which DeGette is a member, is to find $880 billion in cuts over the next decade, DeGette said. The committee oversees Medicaid, which costs about $880 billion annually and is paid for by both states and the federal government. Despite supporting the recent tax cut proposal, top Republicans including President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have maintained that they don’t support cuts to Medicaid services, saying that they only want to “eliminate fraud.” As of October, 1.1 million Coloradans were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, which provides health care policy information. While there aren’t yet specific proposals on how to cut Medicaid, Republicans have floated a few ideas, including creating a work requirement for participation in the program. But that wouldn’t save very much money since the vast majority of Medicaid enrollees are already working, attending school or serving as a caregiver for another person, DeGette said. Another idea is to change the federal government’s reimbursement to a per-person limit, shifting costs to the states. That could be a big problem for Colorado. State lawmakers are already facing roughly $1 billion hole in the state budget. Medicaid accounts for roughly a third of Colorado’s general-fund expenditures, with much of that money going to care for older residents or those with disabilities. The state Medicaid program overshot its budget by $120 million last year, and rising expenses are one part of the state’s budget crisis this year. As a result, state lawmakers will be watching the federal discussions “very closely,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat and a member of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee. Lawmakers of both parties have expressed concern over what cuts to the program would mean for Colorado patients and for the safety-net providers who treat them. Under the Affordable Care Act, Colorado expanded Medicaid in 2013, and the federal government now picks up 90% of the new costs. State legislators haven’t started studying potential options for implementing cuts because it’s unclear which way the federal discussions may settle, Amabile said. “If this was another year when we weren’t under the gun with our own budget-balancing problems, maybe (federal cuts) wouldn’t hit as hard,” she said Wednesday. But if more cuts do come down, lawmakers “are going to have to make some tough choices.” Joining DeGette on Wednesday was Donna Lynne, the CEO of Denver Health. She expressed worry about the impact of any Medicaid cuts for the safety-net health system, which potentially could result in service cuts and layoffs. Joined by Colorado healthcare professionals, including Jeff Tieman, right, president and CEO of the Colorado Hospital Association, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette spoke about the harm to Medicaid in the state by potential cuts being discussed by Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration during a press conference at her Denver office on Feb. 19, 2025. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post) In a statement to The Denver Post, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Fort Lupton Republican who represents north Denver suburbs, didn’t directly address possible Medicaid cuts but said he would support “commonsense spending reductions.” Related Articles Politics | Opinion: Funding gap — Colorado is uniquely vulnerable to federal spending cuts Politics | Report: Most Colorado hospitals spent more on community benefits than they received in tax breaks Politics | Colorado hospitals had lowest patient care profits in over a decade Politics | Colorado’s Medicaid authority terminates transportation provider, capping week of confusion Politics | Colorado Medicaid program battles new problems — with few answers — after transport fraud scheme “While we only have topline numbers from the proposed budget, I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress to protect hard working families,” he said in the statement. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, whose Eastern Plains district includes Douglas County, accused Democrats of fearmongering and failing “to provide any plan of their own to cut government waste.” “President Trump has said he does not want to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid and I stand with him on that commitment,” she said in a statement. Jeff Tieman, CEO of the Colorado Hospital Association, said any cuts to Medicaid could be devastating for rural hospitals in the state, which work with razor-thin and sometimes negative margins. “It would mean that people lose coverage and lose access, but it would also mean that we have to close down services, close down hospitals,” he said. Jim Garcia, CEO of the Tepeyac Community Health Center, a Denver clinic primarily serving the Latino community, said about 10% of his clinic’s revenue comes from Medicaid. More specific information about potential Medicaid cuts is expected in the coming weeks and months. The Associated Press contributed to this story. Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

State lawmakers will again juggle a pair of competing bills aimed at boosting protections for homebuyers or spurring more condo construction — while trying to avert the impasses that killed the parallel efforts last year. The two measures aren’t explicitly at odds, but their competing aims could put them on a collision course. House Bill 1272, introduced in the legislature this week, looks to restrict when homeowners can sue over shoddy construction by offering less-expensive avenues to address problems. It would lead to lower risks for builders and their insurers, proponents argue, making it a safer economic bet to build condos. But sponsors this year added a new twist to the bill: Builders would have to provide a warranty and check other boxes to reap all the protections from it. Also new: The proposed changes would apply only to homes at or below a certain price point that varies based on local conditions. More expensive condos would still be subject to current — and stricter — defects regulations. Supporters argue that would incentivize builders to develop more-affordable units, though that provision has also drawn criticism from reform skeptics. “Last year, the principal criticism we heard about our bill is that it focused only on the reduction of litigation,” Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat, said. “There was no focus on making sure that homes were just built right in the first place. That was feedback I took to heart.” The new bill, as introduced, has won solid bipartisan support. In the House, it has more Republican sponsors than Democratic, though members of the latter party are its chief proponents. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, also cheered Bird’s bill at a news conference Wednesday as a proposal that “balances homeowner protections, de-risks the market and allows more condos to be built and sold.” Representatives from the Hispanic Restaurant Association, an early learning center and the Colorado Black Women for Political Action also cheered the measure for its far-reaching potential for increased homeownership. Meanwhile, lawmakers will also weigh House Bill 1261. That measure is aimed squarely at lowering the threshold for when homeowners can sue for construction defects. It would give homeowners more time to discover problems before shutting off the courts to them, and it would add other requirements that supporters hope would speed up lawsuits against builders. Rep. Jennifer Bacon, the Denver Democrat sponsoring the bill, said she understood why Bird — who has pushed for construction defects changes over the past two years — was eager for reforms: Colorado is short of housing, and the legislature has pushed broadly to incentivize more building in recent years. Related Articles Politics | Lawmakers give CBI longer to spend $3 million to address rape kit backlog — with new oversight Politics | Price-gouging, housing bills get hearings as gun and labor bills reach halfway point this week in the Colorado legislature Politics | Colorado Senate passes gun control and labor union bills, sending Democratic priority measures to House Politics | Colorado senator resigns seat days before decision on ethics investigation — amid new claim of faked letter Politics | Colorado program that helps “the most vulnerable families” with child care faces freezes amid rising costs But Bacon said she was concerned about giving too much leeway to builders at the potential expense of homeowners — particularly since the changes would apply only to condos of a certain price. “These are people that, when they buy (these condos), will likely be the most leveraged they are ever going to be for a couple of years,” Bacon said Wednesday. “You probably just put down all the cash that you have, and so for your house — especially because these are new builds — to fall apart is devastating. You can’t recover.” It’s unclear how the two bills — Bird’s and Bacon’s — will be reconciled, or if one will die or absorb the other. Similar bills last year, also led by Bacon and Bird in the House, died in the final days of the legislative session. Sen. Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican and the Senate minority leader, signed on to back Bird’s bill this year. But it’s starting in the House, where Democrats killed the measure last year. He’ll be watching how it emerges from that chamber — and if it receives amendments that change its thrust. Lundeen is also running his own construction defects bill, Senate Bill 131, which he characterized as “a little more aggressive” in reining in lawsuits. “We need to change the way the laws are written so they don’t invite lawsuits that prevent developers and insurers from building for-sale multi-family housing,” Lundeen said. “If that’s the type of policy that comes out of the House, great — I’m all in.” He also highlighted opposition from the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association — a traditional backer of Democrats. It has signaled early opposition to Bird’s bill. Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

