And he took his father to the flame and his father said I am not a goat And the boy said   no    you are not a goat And the father said     where are the goats And the boy said    you are a goat today or you will be a goat The father thought about hybrid beasts and said nothing He looked with love at the strange child he created He thought about how hard it had been to keep the boy alive And when the boy led him down the death path he kept thinking I should be in charge But I am tired and I can’t do anything to gain control I am crinkled, worn-out, sick of seeing Things get destroyed in my name Do I mind that I might be turned into someone else’s burden? Also, I admire my son’s determination Someone, the voice of X, told him to take me to the flame Someone serious, a credible character, Told him to take me to the flame It would have been perfectly reasonable to resist To say look, son, this is not the kind of thing you should do to your father But I was tired and the child was persistent and I wondered How long will this thing go on? It’s true, I am old now I don’t actually want to live that much longer But there are a few more things I have to do Is it presumptuous to say there is a future that depends on me? The Earth has its own ideas The sea has other ideas And the sky has ideas There are just a few bodies falling from the sky today I think I recognize some of them They are my children and one of them whispers to me This is not the right way to live And to live in the wrong way is to die in the wrong way Who said that and what did they mean? Before he takes me to the flame I tell my son There is nothing left to do here on Earth I welcome the pain and I welcome my son’s audacity I admire his fingers as they grip my shirtsleeve In those fingers I feel sadness, tenacity, anger, hope I feel the violence of the centuries filling up in his blood I know how lonely it is in his body The expectations of our people are extraordinaryThis poem appears in the February 2025 print edition.

John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, was born in 1815. Some years ago, as the bicentennial of Macdonald’s birth neared, some civic-minded residents of the Ontario county in which I spend summers decided to mark the occasion by raising a statue in his honor.Macdonald arrived at the county seat of Picton in 1833 to train as a lawyer. The law would ultimately enrich him and enable him to enter politics. Yet he had not reached his 20th birthday when he nearly wrecked his career before it started.Macdonald got into an altercation with a prominent local doctor. Politics may have been a factor: The doctor was a Reformer; Macdonald already a Tory. Alcohol may have been a factor too—it so often was with Macdonald. Both men were charged with assault. The doctor was convicted. Had Macdonald been convicted as well, he would likely have lost his right to practice law.On October 8, 1834, Macdonald made his first appearance in a court of law. The case he argued before the jury was his own. He won.The Prince Edward County statue commemorated that early turning point in Macdonald’s career. The sculptor, Ruth Abernethy, depicted the youthful, wavy-haired Macdonald as if he was addressing a jury, resting one arm on a witness box, inside of which stands an empty chair. The chair invited passersby to sit in the middle of this significant scene in Canadian history, maybe pose for a photograph, and thereby join the country’s continuing story.For five years, the statue stood as an ornament on Main Street, in front of the town library. Then came the events of summer 2020. Two months of pandemic lockdowns had left millions of people bored and restless. The killing in late May of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer triggered a worldwide surge of protest that frequently escalated into vandalism and riot.Statues interpreted as symbols of white domination or European colonialism were disfigured or toppled across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. In Canada, statues of Macdonald were destroyed or vandalized. Ours in Picton was twice daubed with red paint.At first, local authorities tried to protect the Picton statue. Then, in May 2021, an anthropologist working near a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, discovered disturbances in the ground that she said probably indicated unmarked graves. A local Indigenous band council quickly enlarged this claim, announcing that the remains of 215 children had been found at the former school.The history of these residential schools, where students and teachers suffered grim rates of mortality from disease, had long been known and acknowledged. Large-scale programs to vaccinate the Indigenous people of British North America against smallpox began in the 1830s and were highly successful. But tuberculosis was not so well understood. Students brought in from isolated bands proved tragically susceptible. The residential schools were ravaged by tuberculosis until the advent of modern antibiotics.Physical and sexual abuse also disgraced the school system. Students lost continuity with their ancestral cultures and languages. These awful events were minutely described in accounts published in the 1990s, and they were reexamined by a federal commission in the 2010s. In the 2000s, the government of Canada issued a formal public apology for the schools and paid billions of dollars of restitution to some 80,000 people who had attended them.The United States operated a residential school system of its own, in both the mainland U.S. and in Hawaii and Alaska. The American system was even more decentralized than the Canadian; record-keeping was poor. In December, The Washington Post published an investigation reporting that the true death toll over the 150 years from the 1820s to the 1970s was three times higher than the previously accepted figures. In the U.S., as in Canada, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and influenza were the leading causes of death for much of that period, followed by other infectious diseases for which causes and cures would not be discovered until years later.But here at Kamloops, seemingly, was proof of something even more terrible: mass death on a previously unknown scale, covered up by school authorities and the government of Canada, over a period of almost a century. Or so Canadians and the world were invited to believe. Prestigious international media such as the Associated Press, CBS News, and The New York Times shocked the world with news reports of the lost schoolchildren.In response to the news, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that he’d ordered the flags above the Canadian Parliament and all federal buildings to be lowered in mourning. The flags would remain lowered until November 7, 2021, the longest official mourning in Canadian history. A year after the original headlines, he joined a daylong memorial service at the site, where Governor-General Mary Simon, effectively Canada’s head of state, denounced the “atrocities” that had taken place at the school.The residential-school system in Canada dates back to the mid-19th century. The system wound down in the 1970s; the last school shut in the ’90s. But it was Macdonald’s government that put federal resources into the system for the first time, and so its sins were laid at his door. In June 2021, following the “mass grave” claims, the Prince Edward County Council voted 13 to one to remove the Macdonald statue from Picton Main Street.[Mary Annette Pember: A history not yet laid to rest]No country has a perfectly clean past. Canada’s, however, is cleaner than most. The most notorious episode of violence erupted in 1885. Indigenous and Métis people in the Saskatchewan territory were goaded into rebellion by local abuses. The uprising was suppressed at the cost of fewer than 100 battlefield deaths on all sides. Eight Indigenous men were hanged on one day in November 1885 for their deadly attacks on white settlers and missionaries. Three others had their death sentences commuted. (The rebellion’s ringleader had been tried and hanged a few days earlier.) Compared to the recurring atrocities in the trans-Mississippi American West, this is a mild record of armed force. Yet, over the past decade, Canada has been wracked by a spasm of self-accusation of the severest crimes a nation can commit.In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission accused Canada of “cultural genocide” against Native peoples. In 2019, another commission—this one investigating the murders and disappearances of thousands of Indigenous women and girls (commonly at the hands of the men in their lives)—dropped the modifier cultural to upgrade the accusation to “race-based genocide.”Trudeau at first conceded the charge. Speaking in Vancouver after the second commission’s conclusion, he said, “We accept their findings, including that what happened amounts to genocide.” A few days later, he took a step back. Speaking in French to Radio-Canada, he said: “I accept the commissioner’s report, including the fact that they used the word genocide, but for me, it is a bit more appropriate, I believe, to talk of a ‘cultural genocide.’”Pope Francis, visiting Canada in the summer of 2022, lent his authority to the accusation: “It is true. It was genocide.”In October 2022, a member of Parliament for the left-wing New Democratic Party introduced a motion to acknowledge “what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide.” The motion was adopted by unanimous consent. Not a single lawmaker dissented.The allegation that hundreds, if not thousands, of children had died in cruel neglect (or worse) in Canadian educational institutions, and that their bodies had then been covertly buried, was thus accepted as fact. Doubters, including some of the country’s leading historians, faced accusations of being “genocide deniers.”Despite this overwhelming social pressure, awareness did begin to seep through Canadian society that something was amiss. No new human remains have emerged; excavations, which could provide definitive proof of unmarked burials, have not taken place.As the mass-graves story has been challenged, those who told it have become more militant in its defense. The federal Department of Justice said it is studying proposals to criminalize so-called residential-school denialism.Rather than contesting specifics, however, advocates have shifted the battleground to more philosophical terrain: a new practice of condemning the very existence of Canada and countries like it as a crime, the crime of “settler colonialism.” A project of “decolonization” now dominates Canadian cultural institutions, universities, even provincial K–12 education systems.One startling incident garnered much attention. In September of this year, several Toronto District public schools sent middle schoolers to a march on behalf of Native water claims. Once at the event, teachers led the students in anti-Israel chants. A Jewish student who took part was reportedly told by a teacher to wear a blue shirt to identify her as a “settler” and “colonizer.”The comedian Louis C.K. has a bit about the word Jew being an unusual word—it can be both the perfectly correct term for a Jewish person and, depending on the tone, a nasty slur: “He’s a Jew,” as opposed to “He’s a Jew.”So it is with settler colonialism. At one level, this can be simply a descriptive term for how Canada developed from a string of European colonies populated by European settlers. The laws of Canada, its political institutions, its technology, its high culture, and its folkways were largely imported from across the Atlantic Ocean. How could it have been otherwise? Canada was a thinly populated place before the Europeans arrived, perhaps 500,000 people in the half continent from Newfoundland to British Columbia, from the southerly tip of Ontario to Baffin Island.In the more densely populated regions of the Americas, Indigenous culture made a deep impression on successor societies. You encounter it in the language: potato, maize, and chocolate are all words of Indigenous origin. When a Mexican eats a taco, he is likely not only eating a pre-Columbian food; he is also using a name derived from pre-Columbian sources.Wars against and alongside Indigenous nations exerted enormous influence over the ultimate form and borders of Canada. Why is English rather than French spoken in northern New England, upstate New York, and the valley of the Ohio? Why was the border between the future Canada and the future United States drawn where it is? The answers to those questions were determined in great part by complex struggles, first among Indigenous nations, then between those nations and the French and English colonies, and finally among the independent United States and the British colonies and their respective Indigenous allies and enemies.But the character of the society that formed within those borders was determined by the settlers themselves, for basic reasons of demography.The encounter between Europe and the Americas triggered one of the greatest demographic calamities in human history. The Americas were first inhabited by wanderers from Siberia. When the most recent ice age ended, the land bridge to Asia disappeared. There would be little contact between the two portions of humanity for thousands of years. When the worlds met again, after 1492, they infected each other in ways that proved much more deadly to the Americans than the other way around. Indigenous people died in horrifying numbers. In densely populated Mexico, the population shrank by perhaps as much as 90 percent. The numbers for what is now Canada must have been fearful too, and from a much tinier starting point.Such a catastrophe must have convulsed the afflicted societies. Former structures of authority and belief must have been shaken, old gods discredited. The ability of Indigenous people to defend themselves against the incursions of the Europeans was broken by microbes at least as much as, or more than, by the newcomers’ superior military capability.History abounds with stories of conquest: The Arabs exploded out of the desert to impose Islam upon the Middle East and North Africa; King William and his Normans crossed the English Channel in 1066; the Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty to rule China. For that matter, plenty of such stories exist in the pre-Columbian history of this hemisphere. When we read land acknowledgments about the different nations that hunted or farmed in what is now, say, Montreal or Toronto, we are reading lists of invaders and invaded, victors and vanquished, enslavers and enslaved.Throughout history, however, the upheaval of conquest has only very slowly altered underlying social and demographic realities. The winners seize the heights of the social hierarchy and appropriate the land and wealth of the previous elites. But for the toiling subjects beneath those elites, life continues more or less as before. They pay taxes to new masters. Their patterns of work, their religious faith, their language, their family organization and funeral rituals—these change very gradually, if at all.What happened in the Americas (and in Australia and New Zealand) was very different. After contact with Europeans, one social reality largely vanished and was replaced by another. If settler-colonial were simply an attempt to describe and explain that difference, then the term would be useful.[Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism]But now we come to the sneer in Louis C.K.’s joke.Settler-colonial is not intended purely, or even primarily, as a description of a particular path of social development. It is intended as a condemnation of the new societies that have been created by that path of development. And there is something very peculiar about this critique of Canada and elsewhere in the New World.Moral critique is always based on an implied moral alternative. When socialists denounce capitalist societies, they do so because they believe they possess a superior code for creating and distributing wealth. When Islamists attack secular societies, they do so because they believe they better understand God’s commands for how men and women should live.But what is the moral alternative offered by the critique of settler colonialism?Sooner or later, the Old World was going to discover the New. How might that encounter have gone differently in any remotely plausible way?In the Canadian case, Macdonald is harshly criticized for not doing more to rescue western Indigenous nations from the catastrophic effects of the disappearance of buffalo herds in the late 1870s and early ’80s. At the time, the trans-Canada railway was not yet finished. Beyond its central core, the federal government was a puny organization whose civilian employees were recruited more for party loyalty than technical competence. The most important federal force in Western Canada was the Northwest Mounted Police, which numbered only about 300 troopers. Even so, the Macdonald government contrived to deliver rations to almost the entire population that had signed treaties with Canada, some 30,000 affected people. The Macdonald ministry spent more on support for Indigenous populations than it did on the Canadian military or almost any other function of government. Even a severe critic of the government’s record, the historian James Daschuk, acknowledges that “the Macdonald administration avoided the political backlash from a region-wide mortality of the indigenous population from famine,” even if “the quantity of rations was often the absolute minimum to sustain life.”Macdonald’s critics blame him precisely because he tried to save Native lives in the way he thought best: by guiding the Indigenous people of Western Canada toward a self-sustaining way of life in the modern world. Macdonald’s hopes and plans failed. But no one can say that latter-day policies would have succeeded any better.Over its near-decade in power since 2015, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has nearly tripled spending intended to benefit Indigenous people. The scale of the spending is very large. Canada now commits more resources to what the government terms “Indigenous priorities” than national defense. Over that same period, Canadian Indigenous people have plunged into a demographic disaster more terrible than anything in the Macdonald years. From 2017 to 2021, average life expectancy for Indigenous people in British Columbia dropped by six years, to 67.2 years (the average for non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021 was 82.5 years). From 2015 to 2021, Indigenous people in Alberta suffered a collapse in life expectancy of seven years, to 60 for men and 66 for women. The principal culprit: opioid addiction and overdose. In Alberta, Indigenous people die from opioids at a rate seven times higher than non-Indigenous Albertans.Canadian history is unscarred by equivalents of the Trail of Tears or the Wounded Knee Massacre. Yet Native Americans are more likely to complete high school than are Indigenous Canadians. The land acknowledgments and genocide accusations are not helping.Almost all real-world ideas for improvement of the condition of Indigenous Canadians depend on the resources and institutions that were developed by the modern society of Canada—which was settler-colonial in the non-sneering sense of the term. The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.In other words, the system of beliefs that so negatively judges settler colonialism is itself one of the most refined and exquisite products of settler colonialism. To the extent that a modern liberal democracy has failed to deliver on those promises to any category of its people, whether defined by race, sex, or any other characteristic, then it is both the responsibility and the pride of that democracy to attempt to correct that wrong.There are passages of guilt to remember and expiate. History should always be told in full. But we don’t correct past wrongs committed in a liberal democracy by defaming the ideal itself.Like Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, modern-day Canadians live in a good and just society. They owe honor to those who built and secured that good and just society for posterity: to the soldiers and sailors and airmen who fought the wars that kept those societies free; to the navvies and laborers who built their roads, laid their rail, dug their seaways; to the authors of their laws and the framers of their constitutions; and, yes, to the settlers and colonists who set everything in motion.This essay is adapted from a talk given in Toronto on December 4, 2024, to the Canadian Institute for Historical Education.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kristen V. Brown, a staff writer who has covered the privacy concerns plaguing 23andMe, genetic discrimination from health insurers, and why bedbugs could be more horrifying than you think.Kristen is a fan of Still Life, by Sarah Winman, and the sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is a master at imagining life on Earth in the aftermath of climate disasters. She also enjoys watching anything by Jeff Goldblum—including his band performances—and believes that Lacey Chabert may be the true Queen of Christmas (sorry, Mariah). The Culture Survey: Kristen V. BrownBest novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I just read Still Life, by Sarah Winman; it’s like an antidote to the past few months, which have been pretty high-octane no matter your political persuasion. The story follows a group of characters who find one another again and again over the course of several decades, starting in World War II. It’s told through many small, intimate moments—ordinary domestic scenes and conversations about art and love—against the backdrop of major historical events. It did what I think most good novels do, which is make you consider something about your own life. In my case, that means slowing down and enjoying the scenery no matter what chaos reigns in the world.I also recently read and loved Taco USA, by Gustavo Arellano, which chronicles the rise of Mexican food in the United States. My family has some Mexican roots, and I am from Southern California, but I never knew much about the history of Mexican cuisine in this country—including how much of it was spread outside of border states by companies such as Taco Bell and Chipotle (and by non-Mexicans). Fun fact: Did you know canned tortillas used to be a thing? An author I will read anything by: I’m a sci-fi fiend, so I’m going to go with Kim Stanley Robinson. He’s a master at imagining plausible (and scary!) near-futures. Robinson is probably best known for his deep-space narratives, but recently, more of his work has focused on imagining Earth in the aftermath of climate disasters—books such as The Ministry for the Future and New York 2140.I love him for his details: He builds elaborate worlds in his stories, right down to how sea-level rise would affect the investment market. For anyone who thinks all of this sounds too grim, though, much of his writing is ultimately utopian. His characters persevere.An actor I would watch in anything: Jeff Goldblum. I don’t even really have a compelling reason for loving him, but I love him. I saw him once in San Francisco, playing the piano with his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra; in between songs, he did Jeff Goldblum trivia. It was amazing. I also enjoyed The World According to Jeff Goldblum, his documentary series that was canceled way too soon. [Related: Kaos offers a sharp twist on a familiar story.]A good recommendation I recently received: Hot Frosty. If you love bad Christmas movies, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll appreciate the absurdity of watching a hot snowman come to life, discover home-improvement television, and find his calling as the local handyman.This movie was also my introduction to the extensive canon of Lacey Chabert Christmas films. I think she might give Mariah a run for her money as the Queen of Christmas. My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I have only ever downloaded one phone game, and it was Ticket to Ride, which is a phone version of the board game. Five years later, I still have not tired of it. I play it almost every day.The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Shrinking. Harrison Ford is doing comedy! His dry sense of humor is incredible, and he’s absolutely brilliant in this. [Related: 11 undersung TV shows to watch]My favorite pop-culture movie and favorite art movie: My top pop-culture film is a tie between The Lost World: Jurassic Park and 13 Going on 30, which basically sums up my taste.My favorite art movie is definitely Drawing Restraint 9, a 2005 Matthew Barney film that stars Björk (they were a couple at the time). Watching this film is a very bizarre experience. In one scene, they cut away each other’s flesh, and what is underneath seems to be whale blubber instead of blood. This movie has elements of body horror, revealing the fundamental limits of the human body, which is a subject I’m very drawn to.An online creator that I’m a fan of: Like many other Millennials, I am obsessed with the cookery of Alison Roman.A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I discovered Nan Goldin’s photography when I was a freshman college student interested in photojournalism. Her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency truly changed how I viewed the world, particularly how my experience as a woman was different from that of a man. It was one of the reasons I wanted to someday write about gender and women’s bodies. A few years ago, I purged most of my physical books (New York apartments are tiny), and hers is one of maybe 10 I kept. As for something I now dislike: This isn’t a cultural product per se, but I used to be obsessed with the color red. My teenage bedroom was all red sparkles. Now I cannot stand anything red—I find it aggravating.Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Doomed to be a tradwife We’re all in “dark mode” now. Invisible habits are driving your life. The Week Ahead The Last Showgirl, a drama film starring Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas showgirl who discovers that her production is ending (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of Goosebumps, a horror anthology series starring David Schwimmer as a divorced dad whose kids unearth a dark secret in their home (premiering on Disney+ and Hulu on Friday) Rosarita, a novel by Anita Desai about a woman who is approached by a mysterious person about her mother’s past (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Charlotte Ager The Isolation of Intensive ParentingBy Stephanie H. Murray Two nights a week, one family takes all the children for three hours, giving the other parents an evening off. Even outside these formal arrangements, it has become fairly routine for us to watch one another’s kids as needed, for one-off Fridays or random overnights. A few months ago, while I was stirring a big pot of mac and cheese for the six kids scurrying around me, ranging in age from 2 to 7, I realized that, quite unintentionally, I’d built something like the proverbial “village” that so many modern parents go without. Read the full article.More in Culture What not to wear Five books that offer readers intellectual exercise A history of the end of the world “Dear James”: My boyfriend is about to move in with his ex. Parents, put down your phone cameras. Catch Up on The Atlantic The rise of John Ratcliffe Narendra Modi’s populist facade is cracking. The MAGA honeymoon is over. Photo Album Former President Jimmy Carter teaches a Sunday-school class at Maranatha Baptist Church in 2015. (David Goldman / AP) Former President Jimmy Carter died last Sunday at the age of 100. Take a look at these photos that commemorate his life of service.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Some people view reading as though it’s homework, making a list of the books they intend to get through in a given month or year. But perhaps a better approach is to view reading as a mental workout. As Ilana Masad wrote recently, “There are many ways to advance your skill and capacity as a reader: Some of us are naturally drawn to detailed nonfiction, and others must learn to love it; some may have a taste for meandering, multigenerational epics, while their friends must train to build up the attention span they need.”Instead of deciding how many books you’d like to read this year, it might be worth considering which “muscles” you’d like to strengthen in your brain. Today’s newsletter explores reading, puzzles, and other forms of exercise for the brain—including the physical kind.On Mental WorkoutsThe Most Controversial Game on the InternetBy Elaine GodfreyWyna Liu, the editor of the New York Times game Connections, discusses her process and the particular ire her puzzles inspire.Read the article.Five Books That Offer Readers Intellectual ExerciseBy Ilana MasadEach of these titles exercises a different kind of reading muscle, so that you can choose the one that will push you most.Read the article.Six Books That Feel Like PuzzlesBy Ilana MasadThese titles represent an eclectic mix of various styles and moods, but any one of them will be exactly right if you want a brainteaser.Read the article.Still Curious? Why one neuroscientist started blasting his core: A new anatomical understanding of how movement controls the body’s stress-response system (from 2016) Walking for a better brain: When a 70-year-old man walked the length of the United States in 1909, he sparked a conversation that ultimately changed medicine’s ideas about the value of exercise in old age. (From 2014) Other Diversions Doomed to be a tradwife Invisible habits are driving your life. What Taylor Swift understands about love P.S. Courtesy of Robin H. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I attached a macro lens to my phone and a world opened up that I had never seen before,” Robin H, 73, from Orinda, California, writes. “I took this photo while admiring the beautiful symmetry of this cactus at the UC Botanical Garden. When I got  home and looked at my pictures I saw there was a tiny aphid on the plant which had been invisible to the naked eye. It reminds me of the beauty and fragility of our world.”I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Mike Johnson keeps the speaker’s gavel after Donald Trump persuades holdouts to switch their vote. And we are days away from Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of Trump’s win.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The Accidental Speaker]Join moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, Peter Baker of The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell of Washington Post Live, Francesca Chambers of USA Today, and David Ignatius of The Washington Post to discuss this and more.Watch the full episode here.

