This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.Related: Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line. (From September) The MAGA honeymoon is over. (From December) Michael Scherer contributed reporting.Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire. Trump’s day of reckoning Why Quaker parents were ahead of their time Today’s News The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first. Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit. At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.More From The Atlantic Cory Booker, endurance athlete How the Trump administration learned to obscure the truth in court Iran wants to talk. Evening Read Illustration by Jan Buchczik To Be Happier, Stop Resisting ChangeBy Arthur C. Brooks In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought … In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. Read the full article.Culture Break Bruce Davidson Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation—and the world he built at home.Read. Derek Thompson interviews Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, about the real story behind the Gilded Age.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.[Rogé Karma: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire]On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.[Read: The good news about Trump’s tariffs]If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.

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.Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought. To this end, Herrigel took up his archery studies with the master Awa Kenzō, which he later chronicled in his 1948 book, Zen in the Art of Archery.Herrigel’s archery program was arduous and frustrating. “Drawing the bow caused my hands to start trembling after a few moments, and my breathing became more and more laboured,” he wrote. “Nor did this get any better during the weeks that followed.” Indeed, the weeks became months, and the months wound up becoming five years. At long last, Herrigel learned how to loose an arrow and hit his mark. When he finally acquired the skill, he also realized that he now understood the Zen attitude. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise,” he wrote—when you “let go of yourself.”In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. To figure out what sources of resistance are holding you back, and discover how to find release from them and live better, read on.[From the January/February 2012 issue: Arrow envy]Unless you are a monastic, your life is probably characterized by a lot of resistance, especially to change. Even the most adventurous people are susceptible to this because change almost always means an uncertain or challenging future. Researchers have found that our resistance to change is rooted in at least four sources: routine seeking (a preference for boredom over surprise), emotional reaction to imposed change (stress aversion), a short-term focus (seeing change as a hassle of adjustment), and cognitive rigidity (a reluctance to rethink things).Scholars have argued that change-resistance is a behavioral pattern that can be epigenetic—that is, a trait that becomes heritable because, without altering a person’s actual DNA, it modifies the way their genes are expressed at a cellular level. Change-resistance, the argument goes, gets reinforced and passed on because it provides a way to conserve energy, rather than having to learn the same routines over and over. And people almost certainly evolved a resistance to change in the first place because it leads to stability in decision making, and that makes living in social groups easier.This helps explain why most people naturally resist change—whether that change involves becoming single even when a relationship has gone south, remaining in a job that bores you, or staying put in a city you haven’t liked for years. And that also explains why, as natural as change-resistance is, it tends not to improve your happiness. Change in life is inevitable, after all—and always resisting it is onerous. In fact, your resistance to change may well be making you unhappier, because it is positively correlated with neuroticism, a trait that personality research has found to be a driver of unhappiness.An especially common area of change-resistance is unwillingness to think differently, which manifests as a rejection of ideas and opinions that vary from our own. In 2017, three psychologists used a series of experiments to demonstrate that most people prefer to hear the views of those who vote as they do, and that on cultural issues, most would forgo a small cash sum ($3) rather than have to hear a view opposing their own. Neuroscientists have shown that hearing political views you don’t share activates the amygdala, which is implicated in the human response to perceived threats.Once again, this mechanism probably evolved from a time in human prehistory. In this case, what we think of today as an opposing ideological allegiance back then actually implied membership in a different, and potentially hostile, tribe or kinship group. Today, that trait persists in maladaptive ways: I find your view on climate change so disagreeable that my Pleistocene brain reacts as if you’re an unwelcome interloper who’s come along to burn my village. Aren’t we always complaining about how tribal politics has become?[Read: In praise of pointless goals]The impulse to resist is so natural, then, that it’s encoded in your genes. As that suggests, a degree of resistance can be perfectly appropriate and healthy. But your predisposition to resistance may affect your life in negative ways when it makes you rigid, like Herrigel locked in place with his arms trembling, not knowing how to take a shot. Such rigidity in the face of change will lower your happiness.As the years passed, Herrigel finally understood that productive nonresistance means effortless effort, a phrase Herrigel used elsewhere to describe how he ceased to focus consciously on trying to hit the target and—in something akin to a “flow state”—lost himself in the process of shooting. In other words, he became indifferent to performing correctly at each stage, such as the release of the string from his finger or the business of keeping aim; rather, his self dissolved into a state of nonjudgmental absorption in the complete action of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow when the string’s time came to slip his finger.Herrigel had thus mastered the whole “way of the bow.” One word of caution: Herrigel may sometimes have taken his own advice too far, as when, after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, he acceded to the demand that he join the Nazi Party. Nonjudgmental absorption in the moment is not an alibi for bad judgment.Nevertheless, from his philosophy of archery, we can infer three valuable lessons for tackling a situation in which resistance is natural but is also lowering the quality of life.1. Focus on process, not outcome. Some common business advice is Do things well and let the results come naturally, but this applies equally well more generally. Take the case of your job: Focusing on an involuntary change, such as the possibility of being laid off, will make you fearful and rigid, and distract you from what you’re working on from moment to moment. By all means, think about that potential problem for a few minutes when it crosses your mind, but then put it aside and refocus on doing a great job today. Be kind and generous to others who may also be worrying about their job. Live in what the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie called “day-tight compartments.” Resisting an outcome you probably have little control over will make you miserable. So, instead, allow yourself to work on the processes that you can control more, and you will feel better.2. Practice mindful absorption. Now that you are mentally released from obsessing over outcomes, the next step is to practice being completely absorbed in the necessary action. This will improve your performance and reduce your stress. Say, for example, that your romantic relationship is in trouble: Shelve your fear that your partner might leave you at some future date, and instead be mindful of your role in the relationship today and what you can do to make it better. This might or might not save the relationship ultimately, because it can’t make past difficulties disappear, but being fully present and attentive as a partner gives you a better chance of success—if not in this relationship, then in your next one—than trying some shortcut fix or melodramatic gesture.3. Release the ego. Herrigel emphasized that, as an archer, he had to learn to focus on the arrow as opposed to himself. In other words, he had to exercise a degree of ego erasure, an exclusion of self-consciousness. This is a topic I’ve touched on before, about what it means to shift from the “me-self” to the “I-self” and how that can produce greater happiness. Let’s return to the situation of being confronted by a point of view with which you strongly disagree. Given your resistance to changing your own view, your amygdala will tend to make you overreact and see this contrary argument as a threat. Instead, release your ego and tell yourself, “This opinion has nothing to do with me.” Then simply listen with detached curiosity; you may learn something interesting about why this person thinks that way and avoid an unnecessarily negative encounter. And if you do choose to engage further with this interlocutor, you will probably be more persuasive by being a listener. Not that it matters to you, O enlightened one.[From the October 2015 issue: How an 18th-century philosopher helped solve my midlife crisis]I first read Zen in the Art of Archery at the age of 20—I’ll admit, not with the purest of motives. My purpose was to become a better French-horn player for fame and fortune rather than for the zen of playing. Obviously, I was completely missing the real message. I picked up Herrigel’s book again at 55, when I was in the necessary process of changing jobs, careers, and cities, and in a state of abject terror.Clearly, I had some resistance to overcome. Now the book made sense to me. It helped me stop thinking so much about how I was going to hit the target of my professional shift, and instead get mindfully absorbed in my daily work. That largely took my ego out of the equation and enabled me to allow the shift to occur naturally, without judgment or forcing anything. The openness to change that I learned from Herrigel’s mastery of archery has made these past five years among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.[Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller]Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)  Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper. If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn't mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.[Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions]If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.The goal, according to senior administration officials, is to pressure other countries into removing their trade barriers, at which point the U.S. will drop its own. In his Rose Garden speech announcing the tariff order, Trump demanded that foreign countries “terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers,” and “don’t manipulate your currencies” if they hoped to get a reprieve from tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has even argued that many of the new tariffs won’t ever need to go into effect, because other countries will be so quick to comply. In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.[Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs]Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.”Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself. “These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” read the White House’s memo on the new order. Translation: The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet.To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods. The upshot is that, in order to meet Trump’s demands for tariff removal, Europe would need to overhaul not only its trade practices but much of its tax and regulatory system.The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me. “The idea that they’d do it with basically no guaranteed upside just completely boggles the mind.”[Scott Lincicome: How Republicans learned to love high prices]Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.” Brazil’s president is considering retaliating, and the country’s National Congress, which includes many vocal right-wing supporters of Trump, recently approved legislation to empower him to do so.If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.Trump seems to welcome that possibility. During his Rose Garden address, which was titled “Make America Wealthy Again,” the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.In theory, the flip side of sustained higher prices would be a boost to American manufacturing, as consumers choose to purchase domestic goods over foreign ones. But here again, reality might laugh at the theory. About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.Perhaps the greatest damage will result from global uncertainty. After weeks of economic chaos, Trump’s big announcement was supposed to finally provide some clarity, allowing businesses to plan for the future. Instead, the future is more cloudy than ever. No one knows which of the tariffs will stick and which will be lifted. Countries will appeal to Trump to get their tariffs removed. Industries will lobby for carve-outs. The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.[Rogé Karma: The job market is frozen]What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.