The subtly clever ending of Sandy Rustin’s comedy “The Suffragette’s Murder” is sure to resonate with film fans of the late 1930s, referencing the 1939 version of the big-screen adaptation of “The Women.” Like that film, this play riffs on gender politics, but in the mid-1800s when they were beginning to first take hold. The play takes place on the morning of July 5, 1857, nine years after the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. Alma Mayhew (Megan Hill), her husband, Albert (Matthew Boston), and some of the tenants of their boarding house are making plans for a clandestine meeting of East Coast suffragists. The tenant Mr. Albright (Rowan Vickers) and the constable (Kevin Isola) in the world premiere of Sandy Rustin’s “The Suffragette’s Murder” (Jamie Kraus Photography, provided by the Denver Center) Throughout the early minutes of the play, Mrs. Mayhew shouts up to the rooms, trying to rouse Lauralee, a roomer who has bartered her cleaning services for accommodations. Happy with himself, Mr. Mayhew has already put the pot of coffee on, a fact another tenant will make a point of deriding. One of the first things you might notice entering the in-the-round Kilstrom Theatre, where this sly and slapstick-y comedy unfurls, is that the Denver Center encouraged scenic designer Reid Thompson to have a good time of it. And so he has. The parlor of the Mayhew boarding house in Manhattan’s Lower East Side is well-appointed with a piano, side tables, settees and knick-knacks. A staircase leads up to a landing, a few more stairs and then the hallway outside the tenants’ rooms. Portraits adorn the wall along the stairway. As is the way with a parlor comedy cloaked as a murder mystery, this one wastes little time introducing the various suspects (ahem, characters). Yes, even before there’s been a killing. (And Rustin, the playwright of “Clue” — one of the most produced plays of the last few years — is practiced in the juggling of possible murderers.) Mr. Albright (Rowan Vickers), an Irishman hoping to make America his home, bounds down the stairs and begins dispensing unexamined views on women and integration. The latter criticisms are directed toward the hostel’s progressive proprietors but also at a fellow tenant, Mr. Jennings (Curtis Wiley), a Black inventor with some extra, winking flair. Rustin creates a smart and subtle bit of connective tissue between women’s rights and abolition, by having Mr. Jennings be a refugee from Seneca Village — intentionally to be confused with Seneca Falls, the site of the first rights convention.  Seneca Village was the settlement established by free Blacks seized by eminent domain in 1857. It was where parts of Central Park now stand. Also on hand is the burly, bearded Mr. Orton (Gareth Saxe), who sits unspeaking in the shadow of the stairway, taking everything in. Alma (Megan Hill) and Albert (Matthew Boston) Mayhew, the progressive proprietors of a New York City boarding house. (Jamie Kraus Photography, provided by the Denver Center) Although the rooming house is in New York City, it has the feel of the antebellum South. That sense is amplified when Mrs. Adams (Linda Mugleston) and her daughter, Mable (Annie Abramczyk), enter. The proper Alabamans carry boxes loaded with contraband: sashes for attendees of the gathering of voting rights advocates. They came to New York so that the young, excitable Miss Adams could have her out-of-wedlock baby. (For slightly different reasons, Mrs. Mayhew once required the very sort of refuge she now offers other young women.) But mother and daughter have embraced the duties of the empowerment movement with zest. “Activism is its own kind of thrill,” Mrs. Mayhew remarks. Apart from Mr. Albright, everyone is both nervous and excited about the day’s meeting. But where is Lauralee, who still hasn’t emerged from her room? The night before, she had been sent out by Mr. Mayhew to stir up some good trouble (to borrow a phrase from the late, great congressman and civil rights champion John Lewis). The co-conspirators crafted a fine alibi for their local constable were he to appear: a séance! In a bit of subterfuge, the Adamses wear sashes with the word “SÉANCE” across them. But when a new police officer shows up at the door, the feminists — female and male alike — are distressed. The constable (Kevin Isola) delivers news that a body has been found. The previous night’s July Fourth celebrations gave way to a riot between two gangs. Even so, the death appeared far from accidental or collateral. Clues suggest it’s Lauralee. Cue the collective gasp. There will be more sharp inhalations on the part of the well-oiled ensemble, and each proves amusing if only for its unabashed silliness. To throw the doggedly curious constable off the track, they go ahead and hold the seance. Mable wholeheartedly takes to her clairvoyant role. Her congress with the spirit world goes unexpectedly well. Director Margot Bordelon choreographs the guffaw-eliciting nonsense with a light yet deft touch. On the surface, the sexual politics of “The Suffragette’s Murder” are lightweight. It’s a comedy, after all — though it plays differently this month than it did when it had its staged reading during the Denver Center’s Colorado New Play Summit two years back. Shenanigans buoy the politics of “The Suffragette’s Murder.” From left, Albert Mathew (Matthew Boston), Mrs. Adams (Linda Mugleston), Mr. Jennings (Curtis Wiley) and Mr. Orton (Gareth Saxe). (Jamie Kraus Photography, Provided by the Denver Center) In a nice feat, “The Suffragette’s Murder” refuses closure. One of the most durable alliances will be tested when a secret is revealed; others will become more solidly forged. “If you’re defeated by men today,” says Mrs. Adams, “let yourself be buoyed by women tomorrow.” In the upper hallway, Mr. Jennings offers a final “Woosh!” — his infectious expression of optimism. It’s a sweet exclamation, hopeful but also a little heartbreaking. And that, too, has to do with timing. IF YOU GO “The Suffragette’s Murder.” Written by Sandy Rustin. Directed by Margot Bordelon. Featuring Megan Hill, Gareth Saxe, Matthew Boston, Rowan Vickers, Linda Mugleston, Annie Abramczyek, Curtis Wiley and Kevin Isola. At Kilstrom Theatre in the Denver Center’s Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Through March 9. For tickets and info: denvercenter.org or 303-893-4100. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

The people in charge of administering a $200 million federal grant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings across the Denver region felt relief Wednesday after the Environmental Protection Agency reopened the portal that allows recipients to file receipts to be reimbursed for their work. After weeks of uncertainty and zero communication from the EPA, the portal opened Wednesday morning without notification — almost a month after President Donald Trump attempted to freeze federal spending. The Denver Regional Council of Governments quickly filed receipts for $120,000 it spent in January on its building decarbonization program, said Chris Selk, communications program manager for the council. “It’s on our list of things to do every day to log on and see if we can access it,” Selk said. “Today we struck gold. We have no idea if it’s temporary or permanent or what. It is frustrating and challenging for us to be put in this position.” The grant was one of several that are funneling about $640 million into Colorado for clean water, pollution reduction and reimbursement programs to encourage homeowners to electrify their houses and use solar panels. The EPA said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that funding was now accessible to all recipients of grants awarded through the Inflation Recovery Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Denver Regional Council of Governments’ experience illustrates how uncertainty and chaos have impacted projects that rely on federal funding since Trump issued a Jan. 27 memo to freeze all federal spending. It also shows how some of the president’s broad, abrupt orders are not holding up under judicial scrutiny and protest from the people they affect. Multiple states, including Colorado, filed a lawsuit almost immediately after Trump last month announced that all federal spending would be suspended by 3 p.m. the following day. A judge issued a temporary restraining order and then two days later, on Jan. 29, the federal Office of Management and Budget rescinded Trump’s order. Still, it took weeks for the financial spigot to be turned back on. The Denver Regional Council of Governments received the grant last year through the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction program, which was funded by the bipartisan 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The grant will help people living in a nine-county region to live in more efficient homes that are powered by electricity rather than natural gas. The grant would be used to develop policies to help reach net zero emissions for buildings, provide rebates and incentives for homeowners, especially those in low income communities, to retrofit their homes and to train workers to carry out the work, said Robert Spotts, the council’s building decarbonization program manager. The goal was to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions along the Front Range, which is in severe violation of federal air quality standards, and to help the state reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050, based on 2005 levels. So far, the regional council has spent about $500,000, but it is hiring more people to carry out the work, Spotts said. After the president’s order, communication from the EPA was cut off, he said. On Feb. 7, Gov. Jared Polis and Democratic U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet sent a letter to Russell Vaught, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget, imploring him to release more than $570 million in obligated funding that Colorado recipients could not access. State officials were trying to determine Wednesday how much of that had become accessible. Related Articles Politics | Castle Rock taps AI to plug underground water leaks — and prevent the loss of millions of gallons Politics | New Denver community center, with coffee shop and donation-based grocery store, aims to draw neighbors to Loretto Heights campus Politics | Colorado to start regulating emission of 5 air toxics that make people sick Politics | Nearly 18 years after Dick’s Sporting Goods Park was built, it still hasn’t done for Commerce City what Coors Field did for LoDo Politics | New law could finally address thousands of abandoned mines leaking pollution into Colorado water The EPA said portals for funding through the Inflation Recovery Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act started reopening on Feb. 11, one day after a federal judge found the White House was not following his order to release the money, and most were back online by Friday, according to an emailed statement from Taylor Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the EPA’s Region 8 office in Denver. Once receipts for expenditures connected to a grant are filed, it typically takes two days for the money to be sent, Spotts said. He and Selk are hopeful that is the case this time. “These executive orders the administration is putting forth do not leave a lot of room for nuance,” Selk said. “In truth, our grant is funding economic development in the region. It’s funding jobs. It’s funding innovation. And a reduction in greenhouse gases makes for better health for 60% of Colorado through this grant, including the one in 12 kids who have asthma in the region alone. “That’s what people need to be aware of when we talk about these funds being frozen.” Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Before Ken Rosenthal opened the bakery-cafe that would become Panera Bread, he was a businessman who didn’t know how to cook eggs. Panera Bread founder and Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal, 81, died on Feb. 14, 2025. (Courtesy of the Rosenthal family) “Everybody who had been in the bakery business and even some of his partners later on told him he was crazy,” his wife, Linda “Laya” Rosenthal told The Denver Post on Wednesday. “I told him, ‘We have nothing. If we lose everything, we still have nothing,'” she said, laughing. But Ken Rosenthal didn’t lose everything – he opened the St. Louis Bread Company in 1987 in Kirkwood, Missouri, which would eventually grow into Panera Bread, a fast-casual eatery with more than 2,000 locations across the United States, including 37 in Colorado. He remained involved in the company for more than 30 years. Rosenthal died at his Scottsdale, Arizona, home on Friday from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 81 years old. Rosenthal’s love for bread started in the 1980s, when his brother, Don Rosenthal, told him about a bustling bakery-cafe, Le Boulanger, that shared a building with his office in San Francisco. He temporarily moved to California and learned to bake from owner-manager Roger Brunello, who carried a sourdough starter on the plane with him to St. Louis before Ken Rosenthal opened his first store. While some people were surprised and skeptical about an entrepreneur opening a bakery, his family wasn’t. “He put his heart and soul into it and he loved it,” Laya Rosenthal said. “He believed in it, and I believed in him.” Despite opening on the day of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, the St. Louis Bread Company grew to 18 locations by the time Ken Rosenthal and his business partners sold it to Au Bon Pain in 1993. “What we were doing at the time in St. Louis, there was no competition,” Rosenthal’s longtime friend and business partner Doron Berger said. “That was part of the genius of Ken, because everyone tried to talk him out of doing it before he opened the first location, but nevertheless he pursued it.” Rosenthal consulted for the company for a few years before starting a franchise operation, Breads of the World, which would go on to open nearly 100 Panera stores in Colorado and Ohio, Berger said. Rosenthal remained active with the franchisee until it was sold in 2018. He and his wife moved to Cherry Creek in 2002 to be closer to their children and grandchildren and continue running Breads of the World, later moving to Greenwood Village. No matter what role he held in business, Rosenthal’s humility, generosity and kindness remained constant, according to his friends and family. While he wasn’t one to talk about his own success, Rosenthal’s son-in-law Craig Flom remembers walking down the hall with him before a corporate Panera meeting and seeing people staring and whispering as they passed by, with some walking up to him to thank him. “Just watching their eyes when they talked to him — it was amazing and something I took away from it was his impact on so many people,” Flom said. Rosenthal was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 11, 1943, to Adis and Herman Rosenthal. He attended University High School before jumping into business, starting multiple ventures before turning to the culinary world. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Laya Rosenthal; four children; 13 grandchildren and his brother. Services were held Monday at Aish of the Rockies in Greenwood Village. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Castle Rock Water lost 166 million gallons of the stuff in 2023, as the life-giving liquid silently escaped from pipes, fittings and valves across the town’s 517-mile water system — mostly underground and largely undetected. Losses in one recent year leaped as high as 240 million gallons — or 737 acre-feet, enough to supply roughly 1,000 families with water for a year. The leakage costs the town anywhere from $400,000 to $650,000 in annual revenues. “It’s called non-revenue water — it’s water we produce but we don’t get to charge the customer for it,” said Mark Marlowe, director of Castle Rock Water. More importantly, it’s a waste of a vital resource that communities in Colorado can ill-afford to lose, as the climate warms and the American West dries. To stem its losses, Castle Rock will launch a six-month pilot program next month with a Canada-based firm specializing in artificial intelligence technology. It’s designed to detect leaks in municipal water systems early and often, making a fix easier and cheaper than having to assemble a team in the middle of the night to tackle a busted main. The Douglas County town of 81,000 uses approximately 3.2 billion gallons of water a year. “Emergencies never happen at noon on a Wednesday — they happen at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve,” Marlowe said. “You have to go in and fix it proactively, before it becomes a bigger leak and surfaces.” The $90,000 pilot will place “acoustical loggers” in eight fire hydrants throughout the town’s Cobblestone Ranch neighborhood. Digital Water Solutions’ president, Tim Sutherns, said the company’s equipment will “actually listen to the water,” detecting and collecting the particular sounds the flowing water produces as it courses through the system — or out of it. It’s a more precise approach than what many leak detection systems use today, Sutherns said — listening to the pipes themselves for vibrations and acoustical signals that might indicate a crack or split. “PVC pipe is challenging for leak detection, because it doesn’t resonate,” he said. Digital Water Solutions’ embedded loggers, called “hydrant.AI” devices, measure pressure, acoustics and water temperature from inside the water column and continuously monitor for aberrations that could signal a problem. Those data points are collected and sent via cellular connection to the company’s cloud servers. “When there’s a leak in the pipes, there are certain frequencies created,” Sutherns said. “There’s a different noise when water is exiting a pipe than when it is flowing through the pipe.” The company’s artificial intelligence prowess then kicks in. “That is where we apply our machine learning to it,” he said. The 7-year-old company, which has installed its equipment in 40 municipalities across the United States, Canada and Iceland, has amassed enough data to create powerful AI models that can quickly identify problems deep underground. “Over time, that grows,” Sutherns said. “And the accuracy of the models increase.” Pipes attached to granular activated carbon filters inside Plum Creek Water Purification Facility in Castle Rock, Colorado, on Wednesday, August 16, 2023. The filters remove PFAS and other chemicals in the water. The facility started testing in 2021 for PFAS on a regular basis. (Rebecca Slezak/Special to The Denver Post) Artificial intelligence, a technology that has received gobs of attention in recent years, is a particularly valuable and effective tool for the water utility sector, Gigi Karmous-Edwards said. She runs her own consultancy and was one of 26 experts who worked on the American Water Works Association’s Water 2050 Technology Think Tank. That’s largely due to the fact that the infrastructure for water systems exists mostly underground, she said. Down there, visibility is compromised and small problems can gradually become big problems that only become apparent when they surface. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the country’s drinking water infrastructure consists of 2.2 million miles of underground pipes, many of which are aging and undermaintained. There is a water main break every 2 minutes in the United States, with an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water lost each day, according to the organization’s most recent infrastructure report. Last May, a break in a 32-inch water main in downtown Atlanta brought the city to crawl and triggered boil water advisories across the Georgia capital. And on Friday, a similar failure in the northern suburbs of Chicago caused significant flooding and trapped cars, forcing residents to navigate frigid water and ice to get to safety. Some of those calamities could be averted if water utilities catch wear and tear on the system early, Karmous-Edwards said. “When you put this technology in play, you start pulling together the story of what’s going on underground,” she said. “The more knowledge you get from sensors and the combination of different data sets and modeling capabilities, the faster you get early detection.” It’s not clear how widespread the use of AI is in municipal water systems. Digital Water Solutions’ Sutherns said Castle Rock is his company’s first Colorado customer. But just last week, Farmington, New Mexico, started using technology from FIDO Tech, a U.K.-based company, to help detect leaks across 200 or so miles of its water delivery system over the next decade. Related Articles Environment | Seven states’ Colorado River negotiators, all at same conference, didn’t meet together: “Tensions are extremely high” Environment | Water vs. growth: Colorado communities, developers struggle to juggle both Environment | A second metro Denver town clamps down on lawns amid drought: “Water’s on everyone’s mind” The city hopes it creates some relief for water users within the oversubscribed Colorado River Basin. “The only way out of these situations is through digital technologies,” Karmous-Edwards said. But how digital should Castle Rock go? Last May, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned that cyberattacks against water utilities across the country were becoming more frequent and more severe. The agency found that roughly 70% of utilities inspected by federal officials over the previous year violated standards meant to prevent breaches or other intrusions. Recent cyberattacks by groups affiliated with Russia and Iran have targeted smaller communities, the agency warned. Sutherns, with Digital Water Solutions, said any intrusion threats won’t come from his company’s end. The data it sends wirelessly from the hydrants to the cloud is fully encrypted. And the company’s technology is not integrated with Castle Rock’s water delivery operations. The town will notate any reductions in water loss over the next six months and decide whether to expand the contract. Mayor Jason Gray, who serves as the Town Council’s liaison to the Castle Rock Water Commission, said the new technology will “monitor the system twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” “This is a pilot that will help determine just how effective this will be,” he said. “It is worth a small investment to see how much the technology can improve the leak detection work Castle Rock Water already does.” Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