The dinner was to be at Galina’s apartment, in the East 70s. She had been watching a lot of Visconti and wanted to re-create the salons and dinners of The Innocent, Ludwig, and Death in Venice.For approximately a decade, her husband, Igor, had been dying from a series of treatable cancers in nonessential tissues. “Dying is so boring after a while,” he said. In the spring, his doctors had told them that nothing more could be done and the time had come to transition to hospice care. Galina and Igor were astonished by the surprise they felt at being told that Igor’s dying had turned acute.“It’s just been such a reversal,” Galina said to her friends. It was like Icelandic villages and their volcanoes: You somehow feel betrayed when the lava sweeps down the rock face and takes everything with it. Galina and Igor had then retreated into their favorite films and novels, which was what had made her throw the party that night. One final note of beauty.Caspar arrived late—he’d had trouble getting across town. Protests cut a diagonal through the city, disrupting the trains and traffic. Even as he stepped into the lobby of Galina’s building, he could hear the beat of the choppers circling above, making a net of slashing light over the blocks between Park and Fifth. Galina met him just off the elevator and kissed his cheeks in greeting.“You’re cold,” she said.The apartment was warm with gold light and the murmur of conversation under music. Someone was playing Schubert on the piano.“The weather finally changed,” he said. She squeezed his fingers. Galina had let her hair go gray during the pandemic, and he was not entirely sure it suited her. She had a round but not kind face with mischievous eyes. She wore a gold dress with a modest neck but a sharp slit.“I’m glad you could come.”In the living room, people sat in their evening finery on lovely antique chairs and velvet chaises. Galina left him at the doorway to join Igor, seated on a chaise at the front by the window. Caspar watched the back of his head, sallow under the chemo fuzz. Igor’s shoulders, once broad, were quite skinny now. His oxygen tank sat at his knees like an obedient mastiff.The pianist was young and blond, which made Caspar realize that he hadn’t seen a blond adult man in a long time. He played the Schubert well, in a lovely though condescending way. He wasn’t really trying. Caspar stood at the back of the room and watched him lilt his way through the piece, going through the motions. This sarcastic attitude made the playing uglier as it went on, and in the end, Caspar retracted his previous judgment—it hadn’t been lovely at all. Everyone clapped. Over the heads of the crowd, Caspar’s eyes met the young man’s. Something poisonously sarcastic in his expression made Caspar want to leave.“Well, look who’s finally here!”It was Nina. She had just come from the bathroom.“Traffic,” he said.“Oh yes,” Nina replied, but did not elaborate. She knew about the protests, of course. Her husband was a senior attorney for the city.“How is he?” Caspar asked.Nina looked out over the room at the others gathered, who had turned at her greeting. She smiled at them and said to him, quietly, “Not here. Not now.”She put her arm through Caspar’s and ushered him forward.Nina and Caspar had both been Galina’s students as undergraduates. They had registered for a graduate course on Faulkner, been intimidated at first, then stayed because of Galina. Together, they made diagrams and charts to take apart The Sound and the Fury, and they ate lunches in Washington Square Park while committing lines of Faulkner’s prose to memory to recite for Galina’s lightning-round verbal interrogations. During that strangely warm fall, they became friends and, for just a couple of confused, painful weeks, nearly more than friends. But Caspar, no matter how hard he tried, was incurably gay, and Nina was, unfortunately, not willing to make herself a martyr.It was for the best, Galina told them later. Because they might have married each other and ruined a lifelong friendship.They stopped by the chaise so that Caspar could say hello. Igor’s eyes were cloudy, and his chest rattled with effortful breathing. The cannula pressed against Caspar’s cheek when he bent to kiss him.“Sorry I’m late,” he said.“No one is ever late in New York,” Igor said. He tried to laugh, but his chest seized up and he had to cough violently into his handkerchief. Galina gave him a glass of water. When Igor recovered, a wild, dazed look in his eyes made Caspar feel cold, as if some winged thing were passing over his soul.“You’ve just seen it, haven’t you?” Igor whispered. He gripped Caspar’s wrist.“Seen what, Igor?”“I know you have.”“No, I haven’t seen anything. I promise.”Igor stared at him as Galina tried to pry his grip loose.“He gets like this in the evenings.” She leaned in to say something in Igor’s ear. His expression grew focused and then softened. When Igor released him, Caspar flexed his hand and looked around to find that people were trying politely not to stare in their direction. About 20 guests had arrived, too few to be truly anonymous.Nina came to the front to help Galina with Igor, first getting him to stand and then escorting him out of the room. As they passed, people touched his shoulder and his back. They squeezed his arm and said quiet, comforting things. The three of them and the little tank on its cart reached the doorway and turned the corner.Several guests approached Caspar—Simon and Richard, two of Galina’s former colleagues in the English department, and Elaine, a literary critic. Their smeary glasses turned their eyes large and owl-like as they blinked at him wordlessly, as though the mere act of looking were enough of a prompt.“He didn’t say anything to me, not really,” Caspar said.“It’s just very strange,” Richard said. “I’ve known him a long time. I never thought he’d go batty.”“Has he been saying strange things to you?” Caspar asked.“Yes,” Richard said, “though nothing very interesting. I was sitting with him the other day, had been for an hour or so, just reading to him—Galina was out, but reading calms him when she’s not around. And he just kept … asking for her. Even though he knew she was out for the day.”“But maybe he didn’t know it,” Simon replied. “That’s how it is. They don’t know. They are prisoners of their present. They have no recourse to the past and therefore no recourse to knowledge.”Elaine’s eyes widened, and she made a low hum of disagreement.“Oh, don’t start,” Richard said.Caspar laughed. Elaine’s area of expertise was modernism.“I’m going to make my rounds,” Caspar said. As he left, Elaine was puffing up her chest.After that Faulkner class, he had gone on to study mathematics and physics. Now he was an adjunct, trying to find a postdoc that might lead to a material change in his life. Nothing had been forthcoming.Aside from various former students of Igor’s, no one looked familiar, including the pianist, who now lurked near the window, staring down onto the city. All that anyone else seemed to know was that he was a distant relative of Igor’s, from Prague, and that his name was Radek. He wore a casual suit, slightly boxy, in dark gray, with elegant shoes, and standing there at the window, he was clearly tall, which hadn’t been obvious when he was sitting.“You are the relative,” Caspar said by way of hello. He offered Radek a glass of white wine. Radek refused but smiled.“I am. He is my uncle’s uncle,” he said.Radek had dull-blue eyes, thick brows, and a fullness to his face that might fall away in the coming years. He was younger than Caspar initially thought.“Come to say hello, then?”Radek laughed quietly. “Yes, something like that. It is actually very funny. Two weeks ago, I was walking into rehearsal, and I saw a poster for a talk. And it was strange, because the talk, the series, is named after Igor. And we have the same last name. So I thought, Oh, who is this? I looked it up, thinking, Is this someone from a long time ago? And I found out, no! It is Igor! I call my mom and I say, ‘Mom, Mom, I found this poster! With our name!’ Then she told me that, ‘Aha! That is your uncle’s uncle!’ ”“This is your first time meeting them?”“Yes,” Radek said. “It’s very funny.”Then he grew more contemplative. “I suppose it’s not very funny. It’s very sad.”“Yes,” Caspar said. “He’s a wonderful man.”“Was he your teacher? So many of his students are here.”“No,” Caspar said. “Galina was my teacher. But I have known them for a long time, ever since.”Radek nodded. Then he took the wine from Caspar and gulped it down.“They do seem really wonderful. They must have been great teachers for so many people to have come to say goodbye.”Caspar nodded. It was getting sadder.Outside, over the dark city, the choppers were spreading wide their net of light. Radek turned to watch.“Why are they out there? Do you know? I tried to look it up.” Radek showed him the blank screen of his phone. “There was nothing on the transit apps.”“Protests,” Caspar said.“For what?” Radek frowned.“You don’t remember? This summer, a boy was pushed onto the tracks by a woman. She said that he was attacking her. But it came out that she had just felt unsafe because he was standing near her and talking to himself. He was unhoused. And possibly off his medication. Anyway, they reviewed some footage and the city prosecutor declined to take up the case, and people were very upset.”“Unhoused?”“Homeless,” Caspar said.“Ah.”“He was 17, I think? He’d run away from a group home. Anyway, it was very sad.”“She pushed him because she felt scared?”“Yes,” Caspar said.“And no charges?”“No. And there was a shooting in Brooklyn,” Caspar said.“God, this place.”Caspar laughed. “Yeah, sometimes it really does seem like misfortune piles up here. But I’m not sure the ledger looks any better anywhere else.”“No,” Radek said. “Probably not.”Nina returned, looking tired and pale. Caspar introduced her to Radek.“You’re the nephew,” she said. “Pleasure.”Radek’s eyes glinted as he admired her. He did a silly little bow.“Don’t be patronizing,” she said.“How are they?” Caspar asked.Nina sighed. “I need a cigarette. But they’re fine.”“Should we go down?”“Isn’t it cold?” she asked.“Yes, but since when has that stopped us?”Nina laughed.“Mind if I tag along? I don’t know anyone else,” Radek said.Caspar almost said that he didn’t know the two of them either, but Nina shrugged.“Sure,” she said.They put on their coats and took the elevator down. They stood under the green awning. Radek lit Nina’s cigarette first. Then Caspar lit Radek’s and Nina lit his, a funny game of formality. The chopper blades were audible, but moving into the distance. They could hear the barest whine of sirens and a dull roar from downtown. Nina gazed up the street into the wind, westward. The sharp chill brought tears to her eyes, but she would not look away.“My husband,” she said to Radek, “is a prosecutor for the city. Right now, right this moment in fact, he is holed up in a building somewhere, under siege.”“That’s a bit dramatic,” Caspar said. His fingers were getting numb already. It was mid-November.“No,” she said, flicking ashes to the side. “Not at all. Those were Valeri’s words. Under siege, can’t make it tonight, eye-roll emoji.”“Is he safe?” Radek asked. They both looked at him, his boyish exuberance. His flashing eyes. Nina took a long pull on her cigarette.“Very,” Caspar said. “He’ll be fine.”“This whole case is such a nightmare,” she said.Caspar looked away. They had very nearly gotten into an argument several times because Nina believed the woman’s fear was sufficient cause to defend herself. Caspar did not agree, at least not entirely, that the woman was without blame or culpability. You couldn’t go around in the world weaponizing your fear against other people. Did others not also have an equal claim to safety? They couldn’t come to an agreement. Caspar didn’t want to say that Nina’s judgment was impaired by the fact that she was also a white woman. Nina obviously felt the same way about Caspar being Black.“I feel for the girl,” she said.Caspar suppressed his urge to respond. He walked to the other side of the awning and gazed eastward down the street.“Still,” Radek said. “She did cause a boy to die.”“Boy,” Nina said, but then, catching herself, “I’m just worried about my husband.”“Understandable,” Radek said.Caspar watched a Lyft pull to a stop and let passengers out across the street. Two drunk women, their voices high and brittle, laughed as they helped each other into the lobby of their building. The car pulled away. Caspar looked up at Galina’s building. The doorman stood at the ready to let them back inside. Nina and Radek were whispering about something. Nina had a bad habit of collecting strays. Caspar dropped his cigarette and put it out with his heel.“Should we go back up?”Radek was laughing, looking in Caspar’s direction. Nina smiled. “Of course, my love.” She took Caspar’s arm.“Your coat will smell like smoke. Aren’t you supposed to be quitting?”“I’ll just blame your bad influence,” she said. Radek lagged behind as they went inside. Nina glanced back at him and murmured, “What do you make of our new puppy?”Caspar pressed the call button for the elevator. Radek stood awkwardly off to the side. He was good-looking, though Caspar couldn’t get rid of the impression from earlier, the sarcastic Schubert.“I think he’s a child,” he said.“That’s the problem with New York,” Nina pouted. “There are no men anymore.”“Were there ever?” he asked.“Oh yes,” she said, loud enough for Radek to hear. “But now they’re all eunuchs.”Back in the apartment, they hung their coats in the closet. Galina had returned from the bedroom and was standing just outside the kitchen. The other guests had gone to sit in the dining room. Nina made Radek pour her another glass of wine. Caspar joined Galina.“Smoking? How bad,” she said. “Where is Nina?”“With your nephew,” he said.Galina turned her head just slightly so that she could take in the sight of Nina and Radek. Her expression conveyed something that Caspar could not read, but he assumed it was a form of displeasure.“None of my business,” he said.“Awful.” But Galina was now smiling with barely contained amusement.“Shall we go in?” Galina asked. “Nina, you sit with me.”“Of course,” Nina said. “I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”Radek sat on Caspar’s right. They were pretty far down the table from Galina. She and Nina were in close conversation. Galina had hired caterers for the evening, who were setting out the cold soup course.Voices rose and fell. Ben the surgeon was talking to Ben the poet about something Caspar couldn’t quite make out. Someone said, “The pandemic has changed everything—what does and doesn’t make sense, on the money side. It’s all a mess.”Caspar could tell that Radek was following bits and pieces of conversation but not really committing to anything in particular. He seemed content with just being at the table.“Your Schubert earlier was good,” Caspar said.“You thought so?”“But it was not very nice.”“So you could tell,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to play. I was asked last minute.”“Yes, I thought it was sarcastic,” Caspar said. “A little mean-spirited.”Radek nodded, though he did not look chastened. “Sometimes, I can’t help myself. I have a bad nature—I’m rather spiteful.”“I can tell.”“But is it so bad, to be spiteful?”“Yes,” Caspar said, but then, thinking for a moment, “Maybe not. I don’t know. But tonight it seemed bad.”“Why? I don’t know anyone here.”“But the occasion,” he said. “You had to know that at least. And so, to choose to play a sarcastic Schubert?”“Yes, but didn’t you see Igor’s face?”“No, not at first,” Caspar said.Radek leaned toward him. His breath was sweet from the wine, warm.“He loved it,” Radek said. “I think it made him happy.”Radek’s lips brushed Caspar’s neck, and there was a flash of damp heat.“Well, you’re the one who had the view of his face—I defer to you,” Caspar said.“But you didn’t care for it,” Radek said, and paused. “Don’t you think it’s rather sarcastic to ask someone to play Schubert for a dying man?”Caspar laughed. “You’ve got me there.” They were quiet for a moment. Nina was watching them.“What would you have played if you’d had your pick?” Caspar asked.“For myself or for Igor?”“I hadn’t thought of that,” Caspar said. “What would you have picked for yourself?”“And just piano, or any music?”“Let’s start with just piano.”Radek folded his arms across his chest and hummed in thought.Brian Kanagaki for The Atlantic“On a night like this,” he said, turning it over. The fish course had arrived, and Caspar picked at his dorado. A gorgeous, delicate seared white skin. A pale sauce.“Brahms,” Radek said. “His three intermezzi, opus 117.”“I don’t know them,” Caspar said.“He told a friend as he was writing them that they were a lullaby for his grief,” Radek said. “I find them very beautiful. No one really thinks of them. They are overshadowed by opus 118. But Glenn Gould did a recording of opus 117 and it is my favorite of all of his work.”“That’s nice,” Caspar said. “I’ll have to listen to it sometime.”“But listen to the Gould version first. Before you listen to anyone else. His is the best. It’s melancholy, yes, maybe even sad sometimes, but I find it very beautiful and oddly hopeful. Like, Life, it goes on. He understands it the deepest. Everyone else just follows.”“I will,” Caspar said.Radek put his arm around Caspar’s shoulders and squeezed him. The suddenness of the contact, the immediacy, was startling, but also, it had been a long time since someone had truly hugged him.“It’s a promise,” Radek said. “You have to email me or call me when you listen.” Radek’s eyes were very serious. Caspar nodded.“I promise,” he said.Two weeks later, Caspar was walking with Nina in Central Park. Igor had died at the house upstate, near Hudson. There had been no funeral. There had been no memorial. He would not have wanted them to stand around sniffling and crying over him, Galina said. Caspar agreed.The wind was sharp and damp. It was a miserable day for a walk.“How is Valeri?” he asked.“Better,” she said.“Good. I’m glad it worked out.”“Me too,” she sighed. “It was so hard on him. Hard on all of us. Just a sad mistake.”Caspar did not reply right away.“I know you don’t agree,” she said. “But I really do feel sorry for her. And for the man who died, obviously.”“Yes, of course,” he said. “We all feel sorry.”“And poor Igor, too.”They sat on a bench and watched children climb and play. They drank coffee from a cart and talked about what they had been doing for the past two weeks. Nina was in the midst of writing a very long article about a recently rediscovered Italian author whose work had Marxist undertones.“She’s like an Italian Grace Paley,” she said. “But totally sick in the head. Like, deranged body horror. Headless dogs. It’s great.”“I’ll look for it. Where will it be?”“The London Review of Books, if I can meet my deadline,” she said. “What about you? What are you doing? Still wasting yourself on undergraduates?”“I help run a lecture course for a couple of faculty, do some tutoring,” he said. “It’s a life.”“Sounds terrible.”“It’s not,” he said. “Don’t be elitist.”“You should be at MIT,” she said.“No, I shouldn’t. I probably should have just gone into industry.”Nina looked horrified.“You should write. You’re a beautiful writer.”Caspar laughed. “No, that was always you.”“You are. Galina always said so. Your writing is beautiful, sensitive. You are a prime noticer.”“But all the rejection,” he said. “All the bad ideas before you get a good idea. I don’t have the courage.”A group of screaming children threw themselves around in fits of delight and rage. A group of them ran from one end of the playground to another, and they went on that way, until the group grew long and stringy and folded back on itself. All the children, made chubby by their coats and jackets, their hats and scarves, the pitch of their glee rising and falling like a siren.“Have you heard much from Galina?”“She’s still upstate,” Nina said. “That’s all I know. You?”“About the same.”“I hope she’s okay.”“Have you spoken to the nephew?” he asked.Nina flushed and looked down.“No,” she said. “Not a lot.”“Which is it—no or not a lot?”“Don’t be a morality cop,” she said. “It’s nothing.”“Why do I not feel like it’s nothing?”Nina poured the rest of her coffee onto the brown, scraggly lawn. It steamed.“I’ll take that as a sign to shut up,” he said.“Next time, it’s your lap.”They walked back to Columbus Circle. Everything was crusted in Christmas cheer, but neither of them felt very cheerful.“You have a bad habit,” he said.“I know,” she said.She was going uptown. He was going downtown. They parted and took different trains.On the platform, vendors were selling mango and churros and boxes of candy. A man was playing Celine Dion’s greatest power ballads on an electric violin. Caspar stood among the throng waiting for the first compartment on a downtown C. When the train arrived, he read while standing, letting an old woman take the seat he wanted. In between stations, when their train came close to another, he looked into the adjacent car and watched the people there as they, too, went length by length through the dark.In February, Caspar was browsing cards at a downtown stationery store when he heard his name from an unfamiliar voice.He looked up and there was Radek. They had not seen each other since Galina’s party. But as sometimes happened in the city, meeting just the one time charged both people with the potential of meeting again. They hugged, and Radek asked what had brought Caspar to this particular store.“Oh, I live around here,” he said.“No, you can’t.”“Why can’t I?” he asked.“Because I live around here.”“Since when?”“Since two years ago,” Radek said.“I’ve never seen you!”“You wouldn’t have known if you had seen me. You didn’t know me then.”“I guess that’s true,” Caspar said.“I bet I know who that’s for,” Radek said. He pointed to the card in Caspar’s hand, a delicately made watercolor on high-quality stock. Amid softly blooming whorls of earth-toned color was a gorgeous calligraphic rendering of Congratulations!“I bet you do,” he said. Nina had told him three weeks ago about her pregnancy. Valeri was thrilled, but anxious. “You’ve got one too.”Radek had picked out a bright-orange card with happy cats on it, painted in muted watercolor. His eyes darkened just a little.They paid for their cards and stepped out into the cold. Radek asked if he wanted to go to a café. It turned out they had the same favorite spot, near the IFC theater.“I was just here a couple days ago,” Caspar said. “I saw a documentary about Nan Goldin.”“No,” Radek said. “Because I was here a couple nights ago seeing a documentary about Nan Goldin.”They each took out the tickets they’d left in their coat pockets and discovered that they had indeed gone to the same showing.“What did you think?” Radek asked.“I found it very moving,” he said. “A little scattered, but very moving.”Radek ordered an espresso. Caspar ordered a black coffee. The café was busy, so they squeezed in at the bar by the window, sitting on two rickety stools.They talked about the documentary. Radek also found it moving. But less so than Caspar.“It felt like two movies somehow brought together—it also seemed rather dubious on the start of the addiction,” Radek said.“I suppose,” Caspar agreed. “But it’s slippery, with addiction. There’s no definitive hard start. It comes on slowly sometimes.”“But there was a hard start. When that man beat her up and left her. She got deep into heroin. It feels very clear when there’s someone else to blame, but for her own accountability, I don’t know. And the activism stuff, forget it.”“You didn’t like that part?”“I thought it was so boring. So mushy. So good.”“That’s true,” Caspar said. “That part had less scrutiny in it.”“But I did like the part about New York. That era. That would be fun to do again.”“That part really flattened me,” Caspar said. “They were so young and so free. They were broke, yeah, and struggling in a lot of ways, but they seemed so … I don’t know, it’s like they had a different kind of freedom than we have now. A freedom from language for that sort of stuff.”“You mean being gay?”“Yeah, or trans even. It’s like, they all had this space to just exist. I bet that was nice.” Radek hummed in agreement. Neither of them said anything for a few moments. Then he said, “I guess you know.”“That could mean anything,” Caspar said. “What do I know?”“About me and Nina,” he said. “After the party, we met a couple of times. But she told me I wasn’t serious.”“That sounds like her,” Caspar said. Radek had begun turning his cup slowly, and it scraped the fake marble of the tabletop.“It was dumb,” he said.“Yes,” Caspar agreed.Radek looked at him from the side, an appraising stare.“You don’t think I’m bad? You won’t judge me?”“No,” Caspar said. “I was in love with Nina once.”Radek gaped at him. Caspar laughed.“A long time ago—when we were almost young enough to do something stupid about it. But thankfully, Galina stopped us.”“How did she stop you?”“Well, she just let us see that making ourselves unhappy because we thought it would make the other person happier was actually a deeply stupid choice to make.”“Is that why you’re so devoted to her?”Were they devoted to Galina? Caspar wasn’t sure. He hadn’t spoken with her in months. This in itself was not unusual; they sometimes went a whole year without speaking. But yes, he would do almost anything for Galina.“I suppose when someone prevents you from making the greatest mistake of your life, you feel a little loyalty to them.”“Just a little? Americans are so brutal.”“We keep score like no one else,” Caspar said.Radek had stopped turning his cup. The crema had settled in the bottom amid the sooty remnants of the coffee.“Still,” Caspar said. “She must have liked you if she invited you to her baby shower.”Radek showed a confused expression until it clicked. “Oh, Nina. Yes.”They were quiet a bit longer.“And how are you keeping busy?” Caspar asked.“I played a concert,” he said. “A very small one—in a friend’s father’s loft. Me and three others. There is so much money in this place.”“What did you play?”“I played some Philip Glass, actually. I’ve not played a lot of his work. But the show was meant to be a medley of contemporary masters. And I got Glass.”“I love Glass,” Caspar said.“Yeah, people do.” Radek’s eyes flashed.“Don’t be condescending.”“Yeah, yeah,” Radek said. “It was nice. People enjoyed it.”Their time had come to an end. Caspar finished his coffee, and they went back out onto the sidewalk. They hugged goodbye, and as Radek was turning to leave, he stopped.“Did you ever listen to that Brahms?”Caspar paused a moment, searching his memory, and then, alighting upon the relevant facts, he said, “Ah. No, I never did.”“Just as well. I realized I didn’t give you my number, so you couldn’t tell me what you thought.”“Here, give me your phone,” Caspar said. He typed his name and number into Radek’s phone and then called himself. Then he saved Radek’s information. “Now we are in touch.”Radek laughed.They hugged again. Though they lived in the same neighborhood, they lived in opposite directions from the IFC, so they each set off into the cold wind.When Caspar got home, he looked up the Glenn Gould album of the Brahms intermezzi. His music app was a mess of Fauré and Debussy from having let it run long into the night the previous evening, when he’d been grading. Not having enough pop divas of any era in his queue made him feel older than he was.The Gould version of the intermezzi, particularly the three from opus 117, did have what Radek had described. A certain unpretentious lightness, a stirring belief— hope, even. When the melancholy came in the middle of the first intermezzo, it was as if someone had drawn a cool, dark shade across a sunny afternoon. The music changed after that, still progressing, but somehow inflected with a new sadness, so that in its steady forward motion, it became a perfect expression of seeking happiness in dire straits. Caspar could understand why a person would choose this for their last party. The second intermezzo had the underlying character of a waltz, both less wistful and more playful than the first. There were brassier accents as well, and the melody felt more intricate. Yet, here, too, was a theme of nostalgia and recollection, a long backward glance.Caspar played the whole album as he reheated soup for dinner. When it ended, he started it over and sat on his sofa to listen again. Then he wrote Radek a long text message explaining his feelings about the music. But he deleted that. Instead he texted, Listened. Very good. Love the second one especially.Radek texted back, Gould?Yes, Caspar texted.!!! he is the best!I agree.Next time, I will play it for you.Here Caspar paused. The insinuation of a next time.Caspar typed Like you did for Nina? But this seemed needlessly cruel. Instead he sent, Yeah, yeah, sure.No, really, I will.Ok.I will. Come over right now. I will play.Caspar did not know what to say. He felt bad that he had accidentally gotten them on this course of proving something. Or needing to prove something. Then it occurred to him that Radek was being sarcastic again, and that this needling, bratty behavior was somehow part of the charm that had gotten Nina to sleep with him.No, next time is fine, Caspar texted.Radek sent an annoyed emoji.In the spring, Galina had another party. She was selling the apartment and wanted to have a salon to celebrate. Or to close an era. She was in a long black skirt and a gray cashmere sweater. Her face had become keen and smooth. Something had been blasted away from her.She kissed Caspar in greeting and took his arm. The salon was in the afternoon this time. The room was flushed gold with sunlight. Radek and Nina were speaking near the window. Her belly was big now. She wore a gray jersey-knit dress. She looked radiant.Elaine and Richard and Simon were there. The others were not. In honor of Nina’s pregnancy, they were all drinking cider and coffee, tea. There had been a warm soup course and a chicory and fennel salad. The food was good, tart, enlivening. Elaine and Simon were arguing about Woolf and Forster. Elaine thought Forster was a misogynist, and Simon thought Woolf was a homophobe.Richard stood between them looking beleaguered.Galina and Caspar sat on the chaise overlooking the city. Where she and Igor had sat many months ago.“I have been thinking,” she said, “of what he said to you that night.”Caspar had forgotten that moment, but it made itself available to him at this mention. Igor’s wide eyes. The desperation in his grip.“What did you see?” she asked. A long segment of light fell over her lap. They were warm there, the sun striking their knees and thighs. The fabric of the chaise had slowly faded from this light. Every day, soaked in sunshine.“I don’t know,” he said. “Except, that moment, when he choked. I thought I … It wasn’t sight. But I had this feeling of, I don’t know. Like something was going.”Galina nodded.“And I guess he saw me see that? I don’t know. It makes me sad that he got scared because I panicked when he choked.”“His last weeks were very difficult,” she said. “We knew they would be, of course, but to live them? That was excruciating.”Caspar didn’t know what to say. Instead, he put his arm around Galina and let her rest her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes.Nina sat on the arm of the chaise. She smelled like Radek’s cologne. Radek sat at the piano. He and Caspar shared a look. Then Radek began to play the second intermezzo. The others joined them near the chaise, and Radek played on. Caspar’s chest felt tight. The last notes hung in the air, and then that was it. That was it.Caspar and Radek took the train together. They sat on facing benches. Sometimes, people stood between them and they couldn’t see each other except when the train rocked and opened a space. Radek’s face did not change during the whole ride. He looked as peaceful as when he’d been playing the Brahms.At their stop, they climbed the steps, Radek in front, Caspar behind, and when they emerged, there was a moment when they might have gone in either direction, apart or together. But Caspar did not feel equal to that. They went on standing near the top of the subway-station stairs, which was the worst place to stand. And after a few moments of getting annoyed looks, Radek nodded. Then he put his arm through Caspar’s and led him to the café, where they sat for an hour, not really speaking, not really doing anything, just passing the time together, until the light was gone, and they had to go home.This story appears in the February 2025 print edition.