The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck pace—and changing the underlying details just as quickly—the administration was able to get the Supreme Court’s approval for policies without full legal scrutiny. That same approach is once again under way in the deportations case and in others now before the Court.The story of the first Trump administration’s travel ban began on Friday, January 27, 2017, when the administration announced a prohibition on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries with no exceptions, including for people with ties to the United States, such as green-card or visa holders. It did so with no advance warning, which meant passengers boarded flights not knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States. The policy was sloppy, cruel, and riddled with animus—so blatantly illegal that the Trump administration declined to continue defending it after lower courts invalidated it.[Tom Nichols: Trump’s authoritarian playbook]With the slapdash version dead, the administration came up with a (slightly) modified policy that appeared more legitimate, at least on a superficial level. The second ban, unlike the first, did not apply to visa and green-card holders. This one was also purportedly temporary: As written, it was set to last for 90 days, during which time the administration said it would conduct a formal review to determine what kind of permanent travel restrictions were warranted. Despite these nominal changes, it still reeked of illegal animus.The administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to implement the temporary ban, but it did so in a strategic way that would enable the Court to give its okay without having to decide the substantive question of whether the measure was legal. Here’s how that worked: In spring 2017, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits blocked the new ban. The government then turned to the Supreme Court, requesting emergency relief from those decisions. Curiously, the government requested expedited briefing (a rush on the papers both sides file in a case), but not expedited oral argument. In fact, it asked the Court to delay hearing the case until the fall, at which point the policy would have expired. By making its request in this way, the government was asking for an up-or-down vote on the lower court’s decision, but not a full consideration of the legal merits.This gambit paid off. The Court allowed the administration to partially enforce the second travel ban for 90 days. By the end of that period, the administration had rolled out the third and final iteration—so that the third ban went into effect just as the second expired. The Court heard oral argument over whether the third iteration of the policy was invalid in spring 2018, and a few months later, the Court upheld it. In effect, the second version bought the administration time to put together a policy that looked more legitimate while it enforced a less legitimate version. The administration could claim that the third ban emerged from a formal process and had undergone significant revisions, rather than being fired off on a whim and on the basis of animus. But in the meantime, the administration was able to do what it wanted anyway: suspend entry from several majority-Muslim countries into the United States. And that may have made the Court more comfortable with accepting the third version, because a ban was by that point the status quo.Part of the reason this worked is that the administration managed to get the Court to act quickly, without a careful parsing of the facts. That was a smart move, because actually defending the policy on a factual basis would have been quite a challenge. During the oral arguments over the third ban, the justices asked the Trump administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, about the waiver process—the mechanism that might allow people to show, on an individual basis, that they should be allowed to enter the United States. The solicitor general assured the Court that the process was available to people via consular officers. But after the argument, consular officials said that they had no authority or discretion to grant waivers, and that only certain officials in Washington could do so. The problem was that by then, the ban was in effect.The new Trump administration now appears to be deploying a similar strategy in much of the litigation over its policies. For example, the recent litigation over the attempted shutdown and defunding of USAID confirmed that the administration is still trying to couple speed with factual opacity.[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]In that litigation, the administration claimed to possess the outlandish authority to cancel spending items that Congress had appropriated and approved—not just for USAID, but for other agencies, grants, and contracts. Numerous federal district judges have found several of the administration’s funding freezes unlawful. The relevant federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act, allows courts to block certain agency actions. That’s just what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did in the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States case—block the administration’s implementation of an across-the-board funding freeze at USAID.The administration rushed to the Supreme Court to free itself from lower-court decisions blocking its initial version of the policies. In particular, the administration requested relief via the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Again, this is right from the travel-ban playbook.The administration’s lawyers asked the Court to act quickly while insisting that it wasn’t possible to pay out the contracts that had been subject to the initial USAID freeze, which the district court had effectively ordered it to honor. And because the case was developing so rapidly, the government’s timeline did not give the justices much chance to familiarize themselves with the details. As with the travel ban, a rushed job stood to benefit the administration by increasing the odds that the Court would take the government at its word without really looking into things deeply.In this instance, the administration did not prevail, but it certainly tried. Before the Supreme Court, the government said that it was “not logistically or technically feasible” for it to pay the 2,000 or so invoices ordered by the district court. The justices refused to pause the district court’s ruling, instead allowing the court to determine whether a preliminary injunction was warranted, and directing it to act with “with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” Left with time to develop and consider more facts, the district court pointed to a declaration by Peter Marocco, the acting director for USAID, acknowledging that prior to January 20, 2025, both USAID and the State Department could process several thousand payments a day. This temporary victory for the rule of law might not last, however; the litigation may yet head back to the Supreme Court, where the administration’s rush strategy could eventually win out.If the Court accepts what the government is saying now in the summary-expulsion case, it will be risking its own credibility. In that case, the administration is asking the Court to credit, without evidence, several of its assertions. Among them is the unbelievable claim that individuals facing summary expulsion would somehow be able to challenge their prospective expulsion even though they may not know they are about to be sent to a foreign prison.The Court should reject the government’s request to pause the lower court’s decision and recognize that its rush strategy is designed to make a mockery of the rule of law, not to mention the concept of facts. As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsA couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, “greeted me with a strong handshake,” Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: “the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using “muscular state policy” to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities.In this episode, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin talks with the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use “racial preferences and stereotypes” in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news.Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind.The woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she’s a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa. [Sound of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest] Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He’d been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas. News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked. Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation: a fellow at Georgetown, also arrested. News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa. Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of “forcing women to compete with men in sports.” President Donald Trump: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports, so you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding. Maine Governor Janet Mills: See you in court. Trump: Every state—good. I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. [Music]Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they’re protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women’s sports, going after unfair racial preferences.But our guest on the show today says that is just what’s on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary.[Music]Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show.Adam Harris: Thanks for having me.Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, “Orbán’s War,” referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we’re seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo’s argument in that essay?Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn’t necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite.Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they’re facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.Rosin: It’s interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they’re viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back.Harris: Yeah. It’s sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they’ve lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.Rosin: So it’s actually incredibly ambitious.Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We’re only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I’m starting to understand how this fits more broadly into “Make America Great” and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven’t said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread?Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we’ve seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.Rosin: Okay. So it’s diversity principles, but it’s also diversity principles as filtered through universities.Harris: Yes.Rosin: But it’s essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them.Harris: Yes. There’s a grand idea behind them.Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news?Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a “prize scalp.”Rosin: A “prize scalp.”Harris: A “prize scalp,” and that’s a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution.And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook?Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?Rosin: Out of control.Harris: Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn’t really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things.And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren’t necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don’t trust higher education, they don’t mean their local community college. They don’t mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway.And so over the last two years, really, you’ve seen these attacks on Columbia and how they’ve handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you’ve seen attacks on Columbia and what they’re teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you’re not handling this well, so let’s go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what’s going on—because that’s typically what happens, right?As someone who’s covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.Rosin: Okay, so if it didn’t go through the usual process, it didn’t seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia’s funding? What was that first move about?Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don’t immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too.We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don’t necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don’t comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.Rosin: Okay. So they’re not following the rules of a proper investigation. They’re just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They’ve actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that.So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can’t have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we’re going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn’t have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College.It’s adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.[Music]Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out.[Break]Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it’s a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it’s not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What’s the ultimate—I don’t know what happened in Hungary, so—Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they’re trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of “Make America Great Again.” And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great?And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans.You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it’s reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that “Dear Colleague” letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you’re going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We’re going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did.And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It’s like if you’re going to say that you’re going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn’t be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn’t have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it’s obviously not what you’re actually after if you’re eliminating the office.Harris: Exactly.Rosin: You know, as you’re talking, what’s chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?Harris: Yes. And you know, it’s interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there’s been this argument that institutions don’t teach students how to think; they teach students what to think.Rosin: That’s what conservatives say.Harris: That’s what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they’re not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such.We’ve already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you’re not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don’t want to lose my funding, and so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.” Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they’re looking for?Harris: So it’s difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That’s going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia’s funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they’re saying for Columbia to do, let’s go ahead and do that—Rosin: So that they won’t come after us.Harris: —so that they won’t come after us.Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I’m realizing now. It’s a very common tactic.Harris: Exactly.Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn’t have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That’s obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they’re scaring universities.I want to know what’s happening inside the universities and how they’re responding. As someone who doesn’t follow higher education as closely, it’s not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you’re not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it’s very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government.There’s this idea that’s sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don’t you just start using that? There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That’s not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that’s $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you’re never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can’t trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you.And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that’s not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn’t receive significant government subsidies.Rosin: That’s interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.I’ve watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they’re scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you’ve watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump’s election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation?Harris: So there’s been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven’t really seen many public responses, in part because there’s a sort of “keep your head down and hope that it’s not you,” you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they’re trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right?Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that’s supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There’s this big federal thing that’s going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that’s to tenure, whether that’s to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They’re also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it’s happening over there, then it’s not happening to us, and we’re already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.Rosin: And do you think that’s a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there’d just be deadly silence. But there’s also silence on the streets. There’s silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope?Harris: It should be.Rosin: You want to hold onto it?Harris: I do, because we’ve seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won’t make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can’t make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn’t have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle’s only a principle when it’s tested.Rosin: Right.Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn’t believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there’s a kind of obligation there. It’s one of the reasons why they get paid so much.Rosin: Whoa. Okay.Harris: (Laughs.)Rosin: No. I mean, you’re clear. I appreciate it.Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real?Harris: I don’t know if it’s a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks.I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that’s doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it’s majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It’s students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college.But it was also a place that has—it’s the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it’s a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it’s not a military school. So I don’t know that there’s a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen.Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite?Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it’s not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal—Rosin: And what did he mean by “normal”?Harris: By “normal,” he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it’s, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there’s this quiet administrative, instructional war that’s going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it’s like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates.Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically.Harris: Exactly.Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that.Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Photograph by Bruce DavidsonThis is the living room of the 800-square-foot house in Denver that held our family of five in the mid-1960s. Every night, my father turned that tiny space into an office, sitting cross-legged in a wide armchair, hunched over the coffee table that held our most valuable possession, a new IBM Selectric typewriter. In the morning, my mom stacked paper and put things away, trying to make the living room livable again.In 1968, the writer Stan Steiner published a book about a cohort of young Native American activists he called the “new Indians.” My dad, Vine Deloria Jr., was one of them. When he met Steiner, he was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944 to organize across tribal lines, coordinate political strategy, and lobby Washington. “Ten years ago, you could have tromped on the Indians and they would have said, ‘Okay, kick me again. I’m just an Indian,’ ” he told Steiner. Those days of acquiescence were over: My father demanded instead that Americans honor their treaties and recognize the political sovereignty of tribal governments.[From the May 2021 issue: National parks should belong to Native Americans]Steiner’s book sent New York publishers chasing after the new Indians he’d identified, hoping to find the voice of this activist generation. My father was one of the few able to get a manuscript between covers, the 1969 best seller Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.As he transformed our living room, my father transformed his life, bringing it into line with what he imagined a writer’s looked like. The transformation wasn’t entirely smooth. At one point, my father lost confidence in the project, and tried to return his advance to his publisher. His editor waved a marked-up page of manuscript at him—Norman Mailer’s, as he recalled—and my dad realized he wasn’t in it alone. He soldiered on.This portrait, by the Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson, accompanied an excerpt from Steiner’s book published in Vogue. The image captures the writer’s infrastructure our home hosted each night: chair, table, typewriter, scattered books and newspapers, a ream of fresh paper. And, of course, the stimulants: a cup of cold coffee, a sugar bowl, and a cigarette to keep him going.[From the September 2022 issue: How Reservation Dogs exploded the myths of Native American life]My father is wearing a new pair of Justin boots, stirrup-friendly, with the sharp toe pointing in your face. He was about a decade removed from the Marines, and a new regime of travel food and chair time is visibly filling out his frame. He’s holding forth, because my father spoke his book before he wrote it, practicing his words in meetings and interviews. My father is in the room’s corner, but not at all cornered; you can see in his face the new force of Indian Country that exploded in those years. My mom was there too, likely asking him to clean things up before the shutter clicked.This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A New Force of Indian Country.”

One morning in 1991, I prayed with the fervor that only a tween can muster for one thing above all others: cold Diet Mountain Dew. But all of the cans in my mom’s stash were warm. So I tossed one in the freezer, forgot about it, and hours later retrieved the frozen-solid mass. Then I decided to pop it in the microwave. You can imagine what ensued.After extinguishing the flames, my mom asked us kids what we thought had happened. I stepped forward as if approaching the gallows—and she lavished me with praise. For telling the truth. For taking responsibility. Her response might seem surprising, but we’re Quakers, and avoiding judgment is pretty on-brand.From where I stand now, I can see that her decision to use positive reinforcement aligns with research on motivating kids, something I’ve become quite familiar with as a journalist covering parenting and education. Still, for years, I didn’t recognize the connection between my faith and the child-development studies I frequently combed through at work. Then, when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily left our public school without enough adults to meet my son’s needs, we switched him to a Quaker school. The school is organized around an acronym I’d never heard before—SPICES—that stands for principles I know well: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. Those aren’t the only pillars of Quakerism, but they’re big ones, and seeing them all together got me thinking. Sitting in the meetinghouse one Sunday morning, after nearly an hour of silent worship, I had a Queen’s Gambit moment. Whereas the chess champ saw pawns moving across a phantom board, I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.The Religious Society of Friends—“Quaker” being a derogatory term, reclaimed—is a hard faith to explain, because it tries to eschew dogma. It’s now possible to be a Muslim Quaker or a Hindu one, or to not believe in any god at all. That said, Quakers all over the world tend to talk about the same principles and take part in some of the same practices. For example, in place of rules, Quakers publish “advices and queries,” which prompt individuals to make good, considered choices. Attendees of Quaker meetings near me were recently asked to ponder: “Do I make my home a place of friendliness, joy, and peace, where residents and visitors feel God’s presence?” The children’s version read: “In what ways am I kind to people in my home?” Certain expectations underlie these questions—that one should try to be kind, for example—but so do curiosity and an openness to differing answers.As it turns out, leading with questions is a great way for parents to talk to children. Encouraging kids to come up with their own solutions grants them autonomy. And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life experience better emotional health, including less depression and anxiety. Fostering kids’ autonomy has also been tied to children building stronger self-regulation skills, doing better in school, and navigating social situations more effectively. Best of all, once kids get used to the self-discipline that comes with exercising autonomy, it can become habitual. Give your kids agency in one area, and they tend to “develop internal motivation even for things that they do not want to do,” Edlynn said, “because they’re integrating the understanding of the ‘why’ those things are so important.”[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]It can be scary to trust children with independence. But kids are better problem-solvers than some people might think. When my son, at age 10, asked me if he could play laser tag with friends, I asked him how he could avoid pulling a trigger (in deference to the Quaker value of pacifism). He decided to serve as referee. I was proud of him for exercising “discernment,” another Quaker value, all on his own, for listening to his “still, small voice within” and letting it guide him to a solution that satisfied his need for belonging. He is now 13 and recently couldn’t decide whether to accept a babysitting job or relax at home. I asked him, “What do you think tomorrow-you will wish today-you had done?” He picked out stuffed animals to give his charges, spent the evening feeling needed, and had cash the next day when he wanted to buy boba for a friend.Obviously, real damage could come from giving kids complete autonomy, and Quakerism recognizes this. Early Quaker epistles inveigh against permissiveness, and a 1939 text, Children & Quakerism, quotes William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, saying, “If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection.” In other words, pacifism doesn’t mean that parents can’t set boundaries. As a 1967 book about Quaker education, Friends and Their Children, put it, “There is a difference in principle between setting an army on the march and carrying a tired and hysterical child up to bed.” So when my son used to leave toys out, I wouldn’t clean up for him. I’d prompt him to do so: “I see blocks still sitting on the floor.” That was usually enough. When it wasn’t, I would stage a mini sit-in, and we wouldn’t go on with our evening until the blocks were put away—the type of consequence that’s crucial for raising considerate kids. If he hollered, I would “bear witness” to his suffering and “be with” him, silent but unwavering. Two children work together at Friends Select School, in Philadelphia, as part of a 1945 American Junior Red Cross program on race relations. (Bettman Archive / Getty) In addition to sit-ins, both civic and domestic, Quakers have a tradition known as “spiritual gifts.” That involves treating individual talents as assets that belong to the community and ought to be developed in ourselves and encouraged in others. For parents, this means focusing on what our children choose to do, are good at, and enjoy. You can’t ignore your kids’ weaknesses—but you can spend less energy on them. For my youngest’s terrible handwriting, that meant aiming for legibility and saving the time that could have gone toward cursive lessons for activities that animate her, such as building boats and airplanes from the contents of the recycling bin. Research backs up this approach. According to Lea Waters, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of The Strength Switch, focusing on children’s strengths “has been shown to increase self-esteem, build resilience, decrease stress, and make kids more healthy, happy, and engaged in school.”But perhaps the most important element of Quaker parenting is the edict to “let your life speak.” In practice, that looks like apologizing to your kids freely, saying please and thank you, and, yes, trying not to shout at them. It means acting in accordance with your values, such as when my grandma took me to pack toothbrushes and soap into “kits for Kosovo,” and when my kids make PB&Js for our unhoused neighbors or bring games to a family shelter. The idea, supported by common sense and reams of research, is that kids develop empathy by living it alongside their caregivers. What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior. The closest that Quakers come to dogma is the belief, first expressed by the religion’s founder, that there is “that of God” in every person, children very much included. That’s why, as Friends and Their Children notes, Quakers try to make children feel “welcome at the very centre of life”—a concept quite similar to the “unconditional positive regard” that psychologists today know leads to secure kids. Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of mattering makes kids more likely to be happy, resilient, academically high-achieving, and satisfied with their life, as well as less likely to struggle with perfectionism or addiction, Gordon Flett, the author of the American Psychological Association’s Mattering as a Core Need in Children and Adolescents, told me.[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]So here I am, nearly 375 years after Quakerism’s founding, asking my kids questions, giving them bounded autonomy, and nudging them to invest in their strengths and be stewards of their community—all while communicating that their worth is in no way contingent. Put together, these Quaker practices result in a parenting style considered ideal by psychologists: authoritative parenting. As Judith Smetana, a University of Rochester psychology professor whose work focuses on parent-adolescent interactions, explained to me, authoritative parenting is characterized by the effort to warmly and responsively set limits, and to support kids rather than punish them harshly when they overstep those limits.Some people might argue that Quaker parents aren’t doing anything special. What is free-range parenting if not oodles of agency? When Quaker parents try to stay calm and acknowledge their kids’ feelings when they act out, aren’t we just doing what the so-called Millennial parenting whisperer Dr. Becky recommends? In telling my teenage son that I see the packaging from his graphing calculator lying on the table rather than in the trash, am I not just following “Say What You See” coaching?But pop parenting philosophies can be unhelpful, especially because parents not infrequently misinterpret them. Take gentle parenting. At its best, it encourages parents to give kids the respect and empathy they need to thrive. But gentle parenting, at least as it’s presented in Instagram reels, can result in children doing as they please. “What it really leaves out,” Smetana told me, “is the importance of structure and being clear about where the boundaries are.” Many parents are left feeling helpless—a common experience among pop-parenting adherents. In the aughts, a friend of mine tried attachment parenting, an approach centered on enhancing the bond between mother and child with, among other practices, maximum physical proximity. She ended up feeling like a failure each time she put her baby down to use the restroom.[Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]For new parents, sorting through the good and bad of each of these schools of thought can feel not just bewildering, but impossible. “These terms come and go so quickly,” Smetana told me, “and fads in the popular audience don’t intersect very well, necessarily, with the research.” It’s taken me more than 15 years, during which I’ve read hundreds of parenting books and academic papers, to piece together which bits of each philosophy are relevant to me. According to Smetana, even authoritative parenting can be of limited use for caregivers, because its advice is so broad. There are lots of ways to be an authoritative parent, which can leave moms and dads (but mostly moms) feeling rudderless.That’s where Quaker parenting has stepped in for me, providing a simple way to separate the wheat from the child-development chaff. It gives me plenty to cling to, but its guiding principles are also flexible enough to allow leeway. This isn’t to say the religion is perfect. Its past is filled with failures. Many Quakers worked to abolish slavery, but many did not; some were themselves enslavers. The Society of Friends was the first religion to officially condemn that horror, but some meetinghouses—which are known for having benches arranged in egalitarian formations—featured segregated seating for Black members. Quakers also participated in forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, including boarding schools that stripped children of dignity, culture, and health. Although not exclusively white, Quaker membership in the U.S. is still predominantly so.But even in these shortcomings lies an essential Quaker parenting lesson. We favor queries over strictures because of a concept known as “continuing revelation,” or the idea that we cannot know all there is to know, and we will always later realize that we were wrong. The principle has helped me cultivate humility and compassion for myself after missteps. Because there can be no one best way in Quaker parenting, I’m freed from feeling like every detail of every decision will lead only to perfect success or abject defeat.Looking back at the Diet Mountain Dew incident, I bet my mom wanted to rail at me. She’d warned again and again that metal in the microwave would spark. But Quaker values urged restraint then, just as they did decades later, when two of my daughters enrolled at schools with grade portals. With just four clicks, I can see how many points they’ve missed on each test and which assignments they haven’t turned in. Snowplow parenting tells me to lean into snooping and send emails to their teachers requesting retakes and extensions. It’s sorely tempting. But Quaker principles remind me not just about the value of autonomy, but also that kids need stillness and peace of mind, that pestering them isn’t likely to lead to the “nonviolent communications” that improve connection, and that the goal is for teens to develop a purpose-based identity rather than a performance-based one. So I resist the urge to monitor and intervene—just as research on anxiety suggests I should.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Grocery bills will likely rise as shoppers pay more for household staples because of the Trump administration's new tariffs.