LONDON — Smartphones are useful tools for everyday life, but they’re privy to nearly everything about you, including all the places you’ve been — if you let them. When you use a map app to find the new restaurant your friend recommended, or your phone’s browser to check the price of something you saw while window shopping, you could be unwittingly allowing your phone to track your location and share that information with others. Phones use various signals to find your location, including cell tower pings, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth and GPS. Sometimes your phone needs to know your location to provide a useful service, like telling the Uber driver where to pick you up. But in other cases, there’s little justification for tracking your whereabouts, which then can be exploited by apps, ad services or even hackers. “From fitness tracking to navigation, every location ping potentially reveals details about our routines and movements – which could be risky in the wrong hands,” said Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security. “Users should turn on location tracking only when necessary, such as during navigation, emergencies or sharing updates with trusted contacts, and disable it immediately afterward.” Experts warn location data could be used to track people who visit abortion clinics. Or “a disgruntled ex could use location sharing to stalk someone, or a current, abusive partner could force you into location sharing as a means of control,” said David Ruiz, senior privacy advocate at cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. Here are some tips to make sure location tracking is kept to a minimum: App permissions Head to your phone’s control panel to check permissions. iPhone users can go to the Privacy & Security tab, and then to Location Services to check settings for individual apps. It’s not a good idea to let apps always use your location in the background, according to cybersecurity experts. Instead, get the app to either ask first before using your location, use it only while you’ve got the app open, or even never let it use your location. While you’re in Location Services, you might notice little arrows that indicate which apps have used your location. Purple means recently, while grey indicates the past 24 hours. It’s a little different for Android phones because there are so many different versions by various device manufacturers. In general, go to settings, and then tap the Location icon, which lets you turn it on or off for all apps. To tweak settings for individual apps, tap App location permissions, where you’ll get choices similar to those in iOS. iPhone privacy Apple has other tools to cut down on third-party tracking that might include location information. On the iPhone’s Privacy & Security setting, under the Tracking tab, there’s a toggle to Allow Apps to Request to Track. With this switched off, any new app requests will be automatically denied and they will also be stopped from accessing your phone’s ad identifier. Advertising ID Privacy experts recommend blocking your Google or Apple device’s in-house ad identifier, which enables third-party tracking on most devices for better ad targeting. On iPhones, go to the Privacy setting then scroll down to Apple Advertising, and then switch off Personalized Ads. On newer Android phones, go to the Privacy setting, then to Ads, where you can tap Delete Advertising ID. Pinpoint or general Whether you use Android or iOS, they both have settings to allow precisely pinpointing your location by combining wireless signals with data from onboard sensors such as the gyroscope, accelerometer and barometer. This helps to estimate the phone’s position if, for example, you’re inside a building blocking a GPS signal. One reason to use this function is to show someone you’re meeting exactly where you are. Google says its signals are randomized so they can’t be associated with a specific person or account. In any case, you might not want every app to know this, so you can tell your phone to only share its general location. On Android phones, turn off the Location Accuracy setting for all apps. On iPhones, switch it on or off for individual apps. Your Google account Along with app permissions for your device, it’s also a good idea to check your Google account. Google was forced to be more transparent about its location tracking practices after a 2018 Associated Press story that found the company continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history.” Go to myaccount.google.com and then to the Data & Privacy section, where you’ll find the Location History controls. Under recent changes, the history will be deleted after three months, though you can change that default setting. Browsers Popular smartphone web browsers like Safari or Chrome could give away your location, so try using one that that doesn’t store information about you, like DuckDuckGo, Firefox Focus or Ecosia. If a privacy-focused browser needs to access your location through your IP address, they will ask first. It will also let you easily delete your cookies and other web browsing data. Find my device Phones or tablets can also be tracked with Apple’s Find My or Google’s Find My Device features for recovering lost devices. You can turn this feature off if you think someone has gained access to your Apple or Google account. Block the signal Some cybersecurity websites recommend using airplane mode, but it doesn’t always shut off all signals so you shouldn’t rely on it. A signal-blocking Faraday pouch would be a better bet, but be sure to test it to make sure it’s actually jamming all signals. And, keep in mind, you’ll need to take the device out of the bag to use it. Tradeoffs There are so many possible ways for smartphones — and other devices like smartwatches — to track our location that it’s hard to provide an exhaustive checklist. Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | Demolition planned as Wash Park church sells for $4M Our default relationship with apps, companies, and platforms is for them to track us, “which absolutely makes it harder for us to scrutinize all the channels through which our data is being sent,” said Ruiz. “The unfortunate truth is that, to shut everything down, we have to go into our device settings and check each app, line by line, and make individual decisions for how those apps collect our location data,” said Ruiz. “It’s either that, or turn off all location data entirely,” which could result in inconveniences like having to manually enter your address on ride-hailing apps, or not getting live directions from mapping apps, he said. ___ 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. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

SAN FRANCISCO — In 2020, Uber was at a crossroads: The company had made an expensive bet on robot taxis, but the project was laden with legal problems and burning through cash. So Uber gave it away to another startup. But five years later, Uber’s future seems as tied to autonomous vehicles as ever. The company is now betting that it can embrace driverless taxis without spending money to build them — at the risk of being overtaken by the companies that do. In recent months, Uber has doubled down on what it calls its “platform strategy,” teaming up with robot taxi companies like Waymo. In Phoenix, riders can order a Waymo car through the Uber app, and in Austin, Texas, Waymo’s robot taxis will soon don the Uber logo. The ride-hailing giant now has 15 autonomous vehicle partnerships, from Waymo to international companies like WeRide and autonomous food delivery services like Avride. But those partners are also competitors. In December, when Waymo said it was expanding into Miami without an Uber partnership, Uber’s stock tumbled 9%. And Waymo’s expansion is far from over: Last month, the company announced that it would test its vehicles in 10 new cities this year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last week that his company would have self-driving taxis on the roads of Austin in June. He has made similar predictions for years about when Tesla vehicles would be able to drive themselves, but industry insiders say it is most likely only a matter of time before his company makes good on his promise. For Uber, the question is whether it will ride on or get run over by the driverless taxi expansion. “No one is exactly sure who’s going to be the winning technology,” said Tom White, a senior research analyst with the financial firm D.A. Davidson. “So everyone is keeping their potential enemies close.” On Wednesday morning, Uber said that in its most recent quarter, its gross bookings, an important measure of the company’s business, grew 18% from a year earlier, which was higher than Wall Street investors had expected. Uber’s revenue increased 20% to $12 billion, also higher than Wall Street expectations. Uber also beat expectations for net income thanks to $7 billion in tax benefits. Wall Street analysts asked Uber executives about its vision for the robot taxi market in a phone conference Wednesday morning. “The first markets that are going to be penetrated are going to depend on regulation,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said. “I think in the next five years, the addressable market is going to be probably in the order of 10 to 15% of the overall marketplace.” In the 2010s, the hype around autonomous vehicles “probably ran ahead of the technology,” Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s senior vice president of mobility, said in an interview. “Now that’s starting to flip.” It is hard to tell if Waymo has cut into Uber’s business, including in cities like San Francisco, where Waymo’s cars can fairly be described as a mainstream transportation option. (Khosrowshahi has said robot taxis have not affected demand for Ubers.) Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location Lyft, Uber’s top rival, has taken a similar approach to robot taxis, announcing three autonomous partnerships of its own since November, with more in the works. The value of robot taxis to Uber and Lyft is clear: Human labor is one of their largest costs. The companies also envision a future when people will buy driverless cars to use as personal vehicles and, in off hours, rent them to ride-hailing networks, said Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s head of driver experience. But for now, robot taxis are more costly than they are profitable and require an enormous amount of capital to develop. After General Motors, the owner of Cruise, bowed out of the robot taxi competition in December, the club of companies funding the race for autonomy essentially shrank to two: Alphabet, the parent company of Waymo and Google, and Amazon, the parent of Zoox. Riders in Atlanta and Austin can soon order a Waymo through Uber’s app, as those in Phoenix can. In those two cities, Uber will also provide fleet management services like cleaning and charging. The company takes a portion of the revenue from each ride, likely between 10% and 20%, according to analyst estimates. (Macdonald declined to provide financial details of the partnership but said they would evolve over time.) The increased supply of vehicles on the Uber and Lyft apps also shortens waits and lowers costs for riders. And both companies already operate fleet management businesses, so taking over those services for a partner like Waymo is convenient, Macdonald and Bird said. For consumers, having robot taxi rides on an app like Uber or Lyft is a draw in itself. “That’s the biggest benefit for us,” Bird said. “Just diversifying the types of options that riders have on the platform.” But the value of an Uber partnership for Waymo becomes less clear in a city like San Francisco, where the demand for Waymos already exceeds the supply. Melissa Covarrubias, a lawyer in Phoenix, now exclusively takes Waymo as a ride-hailing option, feeling safer and more comfortable after negative experiences with Uber and Lyft drivers, she said. “And the interior of the Waymo is so nice and luxurious, and you can select your own music,” she added. Sean Campbell, also a lawyer in Phoenix, said Waymo had become his ride-hailing choice around 35% of the time, especially when going to work. But he uses Lyft to get to events like sports games or concerts, where Waymo would have to navigate large crowds. “But for a night out, I always take Waymo,” Campbell said. “The thing with Waymo, beyond the technology: It’s just fun.” Uber’s relationship with Google, before Waymo was spun off, had tumultuous beginnings. In 2016, Anthony Levandowski, a top Google engineer, left the company and later became an executive at Uber. In 2020, he was convicted of stealing Google’s trade secrets, among other legal disputes between the two companies. But Khosrowshahi, who took over as Uber’s CEO in 2017, mended the relationship. In 2020, he handed off Uber’s autonomous research division to the startup Aurora, in which Uber then invested $400 million. “First we had to make peace with them and settle in court, et cetera,” Khosrowshahi told The New York Times on a recent podcast. “And then over a period of time,” he added, “we built relationships.” In response to questions about its partnership with Uber, a Waymo spokesperson provided a statement from the company’s blog post announcing the expansion to Atlanta and Austin. Uber’s earnings calls have become a regular forum for analysts to pepper Khosrowshahi with questions about his autonomous strategy. While most analysts believe the company is on a promising track with its partnerships, the robot taxis present a big “risk or opportunity for Uber,” said Nikhil Devnani, an analyst at Bernstein. “I think the market is still trying to figure out which outcome it’s going to be.