Freedom is a word that turns up with embarrassing frequency in rock-and-roll songs. How we love to free-associate about freedom. On occasion, we’re good for a “Chimes of Freedom” (at least Bob Dylan is), but if we’re honest, the freedom musicians are most interested in is our own.The reason I am climbing on this slippery soapbox called “freedom” today is because I’m being given a presidential medal by that name—an honor I’m receiving mainly for the work of others, among them my bandmates and our fellow activists—and it’s got me thinking again about the subject. When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the 1960s, that had its place too. We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation. The freedom songs of the folk singers went electric, the coded messages of gospel music burst into the full flower of funk and soul. Even disco promised emancipation, from Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” to Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out.” In U2, we wanted our song “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.Outside the studio, it felt like freedom was unstoppable. In Europe, the generation before us had paid for our freedom in blood. We promised we would never forget. Yes, freedom was stalled here, suppressed there, but not forever, we thought. Walls were made to tumble. I think my generation believed that consciousness itself was evolving, that humankind was moving inevitably toward being freer and more equal—despite five or six millennia of evidence to the contrary.I believed it, anyway.At age 18, we in U2 had our first proper go at activism at an anti-apartheid concert at Trinity College Dublin. Later we answered the call of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to take up the cause of freedom again—in this case, freedom from economic slavery—and help cancel the old Cold War debts of the least developed countries. Statistics don’t rhyme very well, so I couldn’t sing my way through this campaign. I needed what one of our friends, Bill Gates, would later refer to as a software update, which is to say, a bigger brain.Rather than go back to school, I went to Africa for my education. Africa, a continent confronting yet another colonizing force—a virus. And what was the death sentence of HIV/AIDS if not a negation of freedom, namely the freedom to go on living? Bobby Shriver, Jamie Drummond, Lucy Matthew, and I launched ONE and (Red) to help lift that death sentence. Our M.O. was to enlist a wide variety of politicians across the political spectrum and to do the same with the forces of commerce to make sure that lifesaving medicine would reach the people whose lives depended on it, whether or not they could pay for a single pill. We were following the African activists who were leading the resistance to this nasty little virus in the form of groups such as TASO in Uganda, TAC in South Africa, unsung heroes like Zackie Achmat who refused to take his own ARVs until they were available for all. And took the South African government to court to prove that he and HIV/AIDS existed.  Most of my life, freedom could really hold its head up. Freedom had attitude, freedom was an attitude. Walls really did tumble, not just the one in Berlin: The Iron Curtains of the Soviet Union were drawn back to reveal democracies struggling to be born, gasping for free air; and extreme poverty—a trap as confining and debilitating as any prison—released millions of people from its grip. Thanks to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), that brilliant cross-party achievement of President George W. Bush, 26 million people have been freed to go on living despite an HIV diagnosis. And Jubilee USA reports that in the years since Drop the Debt—another bipartisan triumph, this one led in the U.S. by President Bill Clinton—an extra 54 million children have been able to go to school. That’s freedom right there.So if freedom swaggered—or even sometimes staggered, carrying a drink and smoking a cheroot—we kind of forgave freedom, because it got results.But where are we now, as my hero David Bowie sang?Is the Medal of Freedom a nostalgia act? Is freedom itself a nostalgia act?Maybe the idea of freedom as a guarantee. But not freedom as a mighty, worthy struggle.In America, the land of the free, we saw in the past election that freedom is universally valued but not universally defined. For some it means the freedom to things, such as access to reproductive care; for others it means freedom from various forms of perceived government intrusion. It’s an old family argument—older than America itself.While America wrestles with the meaning of freedom—not just what it is, but who gets it—in other parts of the world, people are literally dying for it. In Ukraine, freedom is a brutally direct, existential question, framed by Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs: Are your lives worth this fight, this struggle? In Sudan, a civil war whose parties are supported by great powers poses the question of what freedom means when famine is not even considered a new tool of war and hardly makes the news.Across the Middle East, freedom has always been at the beneficence of great powers passing through rather than the great peoples born of the Levant. In Syria now we see the first, tentative shoots of freedom after Assad and Putin squeezed and choked the life out of this most mythological ground. But caution is the word. Seeds of democracy can be scattered or trampled. Even in the Queen of Sheba’s Yemen, we see Iran trample on more treasured peoples and impose its brand of fundamentalism not just on its neighbors but on its own people, mostly Persian but also Kurdish, like Mahsa Amini. Women and men yearning to breathe free—free of the vice and virtue police. (Yes, that’s really their formal title.)And then there’s Gaza. Israel’s prime minister for almost 20 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used the defense of Israel’s freedom and its people as an excuse to systematically deny the same freedom and security to the Palestinians—a self-defeating and deadly contradiction, which has led to an obscene leveling of civilian life that the world can visualize daily on their cellphones. Freedom must come for the Israeli hostages, whose kidnapping by Hamas ignited this latest cataclysm. Freedom must come for the Palestinian people. It does not take a prophet to predict that Israel will never be free until Palestine is free.   Freedom is complex and demanding.It might even be a little dull, the work of freedom. Certainly the work of peacemakers. Which I’ve witnessed and of course don’t have the stamina for. The fluorescent lights, the conference tables with plates of stale sandwiches, the late nights of hard work and of missing your family back home. In Ireland during the late 1990s, I wasn’t in those rooms, but we all held our breath as almost everyone gave up something they believed in for the cause of peace.This stuff is complicated. I used to love a good rant about it. Shooting your mouth off before you knew anything was part of the attraction of rock and roll. I used to think that being heard was the most useful thing I could do, maybe because it was the only thing I really knew how to do.  But at some point the returns diminished. I remember Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, with raised eyebrow, asking with exasperation, “What is it this time, Bono? Rock Against Bad Things?”I still have a fondness for symbolic or poetic acts—a fist in the air, a shout, an indelible image. I still think they’re important. But for more than two decades, I’ve opted for more activism and less symbolism. A petition for something utterly worthy arrives once a month at our house. But I’m not much of a signer. These days I’m more inclined to be specific than dramatic, to organize than agonize.On the barricades, this word might sound like a yawn, but now all I want to be is an actualist (I thought I’d made the word up until I found it in the dictionary). I suppose being an actualist means being an idealist crossed with a pragmatist. I want to know what actually works. If I throw a punch, I want it to actually land. I enjoyed the wild swings of my youth. But now I’m excited by the strategy and tactics that might put injustice on the back foot.And actually, in the end, it’s not personalities—as dull or luminous as singers can be—that change things. It’s movements like Jubilee 2000 or the ONE Campaign, which takes to the streets but also to the corridors of Capitol Hill and parliaments and G8 meetings, working with people who disagree on everything but the one thing (see what I did there?), cutting deals where they can to fight the injustice of extreme poverty. It’s also the animating idea of (Red), a gateway drug for AIDS activism, a way to bring the capitalists on board (and that was before I realized I was one).Yes, it was 25 years ago almost to the month that the developing-world-debt-cancellation campaign brought me to the office of then-Senator Joe Biden. He was friendly—dropping references to County Mayo, even then reciting Seamus Heaney poems. But he was fearsome too—ready to take a punch as well as throw one. That’s the kind of fighter you want on your side.I left those meetings with a sense that the very ordinariness of the people who wrote the bills, who built the coalitions, whose day job was the grinding unglamorous work of serving freedom, was in fact their extraordinariness.It’s what the fight for freedom needs today: faithful, stubborn, unselfish effort. For many years I quoted that line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I now know it does not. It has to be bent. And that’s how the walls will finally come down: in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Gaza, across the Middle East, in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk. Abraham Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom.” I think he meant that freedom must be re-won by each generation. That is a fine call to action for a new year.