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As tariffs tanked stocks on Thursday, CNBC's Jim Cramer believes investors should look to the same sectors that rose after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

Last year's high-flyers helped lead the broad market lower.

Mortgage rates fell sharply Thursday, following the Trump administration's tariff announcement, but a huge share of Americans still can't afford to buy a home.

The country became a popular alternative for furniture, apparel and toymakers trying to avoid the crossfire of U.S. trade tensions with Beijing

Every weekday, the Investing Club releases the Homestretch; an actionable afternoon update just in time for the last hour of trading.

Apple has warned that tariffs could hurt its business, prompt it to increase prices and potentially force it to stop offering certain products altogether.

Karina Rotenberg and her husband were placed on a sanctions list by the Biden adminstration after Russia invaded Ukraine.

President Trump's tariffs will equate to a nearly $1 trillion trade wall around the U.S., with huge impacts on every sector and every state in the U.S. economy.

The surge in March was exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic,

The ratings agency put the airline on "negative" outlook, saying the company could become less financially conservative.

The use of the Signal messaging app by top Trump officials came to light after The Atlantic's editor was added to a group chat about planned Houthi strikes.

About 900 U.S.-represented employees at supporting plants will be temporarily laid off, in addition to about 4,500 hourly workers at the Canadian plant.

The president announced a minimum 10% tariff on imports from a lengthy list of countries. Here's how financial pros say you should respond.

CNBC Jim Cramer says long-term investors must steel themselves as the stock market tanks on Trump's sweeping tariff announcement.

Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump's new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were under pressure Thursday after President Donald Trump's big tariffs reveal jolted the stock market.

Global markets and businesses were thrown into disarray by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff announcements on Thursday.

Anthropic and OpenAI both rolled out education services for college students ahead of their final exams.

The new features should make it easier for creators to upload and edit videos for YouTube Shorts.

Eight key OPEC+ producers on Thuesday agreed to raise combined crude oil output by 411,000 barrels per day, pushing down oil prices.

The number of pre-seed transactions in the bitcoin startup market climbed 50% in 2024, according to a report from Trammell Venture Partners.

Shares of some of the world's biggest automakers appeared surprisingly resilient on Thursday.

Karina Rotenberg and her husband were placed on a sanctions list by the Biden adminstration after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Grocery bills will likely rise as shoppers pay more for household staples because of the Trump administration's new tariffs.

Apple has warned that tariffs could hurt its business, prompt it to increase prices and potentially force it to stop offering certain products altogether.

Should the president hold fast to his tougher-than-expected trade policy, there's a material risk of at least near-term costs.

The use of the Signal messaging app by top Trump officials came to light after The Atlantic's editor was added to a group chat about planned Houthi strikes.

The ratings agency put the airline on "negative" outlook, saying the company could become less financially conservative.

Mortgage rates fell sharply Thursday, following the Trump administration's tariff announcement, but a huge share of Americans still can't afford to buy a home.

Anthropic and OpenAI both rolled out education services for college students ahead of their final exams.

About 900 U.S.-represented employees at supporting plants will be temporarily laid off, in addition to about 4,500 hourly workers at the Canadian plant.

The number of pre-seed transactions in the bitcoin startup market climbed 50% in 2024, according to a report from Trammell Venture Partners.

Global markets and businesses were thrown into disarray by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff announcements on Thursday.

Eight key OPEC+ producers on Thuesday agreed to raise combined crude oil output by 411,000 barrels per day, pushing down oil prices.

You can file for a free tax extension in minutes if you can't make the April 15 deadline. Here's what taxpayers need to know.

U.S. President Donald Trump's aggressive and far-reaching "reciprocal tariffs" were signed into effect on Wednesday, hitting over 180 countries.

CNBC breaks down what investors should know about how the additional levies will impact individual vehicles and automakers.

The surge in March was exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic,

The White House on Wednesday listed new tariff rates for different countries. It didn't take long for market observers to try to reverse engineer the formula.

The announcement, which came alongside a set of sweeping new tariffs, gives customs officials, retailers and logistics companies a month to prepare.

Trump's plan sets a 10% baseline tariff across the board. But the president's list makes it clear that many countries will face significantly higher rates.

Tech stocks fell in late trading Wednesday following President Donald Trump's announcement of reciprocal tariffs.

TikTok's future in the U.S. hangs in the balance ahead of a potential ban on April 5.

Canned beer imports will be subject to a 25% tariff, putting pressure on Constellation Brands' bottom line.

The launch is a pivotal step toward beginning commercial service for Kuiper, Amazon's initiative to beam high-speed internet to customers from low earth orbit.

President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that DOGE chief Elon Musk has done an "amazing" job but noted that the Tesla CEO has "got a big company to run."

Nintendo will launch game titles including "Mario Kart World" and "Street Fighter 6" alongside the new hardware.

The DOJ argued that charges against Adams should be tossed to avoid hurting the mayor's ability to cooperate with immigration policies of President Trump.

Tesla reported a 13% year-over-year drop in first-quarter deliveries two days after the company's stock wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022.

Payroll gains were stronger than expected in March, countering fears that the labor market and economy are slowing.

United Airlines is adding service to Vietnam and Thailand in October and nonstop service from San Francisco to Adelaide, Australia, in December.

QVC Group, the owner of the QVC and HSN TV networks, is teaming up with TikTok Shop for 24/7 live shopping streams in an effort to revive its business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

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

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

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

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

Colorado companies that sell goods imported from overseas were hammered during Thursday’s stock market plunge, which was the worst one-day drop seen in the U.S. since pandemic fears roiled investors on March 16, 2020. Denver-based VF Corp., owner of several iconic brands like The North Face and Vans, lost 28.7% of its market value on Thursday, making it one of the hardest hit stocks in the country. VF shares suffered their largest one-day drop since Oct. 19, 1987, also known as Black Monday, when they fell 26.1%. VF shares reached a 52-week high of $29.02 on Jan. 29, reflecting a rebound in a company that had once traded in the $80 range four years earlier. Shares of the apparel retailer, however, came under pressure when the Trump administration began proposing widespread tariffs. The day after details came out on Wednesday, shares dropped $4.71 to $11.68, erasing $2.57 billion in market value. Broomfield-based Crocs, another apparel brand that imports many of its products from overseas, suffered a nearly 14% loss in its share price, comparable to the percentage loss suffered by Deckers Outdoor, maker of Ugg boots and Hoka running shoes, and Nike. About 1% of footwear and 2.5% of the clothing purchased in the U.S. is made domestically, with China and Vietnam key sources of those items, according to the investment firm Jefferies. Chinese-made goods face tariffs of 34%, which comes on top of 20% tariffs announced earlier this year.  Vietnamese goods face a 46% hit, among the highest levied on Wednesday. During the first Trump administration, some companies tried to get around higher tariffs on Chinese goods by shifting production to Vietnam, but that approach won’t work this time around, nor will shifting production to Mexico. Denver-based Gates Industrial Corp., originally made famous for its rubber fan belts and radiator hoses, relies heavily on overseas plants for its broad array of products. Shares in that company dropped 12.2% to $16.88. Shares of Centennial-based Arrow Electronics, which distributes electronics and other components imported from around the globe, dropped $9.05 or 8.6% to close Thursday at $96.11, which represents a new 52-week low. Denver-based Palantir, Colorado’s largest public company with a market value of $205 billion, saw its share price fall $3.85 to $83.60, which represents a 4.4% decline. Even with that drop, shares in the company remain four times higher than they were a year ago. Related Articles Improving Investor Behavior: A study in curiosity, simplicity and gratitude Improving Investor Behavior: Safety in numbers Improving Investor Behavior: An investment in efficiency Canmaker Ball Corp. saw its shares drop 3.46% on Thursday. The Westminster company depends heavily on imported aluminum and its shares were hit harder when a separate 25% tariff on aluminum imports was announced on Feb. 10. Oil and gas companies also saw their shares fall on concerns of reduced consumption due to a potential recession and higher production targets that OPEC announced. Denver-based Civitas Resources saw its shares plunge 16.4%, while Houston-based EOG Resources, which has a large office in Denver, saw its shares fall 7.76%. Denver-based Liberty Energy, a field support services firm founded by current Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, saw its value cut by 18.4%. Not every Colorado stock was down on Thursday. Greeley-based Pilgrim’s Pride, which exports its chicken and turkey products internationally, saw its shares rise 4.2% to $51.06, hitting a 52-week high. The tariffs announced on Wednesday are expected to generate $438 billion and $512 billion in revenue for the U.S. government, assuming current levels of imports and purchasing hold up. The amount that U.S. stock markets lost in response to those additional tariffs was around $3.1 trillion on Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

The following Colorado snow totals have been reported by the National Weather Service for April 3, 2025 as of 6:30 p.m. Thursday: Coal Bank Pass, CO — 6.5 inches at 10:36 a.m. MDT Durango, CO — 0.5 inch at 9:17 a.m. MDT Related Articles Weekend snowstorm to deliver significant snow to Colorado’s ski areas, including along I-70 corridor, amid spring break season Colorado snow totals for February 20-21, 2025 Colorado snow totals for Feb. 19, 2025 Colorado snow totals for Feb. 17-18, 2025 Colorado snow totals for Feb. 14-15, 2025 Molas Pass, CO — 5 inches at 10:36 a.m. MDT Pagosa Springs, CO — 1.5 inches at 8:30 a.m. MDT Red Mountain Pass, CO — 4 inches at 10:34 a.m. MDT Telluride, CO — 3 inches at 8:33 a.m. MDT