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 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Boulder County nonprofit Colorado Horse Rescue is celebrating a new chapter with the expansion of its app, HorseAlert. HorseAlert was developed by Colorado Horse Rescue to help horse owners transport their animals to safety during natural disasters. Modeled after rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, HorseAlert notifies volunteer trailer drivers of nearby horses who need to be evacuated during dangerous situations. While the free app has been active in Colorado since April of last year, the Colorado Horse Rescue team recently identified a new need the app could address. Last week, the nonprofit rolled out the app in California in response to the wildfires consuming the Los Angeles area. Colorado Horse Rescue CEO, Katherine Gregory, greets Corazon on Wednesday. (Cliff Grassmick/Staff Photographer) “There were folks that we know in California (that said), ‘How hard would it be for you to get HorseAlert here?’ We wanted to offer it as a tool because it’s something that we have here,” said Katherine Gregory, chief executive officer of Colorado Horse Rescue. “We’re just grateful we can provide this for people.” As of Wednesday, 26 horses and two drivers had been registered in California. In the week since the app rolled out in the state, Colorado Horse Rescue has worked with social media influencers and horse sites to spread the word about HorseAlert. HorseAlert was developed by Gregory and the Colorado Horse Rescue team to provide an alternative to coordinating horse evacuations through Facebook groups. Due to the rapid pace of natural disasters, posts on Facebook can become outdated quickly. The influx of trucks and trailers trying to help can also block the roads for evacuees and first responders. “It’s chaotic,” Gregory said. “There’s no organization. People show up with the wrong equipment. Or, people show up with enough equipment to move 80 horses and they only need to move 20.” Last summer, HorseAlert was used to evacuate horses during the Stone Canyon and Alexander Mountain fires. According to Gregory, one driver was connected with a horse owner needing an animal evacuation within five minutes of opening the app. “It was so beautifully used,” Gregory said. “We were all on it, watching it. It was pretty cool to see horses getting delivered safely to places.” In Colorado, HorseAlert has over 2,150 registered horses and over 400 volunteer drivers. Noelle, left, and Everest, peer across the fence on Jan. 22, 2025. (Cliff Grassmick/Staff Photographer) Gregory said other states have asked to gain access to HorseAlert, as well. The problem, she said, is making sure there are enough drivers signed up in those states. “It’s a community-powered system,” Gregory said. “So, unless there are drivers signed up, it’s not going to work.” Cait Wilson, a member of the placement team at Colorado Horse Rescue, said she thinks HorseAlert will be on “every horse person’s phone” at some point. “I could see it having a usefulness outside of a disaster situation because people are looking for transport all the time,” Wilson said of the app. “I think our industry is collaborative enough and wants to be supportive of other horse people. For me, whether I have a horse or I have a vehicle, that’s something I would be interested in being a part of.” Related Articles Technology | Colorado lawmakers eye church-owned land for new housing in latest land-use reform pitch Technology | Arvada Chamber of Commerce gets a new name for its 100th anniversary Technology | CU, CSU instruct researchers to resume federally funded projects — including DEI work — after Trump’s directive blocked Technology | New law could finally address thousands of abandoned mines leaking pollution into Colorado water Technology | We Don’t Waste continues to grow. So does the need to help people who are food-insecure. Since its founding in 1986, Colorado Horse Rescue’s mission has been to give horses the chance to lead happy, healthy lives. Horses come to the nonprofit from around the country, and the rescue works to find caring adopters. The 50-acre property, located at 10386 N. 65th St. west of Longmont, has 60 horses plus a waitlist. Horses come from owners who might be struggling with financial or health issues. In some cases, the animals were mistreated and have found a sanctuary at the rescue. “It’s a wonderful place of hope for these guys,” Gregory said. “They’re safe now, and they’ll be here until they find their right person.” To learn more about HorseAlert, visit horsealert.org. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

By JAMES POLLARD MONTREAL — Peeps trickle out of a soundproof chamber as its door opens. Female zebra finches are chattering away inside the microphone-lined box. The laboratory room sounds like a chorus of squeaky toys. “They’re probably talking about us a little bit,” says McGill University postdoctoral fellow Logan James. It’s unclear, of course, what they are saying. But James believes he is getting closer to deciphering their vocalizations through a partnership with the Earth Species Project. The nonprofit laboratory has drawn some of the technology industry’s wealthiest philanthropists — and they want to see more than just scientific progress. On top of breakthroughs in animal language, they expect improved interspecies understanding will foster greater appreciation for the planet in the face of climate change. The Earth Species Project hopes to decode other creatures’ communications with its pioneering artificial intelligence tools. The goal is not to build a “translator that will allow us to speak to other species,” Director of Impact Jane Lawton said. However, she added, “rudimentary dictionaries” for other animals are not only possible but could help craft better conservation strategies and reconnect humanity with often forgotten ecosystems. “We believe that by reminding people of the beauty, the sophistication, the intelligence that is resident in other species and in nature as a whole, we can start to, kind of, almost repair that relationship,” Lawton said. At McGill University, the technology generates specific calls during simulated conversations with live finches that help researchers isolate each unique noise. The computer processes calls in real time and responds with one of its own. Those recordings are then used to train the Berkeley, California-based research group’s audio language model for animal sounds. New insights into how animals communicate This ad hoc collaboration is only a glimpse into what ESP says will come. By 2030, Lawton said, it expects “really interesting insights into how other animals communicate.” Artificial intelligence advancements are expediting the research. New grants totaling $17 million will help hire engineers and at least double the size of the research team, which currently has roughly seven members. Over the next two years, Lawton said, the nonprofit’s researchers will select species that “might actually shift something” in people’s relationship with nature. Standing to benefit are animal groups threatened by habitat loss or human activity that could be better protected with better understandings of their languages. Existing collaborations aim to document the vocal repertoires — the distinct calls and their different contexts — of the Hawaiian crow and St. Lawrence River beluga whales. After spending more than two decades extinct in the wild, the crows have been reintroduced to their home of Maui. But some conservationists fear that critical vocabulary has faded in captivity. Lawton said the birds might need to relearn some “words” before they reenter their natural habitat in droves. In Canada’s St. Lawrence River, where shipping traffic imperils the marine mammals who feed there, the group’s scientists are exploring whether machine learning can categorize unlabeled calls from the remaining belugas. Perhaps, Lawton suggested, authorities could alert nearby vessels if they understood that certain sounds signaled the whales were about to surface. Big donors include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, the family charity founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation. The latter aims to support “bottom-up” solutions to the “climate emergency.” At the root of that crisis, according to Waverley Street Foundation President Jared Blumenfeld, is the idea that humans deserve “dominion” over the world. Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location Blumenfeld finds that ESP’s work is an important reminder that we are instead stewards of the planet. “This is not a silver bullet,” he said. “But it’s certainly part of a suite of things that can help transform how we view ourselves in relation to nature.” ‘Exponential takeoff’ in processing calls Gail Patricelli — an unaffiliated animal behavior professor at the University of California, Davis — remembers when such tools were just “pie in the sky.” Researchers previously spent months laboring to manually comb through terabytes of recordings and annotate calls. She said she’s seen an “exponential takeoff” the past few years in bioacoustics’ use of machine learning to accelerate that process. While she finds that ESP has the promise to make finer distinctions in existing “dictionaries,” especially for harder-to-reach species, she cautioned observers against attributing human characteristics to these animals. Considering this research’s high equipment and labor costs, Patricelli said she’s happy to see big philanthropists backing it. But she said the field shouldn’t rely too much on one funding source. Government support is still necessary, she noted, because ecosystem protection also requires that conservationists examine “unsexy” species that she expects get less attention than more charismatic ones. She also encouraged funders to consult scientists. “There’s a lot to learn and it’s very expensive,” she said. “That might not be a big deal to some of these donors but it’s very hard to come up with the money to do this.” The current work largely involves developing baseline technologies to do all this. A separate initiative has recently described the basic elements of