Donald Trump wasted little time after the election in claiming an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” and floating a series of extreme proposals with varying degrees of legal dubiousness. The president-elect has already winkingly suggested that he might stay in office for an unconstitutional third term, indicated that he intends to end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and said that he plans to deport U.S. citizens. If the mood on the right is triumphant, the atmosphere among those opposed to Trump has been despairing, as though nothing can be done to hold him back from what he has planned. A representative headline in Slate read “Is the Law for Suckers, Now?”It’s tempting to conclude that the answer is yes. The country elected a man who has been indicted four times, essentially wiping away any chance that he might face criminal accountability for his effort to hold on to power after losing reelection in 2020. The Supreme Court, in issuing its shocking immunity ruling this summer, seems newly on board with the idea that the chief executive can more or less do whatever he likes. What do legal restrictions and constitutional processes matter in the face of a politics that has lost any semblance of reason?A great deal, in fact. The country has come a long way from the starry-eyed early days of the Russia investigation, when Trump’s opponents purchased votive candles printed with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s face on them and dreamed of a criminal prosecution that might end Trump’s presidency. Sure, the law is not a magic wand to save America—but neither is it entirely useless. Acknowledging the threat that Trump poses to American democracy does not require accepting that he is unbound by law. On the contrary, taking the risk seriously requires taking seriously the legal and political mechanisms available to prevent the worst of Trump’s intended abuses.Those mechanisms are available partly because of Trump’s own shortcomings. As would-be authoritarians go, Trump is often lazy, prone to whims, easily distracted, and poorly organized, and each of those shortcomings can create legal and political weaknesses for his administration. The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued shortly following Trump’s reelection that “there is a large gap between a stated intention and an accomplished fact. And it is within that space that politics happens.”[Read: No, Trump can’t just ‘dismiss’ the Senate]The country has already caught a glimpse of how this process can play out, as Trump has begun to assemble his Cabinet. Within weeks of the election, the vision of a victorious, crusading Trump that his allies promoted swiftly crumbled into something a lot more familiar: a chaotic, grinding slog. That may not sound particularly encouraging, but for those who care about democracy, it’s actually welcome news.The first hint of breakdown emerged out of the constitutional dynamics between the executive and legislative branches. The Republican Party secured a less-than-overwhelming four-seat majority in the Senate, meaning that the new administration can lose only a handful of votes for confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Briefly, it seemed that Trump’s team had dreamed up a solution in order to jam through the president-elect’s more controversial nominees: force the Senate into a recess by inexcusably contorting the Constitution, then use the president’s ability to fill Cabinet slots unilaterally when the Senate is gone.The idea was disturbing. It recalled the monarchical power to dissolve Parliament—and, in that sense, spoke to an absolutist vision of presidential authority entirely unchecked by the legislature or any competing center of power. But the incoming administration appears to have backed away from the scheme after Ed Whelan, a fixture of the conservative legal movement, raised alarm about the scheme and voiced doubts about its constitutionality. One of Trump’s most controversial and least-supported nominees, former Representative Matt Gaetz, has since withdrawn from consideration rather than hope for a recess appointment.Even if Trump’s team decides to pull the trigger on the plan at a future date, they will face no end of difficulty in practice. To begin with, the scheme would require the House to recess first, but the GOP’s House majority is extremely tight, and there is no guarantee that Speaker Mike Johnson could secure the votes to send his chamber home in service of such a scheme, even if he wanted to. In the weeks since Whelan first warned against the idea, legal academics of all political stripes have begun assembling a range of compelling arguments as to why the plan would be unconstitutional—arguments that a Trump administration would have to face down in court. Even if such litigation makes it up to a potentially sympathetic Supreme Court, and even if the Court is sympathetic, Trump will confront the problem that three of the conservative justices previously signed on to an opinion holding that a president may only fill vacancies during a recess that arose during the recess itself, significantly limiting this immense claim of power.None of this is to say that the House, the Senate, or a majority of the justices are pure and principled actors, or that respect for the text of the Constitution will be enough to stiffen their spines against Trump. But the combination of public outrage, the existence of strong legal arguments against Trump’s actions, and the total lack of strong legal arguments for them is potentially significant. Each element makes going along with him a little more difficult for Congress and the Court—especially because, even if many members of the public have given up on thinking of the Court as anything more than a political body, some of the justices still want to be able to think of themselves as fair and impartial jurists. And the more difficulty that Trump encounters, the more likely that he shrugs his shoulders and moves on to the next whim.The same is true when it comes to the specific policies that Trump has promised to implement during his second term, many of them arguably or even blatantly illegal. Dara Lind, of the American Immigration Council, has pointed out that anxious rhetoric around Trump’s promised mass deportations often elides the challenging and perhaps insurmountable “logistical realities” of organizing and executing such an incredibly complex operation. Litigation is part of those logistical realities, too. Consider Trump’s promise to end the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which will reportedly involve an executive order directing the federal government not to issue Social Security numbers to babies born on U.S. soil to parents who are neither citizens nor green-card holders. How is the Social Security Administration meant to ascertain the citizenship of an infant’s parents? What happens when that agency and others are hit with a wave of lawsuits from organizations challenging the order? A signature on an executive order is a very different thing than actually putting a policy into effect.[Read: The potential backlash to Trump unbound]It’s difficult to gauge what the litigation might look like in advance. But the first Trump administration offers instructive examples. Consider the case of the travel ban during the first Trump administration: Shortly after taking office in 2017, Trump released an executive order barring citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. A flood of litigation ensued as lawyers rushed to airports around the country to represent panicked travelers. Courts blocked the order. And though Trump whined, the administration complied—at least that time around. After the Supreme Court finally issued a ruling upholding the constitutionality of the proclamation, more than a year later, the version of the ban that ultimately went into place was significantly watered-down and incorporated a number of exceptions.The final ban was, to be clear, stupid, pointless, and cruel, and the Court’s decision was studiously obtuse as to the hateful intentions behind the policy. But the litigation made a difference in allowing people to enter the country who otherwise would have been stranded—not all of them, and not enough of them, but some. For those people, that difference mattered.This is not a stirring tale of the majesty of law above all. It is, however, a story about the usefulness of the legal process as a means of throwing sand in the gears of the machinery of cruelty. And the travel ban was on far firmer legal ground than many of the proposals being floated for Trump’s second term.Trump has always been defined by his striking lack of curiosity about the government he sought to lead. To the extent that the 47th president is able to convince the country that he has the authority to carry out his political program as a sort of elected dictator, that will be another victory for Trump’s style of empty know-nothingism. In contrast, recognizing why Trump’s power isn’t unlimited requires a deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which the work of government is actually carried out—exactly the understanding to which Trump’s own apathy is ideologically opposed. The more Americans know about their system of government and the laws that shape it, the better they will be equipped to defend their democracy.

This much you already know: Many Americans are alone, friendless, isolated, undersexed, sick of online dating, glued to their couches, and transfixed by their phones, their mouths starting to close over from lack of use. Our national loneliness is an “urgent public health issue,” according to the surgeon general. The time we spend socializing in person has plummeted in the past decade, and anxiety and hopelessness have increased. Roughly one in eight Americans reports having no friends; the rest of us, according to my colleague Olga Khazan, never see our friends, stymied by the logistics of scheduling in a world that has become much more frenetic and much less organized around religion and civic clubs. “You can’t,” she writes, “just show up on a Sunday and find a few hundred of your friends in the same building.”But what if you could, at least on a smaller scale? What if there were a way to smush all your friends together in one place—maybe one with drinks and snacks and chairs? What if you could see your work friends and your childhood friends and the people you’ve chatted amiably with at school drop-off all at once instead of scheduling several different dates? What if you could introduce your pals and set them loose to flirt with one another, no apps required? What if you could create your own Elks Lodge, even for just a night?I’m being annoying, obviously—there is a way! It’s parties, and we need more of them.Simply put, America is in a party deficit. Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004. Last month, Party City, the country’s largest retailer of mylar balloons, goofy disposable plates, and other complements to raging, announced that it would close after years of flagging sales and looming debt. Adolescents are engaging in markedly fewer risky behaviors than they used to; Jude Ball, a psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon, told me recently that a major cause is just that teenagers are having fewer parties. Six months ago on Reddit, someone asked one of the saddest questions I’ve ever seen on the social platform, which is really saying something: “Did anybody else think there would be more parties?”[Read: The friendship paradox]“When I was a kid my parents and extended family used to have serious parties on a regular basis,” the post continues. “I remember houses and yards full of people, music all the way up, lots of food and of course free flowing alcohol. Neighbors, family, coworkers, their friends, they all showed up. And likewise my parents went to their parties. I thought that is what my adult years would be like, but they aren’t.” The post got more than 300 responses, many of them sympathetic.A lot of other people seem to feel the same way, even if they’re not expressing it quite so plainly. Polling from the market-research and public-opinion company YouGov in 2023 showed that although 84 percent of Americans enjoy birthday parties, only 59 percent had attended one in the previous year. In a different YouGov poll from 2022, only 28 percent of respondents said they would “probably” or “definitely” throw a party for their next birthday. This is what a group psychologist would call “diffusion of responsibility,” and what I, Ellen Cushing, would call “a major bummer”: Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks.My point is that we are obligated to create the social world we want. Intimacy, togetherness—the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel—are what parties alchemize. Warm rooms on cold nights, so many people you love thumbtacked down in the same place, the musical clank of bottles in the recycling, someone staying late to help with the dishes—these are things anyone can have, but like everything worth having, they require effort. Fire trucks, after all, don’t come from nowhere—they come because we pay taxes.This year, pay your taxes: Resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests (anything less is not a party!) and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity (anything else is sociopathic!), then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more. Bear in mind that parties can be whatever you want: a 15-person Super Bowl party; a casual picnic in the park with 20 of your pals; an overfull house party, guest count unknown. They do not need to be expensive, or formal, or in your own home. You don’t need a theme, unless you want one. You don’t even need to buy anything, or clean up beforehand, if you’re feeling particularly punk. All you have to do is invite people in.

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.American personal-finance gurus love to rail against the habit of spending money on coffee:  The finance personality Suze Orman once compared buying coffee outside the house to “peeing $1 million down the drain.” But this criticism hasn’t curbed Americans’ love of ordering coffee. Neither has a yearslong stretch of brutal inflation. Through it all, Americans have kept purchasing their lattes and Americanos and drips, their cold foams and pumps of flavor and alternative milks.Most American adults drink coffee regularly. The beverage is inescapable in America in part because it has enabled the long work hours that contribute to America’s culture of productivity. As Michael Pollan wrote in The Atlantic in 2020, “Coffee has helped create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to thrive.” But this alone doesn’t explain its pull: Many people view the act of buying a cup of coffee as a small pleasure, one that fits easily into a busy routine. As the price of everything—including lattes—has gone up in recent years, Americans have stood by this particular habit.Inflation-squeezed consumers are shying away from eating at restaurants, but many have kept indulging in to-go coffee. Starbucks is stumbling—last year, its sales and store traffic dipped, its workers went on strike, and it brought in yet another new CEO—but cafés are flourishing overall. The retail-research firm Circana found that spending at coffee shops in 2024 was up 55 percent compared with 2017 (restaurant spending overall was up about 20 percent in that period). Businesses serving coffee and tea are one of the fastest-growing slices of the restaurant industry.Because coffee has a price cap that’s fairly low, it is generally the “last to go” when people are cutting back on meals out, Alex Susskind, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell, told me. A restaurant dinner could cost hundreds of dollars. But even the most elaborate coffee concoction in most cities couldn’t be more than $8. (I am ignoring stunt orders, such as this one that apparently involved 101 shots of espresso.) Spending more than a few dollars on a coffee drink might seem absurd, especially to those who grew up in an era of much lower pricing. But many people continue to view coffee as a relatively affordable luxury, making it unique in the realm of dining out, Susskind noted: Just like fast-food chains, which did well in the second half of last year, coffee survives through customers’ strong perception that the price won’t go above a certain threshold.But even the last to go may have a shaky future. In December, coffee hit its highest price in nearly 50 years. Major droughts in coffee-growing areas such as Brazil meant that the cost of Arabica beans (a common variety served in the United States) went up about 70 percent in 2024. The price has eased slightly in recent weeks, from $3.35 a pound to $3.20 a pound, but it was closer to $1.80 this time last year. Store brands such as Nescafé and Folgers have raised their prices, pointing to bean costs. In 2025, coffee shops will need to decide how much of the expense to pass on to coffee drinkers. With all of the resources and labor that go into it, a cup of coffee arguably should cost more than what we pay for it now. If coffee prices keep rising, coffee enthusiasts may be forced to consider how much their daily ritual is truly worth.Related: How America lost its taste for the middle The rise of coffee shaming (from 2019) Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Bad news for Trump’s legislative agenda The rise of John Ratcliffe Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change Five books that offer readers intellectual exercise Today’s News Representative Mike Johnson narrowly won reelection as the speaker of the House. South Korean investigators failed to detain President Yoon Suk Yeol after an hours-long standoff with roughly 200 soldiers and members of the presidential security detail. A small plane crashed into a warehouse in California yesterday, killing two people and injuring 19. Dispatches The Books Briefing: During a week of tragedy and chaos, Emma Sarappo has been thinking about the figurative language of death and decay that we use to describe the close of the year. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Thermometers Are Hot GarbageBy Daniel Engber Germs are in the air again: Indicators show that the winter wave of flu and COVID is finally under way. Are you on the verge of getting sick? Am I? My 5-year-old does feel a little warm to me; his sister seems okay. Maybe I should take their temperature? Maybe I should not. Here’s my resolution for the year ahead: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Because doing so is next to useless. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic What Taylor Swift understands about love David Brooks: Vivek Ramaswamy is uninvited from my sleepover. The president Trump is pushing aside Culture Break Todd Webb Archive Take a look. These photos show the painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s life in New Mexico.Pay attention. Parents, put down your phone cameras, Russell Shaw writes. In trying to capture so much of our kids’ lives, we risk missing out.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I enjoyed reading this set of food and drink predictions from Kim Severson, who suggests that we are in for a year of breaking with convention. One trend she’s eyeing? Savory coffee experiences. “Chefs are infusing coffee with sunchoke purée and avocado, and flavoring drinks with ginger, lemongrass and rosemary smoke,” Severson writes. “And yes, coffee is starting to get the omakase treatment.” Happy new year!— LoraStephanie 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.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has had a contentious relationship with Donald Trump in the Washington Post. But things appear to have changed in recent months.

The Social Security Fairness Act repeals two provisions that reduced Social Security benefits for some public workers who also receive pensions.

Chinese robot vacuum cleaner company Roborock says its new model has an artificial intelligence-powered folding arm for removing socks and other obstacles.