Finally, the mottled clumps of gray sky opened and flecks of snow began pelting the faces of the scouts assembled at Canvas Stadium. Heads were hooded. Hands huddled in thick jackets. Rows of NFL evaluators toed the sidelines this Thursday morning, chilled feet antsy for warmth, the intrigue around Tory Horton keeping them firmly planted in Fort Collins. On the sidelines, as the flakes drifted down, Horton’s father, Tim, smiled at CSU head coach Jay Norvell. “That’s what Tory wanted,” Tim told Norvell, as he recalled, of the snow. Horton didn’t need to be here. It’d been all of three weeks since he was cleared to start running routes. All of two months since he was cleared to start running, period. The receiver spent a less-than-ideal portion of his final season at CSU in a bed, recovering from an operation on a knee bludgeoned by hits. And holding a pro day, with representatives from between 28 to 30 NFL teams in attendance, wasn’t the safest of bets. But the goal Thursday was to get evaluators’ eyes on his mentality, the intangibles they couldn’t see on a reel of tape or a medical report. The makeup that kept him at mid-major CSU when two straight 1,100-yard seasons could’ve landed him a nice NIL bag in the portal from an SEC school. Horton was a “football player,” Norvell said repeatedly, the phrase sounding more like an effusive adjective than a fact. As CSU’s staff anticipated the elements, they asked Horton if he’d want to move indoors. He declined. Leave it outside, he told them. “It just shows that competitive, and that mental standpoint, of going out there even though it’s cold and kind of windy conditions and still keeping my routes crisp,” Horton said after his pro day. So he churned out routes under the elements, in no more cover than a pair of black compression shorts, on a pro day where trainer Ricky Proll felt his “stock went up.” Horton’s camp hoped to show scouts his knee, after a lost six-game season in 2024, was plenty healthy. He hit a broad jump of 10.5 feet — which would’ve tied for 12th out of 33 WRs at the NFL combine — and cut smoothly on a series of post-corner and out routes. “This is typical Tory Horton, now,” Norvell said. “I mean, being outside in the snow, in the wind, in the cold, and running routes, catching punts … somebody’s going to get a steal when they pick him.” Exactly when is, of course, the question. Horton could’ve opted for the NFL draft a year ago after a 96-catch season at CSU but chose to return to the program in 2024 to further boost his stock. “There could be some risk,” he acknowledged then. It was unfortunate foreshadowing. Horton endured multiple hits to his knee in six games in 2024, knocked out for the season with season-ending surgery after being helped off in a game against San Jose State. But there was little left for the CSU standout to prove in sheer on-field production. He’s put on 15 pounds since a year ago, questions around a slight frame following him since going under-recruited out of Fresno, Calif. He’s learned how to be “110% locked in mentally,” as he put it, after rehab forced Horton to get his football fix through dissecting film. “He’s more ready,” Norvell said, “for this next step now.” The day was hardly smooth. Horton insisted to Proll that he run a final route after an incompletion on a post, and a subsequent go-ball fell beyond his grasp. But he looked plenty healthy on a series of hard pivots in his route tree, a promising development with the amount of NFL representation on hand. Including, notably, Broncos receivers coach Keary Colbert. “I feel great for what they got in store,” Horton said, asked about the possibility of landing with the Broncos. “Had really good meets with them, so if it was to happen, I wouldn’t be mad.” The leg may not quite be a sure thing yet. The mentality is. After being cleared to run simply in a straight line in February’s combine, his knee swelled up. Veteran agent Chase Callahan advised him not to run the 40-yard-dash. Well — not advised. “I told him no,” Callahan recalled. Related Articles Broncos Mailbag: Should Denver target Bo Nix’s adopted brother, Tez Johnson, in NFL draft? Broncos 2025 NFL mock draft tracker 7.0: What national experts predict Denver will do Mike Shanahan’s Hall of Fame chances? “I think it’s a matter of time,” son Kyle says. 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan on new Broncos ILB Dre Greenlaw, S Talanoa Hufanga: “It was tough losing those guys” Keeler: Broncos’ Courtland Sutton held up his end. It’s time Sean Payton, Greg Penner did the same and extend his contract Horton, though, started testing out some running starts in the hallways of the Indiana Convention Center. He told Callahan he was going to run, and there was no changing his mind. He ran a 4.41, in a development Horton called a “shocker to pretty much everybody.” “For Tory to show that type of courage and competitiveness and wanting to run, and then working out today, I’m just so proud of him,” Norvell told reporters. “And he’s gonna do very well at the next level.” Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

Zeev Buium is chasing not one but two pieces of hardware next week in St. Louis. The University of Denver defenseman was named a Hobey Baker Award Hat Trick Finalist on Thursday afternoon, making him one of three vying for college hockey’s most prestigious award. Buium and the defending national champion Pioneers face NCHC rival Western Michigan next Thursday at 3 p.m. in the first of two Frozen Four semifinals at Enterprise Center in St. Louis. A day later, Buium will be joined by fellow finalists Ryan Leonard of Boston College and Isaac Howard of Michigan State at the Hobey Baker Award ceremony. It will be broadcast live on NHL Network at 4 p.m. He can become the third DU player to win the award, following in the footsteps of Matt Carle in 2006 and Will Butcher in 2017. The 19-year-old is the third Pioneer Hat Trick finalist since ’17, joining Henrik Borgstrom (2018) and Bobby Brink (2022). Already named the NCHC player of the year, Buium is the top scoring defenseman in the nation with 48 points and is second among all skaters with 35 assists. He trails only teammate Jack Devine (44) in the latter. He was taken with the 12th overall pick by Minnesota in last summer’s NHL draft, and there’s a chance he could join the Wild in time for the Stanley Cup Playoffs after DU finishes up its season in the Frozen Four. Related Articles Connor Caponi, DU’s all-time leader in games played, brings physical presence to Pioneers’ 20th Frozen Four Renck vs. Keeler: CU, CSU, DU made headlines. Which school won the weekend? DU Pioneers, Matt Davis stun Boston College to return to Frozen Four for third time in four years DU Pioneers blast Providence behind Zeev Buium tour de force to advance in NCAA Tournament Keeler: DU Pioneers hockey star Matt Davis has thighs on NCAA championship prize Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.

Aurora police are investigating a bomb threat reported after hours at Liberty Middle School, officials said Thursday. The building was evacuated and after-school activities canceled when police received the report, the Aurora Police Department said in a post on X at 4:41 p.m. Related Articles Group accused in burglaries of 21 Aurora homes charged with attempted burglary, conspiracy Police arrest “highly sophisticated crew” suspected of 21 Aurora home burglaries Boulder NAACP chapter to shut down, citing city’s efforts to “suppress and undermine” push for racial equity Suspect arrested by Aurora police after townhome standoff As Arapahoe County struggles with cost, Aurora rebuffs request for more time to take its domestic violence cases There’s no immediate threat to students or staff, and K9 officers are searching the building, the agency said. This is a developing story and may be updated. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO and DIDI TANG A notice to customers dazzled by the low-priced products on Chinese shopping apps: the days of getting trendy clothing, tools and gag gifts that cost less than lunch delivered to your door in 10 days are probably numbered. Related Articles VF Corp. shares shredded on tariff concerns, leading to its worst one-day loss since 1987 Startup with 850 rental houses raises $22M; leases LoHi HQ No gift money? No problem. How to afford a house on your own Trump’s tariffs aren’t strictly reciprocal. Here’s how he calculated them Fear that Trump tariffs will spark recession wipes out $2 trillion in value from US stock values President Donald Trump is ending a little-known but widely used exemption that has allowed as many as 4 million low-value parcels — most of them originating in China — to arrive in the U.S. every day tax-free. An executive order the president signed Wednesday will eliminate the “de minimis provision” for goods from China and Hong Kong on May 2. The tax exemption, which applies to packages valued at $800 or less, has helped China-founded e-commerce companies like Shein and Temu to thrive while cutting into the U.S. retail market. “Shoppers had a full array of product and options of timing,” Marshal Cohen, chief retail advisor at market research firm Circana, said. “Now, they’re going to have a limited array of options and timing: so you can still buy this product, but you may have to wait three or four weeks.” U.S. politicians, law enforcement agencies and business groups have described the long-standing policy as a trade loophole that gave inexpensive Chinese goods an advantage and served as a portal for illicit drugs and counterfeits to enter the country. The sweeping tariffs Trump announced on Wednesday also aim to end the duty-free exception for all imported goods worth less than $800, but only when the U.S. government has the personnel in place to process parcels from every country. What will be the effect on prices and shipping times? A White House fact sheet said small packages of Chinese products sent through the international postal network will be subject to a duty rate of either 30% of their value or $25 per item, an amount that will increase to $50 per item after June 1. Commercial carriers such as FedEx and UPS will be required to report shipment details and remit the appropriate duties to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to the White House. After Trump’s latest round of tariffs, the tariff rate for Chinese products will be at least 54%. Supporters of the de minimis exception have argued that its elimination would drive up costs and hurt low-income consumers and small businesses. The tariff costs threaten to deal a blow to the U.S. operations of companies like Shein and Temu, which rapidly expanded in the U.S. using the de minimis provision to deliver ultra-cheap fast fashion items from China. FILE – Pages from the Shein website, left, and from the Temu site, right, are shown in this photo, in New York, June 23, 2023. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, FIle) However, it’s unclear what impact the loss of the tax exemption will have on the two online retailers, as well as on American companies like Amazon and Walmart, whose platforms include virtual marketplaces where international sellers offer products. Shein and Temu already have been building warehouses in the U.S. so they could get orders to U.S. shoppers more quickly. Shein recently opened a fulfillment and logistics hub in the Seattle area. Neither company could be reached for comment Thursday. Ram Ben Tzion, chief executive officer of the digital vetting platform Publican, said he expected the companies to “be forced to rethink their business strategy and possibly explore opting out of the U.S. market.” In an emailed statement to AP, FedEx said it would support its customers to adapt to the new regulatory requirements and said it would be important for shippers to have “paperwork completed correctly ahead of pick-up” for shipments to move smoothly. Hilton Beckham, an assistant commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the federal agency was ready to implement the latest tariffs. “Our automated systems are fully updated to capture, assess, and administer all new duties, and clear guidance will be provided to support uniform enforcement across the nation,” Beckham said. Ben Tzion, of Publican, said he would “highly doubt” the U.S. government was ready to process the huge number of low-value shipments to be taxed starting next month. The Hong Kong government said the HongKong Post would “temporarily maintain” postal services to the U.S through May 2 but “will not collect any so-called tariffs on behalf of the U.S. authorities.” What is the de minimis provision? Introduced in 1938, the de minimis exception was intended to facilitate the flow of small packages valued at no more than $5, the equivalent of about $109 today. The threshold increased to $200 in 1994 and $800 in 2016. But the rapid rise of cross-border e-commerce, driven by China, has challenged the intent of the decades-old customs exception rule. Souvenir apparel vendor Duane Jackson completes a sale of “Make America Great Again” caps, that are made in China, at his location in New York’s Times Square, Tuesday, April 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Chinese exports of low-value packages soared to $66 billion in 2023, up from $5.3 billion in 2018, according to a February report by the Congressional Research Service. And the U.S. market has been a major destination. The Chinese government, which sees cross-border e-commerce as a critical part of its foreign trade, has introduced favorable policies, including financial support and infrastructure building, to foster its growth. Former President Joe Biden proposed a rule last year that said foreign companies can’t avoid tariffs simply by shipping goods that they claim to be worth $800 or less. Trump tried in February to end the exception but his initial order was called off within days when it appeared the U.S. was not prepared to process and collect tariffs on the millions of parcels. U.S. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, said she was pleased Trump acted a second time to eliminate the rule. “For too long, this customs loophole has let foreign exporters flood our market with cheap goods and helped drug traffickers move fentanyl past our borders — resulting in factory closures, job losses, and deaths,” DeLauro said. An explosion of cheap goods In 2023, for the first time, more than 1 billion such packages came through U.S. customs, up from 134 million in 2015. By the end of last year, Customs and Border Protection said it was processing about 4 million small shipments a day. The cheap prices and increasing popularity of Shein and Temu squeezed fast-fashion retailers like Forever 21 and H&M. Forever 21 blamed the tax exemption in part for its decision to file for bankruptcy last month and close its U.S. stores, “We have been unable to find a sustainable path forward, given competition from foreign fast-fashion companies, which have been able to take advantage of the de minimis exemption to undercut our brand on pricing and margin,” Chief Financial Officer Brad Sell said in a statement. Meanwhile, Amazon launched late last year a low- cost online storefront featuring electronics, apparel and other products priced under $20, in an apparent effort to compete with Temu and Shein. Amazon shipped the products to U.S. customers from a warehouse it operates in China, according to documentation the company provided to sellers.

A federal judge has ordered Colorado’s Elizabeth School District to return 19 removed books to its library shelves — for the second time. U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney denied an appeal from the Elbert County school district Thursday, ordering the district to return the books to library shelves by 5 p.m. Saturday. The school board voted to remove the books last year due to “highly sensitive” content. Sweeney originally had ordered the books be returned by March 25, but the district appealed that decision. The judge, in her new ruling Thursday, wrote that the district’s post-litigation statements that no school board member voted to remove books based on partisan or political motives did not hold weight. Emails between Elizabeth school board members and Superintendent Dan Snowberger showed a commitment to bringing “conservative values” into the district, she wrote. “The Court’s order merely requires the District to adhere to the minimum basic constitutional requirements by enjoining the District from removing additional books because the District disagrees with the views expressed therein or merely to further their preferred political or religious orthodoxy — as was made apparent in the Board’s contemporaneous emails,” Sweeney wrote. Jeff Maher, a spokesperson for the Elizabeth School District, said the district was renewing its emergency motion to put the order on hold pending an appeal to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The renewed order to put the books back on library shelves comes in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and others against the school district after officials removed the 19 books. The titles — including “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye,” and Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give” — centered stories about people of color and LGBTQ individuals. The lawsuit alleged the books’ removal violated free speech protections. Sweeney issued a preliminary injunction last month that ordered the books be returned to school libraries and prohibited the school board from removing any more books “because the district disagrees with the views expressed therein or merely to further their preferred political or religious orthodoxy.” The school district noted in a court filing that it couldn’t return the books to library shelves because they had been discarded after being pulled. That spurred Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell, a Denver law firm representing some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, to donate copies of the 19 books “to help facilitate the school district’s compliance with the federal court order.” Related Articles Colorado school district rejects donation of “banned” books to be returned to library shelves ACLU sues Colorado school district over removal of “highly sensitive” library books Federal judge orders Colorado district to return banned books to school libraries Colorado library fired employee for speaking out about cancellation of Pride event, lawsuit alleges Colorado libraries face increasing requests to remove or limit access to books and programming The Elizabeth school board called an emergency meeting last week to discuss the book donation, and rejected each donated book aside from one: “#Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights.” School board members said that book was too inappropriate for the libraries, but would be kept by the superintendent until further notice. The school board members said the books were inappropriate for school libraries because they contained passages with sexual activity, “controversial social and political commentary,” “alternate sexualities,” “hate” and abortion. “The District argues that the public interest favors granting a stay because ‘thousands of students and their parents rely on the District to appropriately curate its library collections,’ ” Sweeney wrote in her ruling. “The District fails to acknowledge that courts often find that ‘it is always in the public interest to prevent the violation of a party’s constitutional rights.’ ” If the district files another appeal, the ACLU will respond, said Pablo de la Rosa Santiago, spokesperson for the ACLU of Colorado. Then it will be up to the court to decide whether to put the order to return the books on hold, stay the whole case, not issue any ruling and let the original deadline pass, or set a briefing schedule for more hearings. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

In the latest edition of the Nuggets Ink podcast, beat writer Bennett Durando and sports editor Matt Schubert reconvene after a pair of Denver losses. Among the topics discussed: The Nuggets emptied the tank in an effort to end a five-game skid vs. Minnesota, with Nikola Jokic putting up a 61-point triple-double. Yet after Russell Westbrook’s regrettable 14 seconds, Denver dropped that game and another to the Spurs with their starters watching from the bench. Was it worth the gamble? Are there positives that can be taken from the double OT loss? The No. 2 seed now looks like a distant dream for Denver. And the No. 3 is no guarantee either. With a muddled mess below Oklahoma City and Houston in the West, who do the Nuggets most want to see in the first round? What confidence level do the boys have in the Nuggets’ key players? The fellas hash it out in the second half of the podcast with the NBA playoffs looming in a couple of weeks. Subscribe to the podcast SoundCloud | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube Music | RSS Producer: AAron Ontiveroz Music: “The Last Dragons” by Schama Noel Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.