how sperm whales might talk. But ESP is trying to be “species agnostic,” AI Research Director Olivier Pietquin said, to provide tools that can sort out many animals’ speech patterns. ESP introduced NatureLM-audio this fall, touting the system as the first large audio-language model fit for animals. The tool can identify species and distinguish characteristics such as sex or stage of life. When applied to a population — zebra finches — it had not been trained on, NatureLM-audio accurately counted the number of birds at a rate higher than random chance, according to ESP. The results were a positive sign for Pietquin that NatureLM might be able to scale across species. “That is only possible with a lot of computing, a lot of data and many, many collaborations with ecologists and biologists,” he said. “That, I think, makes us, makes it, quite serious.” AI lets scientists see far more ESP acknowledges that it isn’t sure what will be discovered about animal communications and won’t know when its model gets it absolutely right. But the team likens AI to the microscope: advancements that allowed scientists to see far more than previously considered possible. Zebra finches are highly social animals with large call repertoires. Whether congregating in pairs or by the hundreds, they produce hours of data — a help to the nonprofit’s AI scientists given that animal sounds aren’t as abundant as the pages of internet text scraped to train chatbots. James, an affiliated researcher with the Earth Species Project, struggles with the concept of decoding animal communications. Sure, he can clearly distinguish when a chick is screaming for food. But he doesn’t expect to ever translate that call or any others into a human word. Still, he wonders if he can gather more hints about their interactions from aspects of the call such as its pitch or duration. “So can we find a link between a form and function is sort of our way of maybe thinking about decoding,” James said. “As she elongates her call, is that because she’s trying harder to elicit a response?” ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Still looking for a New Year’s resolution for self-improvement? Consider keeping a journal, which studies have shown might help with one’s mental well-being and anxiety issues while also providing a creative outlet for personal expression. Handsome paper-based diaries and notebooks are available if you want to go the screen-free, sensory route, but if you prefer a more multimedia approach to journaling, wake up your phone. Free apps that come with Apple’s iOS software and Google’s Android system allow you to add photos, audio clips and more to corral your thoughts — and set up electronic reminders to write regularly. Here’s an overview. Getting started Keeping a digital diary requires a few basic steps: picking an app, writing an entry and adding new posts on a regular basis. And don’t let the fear of typing long, contemplative dispatches on a small screen dissuade you. Just dictate your thoughts to your iPhone or Android phone with its transcription tools, although check its privacy policy if you’re nervous about your data. Using Apple’s Journal Apple released its Journal app in December 2023 and added new features last year in its iOS 18 update, including the ability to print entries. (The app is not yet available for the iPad.) To set it up, just find the Journal icon on your home screen or in the App Library, open it and follow the on-screen instructions. To compose a journal entry, tap the plus icon (+) at the bottom of the screen and select the New Entry button at the top of the next screen or under a suggested topic. Go to the text field to title your entry and start writing — or tap the microphone icon at the bottom corner of the keyboard to dictate. In the row of icons above the keyboard, you can format the text with bold, italic or other styles; get more topic suggestions; add photos from the library or the camera; add an audio recording; and note your location. You can describe your current mood with the State of Mind screen, which can be shared with the Health app (if you allow it). With your permission, the app shows you a list of topic suggestions drawn from your photos, locations and activities. You can turn off the suggestions by opening the iPhone’s Settings icon, selecting Apps, choosing Journal and tapping the button next to Skip Journaling Suggestions. While you’re in the Journal settings, you can set other controls, like requiring Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode to unlock it or backing up your entries online to iCloud. You can also set up a schedule for journaling and enable notifications nudging you to write. You can bookmark and edit your compositions by tapping the three-dot menu icon in each entry’s lower-right corner. The Journal app has a search function for looking up older entries if you don’t feel like scrolling back in time. Using Google Keep Google has yet to release a similar dedicated journaling app, but its 12-year-old Google Keep can do the job, organizing notes, audio clips, webpages, photos and drawings. To use it, you need a Google account and the Keep app. The app is available for Android and iOS (including the iPad), and Keep content is backed up online, where it can be viewed in a web browser. Once you’ve installed the Keep app, open it and tap the plus button (+) in the bottom-right corner to start an entry. Using the icons at the bottom of the text-entry screen allows you to do things like add a photo or give the entry a background color. Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location Creating and adding a “journal” label filters your posts from other notes or lists you may use within the app. And while Keep, unlike Apple’s Journal, can’t pepper you with suggestions, you can ask Google’s Gemini or your favorite artificial intelligence assistant for topic ideas. Other options Samsung Galaxy users have the Samsung Notes app as another diary option, and keeping a journal on one of the company’s pen-based tablets re-creates the pen-to-paper vibe for the electronic age. If you want a journal app with additional features (like automatically adding the day’s weather conditions), you have plenty of other choices, but you’ll probably need to pay for the premium product. Among the many apps that work on most platforms are Day One (about $3 a month), Diarium ($10 to buy) and the ambitious, AI-powered Reflectary (about $7 a month). Journal apps make it easier to write about your life without the performative aspect of social media. And paying less attention to what everyone else is doing gives you more time to spend on yourself. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas’ Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom have little in common ideologically, but the two have both been vocal supporters of an idea that’s been rapidly gaining bipartisan ground in the states: Students’ cellphones need to be banned during the school day. At least eight states have enacted such bans over the past two years, and proposals are being considered in several more states this year. Here is a look at the push by states for such bans. Why are states banning cellphones at schools? The push for cellphone bans has been driven by concerns about the impact screen time has on children’s mental health and complaints from teachers that cellphones have become a constant distraction in the classroom. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who has called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms about their effects on young people’s lives, has said schools need to provide phone-free times. Nationally, 77% of U.S. schools say they prohibit cellphones at school for non-academic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But that number is misleading. It does not mean students are following those bans or all those schools are enforcing them. Kim Whitman, co-founder of the Phone Free Schools Movement, said the issue is catching on because parents and teachers in both red and blue states are struggling with the consequences of kids on mobile devices. “It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or a rural town, urban or suburban, all children are struggling and need that seven-hour break from the pressures of phones and social media during the school day,” she said. What states are enacting bans? At least eight states — California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia — have enacted measures banning or restricting students’ use of cellphones in schools. The policies range widely. Florida was the first state to crack down on phones in school, passing a 2023 law that requires all public schools to ban cellphone use during class time and block access to social media on district Wi-Fi. A 2024 California law requires the state’s nearly 1,000 school districts to create their own cellphone policies by July 2026. Several other states haven’t banned phones, but have encouraged school districts to enact such restrictions or have provided funding to store phones during the day. Sanders announced a pilot program last year providing grants to schools that adopt phone-free policies, and more than 100 school districts signed on. Sanders said she now wants to require all districts to ban cell phones during the school day, but the proposal will leave it to the districts on how to craft the policy. “Teachers know (cellphones are) a huge distraction, but much bigger than that is that it is impacting the mental health of so many of our students,” Sanders told reporters on Thursday. Other governors recently calling for bans include Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who was sworn in this month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has suggested she’ll seek a statewide policy, but has not offered specifics. What is the opposition to the bans? The cellphone bans have faced opposition from some parents who say they need to be able to contact their children directly in case of emergency. Some parents have pointed to recent school shootings where having access to cellphones was the only way some students were able to communicate with loved ones for what they thought might be the last time. But supporters of the bans have noted that students’ phones could pose additional dangers during an emergency by distracting students or by revealing their location during an active shooter situation. Parents opposed to the ban have also said they want their children to have access to their phones for other needs, such as coordinating transportation. Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said she agrees about the dangers of social media on children but that the bans sought by states are taking too broad of an approach. Banning the devices during the school day is not going to solve underlying issues like bullying or the dangers of social media, she said. “We have not done our job as grown-ups to try to teach our kids the skills they need to actually navigate this technology,” she said. “We’ve just kicked the can down the road and thrown them into the deep end of the pool when they’re by themselves after school.” ___ Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut, Margery Beck, Holly Ramer and Anthony Izaguire contributed to this report. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LAS VEGAS — Like soccer players taking the field in a giant stadium, the 12 finalists ran through a glowing “hype tunnel,” some wearing jerseys with sponsorship logos. As an announcer bellowed introductions and cameras captured their every move, they approached a neon-lit stage to raucous cheers. Then the men sat down at desktop computers, opened their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and began to type. Excel, a program that does complex math on a human’s behalf, is often associated, rightly, with corporate drudgery. But last month, in a Las Vegas esports arena that typically hosts Fortnite and League of Legends tournaments, finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream. Organizers call the event the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “Yes, it is a thing,” the official website says. At stake was a $5,000 prize, a wrestling-style championship belt and the title of world’s best spreadsheeter. But the organizer, Andrew Grigolyunovich, is dreaming bigger. He hopes to turn competitive Excel into a popular esport where pros compete for million-dollar prizes and big-league glory. “Excel was always thought of as a back-office product,” said Grigolyunovich, a Sudoku champion from Latvia. But in Vegas, “these people who are working, I don’t want to say boring jobs — but, you know, regular jobs — they could become stars.” If that seems too ambitious, we’d like to introduce you to Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco, who watched the action from the front row. “This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” Oehm said. “If Excel is the center of your universe, this is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.” The “LeBron James of Excel,” as he was introduced in Vegas, was Diarmuid Early, 39, an Irish financial consultant who lives in New York, who entered the arena in jeans, sandals and a jersey patterned to resemble abdominal muscles. The Kobe Bryant was Andrew Ngai, 37, a soft-spoken actuary from Australia known as the Annihilator, who began the world championship as its reigning three-time champion. “We’re friends — for now,” Early joked as they posed for a photo. But his anxiety was palpable. “I probably take it too seriously,” he said. “I’m very invested in it.” Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs. If that sounds unfathomably complicated, it was: The players were handed a seven-page instruction booklet. To prepare, Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of “focus music.” After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — “Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!” — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: “=CountChar(Lower(D5),”W”)” allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter “W” appeared in a spreadsheet. The aim was to score as many points as possible while staying ahead of rolling eliminations. As cascading answers filled Excel columns, Ngai took a significant lead, to audible gasps. Then he got stuck on a problem, as did Early. Jarman pulled ahead as the two front-runners frantically tried to troubleshoot. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Oehm chanted. “Well, this is ridiculous” The first electronic spreadsheet was VisiCalc, an “electronic blackboard” that automated pen-and-paper calculations. Microsoft introduced Excel in 1985. The company says its suite of office software, which includes Excel, has more than 400 million users. (Google has said that more than 3 billion people use its free suite of products, including Gmail and a spreadsheet program called Sheets.) Part of the appeal, and the intimidation factor, of spreadsheets is their undefined scope. Excel can be a dating organizer or a tool for collating a country’s coronavirus caseload, for example. Speaking in almost philosophical terms, Bob Frankston, a founder of VisiCalc, said that people who treat Excel merely as a finance tool ignore its vast potential. “They don’t realize it’s a mirror” of their minds, he said. “The financial planning tool they’re seeing is in their head.” But for millions of people, it’s still just a tool for accomplishing the tasks their corporate overseers assign to them. It may say something about our times that the instruments of our servitude are also the basis of our games. The first Excel competition, ModelOff, started in 2012. But ModelOff, which featured financial problems that took hours to solve, was not designed with thrills in mind. When ModelOff was discontinued after seven years, Grigolyunovich, a former competitor, created the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization that runs the Excel championship and other events. The championship — which has several corporate sponsors, including Microsoft — was held in person for the first time last year. He said its shortened rounds, eliminations, commentators and pregame “hype tunnel” were designed to raise tension and lure spectators. “I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant who lives in Toronto, said of the tunnel. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other esports do it, we should, too.” Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner. For now, many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN’s annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships. Reluctant rivals The competitors in Vegas said winning requires not just Excel-know how, but also problem-solving acumen, composure under pressure and intuition — or luck. Add the frisson of a live audience, they say, and the competition starts to resemble a sport in its unpredictability, if not physicality. They seemed less interested in Grigolyunovich’s visions of fame and fortune, and more focused on adjusting to the transformation of their staid, niche hobby into a televised spectacle. Mostly they had come to geek out with fellow Excel buffs. Between rounds, they attended spreadsheeting workshops and added each other on LinkedIn. More rivalries could help to build some excitement, several contestants said — but they were too polite, and on too friendly terms with one another, to initiate any. “Basically everything that they do to make it more fun for viewers makes it more traumatic for competitors,” Early said. There was a bit of celebrity stardust in the air, though, as Early and Ngai, the LeBron and Kobe of Excel, fielded a stream of selfie requests. “This guy is amazing,” one quarterfinalist, Joy Hezekiah Andriamalala, a finance student from Madagascar, said to a reporter after snapping a photo with Ngai. “Do you know him? Personally?” Ngai, who appeared resigned to the possibility of losing his championship streak, admitted that being a minor celebrity for a few days was “pretty cool.” He said he had started to treat competitive Excel more like a sport than a hobby, setting aside more time to practice. Onstage, the front-runners tried to prevent Jarman from running away with the championship belt. Early won a semifinal round by turning screens of mazes made of colored cells and emoji into numbers. In the finals, Ngai tried a Hail Mary: filling his remaining cells with random numbers. As the clock ticked down to zero, Jarman turned to stare at the leaderboard. “Ten seconds, is anything going to happen?” a commentator, Oz du Soleil, shouted. Nothing did. Jarman leaped out of his seat and threw his hands in the air, his face gleaming with sweat. The audience erupted. “Look at that! Look at that!” du Soleil yelled. Jarman held the championship belt aloft as someone dumped glitter on his head. Oehm let out a breath he had been holding. “You’d never see this with Google Sheets,” he said. “You’d never get this level of passion.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

With the strides Colorado has made in adopting electric vehicles, state officials believe it’s “full speed ahead” on realizing state goals even if federal incentives are rolled back. Colorado edged out California in the third quarter of 2024 to take the nation’s top spot for market share of new electric vehicles. A report said electric vehicles made up 25.3% of new vehicles sold in Colorado, compared with 24.3% in California. In the fourth quarter, EVs made up 31.5% of new car sales in Colorado, an analysis by the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association shows. “Over a quarter of vehicles sold in our state are electric vehicles and the demand continues to increase substantially,” Gov Jared Polis said in an interview. State and federal incentives to buy and lease EVs and install charging stations and programs by public utilities and communities have helped increase the number of electric vehicles on the roads. What happens if federal incentives are eliminated? One of the executive orders signed Monday by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump targets federal incentives promoted by the Biden administration to speed up adoption of EVs to tackle the effects of climate change. The order freezes money allocated by Congress but not spent for EV-related infrastructure and rescinds an order with the goal of EVs accounting for half of the new cars sold in 2030. Trump is also aiming for a redo on federal rules for tightening standards for tailpipe emissions and a waiver that allows California to adopt air-quality standards that are stricter than federal rules. Colorado has based some of its standards on California’s. There’s uncertainty about the fate of federal tax credits for the purchase and lease of electric vehicles as Trump pursues policies he says would give consumers more choices. A tax credit of $7,500 for new cars is available under certain conditions, including that the vehicle’s final assembly is in North America and a minimum percentage of critical mineral and battery components were produced domestically or in a country in a trade agreement with the U.S. The requirements don’t apply to leases. The leasing company can get the tax credit and pass savings onto customers. Attractive lease deals thanks to the federal tax credits and the state tax credit of $5,000 helped make December a record-breaking month for EV sales at Boulder Nissan. The state credit dropped to $3,500 this year. Cars whose manufacturer’s suggested retail price is under $35,000 are eligible for an additional state credit of $2,500. Ed Olsen, Boulder Nissan’s general sales manager, said the dealership sold about 240 electric vehicles in December, a record. “I’ve been here for 24 years. I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in the car business, especially in EVs over the years,” Olsen said. “The last six months of last year were by far the busiest we’ve ever been with EVs.” Matthew Groves, CEO of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association, said three dealers told him they “sold clean out” of EVs at the end of 2024 because of a rush to buy before federal tax credits disappear. He has seen some purchase orders cut by up to $23,000 per transaction if all the state and federal incentives apply. The association is concerned about the potential loss of the federal tax credit and the lower state tax credit, Groves said. He noted that Xcel Energy-Colorado recently ended its EV rebate program. Caught up short Wes Carter of Fort Collins ordered an electric car last Sept. 12 and received word about a week later that Xcel Energy had approved his application for a rebate. He picked up his car Sept. 18 and waited for the check he