A year after a door plug blew out of a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9, the manufacturer is outlining the progress it has made.

Japanese nutritionist and longevity expert Michiko Tomioka shares her favorite "medicinal multigrain rice" breakfast to start her day.

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Some experts say there's really nothing the government can do about high food prices.

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President-elect Donald Trump congratulated Johnson, who eked out election as speaker of the House after a first ballot was kept open for more than an hour.

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president ever to be convicted of a crime.

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Both General Motors and Ford Motor on Friday reported their best annual U.S. new vehicle sales since 2019.

U.S. Steel's stock opened down more than 7% in trading Friday following the president's announcement.

Early retiree Brandon Ganch focuses on maximizing "net fulfillment" rather than net worth."

The U.S. surgeon general on Friday issued a new advisory on the link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.

The Department of Transportation said its $2 million fine against JetBlue was the first of its kind for chronically delayed flights.

CNBC's Jim Cramer on Friday walked investors through next week's market action.

DraftKings is testing the subscription service in New York, which is tied for the highest tax rate on sports wagering in the country.

Moldova's Transnistria region has been thrust into an energy crisis following the termination of a gas transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

After the Biden administration withdrew its sweeping student loan forgiveness plans, borrowers should look into the existing debt cancellation programs.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has had a contentious relationship with Donald Trump in the Washington Post. But things appear to have changed in recent months.

A year after a door plug blew out of a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9, the manufacturer is outlining the progress it has made.

A rough sketch of the cartoon shows several men resembling corporate billionaires kneeling before a man wearing a suit and a long tie, representing Trump.

Yoran led the cybersecurity company in its IPO in 2018.

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president ever to be convicted of a crime.

Over half of Microsoft's $80 billion in spending will take place in the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote in a Friday blog post.

Both General Motors and Ford Motor on Friday reported their best annual U.S. new vehicle sales since 2019.

President-elect Donald Trump congratulated Johnson, who eked out election as speaker of the House after a first ballot was kept open for more than an hour.

The Department of Transportation said its $2 million fine against JetBlue was the first of its kind for chronically delayed flights.

Moldova's Transnistria region has been thrust into an energy crisis following the termination of a gas transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

Rivian on Friday said it produced 49,476 electric vehicles last year.

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The report centers on Carvana's practice of loan sales as well as the business relationship between CEO Ernie Garcia III and his father, Ernest Garcia II.

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Rising mortgage interest rates collided with the slowest month of the year for sales.

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• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

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

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

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

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

The fans were yelling, the players were smiling, and the 1977-themed scoreboard numbers kept changing like lever pulls on a slot machine. Touchdown Marvin Mims Jr. Touchdown Courtland Sutton. Touchdown Devaughn Vele. Good Lord, how did he catch that one? Bo Nix stood at the fault line of this offensive earthquake. The stadium shook, and the man wearing the No. 44 Floyd Little jersey under the 530 sign in the upper deck danced to “Party Rock Anthem.” The Broncos were in the clear. All they had to do was run out the clock, which read 6:46 remaining. In the second quarter. The Broncos may very well go to Buffalo on Sunday and get eaten like Anchor Bar wings coated in ranch dressing, but they will always have this moment. They earned this. Take Our Poll (function(d,c,j){if(!d.getElementById(j)){var pd=d.createElement(c),s;pd.id=j;pd.src='https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/plugins/polldaddy/js/polldaddy-shortcode.js';s=d.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(pd,s);} else if(typeof jQuery !=='undefined')jQuery(d.body).trigger('pd-script-load');}(document,'script','pd-polldaddy-loader')); The Broncos are in the playoffs for the first time since 2015. This is where they belong. The NFL is better when the Broncos are good. “This organization is known for winning,” said Sutton, soaking in his first postseason berth as the second-longest tenured Bronco. “To have a chance to add to the legacy is humbling.” All of the criticism of their schedule, all of the finger-pointing about coaching decisions the past two weeks, all of the hand-wringing about the slumping defense melted away on a sun-splashed 30-degree afternoon at Empower Field at Mile High. You want an asterisk? Be miserable in your basement with flaming hot Cheetos and a Big Gulp. The Broncos did not win by forfeit. They delivered a 38-0 knockout. It’s not their fault Cincinnati won just one game in September. It’s not their fault the Chiefs secured the No. 1 seed in the AFC, prompting coach Andy Reid to use reserves Sunday, sitting future Hall of Famers Patrick Mahomes, Chris Jones and Travis Kelce. Taylor Swift’s backup dancers might have made this a more dramatic playoff-clinching game. But do not fall into the trap believing the Broncos are not worthy. They absolutely deserve this. They won 10 games. Sure, only two came against teams with a winning record, but the B-side of the vinyl reveals truthful lyrics: They proved they can beat bad teams. That, too, is a skill in the NFL. Related Articles Sports Columnists | Renck: After whiffing twice on playoff berth, Broncos’ Sean Payton has chance for redemption against Chiefs Sports Columnists | Renck: Time for CU to show Deion Sanders it remains serious about football and extend his contract Sports Columnists | Broncos podcast: It comes down to Week 18 for Sean Payton, Bo Nix and Denver Sports Columnists | Renck: Broncos’ Bo Nix will handle what’s next in must-win game vs. Chiefs Sports Columnists | Renck vs. Keeler: Which New Year’s resolution do we want most for Colorado sports: Broncos postseason or Jamal Murray getting right? The Broncos are no longer trapped at the bottom of the mine shaft, no longer living in a “world of suck,” as Emmanuel Sanders eloquently described the start of the 2019 season. They are a team that Broncos Country can be proud of, a team that will definitely save its group photo from the Pat Bowlen Fieldhouse. They went into the playoffs how you are supposed to: Full throttle. The Broncos clobbered the Chiefs, and made a statement through Jumbotron graphics and press box announcements. Nix set a Broncos record with 18 straight completions to open the game, tied for fourth most in NFL history. His 18 touchdowns at home are an NFL rookie best. And he joined John Elway as the only rookie to lead Denver to the postseason. Sean Payton has made some questionable decisions this season. Cutting Russell Wilson and hand-picking Nix was not one of them. Of all the things the kid has taught us — he is a fiery competitor, he doesn’t curse — the most important is that he is a winner. You think Nix understood Sunday’s significance? He ran a lap round the field, high-fiving fans after the game. “I was a little tired at the end,” said Nix, who completed 26 of 29 passes for 321 yards and four TDs. “They deserve it. It has been a long time coming.” When Peyton Manning retired, the Broncos became irrelevant, logging eight years of participation trophies and embarrassment. It only took the 13th starting quarterback and the fifth head coach since Super Bowl 50 to end the NFL’s second longest active playoff drought. “If you said what’s important, it’s not compensation, it’s how your peers think of you,” Payton said. “It starts with the right people and what you are looking for vision wise, I know that. And man, we had a good offseason.” It is days like this when we are reminded of what was and what can be. Here are the Broncos, picked to win five games by oddsmakers and six by me, who galvanized around youth and disrespect. Find a Broncos team that exceeded expectations more than this one. Or a quarterback for that matter. “You would never know Bo’s a rookie,” Sutton said. It is not just Nix who exhibits tireless work ethic. Siri would get lost trying to find prima donnas and troublemakers in the Broncos locker room. It took belief, of course, but that would not have mattered if not for players executing in critical situations. Like cornerback Pat Surtain II turning half the field into a “Do Not Disturb” sign. Like Nik Bonitto transforming from a role player into the Broncos’ best edge rusher since Von Miller. Like Mims morphing into a blend of Rick Upchurch and Eddie Royal, running so fast on his first score Sunday that the name on the back of his jersey began peeling off. The Broncos are going to the playoffs. They are 7.5- to 8.5-point underdogs depending on the book. No one will give them a chance. But watching Garett Bolles wave a Broncos flag and stomp up and down the sidelines, and Malcolm Roach jump into the stands, is it really about that? Put this season in perspective. They found a franchise quarterback, they have a 63-sack defense and they power-washed all the stains from their recent past. Enjoy this. The Broncos are back. And they did not back in. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

The Denver Broncos hosted and beat the Kansas City Chiefs 38-0 securing a playoff position at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver during NFL Week 18 on Sunday, January 5, 2025. Related Articles Denver Broncos | Broncos finish season with team-record 63 sacks: “It really is a special group” Denver Broncos | Broncos vs. Bills kickoff time set for NFL playoffs wild-card game Denver Broncos | Broncos four downs: Sean Payton, Bo Nix solve franchise’s quarterback-coach combo, playoff drought in one season Denver Broncos | Broncos report card: No drama, just glowing grades as rookie QB Bo Nix, Denver roll to AFC Wild Card round Denver Broncos | Broncos rookie watch: Bo Nix throws four touchdowns to end Denver’s eight-year playoff drought Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — The 82nd Golden Globes, airing Sunday night, hope to rekindle some of the frothy comic energy of the days when Ricky Gervais or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted. Comedian Nikki Glaser is emceeing the ceremony from the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. At a gala dinner Friday, Viola Davis received the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and Ted Danson accepted the Carol Burnett Award. The Globes are airing on CBS and available to stream live for subscribers to Paramount+ with Showtime. Here’s a partial list of winners of the Golden Globes: Irish actor Colin Farrell poses with the Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series, or a Motion Picture Made for Television award for “The Penguin” in the press room during the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 5, 2025. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 05: Hiroyuki Sanada, winner of the Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Series – Drama award for “Shōgun,” poses in the press room during the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Award at The Beverly Hilton on January 05, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images) BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 05: (L-R) Kieran Culkin, winner of the Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture award for “A Real Pain,” and Jazz Charton pose in the press room during the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Award at The Beverly Hilton on January 05, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images) British director, screenwriter Peter Straughan poses with the Best Screenplay – Motion Picture award for “Conclave” in the press room during the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 5, 2025. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 05: Ali Wong, winner of the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television award for “Single Lady,” poses in the press room during the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Award at The Beverly Hilton on January 05, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images) BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 05: Tadanobu Asano, winner of the Best Supporting Performance in a Series, Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television award for “Shōgun,” poses in the press room during the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Award at The Beverly Hilton on January 05, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images) Tadanobu Asano poses in the press room with the award for best performance by a male actor in a supporting role on television for “Shogun” during the 82nd Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello) Show Caption1 of 7Irish actor Colin Farrell poses with the Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series, or a Motion Picture Made for Television award for “The Penguin” in the press room during the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 5, 2025. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) Expand Movies Best performance by a female actor in a motion picture, musical or comedy Demi Moore, “The Substance” Best performance by a male actor in a motion picture, musical or comedy Sebastian Stan, “A Different Man” Best performance by a female actor in a supporting role, movie Zoe Saldaña, “Emilia Pérez” Best performance by a male actor in a supporting role, movie Kieran Culkin, “A Real Pain” Best screenplay Peter Straughan, “Conclave” Bottles of moet and chandon are pictured at the 82nd Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP) Best Motion Picture, Non-English “Emilia Pérez” Television Best performance by a male actor, TV series, drama Hiroyuki Sanada, “Shōgun” Best performance by a female actor TV series, musical or comedy Jean Smart, “Hacks” Best performance by a male actor, TV series, musical or comedy Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear” Best performance by a male actor in a limited series, anthology series or a motion picture made for television Colin Farrell, “The Penguin” Best performance by a female actor in a limited series, anthology series or a motion picture made for television Jodie Foster, ”True Detective: Night Country” Best performance by a female actor in a supporting role, TV Jessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer” Best performance by a male actor in a supporting role, TV Tadanobu Asano, “Shōgun” Best performance in stand-up comedy on TV Ali Wong, “Ali Wong: Single Lady” For more coverage of the 2025 Golden Globe Awards, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/golden-globe-awards

When Pat Surtain II learned the Broncos defense finished the regular season with a league-high 63 sacks, he asked to hear the number again. “Sixty-(three)? That’s unheard of,” Surtain said. “Credit to (the defensive line). They get after the quarterback. It makes our job in the back end much easier, knowing the guys up front generate pressures and sacks.” Denver recorded the 14th-most sacks in a single season after notching five in its 38-0 win over the Chiefs at home on Sunday. It was the sixth game the Broncos recorded at least five sacks. The Broncos set the franchise record for most sacks in a season after adding seven last week at Cincinnati. They added to their total Sunday with the help of outside linebackers Nik Bonitto and Jonathon Cooper — fitting given the success both players have had this season. Take Our Poll (function(d,c,j){if(!d.getElementById(j)){var pd=d.createElement(c),s;pd.id=j;pd.src='https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/plugins/polldaddy/js/polldaddy-shortcode.js';s=d.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(pd,s);} else if(typeof jQuery !=='undefined')jQuery(d.body).trigger('pd-script-load');}(document,'script','pd-polldaddy-loader')); Cooper sacked Chiefs quarterback Carson Wentz for a 4-yard loss late in the second quarter. Bonitto, who was named to his first Pro Bowl on Thursday, notched two sacks to help the Broncos end their eight-year playoff drought. Cooper finished the season with 10.5 sacks while Bonitto ended up among the league leaders with 13. The last time Denver had two players record double-digit sacks in a season was in 2018 with Von Miller and Bradley Chubb. In addition to five sacks against the Chiefs, the Broncos recorded 17 pressures. “They were a difference-maker this season,” safety P.J. Locke said. “These dudes are unbelievable and always hungry.” Broncos defensive tackle Malcolm Roach exuded confidence when talking postgame about next week’s matchup against the Bills in the Wild Card round. Even though Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen is playing at an MVP level, and is protected by one of the best offensive lines in the NFL, Roach believes the team’s ability to rush the passer gives them a fighting chance. “Whenever you can affect the passer and protect our passer, you have a chance,” Roach said. Defensive tackle Zach Allen, who finished the season with 8.5 sacks, pointed out that six Broncos had five-plus sacks and 16 ended up with at least a half sack. “It really is a special group and the fact that it’s across the board,” defensive tackle Zach Allen said.  “They genuinely care about each other’s success. … It’s not like that everywhere, so it’s pretty special to be part of a group like that.” Marvelous Marvin. The late-season surge for second-year wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. continued Sunday. Mims capped Denver’s first touchdown drive with a 32-yard screen pass from rookie quarterback Bo Nix and added a 7-yard touchdown catch in the flat late in the third quarter. Related Articles Denver Broncos | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos win 38-0 over the Kansas City Chiefs in NFL Week 18 Denver Broncos | Broncos vs. Bills kickoff time set for NFL playoffs wild-card game Denver Broncos | Broncos four downs: Sean Payton, Bo Nix solve franchise’s quarterback-coach combo, playoff drought in one season Denver Broncos | Broncos report card: No drama, just glowing grades as rookie QB Bo Nix, Denver roll to AFC Wild Card round Denver Broncos | Broncos rookie watch: Bo Nix throws four touchdowns to end Denver’s eight-year playoff drought Over the Broncos’ past two games, Mims racked up 13 catches on 13 targets for 154 yards and four touchdowns. Those two games tripled Mims’ career touchdown total from two to six. For the season, Mims caught 39 passes for 502 yards. All but seven of those catches came in Denver’s final eight games. “We’re young and we’re hungry,” Mims said. “As hungry as we are, we’re willing to go anywhere to go get it. We’ve battled all year. What sense does it make to stop now?” Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

The Broncos beat the Chiefs to finish the regular season 10-7 on Sunday and clinch the No. 7 seed in the AFC and a date with the Buffalo Bills in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. The Broncos will travel to Buffalo to take on the No. 2-seeded Bills at 11 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 12. The game will take place at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. For the Broncos, this will be their first playoff since beating the Carolina Panthers, 24-10, on Feb. 7, 2016 to win Super Bowl 50. It comes after the team’s second winning season since then, too. “Our goal wasn’t to just make the playoffs,” quarterback Bo Nix said after Denver’s 38-0 demolition of Kansas City on Sunday. Buffalo rolled to a 13-4 record and the No. 2 seed in the AFC behind quarterback Josh Allen, who is squarely in the running to win the NFL’s MVP award. “We look forward to the challenge,” Denver coach Sean Payton said Sunday. “They’ve had a great season. … We’re going to have a great week of preparation.” Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