Colorado lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis’ office are weighing legislation that would require 100% of the state’s energy to come from clean sources by 2040 — 10 years earlier than the current target. The proposal is still being drafted and has not yet been introduced in the state House; its details were described to The Denver Post by supporters and opponents Thursday. Broadly, the plan would speed up the state’s timeline to shift to renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, and away from traditional, greenhouse gas-emitting power plants that contribute to climate change. Current state planning calls for hitting 100% clean energy by 2050. Supporters cautioned that the legislation may not be introduced this year, given that the legislative session has roughly five weeks left and a number of significant bills still to debate. But the proposal is backed by Democratic legislators and environmental groups as a way to ratchet up Colorado’s clean energy offerings, particularly in the face of President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash environmental regulations and instill a “drill, baby, drill” mantra. “With the federal government prioritizing fossil fuel interests over people and the environment, state climate action is more crucial than ever,” Paul Sherman, Conservation Colorado climate campaign manager, said in a statement Thursday. “Colorado has the power to lead the nation by embracing clean electricity solutions like solar and wind. We need to cut power plant pollution, invest in clean, reliable energy and protect public health, so our communities — not polluters — come first.” Supporters said the proposal would provide a level of flexibility to utilities who couldn’t hit the new 2040 target. The proposal would also seek to limit those companies’ ability to grow their budgets — by raising rates on Colorado consumers — to adapt to the new targets. The state has long sought to lower its greenhouse gas emissions and to improve Colorado’s air quality, with mixed results. A November report from the Colorado Energy Office and the state Department of Public Health and Environment showed that the state was not on track to meet its near-term goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the gap had narrowed from previous estimates, thanks in part to recent legislative efforts to change land-use policy and encourage denser housing development. Legislative leadership was not immediately available to comment Thursday, and the governor’s office declined an interview request. In a statement, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman said the state was already on track to “reach more than 85% emission reductions in the power sector by 2030 and on a path to nearly decarbonize the power sector by 2040.” “As we look to expand on this successful framework to move us closer to our goals and reduce energy costs for consumers, we will continue to engage in a robust conversation with all those who have an interest in this policy, always putting consumers first,” Wieman wrote. But the proposal has raised alarm bells among the business community and energy industry, who had been operating under the longer timeline established by the 2050 targets. “This is moving the goal posts, no matter how you slice it,” said Meghan Dollar, the Colorado Chamber of Commerce’s senior vice president of governmental affairs. A coalition of energy, business and some labor groups sent a joint letter to legislative leaders last week, asking them not to introduce legislation that would change the 2050 target. Because of the late hour of the legislative session, any new bills require special permission from leadership before they can be introduced, and opponents have pressed Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate to hold off on granting that permission. The different groups have not traditionally agreed on energy transition goals, the letter states, but they united against this one because “we have to build out the framework thoughtfully, and with intention, to ensure that the energy transition doesn’t needlessly result in soaring energy costs.” The signees included pipefitters unions, several electrical cooperatives, Xcel Energy and chambers of commerce and some county governments. It also drew condemnation from Action Colorado, which represents southern and rural parts of Colorado. “This is a sweeping, complete 180 on energy policy in Colorado,” said Sara Blackhurst, the CEO of Action Colorado, said. She said utility providers and businesses have “poured their heart, soul and guts into” hitting the 2050 goal. “To change that to 2040,” she said, “would be absolutely devastating.” Matt Gerhart, a lawyer with Sierra Club, said the proposal would give more flexibility to energy providers. It would have them achieve 95% decarbonization by 2035 and 100% by 2040 — if they can do so within cost and reliability parameters. “Everyone recognizes that affordability and reliability are the cornerstone of making the energy transition sustainable over the long run,” Gerhart said. The governor’s office echoed that sentiment, adding that the proposal would seek to cut the state’s emissions load as much as possible while seeking to balance affordability. Related Articles Opinion: Children should not be able to access pornography online Colorado gas stations would have to post climate change warnings under bill passed by House Colorado bill adding protections for transgender people — including against “deadnaming” — passes first hurdle Colorado Democrats call for “a reckoning” on TABOR and taxes, as GOP vows to “fight very hard” Gov. Jared Polis signs bill to let CU, CSU and other colleges pay athletes directly — but with “concerns” The proposal would serve as a vital bridge between the state’s 2030 and 2050 goals, he said, and would represent “meaningful progress” — without tying the hands of electricity producers if decarbonization efforts prove too expensive or unreliable to make the final push toward clean energy. He said it would not be prescriptive or prioritize certain technologies, such as wind and solar energy generation, over other potential sources of clean energy. Blackhurst, however, said an early bill draft appeared to give preference to solar and wind sources. “This bill is basically taking the clean energy framework (for 2030 emission goals) and extending it outward,” Gerhart said. He could not predict if the bill would be introduced this year or not, however, given the ongoing discussions and ever tightening calendar before the legislature must adjourn on May 7. He also took umbrage at characterizations that the proposal would put parameters on what utilities can do. Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

More than 800 flights were delayed or canceled at Denver International Airport on Thursday as a spring snowstorm hit the metro. Related Articles Colorado weather: Second wave of snowstorm to sweep over state Widening of Peña Boulevard gets green light for study phase as City Council support grows Passengers evacuated plane at DIA onto wing and with their luggage. The NTSB is investigating why. Passenger sues American Airlines after plane catches fire at DIA Colorado weather: Up to 2 feet of snow expected in mountains by Wednesday There were 824 delayed and 14 canceled flights at DIA as of 4 p.m., according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Snow and ice is causing arriving flights to be delayed by an average of 90 minutes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. DIA officials posted a video of snow at the airport on social media and urged travelers to check with their airlines for delays or cancellations. Southwest Airlines passengers were facing 282 delayed and 10 canceled flights, while United and SkyWest reported a combined 371 delayed flights. This is a developing story and may be updated. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

A Manhattan judge rejected a majority of motions by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss parts of a lawsuit accusing the tech companies of swiping stories from The Denver Post, the New York Times and other newspapers to train their artificial intelligence products. The Post, its affiliated newspapers in MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, the Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of stealing millions of copyrighted news stories to benefit popular AI products like ChatGPT. Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein’s ruling Wednesday preserves the core elements of the lawsuit, which will now go forward to trial. While Stein rejected efforts to dismiss claims related to statute of limitations, trademark dilution and stripping content management information from the content in question, he dismissed CMI claims against Microsoft along with a secondary CMI claim against OpenAI, and one other unfair competition claim against both defendants. The judge dismissed additional claims for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times. “We get to go forward with virtually all of our claims intact, including all of the copyright filings,” Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for The Daily News and the Times, said. “It’s a significant victory, albeit a preliminary stage of the case.” A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said “hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on ChatGPT to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and to solve hard problems. We welcome the court’s dismissal of many of these claims and look forward to making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.” Microsoft and OpenAI don’t deny they depend on copyrighted material, instead arguing that it’s under their rights to do so under the fair use doctrine. Under that doctrine, the use of copyrighted materials are permitted under certain circumstances, including using the materials for educational purposes. The Post and affiliated newspapers filed the suit in 2024, challenging that notion, alleging the companies “simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely.” “This decision is a significant victory for us,” said Frank Pine, executive editor at MediaNews Group. “The court denied the majority of the dismissal motions filed by OpenAI and Microsoft. The claims the court has dismissed do not undermine the main thrust of our case, which is that these companies have stolen our work and violated our copyright in a way that fundamentally damages our business.” The Post brought its suit alongside its sister newspapers, MediaNews Group’s The Mercury News, The Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press; and Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Pine also addressed recent efforts by Big Tech to lobby the Trump administration to weaken copyright protections. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling “OpenAI lobbying the government to loosen copyright laws to make their thievery legal is shameful and un-American. They have a $150 billion valuation for a product they acknowledge could not have been built without the copyrighted content they stole from journalists, authors, poets, scholars and all manner of creatives and academics. Makers pay for their raw materials, and good businesses bolster their communities by creating economies and industries, not by destroying them.” Microsoft and OpenAI are accused in the litigation of harming the newspapers’ subscription-based business model by misappropriating journalists’ work and providing it for free. The cases allege that the AI models also risk tarnishing reporters’ reputations by sometimes misstating their reporting or attributing it to others. The papers are seeking unspecified damages, restitution of profits and a court order forcing the companies to stop using their materials to train chatbots. “We look forward to presenting a jury with all the facts regarding OpenAI and Microsoft copying and improper use of the content of newspapers across the country,” Lieberman said. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

JUBA, South Sudan — After being gang-raped by armed men while collecting firewood, the 28-year-old tried in vain to get help. Some clinics were closed, others told her to return later and she had no money to access a hospital. Five months after the assault, she lay on a mat in a displacement camp in South Sudan’s capital, rubbing her swollen belly. “I felt like I wasn’t heard … and now I’m pregnant,” she said. The Associated Press does not identify people who have been raped. Sexual assault is a constant risk for many women in South Sudan. Now one aid group is trying to bridge the gap with technology, to find and help survivors more quickly. But it’s not easy in a country with low connectivity, high illiteracy and wariness about how information is used. Five months ago, an Israel-based organization in South Sudan piloted a chatbot it created on WhatsApp. It prompts questions for its staff to ask survivors of sexual assault to anonymously share their experiences. The information is put into the phone while speaking to the person and the bot immediately notifies a social worker there’s a case, providing help to the person within hours. IsraAID said the technology improves communication. Papers can get misplaced and information can go missing, said Rodah Nyaduel, a psychologist with the group. When colleagues document an incident, she’s notified by phone and told what type of case it is. Tech experts said technology can reduce human error and manual file keeping, but organizations need to ensure data privacy. “How do they intend to utilize that information, does it get circulated to law enforcement, does that information cross borders. Groups need to do certain things to guarantee how to safeguard that information and demonstrate that,” said Gerardo Rodriguez Phillip, an AI and technology innovation consultant in Britain. IsraAID said its data is encrypted and anonymized. It automatically deletes from staffers’ phones. In the chatbot’s first three months in late 2024, it was used to report 135 cases. When the 28-year-old was raped, she knew she had just a few days to take medicine to help prevent disease and pregnancy, she said. One aid group she approached scribbled her information on a piece of paper and told her to return later to speak with a social worker. When she did, they said they were busy. After 72 hours, she assumed it was pointless. Weeks later, she found she was pregnant. IsraAID found her while doing door-to-door visits in her area. At first, she was afraid to let them put her information into their phone, worried it would be broadcast on social media. But she felt more comfortable knowing the phones were not personal devices, thinking she could hold the organization accountable if there were problems. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling She’s one of tens of thousands of people still living in displacement sites in the capital, Juba, despite a peace deal ending civil war in 2018. Some are afraid to leave or have no homes to return to. The fear of rape remains for women who leave the camps for firewood or other needs. Some told the AP about being sexually assaulted. They said there are few services in the camp because of reduced assistance by international aid groups and scant government investment in health. Many can’t afford taxis to a hospital in town. U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to freeze USAID funding during a 90-day review period is exacerbating the challenges. Aid groups have closed some services including psychological support for women, affecting tens of thousands of people. Technology isn’t widely used by aid groups focused on gender-based violence in South Sudan. Some organizations say that, based on survivors’ feedback, the ideal app would allow people to get help remotely. Stigma surrounding sexual assault further complicates efforts to get help in South Sudan. It’s especially hard for young girls who need to get permission to leave their homes, said Mercy Lwambi, gender-based violence lead at the International Rescue Committee. “They want to talk to someone faster than a physical meeting,” she said. But South Sudan has one of the lowest rates of mobile access and connectivity in the world, with less than 25% of market penetration, according to a report by GSMA, a global network of mobile operators. People with phones don’t always have internet access, and many are illiterate. “You have to be thinking, will this work in a low-tech environment? What are the literacy rates? Do they have access to devices? If so, what kind? Will they find it engaging, will they trust it, is it safe?” said Kirsten Pontalti, a senior associate at Proteknon Foundation for Innovation and Learning, an international organization focused on advancing child protection. Pontalti has piloted two chatbots, one to help youth and parents better access information about sexual reproductive health and the other for frontline workers focused on child protection during COVID. She said technology focused on reporting abuse should include an audio component for people with low literacy and be as low-tech as possible. Some survivors of sexual assault say they just want to be heard, whether by phone or in person. One 45-year-old man, a father of 11, said it took years to seek help after being raped by his wife after he refused to have sex and said he didn’t want more children they couldn’t afford to support. It took multiple visits by aid workers to his displacement site in Juba before he felt comfortable speaking out. “Organizations need to engage more with the community,” he said. “If they hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have come in.” ___ For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse ___ The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