was told would arrive in eight to 10 weeks. He’s still waiting. Carter, a retired disabled veteran, shared emails with The Denver Post that showed his car order, application approval and then a Nov. 18 notice from Xcel saying its rebate program was closed. Xcel said if Carter had not received an email saying the check was in the mail, “we have unfortunately reached capacity on the program before your application could be approved and paid out.” The email stressed that Xcel told people the rebates were issued on a first-come, first-served basis. Colorado Public Radio reported in November that Xcel said 103 pre-approved customers who received the email would get a rebate check after all. Carter said he wasn’t able to reach anyone by phone when he initially called about the notice. As of Monday, he hadn’t heard from Xcel. “Given that the program was income-restricted, you had to be poor enough to need it and then to not get it, that’s a heck of a lot of money,” said Carter, who used savings to cover the $5,500 he expected from the rebate. While declining to discuss an individual customer because of privacy concerns, Xcel spokesman Tyler Bryant said in an email that no rebate type was prioritized or paid before the other. He said Xcel worked directly with nearly 100 people whose applications were approved to ensure their rebates were paid. Electric components can be seen under the hood of a 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EV 2LT during the 2023 Denver Auto Show at the Colorado Convention Center on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. (Photo by Eric Lutzens/The Denver Post) Related Articles Technology | Panera Bread founder, Colorado businessman Ken Rosenthal dies at 81 Technology | Strike against King Soopers ends as company and union resume talks Technology | Dated to dream home: Construction pros spend $1M to redo Littleton mansion Technology | Alamo Drafthouse workers strike after layoffs at Denver movie theater Technology | One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location Colorado Public Utilities Commission authorized a budget of $5 million for Xcel’s program. Bryant said as of Jan. 17, the company paid for 1,306 rebates for new and used EVs. Charging ahead The status of the federal tax credits for EVs might be uncertain, but advocates of electrifying transportation don’t believe the shift from gasoline-fueled vehicles is. “Consumers in Colorado and across the country have really made it clear that EVs are here to stay and that demand will continue to grow,” Polis said. “I would add that all of the tax credits and incentives were always designed to be temporary, whether that is in Colorado or nationally.” Travis Madsen,head of transportation program for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said in general, changing the EV tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act would require Congress to act. The administration potentially could make the credits more difficult to access. However, he said Colorado still offers a tax credit, which he described as most generous state incentive in the country. Madsen believes it will be difficult for the new Republican administration to wipe out provisions intended to stimulate domestic manufacturing of EV batteries and other related products. “A lot of the investments that the Inflation Reduction Act made have gone to places in the country that are represented by Republicans.” In Colorado, the state’s goal is to have more than 2 million electric cars and SUVs on Colorado roads by 2035. Another goal is to boost the market share of light duty EVs to nearly 100% by 2050 as part of efforts to address air quality and climate change. There are nearly 170,000 electric vehicles currently registered in Colorado. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said while the federal investments in EV charging infrastructure have been valuable, they make up a small percentage of the money that has been spent in the state. A state transportation package approved in 2021 and investments by public utilities have helped drive the growth of EVs and charging stations. “You already can go just about anywhere in Colorado on a major highway and be within about 30 miles of a fast-charging station. We’re just going to continue to see that progress accelerate with or without the federal investments. “Full speed ahead. Charging pedal to the metal,” Toor added.

By HALELUYA HADERO TikTok restored service to users in the United States on Sunday just hours after the popular video-sharing platform went dark in response to a federal ban, which President-elect Donald Trump said he would try to pause by executive order on his first day in office. Trump said he planned to issue the order to give TikTok’s China-based parent company more time to find an approved buyer before the ban takes full effect. He announced the move on his Truth Social account as millions of U.S. TikTok users awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform. But by Sunday afternoon, a message greeted those who signed on thanking them — and the president-elect — for their support. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message read. TikTok said it shut down the platform late Saturday because of a federal law that required parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operation by Sunday. Google and Apple also removed TikTok from their digital stores. The law, which passed with wide bipartisan support in April, allows for steep fines. While the company that runs TikTok in the U.S. said on X that the steps Trump outlined Sunday provided “the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties,” the TikTok app remained remained unavailable for download in Apple and Google’s app stores. “It was a brilliant marketing stunt for both TikTok and incoming president Donald Trump,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with market research firm Emarketer, said. “By abruptly shutting off service, TikTok proved how unpopular the ban was among its users.” Why was TikTok banned? What can Trump do about it? The law that took effect Sunday required ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations due to national security concerns. However, the statute authorized the sitting president to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale was underway. Although investors made some offers, ByteDance has said it would not sell. Trump said his order would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.” It wasn’t immediately clear how Trump’s promised action would fare from a legal standpoint since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on Friday and the statute came into force the day before Trump’s return to the White House. “I think Trump can at least make an argument that the language is meant to cover any president,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said. Some lawmakers who voted for the sale-or-ban law, including some of Trump’s fellow Republicans, remain in favor of it. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas warned companies Sunday not to provide TikTok with technical support. “Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law,” Cotton wrote on X. “Think about it.” Constitutional and business law attorney Kirk McGill said he thinks Trump lacks the legal authority to suspend the ban but it’s unlikely the question would reach a court in the time it might take TikTok to find a buyer. It’s also unlikely that Apple or Google will face legal consequences if they move forward with Trump’s demands, given that his administration would have to initiate any prosecutions, McGill said. “In the next week or two, before the courts have the chance to do anything, this is certainly going to be a political fight, not a legal one,” McGill said. TikTok shuts off — but only temporarily? The on-and-off availability of TikTok came after the Supreme Court ruled that the risk to national security posed by TikTok’s ties to China outweighed concerns about limiting speech by the app or its millions of U.S. users. When TikTok users in the U.S. tried to watch or post videos on the platform as of Saturday night, they saw a pop-up message under the headline, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.” “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” the message said. “Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.” The app was removed late Saturday from prominent app stores and remained so as of Sunday afternoon. Apple told customers it also took down other apps developed by ByteDance. They included Lemon8, which some influencers had promoted as a TikTok alternative, the popular video editing app CapCut and photo editor Hypic. “Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said. Google declined to comment. Apple did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the day’s developments. Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users expected to continue to have access to videos until a lack of updates caused the app to stop working. After TikTok was back online Sunday, content creator Tiffany Watson, 20, said she was “pretty hopeful” it would stay up. At the same time, Watson said her dedication “solely” to the platform declined during the months the threat of a ban loomed. “Overall, I hope that creators will succeed and find community in spite of the unpredictability of TikTok,” she said. Will the ban’s timing help TikTok? Trump’s plan to spare TikTok on his first day in office reflected the ban’s coincidental timing and the unusual mix of political considerations surrounding a social media platform that first gained popularity with often silly videos featuring dances and music clips. During his first presidential term, Trump in 2020 issued executive orders banning dealings with ByteDance and the owners of the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. Trump has since credited TikTok with helping him win support from young voters in last year’s presidential election. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration with a prime seating location. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told CBS News on Sunday that the president-elect discussed TikTok during a weekend call with Chinese President Xi Jinping “and they agreed to work together on this.” The Biden administration has also stressed in recent days that it did not intend to implement or enforce the ban before Trump takes office on Monday. Who are possible buyers of TikTok? ByteDance has publicly insisted it would not sell TikTok, and no likely buyer has emerged. On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. Perplexity is not asking to purchase the ByteDance algorithm that feeds TikTok user’s videos based on their interests. In Washington, lawmakers and administration officials have long warned that the algorithm is vulnerable to manipulation by China. To date, the U.S. has not publicly provided evidence of TikTok providing user data to Chinese authorities or tinkering with the algorithm to benefit Chinese interests. Another unknown is whether Trump will remain a TikTok fan. “He’s flip-flopped on his stance toward TikTok before, and there’s no guarantee he won’t do so again,” EMarketer’s Enberg said. ___ Kanis Leung in Hong Kong and Charlotte Kramon in Atlanta, Nadia Lathan in Washington, and Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this story.