A New Year’s Eve standoff between Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies and a gunman and a second nearly identical incident three days later both ended in suicide, sheriff’s officials said. Jefferson County sheriff’s officials told residents in the 6500 block of South Weber Street, near Woodmar Square Park in Littleton, to shelter in place on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve as deputies responded to an armed barricade. About three hours after the alert went out, sheriff’s officials said the barricaded gunman had killed himself. Sheriff’s officials announced a second shelter-in-place order — this time, for the 12000 block of Critchell Lane in Conifer — around 3:30 p.m. on Friday. About two hours after the order went out, for the second time in four days, sheriff’s officials announced that the armed man had killed himself and lifted the shelter orders. Related Articles Crime and Public Safety | WATCH: Snowplow drivers block fleeing burglary suspect on I-70 near Floyd Hill Crime and Public Safety | Plane crashed near Larkspur during lesson on emergency procedures Crime and Public Safety | Duo suspected in Park County killing; one linked to El Paso County death Crime and Public Safety | Driver fell asleep before fatal crash that killed himself, mother of their two children Crime and Public Safety | Man found hiding near scene of Commerce City shooting charged with murder No additional details about either case were available on Sunday. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Initial thoughts from the Broncos’ 38-0 win over the Chiefs in Week 18 at Empower Field: 1. Off to Buffalo: Will the last demon exorcised from Empower Field please turn out the lights? The Broncos’ most successful regular season since Peyton Manning hung up his six-shooter ended with a historic, and emphatic laugher. Let’s get this out of the way first: Did Andy Reid show up intending to win? Not with that version of Carson Wentz, no. But so what? You can only pound who’s in front of you. The Broncos shook off nearly a decade’s worth of misery, both against the Chiefs, and the NFL, in one swoop. Denver’s 38 points against Kansas City were the most since Dec. 30, 2012. Which was also the last time a Broncos team led KC by more than 17 points at halftime (21-3). The win also marked consecutive home victories over the Chiefs for the first time since 2013-14. The orange and blue are shuffling off to Buffalo, to the postseason, and doing it with style. Take Our Poll (function(d,c,j){if(!d.getElementById(j)){var pd=d.createElement(c),s;pd.id=j;pd.src='https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/plugins/polldaddy/js/polldaddy-shortcode.js';s=d.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(pd,s);} else if(typeof jQuery !=='undefined')jQuery(d.body).trigger('pd-script-load');}(document,'script','pd-polldaddy-loader')); 2. Nix trix: And the Broncos don’t get back to the playoffs for the first time since 2015-’16 without solving the league’s most basic truism: Gotta have a combo at coach and quarterback. It was costly. And it was a long time coming. But the Broncos finally got there with Sean Payton and Bo Nix. This franchise can start moving forward again, now that it knows that it can build around the latter. And how’s this for marking your territory as a rookie? Nix’s 18 passing scores at home were a new NFL rookie record. His 18 straight completions were the most ever by a first-year NFL QB to open a game, and only two behind Hugh Millen’s record of 20 straight for the Broncos’ single-game consecutive completion record. 3. Sutton incentives: Courtland Sutton redid his contract in the summer to try and help the Broncos soldier through the expensive and painful Russell Wilson divorce. In September, he converted $11.75 million of salary into a bonus and added three void years to his deal — lessening his cap number by $9.5 million this year. No. 14 got some of that money back on Sunday, as his 89 receiving yards by halftime ensured that a $500,000 contract bonus would kick in. Sutton’s half-million came late in the second quarter, putting him at 1,072 receiving yards for the season with a half left to play. The veteran’s deal called for a $500,000 payout once Sutton hit 1,065 yards on the year. A 47-yard catch in the first quarter got him to 1,000 yards, making him the first Broncos player to hit the 1K mark in receiving yardage since 2019. 4. Orange and true: Why should the Broncos petition the NFL to wear their ’77 Orange Crush throwbacks as often as possible? It’s not nostalgia. It’s not fashion. As our old pal Ron Burgundy once said, it’s science. The Broncos went into Week 18 averaging 1.92 points per drive. Over their first 16 drives this season while wearing the classic ‘D’ on a blue helmet, the Broncos whupped the Raiders 34-18 and took a 24-0 lead into halftime against the starter-less Chiefs. Points per drive: 3.63 — a better clip than both the Lions (3.06) and Bills (3.00) were toting on offense going into their respective season finales. The lesson? As long as the Broncos are crushing it in the throwbacks, keep those bad boys in the rotation. Related Articles Denver Broncos | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos win 38-0 over the Kansas City Chiefs in NFL Week 18 Denver Broncos | Broncos finish season with team-record 63 sacks: “It really is a special group” Denver Broncos | Broncos vs. Bills kickoff time set for NFL playoffs wild-card game Denver Broncos | Broncos report card: No drama, just glowing grades as rookie QB Bo Nix, Denver roll to AFC Wild Card round Denver Broncos | Broncos rookie watch: Bo Nix throws four touchdowns to end Denver’s eight-year playoff drought Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

OFFENSE — A Sean Payton had the Denver offense ready to roll from the start. He had a nifty fake reverse in his bag and deployed it perfectly as soon as the Broncos got solidly into Chiefs territory. Bo Nix started hot and stayed that way through the entire first half, plenty of time to build a comfortable lead against a Kansas City team that looked like it had turned its attention to divisional weekend before they even landed in Colorado. But hey, there’s no reason to apologize for racking up 18 first downs in the opening 30 minutes or giving the crowd reason to celebrate rather than consternate. Take Our Poll (function(d,c,j){if(!d.getElementById(j)){var pd=d.createElement(c),s;pd.id=j;pd.src='https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/plugins/polldaddy/js/polldaddy-shortcode.js';s=d.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(pd,s);} else if(typeof jQuery !=='undefined')jQuery(d.body).trigger('pd-script-load');}(document,'script','pd-polldaddy-loader')); DEFENSE — A Vance Joseph’s group has been a little shaky down the stretch run of the season. But there was no way they were going to let Carson Wentz keep them out of the playoffs. Denver’s defense was humming from the start. Related Articles Denver Broncos | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos win 38-0 over the Kansas City Chiefs in NFL Week 18 Denver Broncos | Broncos finish season with team-record 63 sacks: “It really is a special group” Denver Broncos | Broncos vs. Bills kickoff time set for NFL playoffs wild-card game Denver Broncos | Broncos four downs: Sean Payton, Bo Nix solve franchise’s quarterback-coach combo, playoff drought in one season Denver Broncos | Broncos rookie watch: Bo Nix throws four touchdowns to end Denver’s eight-year playoff drought No matter when this season ends, this group will be worth appreciating. They racked up a ridiculous 63 sacks, a franchise record and most in the NFL on the season by a wide margin. This one came against backups, sure, but the Broncos defense closed the regular season with a dominant performance. They logged the team’s first shutout win since a 26-0 Week 3 win against the New York Jets in 2021 for good measure and held Kansas City to 98 total yards. SPECIAL TEAMS — A Why not? It was a day of light duty for the special teams units overall. Wil Lutz had another clean outing kicking the ball and knocked home his 31st field goal of the season, tying a franchise record. What’s more impressive: You can make an argument Lutz has really only missed one should-have-had kick on the year. That was in the fourth quarter in the rain against the New York Jets. Otherwise he missed a 60-yard try at the end of a half earlier in the year and had the kick blocked at Kansas City in Week 10. Really consistent stuff. COACHING — A The Broncos could easily have played tight. They’d blown their first two chances at clinching a spot and both games featured clock management decisions from Payton that were thoroughly criticized. This team hasn’t been to the playoffs in a long time and undoubtedly felt pressure to get the job done at home against the Chiefs. But if they felt the pressure, they certainly didn’t show it. In fact, they played like they thrived on it. All three units were sharp from the start and Denver gave Kansas City’s second-liners no reason to think they had a chance to pull an upset. It’s a different challenge altogether at Buffalo next weekend. But the Broncos are playing in the Wild Card round. And that’s a heck of an accomplishment in its own right. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

A look at how the Broncos’ rookies played in their 38-0 win over the Chiefs on Sunday. Highlight: A game of hot potato in the back of the end zone led to Bo Nix’s third touchdown pass of the first half. His throw intended for tight end Adam Trautman was tipped three times before rookie wideout Devaughn Vele secured the catch to extend Denver’s lead to 21-0 with 11:05 to go in the second quarter. Nix had a game to remember, going 26 for 29 with 321 yards and four touchdowns. He also ran for 47 yards on seven carries. Lowlight: Nix had too much fun in the first half… a little too much fun. During Denver’s final second-quarter possession, Nix scrambled upfield for a 27-yard gain, then pitched the ball to running back Javonte Williams for additional yardage. However, Nix was called for an illegal forward pass, pushing Denver back from Kansas City’s nine to the 37-yard line. Analysis: Nix put together an impressive regular season. On Sunday, the first-round pick became the fifth rookie in league history to record at least 3,500 passing yards and 25 touchdown passes in a season. More importantly, he helped end Denver’s eight-year playoff drought. It’s clear the Broncos have found their guy. No matter what happens in the postseason, the Broncos have to maximize Nix being under a rookie contract and get more weapons. The fact that Nix threw for 29 passing touchdowns despite Lil’Jordan Humphrey being his No. 2 wide receiver for the first half of the season was remarkable. Now, imagine if he has some legit playmakers to pair with Courtland Sutton and Marvin Mims Jr. Take Our Poll (function(d,c,j){if(!d.getElementById(j)){var pd=d.createElement(c),s;pd.id=j;pd.src='https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/plugins/polldaddy/js/polldaddy-shortcode.js';s=d.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(pd,s);} else if(typeof jQuery !=='undefined')jQuery(d.body).trigger('pd-script-load');}(document,'script','pd-polldaddy-loader')); Unsung Hero RB Javonte Williams: The Broncos gave Williams the Samaje Perine role on Sunday and it worked. Williams had three catches for 50 yards on four targets. He was one of four Broncos players with at least 50 receiving yards. Williams had a regular season to forget in terms of individual performance. But against the Chiefs, he showed he could be useful against the Bills next week. Related Articles Denver Broncos | PHOTOS: Denver Broncos win 38-0 over the Kansas City Chiefs in NFL Week 18 Denver Broncos | Broncos finish season with team-record 63 sacks: “It really is a special group” Denver Broncos | Broncos vs. Bills kickoff time set for NFL playoffs wild-card game Denver Broncos | Broncos four downs: Sean Payton, Bo Nix solve franchise’s quarterback-coach combo, playoff drought in one season Denver Broncos | Broncos report card: No drama, just glowing grades as rookie QB Bo Nix, Denver roll to AFC Wild Card round Goat of the game QB Carson Wentz: The 32-year-old signal caller didn’t give his team a fighting chance. Wentz went 10 for 17 with 98 yards and a passer rating of 75.1. He underthrew and overthrew his targets throughout the afternoon, ruining any chance Kansas City could find some kind of offensive rhythm. Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.

More than 600 flights were canceled or delayed at Denver International Airport on Sunday as light snow continued to fall across the mountains and Front Range and temperatures hovered below freezing across the state. As of 5:45 p.m. Sunday, 533 flights at DIA had been delayed and another 98 were canceled entirely, according to data from flight tracking software FlightAware. That’s fewer than Saturday at the Denver airport when at least 1,120 flights were delayed and another 70 were canceled. So far this weekend, that puts the total number of delayed and canceled flights at just over 1,820. Southwest took first for flight delays this weekend with 353 flights on Saturday and 160 flights on Sunday failing to leave the gate on time, according to FlightAware data. United followed closely behind with 364 delays on Saturday and 143 delays on Sunday. Frontier, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta, Key Lime Air, JetBlue, Southern Express Airways, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Allegiant Air, AeroMéxico, Jazz, VivaAerobus, British Airways, Sun Country Airlines, Cayman Airways, Copa Airlines, Envoy Air, Icelandair, Volaris and Air France all delayed flights at DIA over the weekend. SkyWest, the airline that operates United Express, canceled the most flights on both days — 41 on Saturday and 36 on Sunday, according to FlightAware. United and Southwest both canceled 42 flights between Saturday and Sunday, overshadowing two flights canceled each by Frontier and American Airlines. This is a developing story and may be updated.  Related Articles Colorado News | Two armed standoffs between Jeffco sheriff deputies, barricaded gunmen end in suspects’ suicide, sheriff says Colorado News | WATCH: Snowplow drivers block fleeing burglary suspect on I-70 near Floyd Hill Colorado News | How it happened: Broncos crush Chiefs, clinch 1st playoff berth since Peyton Manning era Colorado News | Colorado weather: Light snow in mountains, fog across Front Range Colorado News | Six big, arty events to get excited about in 2025 Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

By MATT O’BRIEN and SARAH PARVINI, the Associated Press If 2023 was a year of wonder about artificial intelligence, 2024 was the year to try to get that wonder to do something useful without breaking the bank. There was a “shift from putting out models to actually building products,” said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University computer science professor and co-author of the new book “AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell The Difference.” The first 100 million or so people who experimented with ChatGPT upon its release two years ago actively sought out the chatbot, finding it amazingly helpful at some tasks or laughably mediocre at others. Now such generative AI technology is baked into an increasing number of technology services whether we’re looking for it or not — for instance, through the AI-generated answers in Google search results or new AI techniques in photo editing tools. “The main thing that was wrong with generative AI last year is that companies were releasing these really powerful models without a concrete way for people to make use of them,” said Narayanan. “What we’re seeing this year is gradually building out these products that can take advantage of those capabilities and do useful things for people.” At the same time, since OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023 and competitors introduced similarly performing AI large language models, these models have stopped getting significantly “bigger and qualitatively better,” resetting overblown expectations that AI was racing every few months to some kind of better-than-human intelligence, Narayanan said. That’s also meant that the public discourse has shifted from “is AI going to kill us?” to treating it like a normal technology, he said. AI’s sticker shock On quarterly earnings calls this year, tech executives often heard questions from Wall Street analysts looking for assurances of future payoffs from huge spending on AI research and development. Building AI systems behind generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini requires investing in energy-hungry computing systems running on powerful and expensive AI chips. They require so much electricity that tech giants announced deals this year to tap into nuclear power to help run them. “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that has been poured into this technology,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan. Another analyst at the New York investment bank drew attention over the summer by arguing AI isn’t solving the complex problems that would justify its costs. He also questioned whether AI models, even as they’re being trained on much of the written and visual data produced over the course of human history, will ever be able to do what humans do so well. Rangan has a more optimistic view. “We had this fascination that this technology is just going to be absolutely revolutionary, which it has not been in the two years since the introduction of ChatGPT,” Rangan said. “It’s more expensive than we thought and it’s not as productive as we thought.” Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent Technology | Data on animal movements help Hungarian researchers create a swarm of autonomous drones Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know Technology | Aspen Waste Systems now has a Colorado presence to go with its Colorado-sounding name Rangan, however, is still bullish about its potential and says that AI tools are already proving “absolutely incrementally more productive” in sales, design and a number of other professions. AI and your job Some workers wonder whether AI tools will be used to supplement their work or to replace them as the technology continues to grow. The tech company Borderless AI has been using an AI chatbot from Cohere to write up employment contracts for workers in Turkey or India without the help of outside lawyers or translators. Video game performers with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists who went on strike in July said they feared AI could reduce or eliminate job opportunities because it could be used to replicate one performance into a number of other movements without their consent. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. Game companies have also signed side agreements with the union that codify certain AI protections in order to keep working with actors during the strike. Musicians and authors have voiced similar concerns over AI scraping their voices and books. But generative AI still can’t create unique work or “completely new things,” said Walid Saad, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and AI expert at Virginia Tech. “We can train it with more data so it has more information. But having more information doesn’t mean you’re more creative,” he said. “As humans, we understand the world around us, right? We understand the physics. You understand if you throw a ball on the ground, it’s going to bounce. AI tools currently don’t understand the world.” Saad pointed to a meme about AI as an example of that shortcoming. When someone prompted an AI engine to create an image of salmon swimming in a river, he said, the AI created a photo of a river with cut pieces of salmon found in grocery stores. “What AI lacks today is the common sense that humans have, and I think that is the next step,” he said. An ‘agentic future’ That type of reasoning is a key part of the process of making AI tools more useful to consumers, said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s innovation and incubation arm, Outshift. AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf. That could mean being able to ask an AI agent an ambiguous question and have the model able to reason and plan out steps to solving an ambitious problem, Pandey said. A lot of technology, he said, is going to move in that direction in 2025. Pandey predicts that eventually, AI agents will be able to come together and perform a job the way multiple people come together and solve a problem as a team rather than simply accomplishing tasks as individual AI tools. The AI agents of the future will work as an ensemble, he said. Future Bitcoin software, for example, will likely rely on the use of AI software agents, Pandey said. Those agents will each have a specialty, he said, with “agents that check for correctness, agents that check for security, agents that check for scale.” “We’re getting to an agentic future,” he said. “You’re going to have all these agents being very good at certain skills, but also have a little bit of a character or color to them, because that’s how we operate.” AI makes gains in medicine AI tools have also streamlined, or lent in some cases a literal helping hand, to the medical field. This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry — one of two Nobels awarded to AI-related science — went to work led by Google that could help discover new medicines. Saad, the Virginia Tech professor, said that AI has helped bring faster diagnostics by quickly giving doctors a starting point to launch from when determining a patient’s care. AI can’t detect disease, he said, but it can quickly digest data and point out potential problem areas for a real doctor to investigate. As with other arenas, however, it poses a risk of perpetuating falsehoods. Tech giant OpenAI has touted its AI-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy,” for example. But experts have said that Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences. Pandey, of Cisco, said that some of the company’s customers who work in pharmaceuticals have noted that AI has helped bridge the divide between “wet labs,” in which humans conduct physical experiments and research, and “dry labs” where people analyze data and often use computers for modeling. When it comes to pharmaceutical development, that collaborative process can take several years, he said — with AI, the process can be cut to a few days. “That, to me, has been the most dramatic use,” Pandey said. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

By Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, The New York Times Company KYIV, Ukraine — In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support. But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed. Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings. “We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.” Ukraine’s experience with Telegram illustrates the benefits and drawbacks of being beholden to a single app. Rarely has a country been so reliant on a platform it has no control over for communication, information and other critical services, particularly during a war. That dependence is emulated perhaps only in Russia, where Telegram is used by roughly half the population, including many in the military and government. That has made the app a central information battlefield in the war. In some cases, Ukrainian and Russian drone pilots use Telegram groups to taunt each other and share videos of attacks. Ukraine’s concerns about Telegram parallel rising global scrutiny of the platform, which is approaching 1 billion users. Once seen as a haven for activists and those living under authoritarian governments, the app has angered governments as it has become a hub of illicit and extremist material. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, was arrested in France in August on charges related to the company’s failure to address criminal activity on the platform. For Ukraine, distancing itself from Telegram will not be easy. Roughly 70% of Ukrainians use Telegram as a main source of news, according to a recent survey commissioned in part by the U.S. government. When air raid sirens wail and missiles descend on Ukrainian cities, people flock to Telegram groups for real-time updates. The government broadcasts official announcements and gathers intelligence inside Russian-occupied territories through the app. Yet in secret cybersecurity meetings this year, Ukrainian officials discussed putting new limits on Telegram, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. The country’s intelligence service concluded the app posed national security risks and was used by Russia for disinformation, cyberattacks, hacking, spreading malware, location tracking and adjusting missile strikes. As a security measure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who regularly posts war updates to his more than 700,000 followers on Telegram, does not use the app on his personal phone, a Ukrainian cybersecurity official said. In March, officials took the unusual step of asking Apple to rein in the platform because the Silicon Valley giant can leverage its app store — which Telegram needs for global distribution — to get the company to act. Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work Technology | Data on animal movements help Hungarian researchers create a swarm of autonomous drones Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know Technology | Aspen Waste Systems now has a Colorado presence to go with its Colorado-sounding name In a statement, Telegram defended the security of its platform, saying Russia “has not — and cannot — access user information.” The company added, “Telegram is and always has been safe for Ukrainians and users around the world.” But what makes Telegram so powerful also makes it a threat, Ukrainian officials said. Unlike other social media, Telegram has few guardrails. There is no algorithm determining what people see and little content moderation, enabling the rapid spread of lifesaving warnings but also exposing the app to exploitation. Broadcasting features allow users to quickly share text, videos and files with large groups. “I have some relatives in the occupied territories and the only way to get in touch with them is Telegram,” said Maksym Yali, an analyst for Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, a government agency that monitors Telegram and other apps for disinformation. “But under the conditions of war, do the risks outweigh the benefits?” He said Ukrainians visiting friends or family in Russia must hand over their phones at the airport to security officers who use specialized software to check their Telegram app, including deleted material, for pro-Ukraine content. Telegram denied that deleted messages could be accessed and said any examples of intercepted communications by Russia that it had investigated were the result of a device being physically confiscated or infected with malware, not security weaknesses on the app. Ukrainians’ affection for Telegram began in 2017. That was when the country banned the Russian-controlled social media platform VKontakte, which was used to amplify Russian disinformation and propaganda. Telegram’s prominence grew during Zelenskyy’s presidential run in 2019. His campaign deftly used the service to connect with voters, thanks partly to Mykhailo Fedorov, a young digital strategist who now leads the Ministry of Digital Transformation. In a 2020 interview, Fedorov said he had regular contact with Durov and his management team. In 2022, just before Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian intelligence cautioned Zelenskyy about Telegram, two people with knowledge of the matter said. In a memo, military intelligence warned about the risks of Russian influence but said the threat did not merit an outright ban of the app. Zelenskyy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The war revealed that many Telegram channels were run from Russia. Accounts that appeared to be Ukrainian peddled disinformation, including unfounded claims that Zelenskyy had fled the country. Still, the app’s popularity soared as traditional media struggled to keep pace. “Telegram is the main source of information, more than television, radio and all the other media,” said Maksym Dvorovyi, head of digital rights with Digital Security Lab Ukraine, a civil society group. He said that was a “sad reality” because of the security risks and volume of unverified information and propaganda. For many popular Telegram channels, the money flowed. With millions of followers, they charged thousands of dollars per ad, with promotions from cake shops and crypto boosters sitting alongside warnings of drone attacks and announcements of blackouts. Few know the operators of some of the most-visited channels, which have names like “Legitimate” and “Cartel.” A September study by Detector Media, a European Union-backed watchdog group, found that 76 of the 100 most popular Telegram channels in Ukraine were operated anonymously. Ukrainian officials have worried about the allegiances of Durov, who was born in Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2021 that the government had “reached an agreement” with Telegram after authorities attempted to block the app during a dispute over access to user data. Ukrainian officials fear Russia can get access to private data and communications on the app, pointing to examples when Russian authorities presented copies of private Telegram conversations to people under investigation. Ukraine has not shown conclusive evidence linking Durov or the company to the Russian government, and Telegram said it had no ties to the Kremlin. “Telegram has never been legally or physically connected to Russia,” the company said. “Telegram was founded specifically in the context of protecting user data from Russian surveillance.” This year, disinformation on Telegram about the war was so rampant that Ukraine asked Apple to intervene. The government requested that the tech giant use its leverage to push Telegram to remove certain fake accounts run from Russia. By April, Telegram had taken down the accounts. But the resolution came with a twist. Telegram also briefly blocked several Ukrainian government-run accounts that let citizens share information about Russian troop movements. Ukrainian officials viewed the move as a thinly veiled warning: Pressuring the company too hard could come at a cost. “It was unspoken, but it was a threat,” Yurchyshyn said. Telegram confirmed it took down the fake accounts after receiving a request from Apple, but said the Ukrainian channels were erroneously removed and were reinstated within hours. The company said it was developing tools to combat disinformation, including new fact-checking features. Fedorov said in a statement that he had requested assistance from Apple in communicating with Telegram as “part of our ongoing work with all platforms that have such extensive reach and cover the war in Ukraine.” Apple declined to comment. After a September meeting of Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity, use of the app was limited in the government and military. Some universities have also banned the app. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s top intelligence official, publicly warned about Telegram’s threats, but said he did not believe it should be blocked altogether. He has called for the abolishment of anonymity for administrators of large channels. Telegram has long argued that anonymity is key to protecting users. Russia has its own concerns about Telegram. After Durov’s arrest in France in August, Russian commentators and military analysts publicly raised alarms about the country’s own reliance on the app, saying he could give Western intelligence services access to private data. In Ukraine, Durov’s arrest emboldened efforts to curtail Telegram. Yurchyshyn said he was working on legislation to add warnings, akin to those on cigarette packets, that remind users that the information on the platform may be unreliable and that the operators of channels are anonymous. But he acknowledged that any new rules were unlikely to diminish Telegram’s sway. “Who wants to be the politician or leader to take responsibility for banning such a popular network?” Yurchyshyn said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Moving in a dense cloud, like throngs of people walking across a crowded public square, 100 drones maneuver through the night sky in Hungary’s capital, the result of over a decade of research and experimentation that scientists believe could change the future of unmanned flight. The behavior of the swarm, made up of autonomous drones that make their own real-time decisions on collision avoidance and trajectory planning without pre-programming or centralized control, is guided by research the Hungarian scientists performed on the collective movements of creatures from the natural world. “It’s very rare that you see some technology and you say it’s beautiful,” said Boldizsár Balázs, one of the researchers working on the project. “In its theoretical core it resembles nature. That’s why the drones themselves don’t need to be pretty, but what they do is pretty because it resembles natural swarming behavior.” Drones have in recent years become a common sight in our skies: Companies like Amazon and FedEx have launched drone delivery services, hobbyists use them for aerial photography and groups of over 1,000 drones have been pre-programmed to deliver large-scale light shows. But the scientists at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest have developed new models based on animal behavior that allow a large number of drones to travel autonomously, reacting in real time to their environment and each other as they coordinate individual routes and tasks in dense aerial traffic. “This is the level we call decentralization … After the drones are told what to do, we can switch off the ground control station, we can burn it or whatever, throw it away,” said Gábor Vásárhelyi, a senior researcher at the university’s Department of Biological Physics. “The drones will be able to do what they have to do just by communicating to each other.” Using data they gathered by monitoring the behavior of pigeons in flight, the patterns of wild horses in the Great Hungarian Plain and other animal movements, they developed an algorithm that allows the drones to make on-board, autonomous decisions, safely mitigating conflicts and avoiding collisions. While such technology has the potential to increase efficiency across many fields, some researchers have voiced concerns that certain applications of autonomous drones could pose significant dangers. Anna Konert and Tomasz Balcerzak with the Faculty of Law and Administration at Lazarski University in Warsaw, Poland, have researched such risks, and warn that military applications could escalate arms races or be misused or hacked by malign actors such as terrorist groups. “When drones take over lethal actions, responsibility may shift from human operators to machines, leading to uncertainty about who should be held accountable if errors occur,” they wrote in an email. “This detachment could lower the psychological barriers to initiating force, potentially making war more frequent and brutal.” Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work Technology | Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know Technology | Aspen Waste Systems now has a Colorado presence to go with its Colorado-sounding name They also write that autonomous drones reducing the human cost of military engagements could “encourage more frequent military actions, leading to faster conflict escalation since fewer immediate human consequences would weigh against the decision to engage militarily.” But beyond military uses, the researchers in Hungary say their technology has the potential to improve people’s lives through numerous other applications. Their digital simulations in three dimensions have them convinced that their algorithm can be scaled up to support 5,000 drones flying together autonomously, which they say could have applications in meteorology, land surveying, goods deliveries and beyond. The researchers are also working on rolling out an agricultural application that can be used for the precision spraying of crops, and believe the technology could also play a role in decentralizing air traffic control systems as more and more unmanned aircraft take to the skies. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

NEW YORK — Two deadly incidents on New Year’s Day — an attack being investigated as an act of terrorism in New Orleans and an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas — both involved vehicles that were rented on Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing company. Early Wednesday, 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter — killing 14 people who were celebrating the New Year. And police fatally shot Jabbar in a following firefight. Just hours after, outside of President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas, a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives also burst into flames. The person inside, identified as active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger from Colorado, died. Officials later said he suffered a gunshot wound to the head before the explosion. Turo said it is “shocked and saddened” Wednesday’s events and that “our hearts are with the victims and their families.” The company added that is “outraged by the misuse of our marketplace by the two individuals who perpetrated these acts.” While both incidents involved vehicles rented through Turo, the FBI has said that is has found “no definitive link” between the New Orleans attack and the Las Vegas explosion. Still, the incidents have put a spotlight on the car-sharing platform. Here’s what we know about Turo. What is Turo? Turo is a peer-to-peer car-sharing company. The online platform allows car owners to rent their own vehicles directly to other nearby drivers, or “guests.” “Hosts” set their prices, availability and delivery options for renters to choose from and book via Turo’s website or app. Billing itself as “the world’s largest car sharing marketplace” today, Turo says it operates through a network of hosts across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and France. The origins of the San Francisco-based company date back almost 15 years, with its first trip completed in May 2010 and nationwide launch later arriving in 2012. The platform was originally introduced as “RelayRides,” but rebranded to Turo in 2015. Over the last 12 years of operating history, Turo says it collected data from over 90 million booked days, 27 million trips, 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion kilometers) driven as of Sept. 30, 2024. Less than 0.1% of those Turo trips ended with a serious incident such as a vehicle theft, the company said Thursday. How was Turo used for the cars involved in these New Year’s Day events? Again, investigators have not found any definitive connections between Wednesday’s attack in New Orleans attack and following explosion in Las Vegas. But both incidents involved vehicles rented on Turo. Related Articles Business | FBI searches for motive behind Colorado soldier’s detonation of Cybertruck outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas Business | Cybertruck that exploded outside Trump Hotel in Las Vegas rented in Colorado Business | FBI says driver in New Orleans rampage acted alone and was ‘100%’ inspired by Islamic State group Business | The Latest: The FBI now says the New Orleans truck attacker acted alone in an ‘act of terrorism’ Authorities said Livelsberger, a Colorado Springs resident, rented the Cybertruck involved in the Las Vegas explosion through the Turo app in Denver. On Wednesday, Turo confirmed that both the Cybertruck and the pickup truck used in the New Orleans attack were rented using the platform. What else has the company said? Turo has said it’s sharing any information it has with law enforcement as investigations continue. The company has also noted that the individuals involved did not have criminal backgrounds that would have identified them as security threats. It said every Turo renter is screened through a “multi-layer, data-science-based trust and safety process.” The men involved in the incidents had valid driver’s licenses, clean background checks, and were honorably discharged from the U.S. military, Turo noted Thursday. “They could have boarded any plane, checked into a hotel, or rented a car or truck from a traditional vehicle rental chain,” the company said. “We do not believe these two individuals would have been flagged by anyone — including Big Rental or law enforcement.” Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner’s support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta’s Threads and its algorithms. The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter’s core mechanic. That’s unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky’s growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms. But with growth comes growing pains. It’s not just human users who’ve been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites. The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October. Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil. “They got this spike in attention, they’ve crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media. “But they don’t have the cash flow, they don’t have the established team that a larger platform would, so they have to do it all very, very quickly.” To manage growth for its tiny staff, Bluesky started as an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other distinctive features to attract new users, such as “starter packs” that provide lists of topically curated feeds. Meta recently announced that it is testing a similar feature. Compared to the bigger players like Meta’s platforms or X, Bluesky has a “quite different” value system, said Claire Wardle, a professor at Cornell University and an expert in misinformation. This includes giving users more control over their experience. “The first generation of social media platforms connected the world, but ended up consolidating power in the hands of a few corporations and their leaders,” Bluesky said on its blog in March. “Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see. On an open social network like Bluesky, you can shape your experience for yourself.” Because of this mindset, Bluesky has achieved a scrappy underdog status that has attracted users who’ve grown tired of the big players. “People had this idea that it was going to be a different type of social network,” Wardle said. “But the truth is, when you get lots of people in a place and there are eyeballs, it means that it’s in other people’s interests to use bots to create, you know, information that aligns with their perspective.” Little data has emerged to help quantify the rise in impersonator accounts, artificial intelligence-fueled networks and other potentially harmful content on Bluesky. But in recent weeks, users have begun reporting large numbers of apparent AI bots following them, posting plagiarized articles or making seemingly automated divisive comments in replies. Lion Cassens, a Bluesky user and doctoral candidate in the Netherlands, found one such network by accident — a group of German-language accounts with similar bios and AI-generated profile pictures posting in replies to three German newspapers. “I noticed some weird replies under a news post by the German newspaper ‘Die Ziet,’” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “I have a lot of trust in the moderation mechanism on Bluesky, especially compared to Twitter since the layoffs and due to Musk’s more radical stance on freedom of speech. But AI bots are a big challenge, as they will only improve. I hope social media can keep up with that.” Cassens said the bots’ messages have been relatively innocuous so far, but he was concerned about how they could be repurposed in the future to mislead. There are also signs that foreign disinformation narratives have made their way to Bluesky. The disinformation research group Alethea pointed to one low-traction post sharing a false claim about ABC News that had circulated on Russian Telegram channels. Copycat accounts are another challenge. In late November, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, found that of the top 100 most followed named individuals on Bluesky, 44% had at least one duplicate account posing as them. Two weeks later, Mantzarlis said Bluesky had removed around two-thirds of the duplicate accounts he’d initially detected — a sign the site was aware of the issue and attempting to address it. Bluesky posted earlier this month that it had quadrupled its moderation team to keep up with its growing user base. The company also announced it had introduced a new system to detect impersonation and was working to improve its Community Guidelines to provide more detail on what’s allowed. Because of the way the site is built, users also have the option to subscribe to third-party “Labelers” that outsource content moderation by tagging accounts with warnings and context. The company didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Even as its challenges aren’t yet at the scale other platforms face, Bluesky is at a “crossroads,” said Edward Perez, a board member at the nonpartisan nonprofit OSET Institute, who previously led Twitter’s civic integrity team. “Whether BlueSky likes it or not, it is being pulled into the real world,” Perez said, noting that it needs to quickly prioritize threats and work to mitigate them if it hopes to continue to grow. That said, disinformation and bots won’t be Bluesky’s only challenges in the months and years to come. As a text-based social network, its entire premise is falling out of favor with younger generations. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 17% of American teenagers used X, for instance, down from 23% in 2022. For teens and young adults, TikTok, Instagram and other visual-focused platforms are the places to be. Political polarization is also going against Bluesky ever reaching the size of TikTok, Instagram or even X. “Bluesky is not trying to be all things to all people,” Wardle said, adding that, likely, the days of a Facebook or Instagram emerging where they’re “trying to keep everybody happy” are over. Social platforms are increasingly splintered along political lines and when they aren’t — see Meta’s platforms — the companies behind them are actively working to de-emphasize political content and news. The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Evan Williams did not want to start another startup. He had already enjoyed the kind of rare, unfathomable success most entrepreneurs only dream of, starting tech companies that made products used by millions — the early blogging site Blogger, the social media giant Twitter, the publishing platform Medium. Along the way, Williams had grappled with corporate turmoil and angst. His last company, Medium, was a decade-long slog that never lived up to its $600 million valuation or lofty mission of solving the internet’s ugliest problems. By the time he stepped down as CEO in 2022, he had no desire to do it again, he said. But he was lonely. He had gotten divorced and moved cross-country twice in a few years. Before his 50th birthday in 2022, he realized he had “underinvested” in his friendships, he said. Post-pandemic, he did not even know where many of his friends were living. “I was doing a lot of reflecting,” Williams said. “In this stage of life, I really wanted to focus on relationships.” Pouring so much energy into his startups was one reason he had this problem. But maybe a startup could also help fix it. In 2022, Williams began working on a Rolodex app that would tell him where his friends were living and traveling. It would be more “social” than “social media,” with none of the comments, stories, posts, likes, hearts or follows that made his previous creations so addicting. But Williams still didn’t want to run a company. Through mutual friends, he met Molly DeWolf Swenson, an entrepreneur, who became a co-founder and the CEO. Last month, they raised $6 million in funding from Obvious Ventures, an investment firm co-founded by Williams, as well as WndrCo and BBG Ventures. This week, they plan to unveil their app, Mozi, which is aimed at helping people foster in-person connections with their social circle. It lets people tell their friends about upcoming plans that may overlap. Those who join the app will see a private friend list based on their phone contacts. They get notifications if a contact plans to visit their city or attend the same event. Profiles include user-supplied information such as dietary restrictions, relationship status, family members and pet names. Organizing contacts by location and travel plans may appeal to a certain type of jet-setting tech worker whose friends are spread around the world. Mozi’s founders hope it will be just as useful for people who don’t travel but want to know when their friends are in town. The company also plans to promote itself around events like music festivals and business conferences. Williams views Mozi as an attempt to return to social media’s original intention, which was about interacting with people you already knew. Over the years, social media companies evolved into just plain media — a place for watching videos from influencers and professional entertainers, reading links to news stories, sharing memes or impulse shopping via highly targeted ads. Many of the apps are optimized to get users hooked on an endless scroll of new information. Williams once spoke out about how wrong he had been about the promise and benefits of social media like Twitter and how he was determined to address thorny problems such as harassment, misinformation and extremism at Medium. He is now more at peace with the role of the internet and its trade-offs. Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work Technology | Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent Technology | Data on animal movements help Hungarian researchers create a swarm of autonomous drones Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know “The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview in Menlo Park, California. “It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything.” Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s texting app. “We’re not trying to keep people on the app,” said DeWolf Swenson, 37, who was a founder of RYOT, a virtual reality startup, and was head of global partnerships at Community, an app that allows public figures and brands to text their fans. “If we’re doing our job well, you’re finding that information as quickly as possible and then getting off the app.” As a power networker who created an elaborate spreadsheet tracking her friends and business contacts, DeWolf Swenson was Mozi’s ideal user. But even the best system could not tell her if someone would be home when she visited their city, she said. Consumer apps like Mozi are out of step with the tech zeitgeist, which has centered most recently on artificial intelligence. But James Joaquin, a co-founder of Obvious Ventures, said he was compelled to invest in Mozi after talking to its early testers. They shared stories about reconnecting with old friends via the app — moments that seemed valuable enough that customers might pay for it, he said. Mozi is free, but plans to charge for premium features it develops. Other founders also see the potential of using online tools to help people connect in person. Andy Dunn, a founder of the e-commerce company Bonobos, raised $24 million over the past four years for Pie, an app that lets creators organize events like running clubs and game nights with the goal of helping people make new friends. The app, available in Chicago and San Francisco, took off this year with 50,000 monthly users, he said. “Even people who love social media or use it frequently know it’s not necessarily that social,” Dunn said. “Mostly it’s an experience we do alone.” Williams also invested in Pie. The two entrepreneurs spent time together last year in Brazil, where they debated social media’s future at the beach. Williams wore a T-shirt that said “More social less media,” Dunn recalled. They determined that the challenges created by social media wouldn’t be solved by making a better social media product. Williams said he decided Mozi was worth building after reflecting on the importance of relationships. Looking back, he said, “everything that had gone really well, even in work, was about relationships, and everything that went poorly was mismanaging relationships.” He added that he was not raised with good relationship models. “I learned late in life what a healthy relationship and conflict resolution looked like, and that was a cause of a lot of my pain and suffering,” he said. When Williams turned 50, his son called it “halftime.” The analogy made him feel optimistic, he said, since “a lot can be determined in the second half of the game.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