According to Margo Harrison, the 1911 invention of Midol was the last time a new period pain product hit the market. That was until last week, when her company, Wave Bye, launched its line of supplements to promote cycle regularity and help curb bleeding and cramps. “(Women) are not trying to be superhuman,” the OB-GYN said. “They just want to feel normal.” Wave Bye, which Harrison founded in 2023, sells a “backbone” daily supplement called Bye Irregularity to make periods more predictable. Those are intended to treat several symptoms, including potential migraines, fatigue and irritability that come from premenstrual syndrome. Once you know your schedule, the company’s period-specific products, called Bye Cramps and Bye Bad Cramps, are more effective, she said.  They prevent messengers from telling the uterus to contract and bleed, she added. “You need to take the supplement every day to regulate your cycle, and then what differentiates our (other) products is they need to be taken two days before bleeding,” Harrison explained. “If you block symptoms two days before, you totally change the period experience.” Other medications and remedies are sparse, Harrison said. Though women will use Midol and Tylenol for relief, those pills target the brain rather than the uterus directly, she said. There are also gummies on the market for PMS, but she added that there’s nothing like Wave Bye’s two-pronged, premenstrual attack on irregularity and period pain using its Vitamin E-based product. Heating pads and relief patches only do so much, too, Harrison added. She hopes that Wave Bye can be a more encompassing approach to the menstruation problem about half the population manages for decades of their lives. The company sells the products in four bundles — each for different severities of symptoms – on its website. They cost between $70 and $80 on a monthly subscription, with one-time purchases and three-month and 12-month packs also available. Harrison is also in negotiations to sell Wave Bye at yoga studios and health shops including Bridget’s Botanicals in Littleton. The company also offers revenue sharing or discount opportunities for health care professionals such as OB-GYNs and nurses. “There’s no benefit from bleeding just to bleed. If you cut your hand, are you supposed to just let it keep bleeding? You’re not getting any benefit from not turning off the faucet,” Harrison said. “It’s not necessarily bad – it’s meant to support a pregnancy. But we want to reduce period pain and bleeding and make that period experience better in order to give people their time back.” Harrison was a clinical researcher at Columbia University and the University of Colorado Anschutz, focusing on pregnancy in poor countries. She then went to consult VC-backed women’s health firms three years ago. Through that and her work as an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains over the last two-and-a-half years, she saw the need for Wave Bye. “I’d have patients sit up from an abortion and hear them say, ‘Well, at least that was less painful than my period,’” she said. “People get gaslit, and the OB-GYNs don’t deal with period pain until it’s really profound. It feels like there’s this gap. They just do what their moms or friends or community are doing.” Wave Bye has so far raised $300,000 out of what Harrison hopes is an $875,000 round. Most of that is angel funding, she said, along with one Denver-area institutional investor. She hopes to close the round in the next couple of months. The money will mostly be used to develop another product, which Harrison said will likely take at least two years, and continue work on a yet-to-be-released app to help users schedule their doses. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling Wave Bye already saw some traction from a small batch of users late last year, so Harrison is confident sales will take off now that her business is officially off the ground. Of the 25 units Wave Bye has sold, she said about half came from three- and 12-month purchases. “If people trust the product,” she said, “they’re gonna get more.” Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

After a few years of writing what she called a “niche newsletter for Washington insiders,” political journalist Tara Palmeri decided she wanted to reach a wider audience. A much wider audience. She’s taking her reporting to YouTube. Palmeri said she is leaving the startup Puck to strike out on her own, focusing much of her effort on the streaming giant. She joins a slew of other journalists who have left news organizations to build their own businesses around podcasts and newsletters. But in politics, the most successful of these independent media stars have strong views and clear allegiances. Conservative hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly remain atop the podcasting charts, and anti-Trump media collectives are rapidly growing; two of them, The Contrarian and MeidasTouch, each have more than 500,000 newsletter subscribers, many of them paid. That is not Palmeri. “I’m not on a crusade,” said Palmeri, 37, the type of political journalist who proudly abstains from voting in elections while she’s covering them in order to maintain objectivity with her audience. “I’m not sold on either party, and that’s why I don’t really have a lot of friends.” In her new venture, Palmeri wants to speak to audiences from the underdeveloped territory of “the middle,” she said, without a political agenda. “There isn’t really anyone there yet, and I want to try.” In focusing on YouTube, Palmeri is also taking a slightly a different tack from many of the journalists who have recently left media companies — whether voluntarily or through layoffs or firings — to release their own content, typically on Substack. (Although she will have a Substack newsletter, too.) YouTube says its viewers want more long-form news analysis, especially via podcasts. It recently announced having more than 1 billion monthly podcast listeners, outpacing any other media platform. (Watching and listening to podcasts is an increasingly fuzzy distinction.) Palmeri is part of a program meant to support “next generation” independent journalists on the platform with training and funding. But whether “news influencers” like Palmeri can succeed at the same scale of popular partisan commentators is still untested. Many people say they want more unbiased news. Do they really? Adam Faze, an emerging-media guru known for producing TikTok shows who is informally advising Palmeri, said he wasn’t aware of other political journalists approaching YouTube quite like her. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling “Not with her access,” he said. Piers Morgan has been successful, Faze pointed out, but his YouTube channel is largely reminiscent of his cable news days, with cacophonous cross-talking panels and a green-screen cityscape backdrop. “I don’t want you to go to this YouTube page and think, ‘I could have watched that on a cable channel,’” Palmeri said. She aspires to “speak like a normal person,” rather than a news anchor, and also “be more gritty.” Palmeri takes pride in her grit. She often describes herself as “feared and fearless” — a daughter of New Jersey whose parents did not go to universities. Her zeal for scoops has made her variously unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans and occasionally other journalists. Before Puck, while working for Politico, Palmeri reported on an investigation into a gun owned by Hunter Biden, a story that she said had “ostracized” her from her newsroom. In 2021, a deputy White House press secretary resigned after telling Palmeri that he would “destroy” her for reporting on his relationship with an Axios journalist who had covered the president. An old-school tabloid sensibility drives Palmeri, who in her 20s door-knocked a couple of White House gate-crashers for The Washington Examiner and chased a “cop-killer” in Cuba for The New York Post. On her new Substack, The Red Letter, she plans to include blind gossip items, Palmeri said. “She has a cadence that makes you feel like you’re just talking to a girlfriend” rather than a journalist, said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who encouraged Palmeri to go independent. This disposition can prove “a little dangerous,” Harris added: “All of a sudden you realize you’ve given up the state secrets.” In November, at a cocktail party in Washington, a former congressional staff member approached this reporter with the warning not to trust Palmeri, who was also at the party. (“I love that,” Palmeri later said.) Palmeri has at times struggled to fit in while working at more traditional newsrooms, such as ABC News, where she spent about two years as a White House correspondent — the first of which she appeared infrequently on the air. “I’ve always felt like there’s never really been a place that I’ve been at home,” she said. After ABC, she hosted investigative podcasts for Sony about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and the wealthy family of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. She intends to continue making podcasts; her current show, “Somebody’s Gotta Win,” an election collaboration between Puck and Spotify’s The Ringer, is set to end in April, she said. Puck, which she joined in 2022, was more suited to her self-driven (and self-promotional) streak than any other employer. “We’re kind of renegades,” Palmeri said, crediting Puck with helping find her voice. “It was the closest place I had gotten to me writing directly to an audience, but it was still edited in a style that was not me,” she said. The tone was more “elite and impressive” than her natural voice; one example she offered was the frequent use of the word “indeed.” To go independent, she is giving up her $260,000 base salary at Puck and funding her new venture with her savings. The dining table of her one-bedroom New York City apartment in brownstone Brooklyn has become her recording studio. With an initial grant from YouTube, Palmeri bought about $10,000 worth of equipment, and tested and hired editors. (She and YouTube both declined to disclose the size of the grant.) In return, she has committed to publishing about four videos per week. Investors are also interested in Palmeri, she said, though she has not decided whether or when to take their money. She would prefer to accept “squeaky clean” funding from both ends of the political spectrum, she said: “This is a trust business.” She has also considered a new line of credit or a small-business loan. “I’m willing to bet on myself,” Palmeri said. “There’s no one over me telling me, ‘This is the headline, this is the angle.’ You don’t like it? It’s me. There’s no one else to blame.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LONDON — If you’ve got a smartphone, you probably spend too much time on it — checking Instagram, watching silly TikTok videos, messaging on WhatsApp or doomscrolling on X. It can be hard to curb excessive use of smartphones and social media, which are addictive by design. Reducing your screen time is often more than just a matter of willpower, especially for younger people whose brains and impulse control are still developing. If you’re a phone addict who wants to cut down on the hours a day spent looking at your device, here are some techniques you can try to free up more IRL time: Delete apps An easy first step is getting rid of any apps you’ve been wasting time on. Over the past year, I’ve deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from my phone because I wanted to use them less. Now and then I’ll have to go the app store and reinstall one because I need to do something like post a photo I took on my phone. (Sometimes I’ll transfer the photo to my laptop and then post it to the web from there, but usually, it’s too much hassle.) The danger with this approach is that if you do reinstall the app, you won’t bother deleting it again. Use built-in controls Both iPhones and Android devices have onboard controls to help regulate screen time. They can also be used by parents to regulate children’s phone usage. Apple’s Screen Time controls are found in the iPhone’s settings menu. Users can set overall Downtime, which shuts off all phone activity during a set period. If you want a phone-free evening, then you could set it to kick in from, say, 7 p.m. until 7 a.m. The controls also let users put a blanket restriction on certain categories of apps, such as social, games or entertainment or zero in on a specific app, by limiting the time that can be spent on it. Too distracted by Instagram? Then set it so that you can only use it for a daily total of 20 minutes. The downside is that the limits aren’t hard to get around. It’s more of a nudge than a red line that you can’t cross. If you try to open an app with a limit, you’ll get a screen menu offering one more minute, a reminder after 15 minutes, or to completely ignore it. Android users can use turn to their Digital Wellbeing settings, which include widgets to remind users how much screen time they’ve had. There’s also the option to create separate work and personal profiles, so you can hide your social media apps and their notifications when you’re at the office. Don’t be distracted There are other little tricks to make your phone less distracting. I use the Focus mode on my iPhone to silence notifications. For example, If I’m in a meeting somewhere, I mute it until I leave that location. Android also has a Focus mode to pause distracting apps. Change your phone display to grayscale from color so that it doesn’t look so exciting. On iPhones, adjust the color filter in your settings. For Android, turn on Bedtime Mode, or tweak the color correction setting. Android phones can also nag users not to look at their phones while walking, by activating the Heads Up feature in Digital Wellbeing. Block those apps If the built-in controls aren’t enough, there are many third-party apps, like Jomo, Opal, Forest, Roots and LockMeOut that are designed to cut down screen time. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling Many of these apps have both free and premium versions with more features, and strongly push you toward signing up for a subscription by minimizing the option to “skip for now” on the payment screen. I tested out a few on my iPhone for this story. To try out Opal, I reinstalled Facebook so I could block it. Whenever I tapped the Facebook icon, Opal intervened to give me various inspirational messages, like “Gain Wisdom, Lose Facebook,” and tallied how many times I tried to open it. To get around the block, I had to open Opal and wait through a six-second timeout before requesting up to 15 minutes to look at Facebook. There’s an option to up the difficulty by increasing the delay before you can look again. Jomo, which I used to restrict my phone’s Reddit app, worked in a similar way: tap the Unlock button, which took me to the Jomo app, where I had to wait 20 seconds before I could tap the button to unlock Reddit for up to 10 minutes. The OneSec app takes a different approach by reminding users to first take a pause. The installation, which involves setting up an automation on the iPhone’s Shortcuts, can be confusing. When I eventually installed it for my Bluesky app, it gave me a prompt to run a shortcut that wiped my screen with a soothing purple-blue and reminded me to take a deep breath before letting me choose to open the app — but in practice it was too easy to just skip the prompt. The Android-only LockMeOut can freeze you out of designated apps based on criteria like your location, how many times you’ve opened an app, or how long you’ve used it. The obvious way to defeat these apps is simply to delete them, although some advise users to follow the proper uninstall procedure or else apps could remain blocked. Use external hardware Digital blockers might not be for everyone. Some startups, figuring that people might prefer a tangible barrier, offer hardware solutions that introduce physical friction between you and an app. Unpluq is a yellow tag that you have to hold up to your phone in order to access blocked apps. Brick and Blok are two different products that work along the same lines — they’re squarish pieces of plastic that you have to tap or scan with your phone to unlock an app. The makers of these devices say that software solutions are too easy to bypass, but a physical object that you can put somewhere out of reach or leave behind if you’re going somewhere is a more effective way to get rid of distractions. What about stashing the phone away entirely? There are various phone lockboxes and cases available, some of them designed so parents can lock up their teenagers’ phones when they’re supposed to be sleeping. Yondr, which makes portable phone locking pouches used at concerts or in schools, also sells a home phone box. See a therapist Perhaps there are deeper reasons for your smartphone compulsion. Maybe it’s a symptom of underlying problems like anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression or low self-esteem. If you think that’s the case, it could be worth exploring therapy that is becoming more widely available. One London hospital treats “technology addiction” with a plan that includes dealing with “discomfort in face-to-face time” with other people, and exploring your relationship with technology. Another clinic boasts that its social media addiction treatment also includes working on a patient’s technology management skills, such as “setting boundaries for device usage, finding alternative activities to fill the void of reduced online interaction, and learning how to engage more with the physical world.” Downgrade your phone Why not trade your smartphone for a more basic one? It’s an extreme option but there’s a thriving subculture of cellphones with only basic features, catering to both retro enthusiasts and people, including parents, worried about screen time. They range from cheap old-school brick-and-flip phones by faded brands like Nokia to stylish but pricier devices from boutique manufacturers like Punkt. The tradeoff, of course, is that you’ll also have to do without essential apps like Google Maps or your bank. ___ Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LAMAR — The land runs deep in southeastern Colorado. For Bob Bamber, the connection goes back to his great-great-grandfather, who homesteaded north of Pritchett, a tiny Baca County town of barely 100 people not far from the Oklahoma state line. So the 44-year-old rancher took notice when he found out that a portion of the 10,000 acres of ranchland he and his father own and lease in neighboring Prowers County had been placed in a zone designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a potential high-voltage electric transmission corridor. And he got agitated. “It’s an emotional reaction because of that family connection,” said Bamber, bouncing in his truck along dirt roads that slice through prairie dotted with cedar trees, yucca and prickly pear cactus. “It sounds cliche, but you are part of the land out here.” His worry echoes that of his over-the-fence neighbor. Val Emick fears that a transmission corridor, with towering pylons marching from New Mexico into three rural Colorado counties — Baca, Prowers and Kiowa — could disturb a fragile short-grass prairie landscape in the state’s far-southeast corner, lowering land values and disrupting ranching and farming operations that span generations. “You go out seven days a week, and you build it and want to pass it down to your kids and your grandkids — it seems unfair,” said Emick, who has lived in the same house south of Lamar for 35 years and runs a cow-calf operation on some 5,000 acres. “And they come in with that threat.” That threat is eminent domain — the power the government has to condemn and take land for public uses, like the construction of highways and other infrastructure. It must pay fair market value to the property owner for the land. No determination has been made about the use of eminent domain to accommodate electric transmission lines as part of the Energy Department’s National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors initiative, or NIETC. But people in this part of the state have fresh and raw memories of the specter of condemnation that hung over the U.S. Army’s plan to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, northeast of Trinidad, nearly 20 years ago. After both of Colorado’s U.S. senators expressed opposition to involuntary land sales for the expansion, the idea was scuttled in 2013. “The biggest concern we have is eminent domain,” Prowers County Commissioner Ron Cook recently told The Denver Post inside the county courthouse in Lamar. “We’ve got third- and fourth-generation farmers and ranchers running these properties, and we sure don’t want them run off their land.” The concern over the NIETC proposal brought a crowd out to the same courthouse last month. Some in the room, including Cook, said they had only recently learned of the project. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from the federal government. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert joined the meeting via video link and told the attendees she would push back hard on the corridor designation. In an email to the Post this month, the Republican congresswoman said she reached out to newly confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fellow Coloradan, and got the public input period for the project extended from mid-February to April 15. In a Feb. 10 letter to Wright, Boebert said what was started under the Biden administration should be looked at again, with an option for the agency under President Donald Trump’s new administration to “shut this project down.” “We can all agree that access to reliable energy is important for the health and prosperity of rural Coloradans, but that doesn’t mean we need to be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach dictated by D.C. bureaucrats who have failed to include community leaders in this process,” she said. Rancher Bob Bamber drives out to check on a few of his cattle at his family’s ranch outside Lamar on March 10, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) “Very important corridor” for grid The NIETC program, which Congress authorized in 2005, tasks the Department of Energy with identifying areas of the country where transmission is lacking. It’s charged with determining where infrastructure is “urgently needed to advance important national interests, such as increased electric reliability and reduced consumer costs,” according to the program’s website. Impacts from a compromised electric grid include more frequent and longer power outages and higher prices for energy due to a lack of capacity to move lower-cost electricity from where it is produced to where it is needed, the website says. So far, no NIETC corridors have been established in the United States. Click to enlarge The Post asked the Department of Energy for comment via multiple phone and email requests but received no response. The department’s latest designation effort began last May with the release of a list of 10 possible transmission corridors, based on a National Transmission Needs Study that was completed in 2023. That list was winnowed in December to three corridors, including what is known as the Southwestern Grid Connector — which would run up the eastern edge of New Mexico, scrape the western edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and pierce the southeast corner of Colorado. The other two NIETC corridors being considered are in the Lake Erie portion of Pennsylvania and across parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska. The Department of Energy says the Southwest Grid Connector could be anywhere from three miles to 15 miles wide, though the ultimate transmission line built would cover far less land. The corridor, the government says, is designed to follow existing transmission line rights-of-way for parts of its path. “It’s a very important corridor,” said Adam Kurland, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in federal energy policy. “It’s probably the one that adds the most value to the grid.” The Southwestern Grid Connector would help link the nation’s eastern and western interconnections, Kurland said, and would provide the ability “to exchange more power and serve a national grid.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the eastern interconnection operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains while the western interconnection covers states west of the Rockies. “There’s very limited transfer between these two interconnects,” Kurland said. “There’s a lot of value for doing that, for reliability of the grid and for resilience against weather systems. You could more easily move power and supply power where it’s needed.” An abandoned car rusts in a field near the area where the federal Department of Energy is proposing to expand the electric grid, stretching from southern New Mexico into southeastern Colorado, south of Lamar, on March 10, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) More data centers, fewer coal plants Grid Strategies, a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the company, are power-hungry data centers and manufacturing facilities. A study that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden participated in last fall concluded that the U.S. transmission system — consisting of a half-million miles of power lines — will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers. And a 2024 report by the nonprofit North American Electric Corp. determined that about half the continent was at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years. That risk comes as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity increases. In Colorado, coal plants across the state have been shut down in recent years as worries about their climate-warming emissions escalate. All are expected to close by the end of 2030. “The more transmission we build, the more flexibility and resilience we create,” said Mark Gabriel, the president and CEO of the Brighton-based electric cooperative United Power. For eight years, Gabriel headed the Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells and conveys electricity across 17,000 miles of transmission lines to 15 western and central states. “As coal goes away, we still need to move electrons,” he said. “How do we meet a growing demand at the same time we’re closing down generator resources?” The state’s future demands on electric power are ambitious. While campaigning for his first term in office, Gov. Jared Polis said he wanted all of the power on Colorado’s electric grid to come from renewable energy sources by 2040. Rules adopted by Denver and the state aim to eventually make buildings all-electric. And Colorado, with its goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030, recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold. “You want to have a diverse portfolio of generation resources, and that portfolio is helped by more transmission,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t (achieve that) unless we have projects like this, and others, constructed.” Rancher Val Emick works on her family’s ranch outside Lamar on March 10, 2025. Emick repurposes old wind turbine blades, seen in the background, to help shield her animals from the wind. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) Farmers lament lack of “bargaining power” But it’s how projects are constructed that matters to Steve Shelton, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher who lives about 10 miles south of Lamar. He grows wheat, corn and sorghum on 20,000 acres. Shelton, 69, was on the other side of the transmission debate about 15 years ago, when he joined neighboring ranchers in exploring deals with a wind farm near Kit Carson to string electric wires across land in the state’s southeast corner. “We had some farmers who said ‘No,’ and we’d have to find another path or sweeten the pot,” he said of the effort, which eventually fizzled out. With the shadow of eminent domain in the mix this time, Shelton said, “you have no bargaining power.” “They would get the development rights or the easement, and the farmer and rancher would have no income off of that,” he said. The county’s fiscal health would also be impacted by a condemnation action by the government, said Prowers County Commissioner Roger Stagner, who served as mayor of Lamar for a decade. Taking land off the tax rolls would not only hit the county’s $41 million annual budget but would also have a ripple effect on the local economy, he said. Boebert, in her Feb. 10 letter to the energy secretary, said the contemplated Southwestern Grid Connector would “affect approximately 325,000 acres of private land in Baca, Prowers and Kiowa counties in Colorado.” There are fewer than 20,000 residents combined in the three counties. “Everything revolves around agriculture. If you’re going to take out that much land, it can affect the entire county,” Stagner said. “If there’s no alfalfa grown on that ground, that farmer doesn’t spend as much in town. That’s a big concern for us.” Bamber, the Prowers County rancher, says he has no issue with the deployment of energy infrastructure across his property, so long as it’s done with full disclosure and landowner input. In fact, he and Emick, his neighbor, host dozens of wind turbines on their acreage that power the Twin Buttes wind farm. “We’ve been able to live with the wind farm because they’ve compensated us,” Bamber said. “We’ve made the tradeoff for the money.” Lease agreements they hammered out with the wind energy company to use their land made the deal palatable, Emick said. “There was no hiding anything,” she said. A small windmill pumps water into a stock tank for Val Emick’s cattle at her family’s ranch outside Lamar, Colorado, on March 10, 2025. Large wind turbines in the background generate electricity. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post) Broken trust, uncertain future With the NIETC process already in the third of four phases, Cook is frustrated and befuddled that he and his fellow commissioners didn’t catch wind of the project before late January. That uncertainty has been a driving force behind much of the resistance to it among his constituents. “That is what we’re struggling with — we have no idea how this is going to end up and what they’re going to do with it,” he said. The Department of Energy describes the third phase of the designation process as the “public and governmental engagement phase.” During this period, the agency will decide the level of environmental review that applies to each NIETC project. It will conduct any required reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The agency conducted a webinar on the latest developments with the Southwestern Grid Connector in mid-January. And it issued a news release about the latest phase in December. But many in southeast Colorado think the federal government could have done a better job of outreach to local officials and property owners. Related Articles Can Colorado’s electric grid keep up as coal plants close and data centers open? Demand fueled by electric vehicles, rooftop solar drives Xcel Energy’s $5B plan for system upgrades 80% of new cars and trucks for sale in Colorado would need to be electric by 2032 under new rule Some take hope in the success of opponents in Kansas last year who eliminated the Midwest-Plains and Plains-Southwest NIETC corridors that were part of the original 10 first proposed in the spring. U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, who represents that state’s 1st Congressional District, issued a statement in December after the Kansas transmission corridors were dropped. “Kansans made it clear from the very beginning that we were not interested in the federal government seizing our private land,” Mann said, adding: “I’m glad our voices were heard in stopping this federal overreach.” Boebert, in her letter to the energy secretary last month, cited Kansas’ resistance and urged the agency to “reconsider and halt further actions on current NIETC designations in Colorado initiated by the previous administration.” That’s the right call, Bamber said. “I’d like to see it just stopped — the trust is broken,” he said. “We’re an afterthought and we should have been partners in this.” Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s. In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Fixler took to the bimah himself. “The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.” The recording was created by what Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an AI chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an AI version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer. Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with AI in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer AI tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of AI in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing AI’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Religious leaders have used AI to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously. But the ethical questions around using generative AI for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using AI for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far. Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate an entire service for his church as an experiment in 2023. He marketed it using posters of robots, and the service drew in some curious new attendees — “gamer types,” Cooper said — who had never before been to his congregation. The thematic prompt he gave ChatGPT to generate various parts of the service was: “How can we recognize truth in a world where AI blurs the truth?” ChatGPT came up with a welcome message, a sermon, a children’s program and even a four-verse song, which was the biggest hit of the bunch, Cooper said. The song went: As algorithms spin webs of lies Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling We lift our gaze to the endless skies Where Christ’s teachings illuminate our way Dispelling falsehoods with the light of day Cooper has not since used the technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw instead from his own experiences. But the presence of AI in faith-based spaces, he said, poses a larger question: Can God speak through AI? “That’s a question a lot of Christians online do not like at all because it brings up some fear,” Cooper said. “It may be for good reason. But I think it’s a worthy question.” The impact of AI on religion and ethics has been a touch point for Pope Francis on several occasions, though he has not directly addressed using AI to help write sermons. Our humanity “enables us to look at things with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events and to uncover their real meaning,” the pope said in a message early last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes bland.” He added, “Such wisdom cannot be sought from machines.” Phil EuBank, a pastor at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, compared AI to a “bionic arm” that could supercharge his work. But when it comes to sermon writing, “there’s that Uncanny Valley territory,” he said, “where it may get you really close, but really close can be really weird.” Fixler agreed. He recalled being taken aback when Rabbi Bot asked him to include in his AI sermon, a one-time experiment, a line about itself. “Just as the Torah instructs us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” Rabbi Bot said, “can we also extend this love and empathy to the AI entities we create?” Rabbis have historically been early adopters of new technologies, especially for printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of those books was in the spiritual relationship that their readers had with God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, who is also a part of Congregation Emanu El. To assist his research, Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on 20 years of his own writings. But he has never used AI to write portions of sermons. “Our job is not just to put pretty sentences together,” Hayon said. “It’s to hopefully write something that’s lyrical and moving and articulate, but also responds to the uniquely human hungers and pains and losses that we’re aware of because we are in human communities with other people.” He added, “It can’t be automated.” Kenny Jahng, a tech entrepreneur, believes that fears about ministers’ using generative AI are overblown, and that leaning into the technology may even be necessary to appeal to a new generation of young, tech-savvy churchgoers when church attendance across the country is in decline. Jahng, the editor-in-chief of a faith- and tech-focused media company and founder of an AI education platform, has traveled the country in the last year to speak at conferences and promote faith-based AI products. He also runs a Facebook group for tech-curious church leaders with over 6,000 members. “We are looking at data that the spiritually curious in Gen Alpha, Gen Z are much higher than boomers and Gen Xers that have left the church since COVID,” Jahng said. “It’s this perfect storm.” As of now, a majority of faith-based AI companies cater to Christians and Jews, but custom chatbots for Muslims and Buddhists exist as well. Some churches have already started to subtly infuse their services and websites with AI. The chatbot on the website of the Father’s House, a church in Leesburg, Florida, for instance, appears to offer standard customer service. Among its recommended questions: “What time are your services?” The next suggestion is more complex. “Why are my prayers not answered?” The chatbot was created by Pastors.ai, a startup founded by Joe Suh, a tech entrepreneur and attendee of EuBank’s church in Silicon Valley. After one of Suh’s longtime pastors left his church, he had the idea of uploading recordings of that pastor’s sermons to ChatGPT. Suh would then ask the chatbot intimate questions about his faith. He turned the concept into a business. Suh’s chatbots are trained on archives of a church’s sermons and information from its website. But around 95% of the people who use the chatbots ask them questions about things like service times rather than probing deep into their spirituality, Suh said. “I think that will eventually change, but for now, that concept might be a little bit ahead of its time,” he added. Critics of AI use by religious leaders have pointed to the issue of hallucinations — times when chatbots make stuff up. While harmless in certain situations, faith-based AI tools that fabricate religious scripture present a serious problem. In Rabbi Bot’s sermon, for instance, the AI invented a quote from Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have passed as authentic to the casual listener. For other religious leaders, the issue of AI is a simpler one: How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it entirely themselves? “I worry for pastors, in some ways, that it won’t help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, which is where I think so much of our great theology and great sermons come from, years and years of preaching,” said Thomas Costello, a pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu. On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Hayon recalled taking a picture of his bookshelf and asking his AI assistant which of the books he had not quoted in his recent sermons. Before AI, he would have pulled down the titles themselves, taking the time to read through their indexes, carefully checking them against his own work. “I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful and so joyful and rich and enlightening, that gives fuel to the life of the Spirit,” Hayon said. “Using AI does get you to an answer quicker, but you’ve certainly lost something along the way.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Imagine a scene in an old Western movie where the camera follows a sheriff driving an old pickup truck on a dirt road. The scene then cuts to the sheriff stopping the car on the road, opening the door and stepping onto the dirt road in his leather boots. He reaches for his holster and pulls out a revolver, points at the camera and shoots. All of these sounds in the scene are important and carefully curated: the sound of the old truck, the dirt road, the leather boots and the revolver. “All of these things have context, and that sound is what we’re focused on,” University of Colorado Boulder alum and sound design startup CEO and founder Isaiah Chavous said. “We’re focused on footsteps, door creaks, environmental noise, room tone and transitions.” Chavous and his cofounders have raised $1.8 million to fund their sound design startup company called Noctal. Noctal is a platform that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to automate the sound design process for content creators and filmmakers. The investment firm Caruso Ventures invested the majority of the $1.8 million, joining other investors including Media Empire Ventures, X’s, formerly known as Twitter, head of original content Mitchell Smith and Major League Baseball player Tony Kemp. “I think these guys could emerge as the leader in applying AI to sound effects,” said Dan Caruso, Caruso Ventures managing director. “And if they do that, they will have a huge impact. There’s going to be a lot of job creation.” Noctal works by identifying the action sequences and events that take place in a video and then accurately placing relevant sound files where they need to go based on the on-screen events. James Paul, Noctal’s chief operating officer and co-founder, said the traditional process of developing sounds in movies is extremely time-intensive. Paul has more than 10 years of media experience working in physical production in Hollywood on films, including the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, and is an active member of the Producers Guild of America. Paul said the process requires a person sitting in a chair watching hours of footage and marking where sounds need to go on a timeline. For example, marking when the sheriff’s truck begins to drive away and when his boots hit the dirt. Then, it requires going into folders, bins or the field to record the sounds. “Using our platform, it automates a lot of that by extracting each of those different events,” Paul said. “The best way we see to use AI is like a creative augmentation. You’re still going to switch things out here and there, but it speeds up that process of having to watch all that footage.” Before founding Noctal, Chavous was a student at CU Boulder. He was student body president, helped co-found the Center for African and African American Studies, co-founded the first-ever police oversight board on campus and received an award from the Colorado Senate for his work with eliminating prison labor contracts with the university. Six days after he graduated in 2021, he moved to California. Chavous led business development and partnerships at an augmented reality game company, working with industry icons such as Lewis Hamilton, Snoop Dogg, Michael Bay, Elton John and Grimes. He said his time at CU Boulder helped him grow and develop important skills, including team management and budget management. “That in and of itself led to being able to create plans you can actually execute under timelines that would be considered impossible, which is the entire objective of building a startup, which is (that) you’re under time constraints that most people would say is impossible with limited resources,” he said. “… and also having conviction over a vision.” Caruso said that when everything in sound design is done by hand, typically, there are one to three main sounds in a scene. But if AI helps, it can help identify background sounds as well, so there are five or six sounds in a scene instead. Related Articles Group accused in burglaries of 21 Aurora homes charged with attempted burglary, conspiracy Amazon’s last-minute bid for TikTok comes as a US ban on the platform is set to take effect Saturday Denver mayor faces questions over Signal use amid national rise in officials’ reliance on private messaging app Feeling overstimulated at Meow Wolf in Denver? Find a stairwell. What is Signal? “You wouldn’t do that because it would be twice as much work,” Caruso said. “But if AI does it, knows the volume of each, it can make a more enhanced video as well.” Chavous said he hopes to positively impact people’s lives through Noctal’s capabilities. “What we’re doing is redefining a workflow, we’re redefining what it means to create,”  Chavous said. “And being a part of that process to embolden the user or the creative is at the center of our DNA of our why.” For more information, visit noctal.xyz/en. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

LONDON — Unwanted phone calls are out of control. Whether it’s a robocall trying to sell you something or spam calls from scammers trying to rip you off, it’s enough to make you want to stop answering your phone. So what can you do to stop them? The scourge of unwanted phone calls has been branded an epidemic by consumer groups, while the Federal Communications Commission says it’s the top consumer complaint. The calls are a nuisance to many ordinary people, some of whom have complained to The Associated Press. “I need help on getting spam calls to stop,” one reader said in an email. She’s getting up to 14 calls a day despite the countermeasures she’s employed. As the name implies, robocalls are automated calls to deliver recorded messages to a large number of phones. A robocall purely to deliver a message or collect a debt is allowed under U.S. regulations, but the Federal Trade Commission says robocalls with a recorded voice trying to sell you something are illegal unless you’ve given explicit written permission to receive them. Many robocalls are also probably scams, the FTC warns. If you’re flooded by unsolicited calls, here are some ways to fight back. Phone settings Smartphone users can turn on some built-in settings to combat unknown calls. Apple advises iPhone users to turn on the Silence Unknown Callers feature. Go to your “Settings,” then scroll down to “Apps,” and then to “Phone,” where you’ll see it under the “Calls” section. When you turn this on, any calls from numbers that you’ve never been in touch with and aren’t saved in your contacts list will not ring through. Instead, they’ll be sent to voicemail and show up in your list of recent calls. Android has a similar setting that allows you to block calls from private or unidentified numbers, although you will still receive calls from numbers that aren’t stored in your contact list. After this story was first published, a reader wrote in with a workaround for that problem: Leave your Android phone on Do Not Disturb but configure it so that anyone on your Contacts list is allowed to interrupt. Just keep in mind that you could also end up not getting important calls, which sometimes come from unknown numbers. If an unwanted call does get through, both Android and iPhone users can block the individual phone number by tapping on it in the recent callers or call history list. You can also enter numbers directly into your phone’s block list. Do not call Sign up for the national Do Not Call registry, which is a list of numbers that have opted out of most telemarketing calls. The Federal Trade Commission, which runs the registry, says it only contains phone numbers and holds no other personally identifiable information, nor does the registry know whether the number is for a landline or a cellphone. The FTC says there are some exemptions, including political calls, calls from non-profit groups and charities, and legitimate survey groups that aren’t selling anything. Also allowed are calls from companies up to 18 months after you’ve done — or sought to do — business with them. But it also warns that while having your number on the registry will cut down on unwanted sales calls, it won’t stop scammers from making illegal calls. Other countries have similar registries. Canada has its own Do Not Call list while the U.K. has the Telephone Preference Service. Carrier filters Check whether your wireless carrier has a call-blocking service. Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, three of the biggest U.S. networks, all have their own call filters for customers to block robocalls and report spam. There’s typically a free basic version and an advanced version that requires a subscription fee. Try an app If your phone company’s filters aren’t good enough, try third-party apps to weed out unwanted callers. There are a host of smartphone apps available that promise to block spam calls, like Nomorobo, YouMail, Hiya, RoboKiller, TrueCaller and others. Many charge a monthly or annual subscription fee but some offer a free basic option. Some also can be installed on landline phones, but only if they use VOIP technology, not copper cables. The Associated Press hasn’t tested any of these apps and isn’t making specific recommendations. We recommend you read user reviews and try some out for yourself. Apple says the apps work by comparing a caller’s number with a list of known numbers and labeling them, for example, spam or telemarketing. Then it might automatically block the call. “Incoming calls are never sent to third-party developers,” the company says. Report calls Did you know you can file a complaint with the FCC about specific spam calls? You can do so easily through an online form. It might not give you immediate satisfaction, but the National Consumer Law Center says data on complaints is the best tool federal agencies have for determining how big a problem robocalls are. Just say no While companies you’ve done business with can make robocalls to you, the National Consumer Law Center says it’s probably because you gave consent – possibly hidden in fine print. But you can also revoke your consent at any time. Just tell the company representative that you want to “revoke consent,” and if that doesn’t stop them, contact customer service and tell them that you don’t consent to receive calls and want your number added to the company’s “do not call” list, the center says. Hang up You might be tempted to try to engage with the call in an attempt to get your number off the call list or be put through to a real person. The FTC warns against doing this and recommends that you just hang up. “Pressing numbers to speak to someone or remove you from the list will probably only lead to more robocalls,” the agency says on its advice page. “And the number on your caller ID probably isn’t real. Caller ID is easy to fake” and can’t be trusted, it says. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling Cybersecurity company Kaspersky advises not even saying anything when you receive what you think is a robocall. We’ve all received scammy calls that start with something like “Hello, can you hear me?” to which you’ve probably replied “yes” without thinking. Scammers “can then store the recording of your confirmation and use it for fraudulent activities,” Kaspersky says. “So, avoid saying yes where possible.” ___ 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 — Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets. Lee, 41, would normally be flattered. In the past, a fast-growing startup like Gamma, an artificial intelligence company he helped establish in 2020, would have constantly looked out for more funding. But like many young startups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using AI tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research. That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable. “If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.” The old Silicon Valley model dictated that startups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fundraising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better. But Gamma is among a growing cohort of startups, most of them working on AI products, that are also using AI to maximize efficiency. They make money and are growing fast without the funding or employees they would have needed before. The biggest bragging rights for these startups are for making the most revenue with the fewest workers. Stories of “tiny team” success have now become a meme, with techies excitedly sharing lists that show how Anysphere, a startup that makes the coding software Cursor, hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years with just 20 employees, and how ElevenLabs, an AI voice startup, did the same with about 50 workers. The potential for AI to let startups do more with less has led to wild speculation about the future. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted there could someday be a one-person company worth $1 billion. His company, which is building a cost-intensive form of AI called a foundational model, employs more than 4,000 people and has raised more than $20 billion in funding. It is also in talks to raise more money. With AI tools, some startups are now declaring that they will stop hiring at a certain size. Runway Financial, a finance software company, has said it plans to top out at 100 employees because each of its workers will do the work of 1.5 people. Agency, a startup using AI for customer service, also plans to hire no more than 100 workers. “It’s about eliminating roles that are not necessary when you have smaller teams,” said Elias Torres, Agency’s founder. Related Articles Owner of The North Face, Vans among Colorado companies hit with worst one-day shares loss following tariff concerns Vail Resorts cutting 64 human resources positions in Broomfield Stem Ciders sells Lafayette property for $12M Olive & Finch picks Golden Triangle for sixth location Ex-Tattered Cover CEO Kwame Spearman buys building for return to bookselling The idea of AI-driven efficiency was bolstered last month by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that showed it could build AI tools for a small fraction of the typical cost. Its breakthrough, built on open-source tools that are freely available online, set off an explosion of companies building new products using DeepSeek’s inexpensive techniques. “DeepSeek was a watershed moment,” said Gaurav Jain, an investor at the venture firm Afore Capital, which has backed Gamma. “The cost of compute is going to go down very, very fast, very quickly.” Jain compared new AI startups to the wave of companies that arose in the late 2000s, after Amazon began offering cheap cloud computing services. That lowered the cost of starting a company, leading to a flurry of new startups that could be built more cheaply. Before this AI boom, startups generally burned $1 million to get to $1 million in revenue, Jain said. Now, getting to $1 million in revenue costs one-fifth as much and could eventually drop to one-tenth, according to an analysis of 200 startups conducted by Afore. “This time, we’re automating humans as opposed to just the data centers,” Jain said. But if startups can become profitable without spending much, that could become a problem for venture capital investors, who allocate tens of billions to invest in AI startups. Last year, AI companies raised $97 billion in funding, making up 46% of all venture investment in the United States, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. “Venture capital only works if you get money into the winners,” said Terrence Rohan, an investor with Otherwise Fund, which focuses on very young startups. He added: “If the winner of the future needs a lot less money because they’ll have a lot less people, how does that change VC?” For now, investors continue to fight to get into the hottest companies, many of which have no need for more money. Scribe, an AI productivity startup, grappled last year with far more interest from investors than the $25 million it wanted to raise. “It was a negotiation of what is the smallest amount we could possibly take on,” said Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith. She said investors were shocked at the size of her staff — 100 people — when compared with its 3 million users and fast growth. Some investors are optimistic that AI-driven efficiency will spur entrepreneurs to create more companies, leading to more opportunities to invest. They hope that once the startups reach a certain size, the firms will adopt the old model of big teams and big money. Some young companies, including Anysphere, are already doing that. Anysphere has raised $175 million in funding, with plans to add staff and conduct research, according to the company’s president, Oskar Schulz. Other founders have seen the perils of the old startup playbook, which kept companies on a fundraising treadmill where hiring more people created more costs that went beyond just their salaries. Bigger teams needed managers, more robust human resources and back-office support. Those teams then needed specialized software, along with a bigger office with all the perks — and so on, which led startups to burn through cash and forced founders to constantly raise more money. Many startups from the funding boom of 2021 eventually downsized, shut down or scrambled to sell themselves. Turning a profit early on can change that outcome. At Gamma, employees use about 10 AI tools to help them be more efficient, including Intercom’s customer service tool for handling problems, Midjourney’s image generator for marketing, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for data analysis and Google’s NotebookLM for analyzing customer research. Engineers also use Anysphere’s Cursor to more efficiently write code. Gamma’s product, which is built on top of tools from OpenAI and others, is also not as expensive to make as other AI products. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.) Other efficient startups are taking a similar strategy. Thoughtly, a 10-person provider of AI phone agents, turned a profit in 11 months, thanks to its use of AI, said co-founder Torrey Leonard. Payment processor Stripe created an AI tool that helps Leonard analyze Thoughtly’s sales, something he would have previously hired an analyst to do. Without that and AI tools from others to streamline its operations, Thoughtly would need at least 25 people and be far from profitable, he said. Thoughtly will eventually raise more money, Leonard said, but only when it is ready. Not worrying about running out of cash is “a huge relief,” he said. At Gamma, Lee said he planned to roughly double the workforce this year to 60, hiring for design, engineering and sales. He plans to recruit a different type of worker from before, seeking out generalists who do a range of tasks rather than specialists who do only one thing, he said. He also wants “player-coaches” instead of managers — people who can mentor less experienced employees but can also pitch in on the day-to-day work. Lee said the AI-efficient model had freed up time he would have otherwise spent managing people and recruiting. Now, he focuses on talking to customers and improving the product. In 2022, he created a Slack room for feedback from Gamma’s top users, who are often shocked to discover that the CEO was responding to their comments. “That’s actually every founder’s dream,” Lee said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.