In a cavernous warehouse north of New York City, a 16-foot robot outfitted with a cutting tool etched intricate grooves into a faceless marble head atop an alien-like torso. Water sprayed into the air as an image created with artificial intelligence entered the physical world. In February, during a three-month stint as OpenAI’s first artist in residence, Alexander Reben gained early access to the startup’s Sora text-to-video tool, which instantly generates videos up to a minute in length from written or spoken prompts. Reben, a technologist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used Nvidia’s neural radiance field technology to turn Sora’s AI-generated imagery into 3D models. The cutting tool, run by a small company called Monumental Labs, turned one of those into a 4-foot-tall sculpture carved from white Italian marble veined with black and gray. While many artists view AI as a threat to their livelihoods, Reben, whose residency ended in April, embraces it as a collaborator. “I got a closer view of how innovation happens within an AI company, and got a better idea of why it’s important to push the edges and try new things,” Reben, 39, said. Toward the end of the residency, he focused on a prototype system that turned photos of real objects into AI-generated images, poems and even short, satirical blurbs. His setup consisted of his phone, a Fujifilm Instax photo printer and another printer that spit out receipts and labels. A web browser-based system combined Reben’s code with a version of the large language model that powers ChatGPT. The “conceptual camera,” whose interface appeared on Reben’s phone screen, had 15 “modes.” One of them, which Reben calls “Silly AI Label Maker,” assigns a name to any item pictured. When he snapped an image of a yellow zinnia, for example, out popped a label designating the flower a “sunny puffball.” The vase containing the flower got a new name, too: “sunflower sipper.” Sunglasses became “shady peepers.” To demonstrate his conceptual camera, Reben held his phone above a rudimentary sketch of a face, a lone tear falling from each eye, alongside a shape that passed for a tree. Almost as quickly as he took the photo, an image sprang from a hand-held printer. The setup turned the drawing into a bizarre, AI-generated picture that blended the face and the tree into a tearful, ghoulish man with a neck and shoulders that looked like they had been carved from wood. Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work Technology | Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent Technology | Data on animal movements help Hungarian researchers create a swarm of autonomous drones Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, says artists like Reben help it understand the potential of its AI tools. His projects “showed our technology in a new light, inspiring our teams to see the creative possibilities of what we’re building,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email. But Hugh Leeman, an art lecturer at universities such as Duke, Colorado State and Johns Hopkins, wonders if the residency is just a marketing move to appease artists who worry their work is being used to train AI systems without permission, payment or credit. Some are concerned that AI could alter the very nature of creativity. “From a company standpoint, they’re getting out ahead of the curve here,” Leeman said. “This is a mechanism of saying: ‘Look, we’ve always loved artists. In fact, we’ve worked with artists.’” But he is a fan of Reben. Leeman started researching his work after seeing it last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. Leeman was most struck by the cheeky mischief — like the AI-generated snubs of the artist’s show that rotated on a wall display, declaring it, among other insults, a “masterstroke of blandness.” “It was both criticizing AI and criticizing him for using it,” Leeman said. “I thought, what a beautiful sense of humor and self-awareness on this that is very needed in the art world.” That humor comes through in Reben’s camera. One of its modes takes images and gives them an absurd twist: Imagine a battalion of tiny toy soldiers climbing a scone as if it were a hilly battlefield. Reben took a photo of sunglasses sitting on a table at his home in Berkeley, California. (He had set out those and other random objects for his demonstration.) The camera produced eight paragraphs under the headline “Local Sunglasses File Restraining Order Against Unrelenting Sun.” The overworked glasses, according to the text, are simply asking for more temperate working conditions: “a few clouds” now and then, or an “occasional overcast day.” “The sun has yet to respond to the allegations,” the passage continues. “Legal experts speculate that the solar defendant might struggle to appear in court given its 93-million-mile commute and busy schedule keeping the solar system in order.” Reben’s works, including some created during the OpenAI residency, are on view at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. In December, they will appear as part of an exhibit by the Bitforms Gallery at Untitled Art, a contemporary art fair in Miami Beach. Reben said that he understood and empathized with the concerns roiling the artist community as AI evolved, but that new technologies always face growing pains. “There are different types of art,” he said, “and different reasons that art exists.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

Are 52 gas stations enough for Lakewood’s 156,000 residents? It’s a question that leaders in Colorado’s fifth-largest city are seriously asking, with the City Council teeing up a proposed ordinance that would severely restrict how many new gas stations could prime their pumps in this western suburb. It’s heading for a final vote early next year. The measure would also throttle the number of new car washes, which a city memo cites for excessive water use and pollution. The proposal passed on an initial vote Dec. 9 and will land in front of the council — to either approve, amend or table — on Jan. 13. “The idea is to be thinking of the future,” said Lakewood Councilman Jacob LaBure, who brought the issue to the council after hearing concerns from constituents about noxious emissions and chemical runoff from gas stations. “Land use is a long game, so you have to think about it long-term.” Lakewood’s ordinance comes after Louisville became the first city in Colorado to limit the number of filling stations, putting in place a hard cap of six for the city of 20,000 in March of last year. Denver has been mulling a similar effort — but instead of a cap, the Mile High City would mandate a quarter-mile separation between new gas stations and existing petrol stations and rail transit stations. The Denver Planning Board will take up the measure at a hearing on Wednesday. It will vote on a recommendation on whether the Denver City Council should adopt the new policy. Lakewood’s measure would go further than Denver’s proposal by requiring a half-mile separation between a new gas station and those already in operation. It would also reduce the potential areas in the city where a station could open through zoning restrictions. New stations would be required to offer at least three electric vehicle charging stations, one of which would have to be equipped with the most rapid charging technology. Car washes are targeted by the ordinance, too. It calls for the same half-mile separation from any existing car wash in the city. Lakewood has 27 car washes. “It will extremely limit how many gas stations and car washes can be built (in Lakewood),” LaBure said. Paul Rice, Lakewood’s manager of development and review, said the city went through a cycle several years ago in which no fewer than seven applications for new filling stations were submitted. Some residents, he said, point to the crush of gas stations at three corners of West Colfax Avenue and Kipling Street as an example of excess and poor planning. Motorists fill up at Maverick, one of three gas stations located at the intersection of Kipling Street and West Colfax Avenue, in Lakewood on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) “Some of these stations are close to neighborhoods,” Rice said. The ordinance’s electric charger mandate is meant to address a perceived shortage of such equipment in the city, he said. “We’re starting to realize the lack of electric vehicle infrastructure in Lakewood,” Rice said. This month, a Boston-based association of environmental organizations reported that Colorado took the lead in electric vehicle sales in the nation by market share earlier this year, edging out California. EVs made up 25.3% of new vehicles sold in Colorado in the third quarter while California was second, with electric vehicles accounting for 24.3% of new car sales. While electric vehicle sales nationally have slowed this year, an increasing number of cities across the country are wondering what the future of gasoline-powered vehicles is — and enacting laws to limit them. Petaluma, California, north of San Francisco, was the first U.S. city to restrict new gas stations in March 2021. Grier Bailey, the executive director of the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association, said Lakewood and some other cities overstate the environmental impacts of gas stations and car washes. “(Enclosed) car washes basically are required to generally be efficient in recycling water, and there are pretty stringent rules around recovery for chemicals,” Bailey said. “Generally speaking, car washes use less water than someone washing their car in their driveway.” And gas stations, he said, are also subject to stringent rules. “Suffice it to say, the penalties for violating fuel formulation or vapor recovery systems are severe,” Bailey said, noting the maximum $15,000 fine that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment can levy for a violation. “The families that own stations in the Lakewood community don’t need to be vilified to their neighbors to promote what is essentially a land-use policy.” Louisville’s 2023 cap hasn’t had much time to play out, said the city’s community development director, Rob Zuccaro. One gasoline station closed following adoption of the ordinance, he said, and an application has come to the city to replace it. A Murphy USA gas station, one of three gas stations located at the intersection of Kipling Street and West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, seen on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) Related Articles Colorado News | Colorado moves to top spot in new electric vehicle sales, edging out California Colorado News | Should Denver put more limits on where gas stations can open? City Council members pitch ideas Colorado News | Louisville sets maximum number of six gas stations within city “The ordinance was one way to support city policies and goals to reduce energy consumption, increase clean energy sources, and transition to a low carbon community,” Zuccaro said. At the time it passed its ordinance, the Boulder County city acknowledged that it was just a small step in controlling the release of climate-changing emissions. Then-Councilmember Maxine Most said Louisville should not invest in fossil fuel infrastructure that would not survive long-term, as the market shifts toward EVs. Louisville’s measure also requires new stations to install EV charging equipment when they open. “We should be taking whatever incremental steps to not create additional fossil fuel infrastructure,” Most said last year. That view is shared by LaBure, the Lakewood councilman. “I’m just trying to think about the future,” he said. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

The subject line of a press release this month from Weld County was stark and foreboding: “County’s assessed value sees 20% decrease.” The cratering of taxable property value in the large county that hugs metro Denver’s northeast corner — from nearly $25 billion in 2023 to just under $20 billion this year — would probably send many county finance directors running to the medicine cabinet for a fistful of antacids. But for Cheryl Pattelli, it’s all part of managing the books for a county whose economy relies largely on boom-and-bust commodity industries, like agriculture and energy, that can experience wild swings in both price and production. Energy, in particular, plays an outsized role. The industry produced a state-leading 135 million barrels of oil in Weld County in 2023 and makes up nearly 60% of the county’s total valuation. It was the high price of oil in 2022 — topping $120 a barrel on several occasions — that helped set the assessed valuation for the 2023 tax year in Weld County. Valuations reached a record $16.8 billion in the energy sector alone. But when oil prices declined in 2023, the value of oil and gas production and equipment in Weld County plummeted 31%, to $11.5 billion. That year’s dynamics formed the basis for this year’s assessed values. “We are used to big fluctuations,” said Pattelli, Weld County’s chief financial officer. “We’re completely used to the ups and downs in oil and gas, and we’ve created budget policies to account for that.” In fact, Weld County projects that next year it will take in the most property taxes it has ever collected in its history — $306 million, a $17 million premium over this year. How that’s possible when tax valuations are in free-fall comes down to adjustments the county has made to its mill levy, or rate of taxation, to ensure its budget remains whole. Specifically, the county hiked its mill levy about 30%, from around 12 mills to nearly 16 mills. The higher rate still remains within the strictures of Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which requires a vote of the people before a government can collect more taxes above a level allowed by a formula that accounts for population growth and inflation. On top of that, said Commissioner Kevin Ross, the Republican-leaning county practices fiscal self-discipline. “We keep our budgets low so we don’t get in a pickle,” Ross said. “That’s why we don’t go spending everything we have.” Weld County also has a $230 million reserve fund it can tap to help get through tough times. A push for economic diversification While the energy sector showed weakness in the 2024 valuations, residential property values in the fast-growing county climbed 3.3% to $3.35 billion. Commercial and industrial values also went up. Weld County, which includes Greeley, is one of the fastest-growing counties in Colorado, having gained more than 100,000 residents since 2010. It has a population of about 369,000, which is expected to approach 600,000 by 2050. And with that population growth, Weld County’s economy is becoming increasingly diverse, said Rich Werner, president and CEO of Upstate Colorado Economic Development. Some of the county’s growing industries are food processing, biosciences, construction and renewable energy, including a Vestas wind turbine plant in Windsor. “Oil and gas and agriculture will always be our base industries,” Werner said, “but we continue to push on diversification to further support these emerging areas.” The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis pegs Weld County’s 2023 gross domestic product at $28 billion — just ahead of Douglas County, at $27 billion, and behind Boulder County, at $35 billion. But Werner worries about recent regulations that have been placed on the oil and gas industry, most notably a 2019 state law overhauling oversight of the industry. “When companies are looking to come to a region, they are looking for not only economic certainty but political certainty,” he said. “I’m worried about the business climate in the state — we are seeing in study after study that it is harder and more expensive to do business in the state.” More barriers for oil and gas Last year, a survey of 156 Colorado business leaders showed that four in 10 of those asked said they believed the state’s economy was headed in the right direction, while the remainder said it was on the wrong track. Nearly two out of three business leaders cited regulatory compliance as a top concern, with most worries centered on state rules. Ross, the county commissioner, says it’s harder these days for energy companies to get their permits to “put up their rigs and punch a hole” in the ground. And many operators remember the dramatic retrenchment within the industry just a few years ago, in the face of a price crash due to the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdown of the global economy. Related Articles Colorado News | A heavier regulatory burden has Colorado business leaders looking elsewhere, poll says Colorado News | Can Weld County maintain its fiscal health as oil and gas production gets pinched? Colorado News | Colorado’s No. 1 oil-gas producer girds for economic fallout from coronavirus, but sees no cure for tougher law “If production drops off and you have a state that is not friendly to oil and gas development, that’s going to negatively impact Weld County in a drastic way,” he said. In the meantime, solidly red Weld County will continue with its disciplined approach to fiscal management, Ross said, regardless of oil price fluctuations or state regulations set largely by Democratic officeholders and appointees. The county has no sales tax, issues no debt and is one of just 11 counties in Colorado that has yet to “de-Bruce.” That colloquialism, inspired by TABOR architect Douglas Bruce’s name, refers to a government asking voters if it can retain tax revenues beyond what the constitutional amendment allows. Weld’s approach should keep business interest in the county alive and residents not feeling too burdened by taxes, he said. “Weld County is in a strong place — we’re used to this,” Ross said. Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

In mid-November, as election post-mortems focused on inflation worries and the holiday shopping season began to pick up steam, Amazon introduced a new storefront. Known as Amazon Haul, and currently available only on the app and in the United States, it promises “a place to discover even more affordable fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics and other products with ultralow prices.” Everything on the site is $20 or less. One long-sleeved emerald-green stretch velvet minidress is $12.99; opaque purple tights are $3.99; and a cherry-red elastic belt is $1.99. The offerings all come from third-party sellers and take two or so weeks for delivery, which is presumably the source of some of the price cuts. The more you buy, the cheaper the tab, according to the site: “5% off orders $50 and over, and 10% off orders $75 or more.” And for a limited time, customers get an extra 65% off at checkout. But is this really about savings? Or is it about something more complicated and potentially insidious? Maria Boschetti, a spokesperson for Amazon, said that the company was simply responding to customer behavior, giving them more of what they wanted. That’s probably true. But it seems that what Amazon thinks customers want isn’t just more money in the bank. It’s the ability to acquire more and more stuff. At least judging by the name of the new store. Amazon declined to comment on the inspiration behind the “Haul” moniker, but presumably that’s the whole point of the concept — at least as a defining principle of 21st-century shopping. By naming its new store after the practice, Amazon is simply offering what Ken Pucker, an adjunct professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, called “truth in advertising.” Perhaps it is time to actually face what that means. The term “haul” became popular on YouTube in the early 2000s as a reference to fashion and beauty buying sprees and entered the Urban Dictionary in 2009. Vloggers would share their purchases with their followers, tapping into the growing sense of shopping as vicarious thrill and emotional sustenance. Facilitated by the dual rise of fast fashion with its emphasis on novelty for all and the explosion of social media and influencer culture, hauls became a form of performance art and shared practice, a cultural phenomenon. They were boosted in 2022 by the arrival of the instant fashion digital marketplace in the form of Shein, which adds up to a reported 10,000 garments a day to its site, and Temu. At this point, there are 17 million posts under the hashtag #haul on TikTok alone, according to the platform’s analytics, with 16,000 added in the last seven days — and an additional 1 million videos on YouTube and 3.7 million posts on Instagram. There are subhashtags like #sheinhaul and #targethaul, and this fall, back to school began “flooding” social media, according to Vogue. You can spend hours staring avidly at strangers surrounded by veritable mountains of new things. “It became almost a human right to participate in consumer culture,” said Lucie Greene, the founder of trend forecasting firm Light Years. “We’ve gotten to the point where you feel left out of society if you are not part of the shopping cycle.” And the shopping cycle, which used to have ebbs and flows, is now less a cycle than a constant stream, a fire hose of product. “The hyper-consumption that triggers, just because of the newness and the price point, creates this instant need for the next thing,” Pucker said. “And if you can satisfy that at a price point that’s half what it was, you can buy twice as many.” To be sure, there is nothing wrong with shopping, nothing wrong with the concept of treats and extras. There is a human desire for beauty and its delight and self-expression. People should have access to that pleasure, at whatever price point they can manage. There is something comforting and reassuring about abundance, especially at a time when there seems to be a free-floating sense of malaise in the air. But that’s not what hauls are about. Hauls are the shopping equivalent of a dopamine-chasing overdose. That is the essence of the idea, which is less about any one thing than about the sheer number of things. It’s the elevation of quantity over quality, muchness as an end in itself. Like social media itself, and smartphones, the haul creates its own subset of compulsive behavior. “It accelerates the consumption addiction,” Greene said. That addiction isn’t officially a part of the DSM-5, the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it is recognized by the Cleveland Clinic and the journal World Psychiatry, among other official bodies. By embracing hauls, we are training ourselves, in a Pavlovian way, to chase the thrill of delivery, the joy of unboxing. By sharing endless haul videos, we are seducing other people into sharing our compulsion for more and more and more, because the more people who buy into any one idea, the less bad we feel about our own behavior. But by focusing on the stuff — on the pleasure of piles, the allure of excess — each thing becomes less important, which means it is even more disposable. When the excitement of getting all that stuff wears off, the stuff itself doesn’t really matter. It just takes up space. And that means it’s easy to throw away. There’s a tendency to be preachy about the sustainability of all this. And there’s no question it is an issue: in terms of the human labor that almost always bears the brunt of low-cost production, the chemicals and waste and carbon emissions involved, and the piles of disposable stuff that end up in landfills. “It’s the privatization of profit and the socialization of cost,” Pucker said. Related Articles Technology | Former all-Black fire station in Five Points to be converted into residence Technology | In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work Technology | Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent Technology | Data on animal movements help Hungarian researchers create a swarm of autonomous drones Technology | Turo-rented cars were involved in 2 deadly incidents this New Year’s. Here’s what we know That’s the subject of many films, including “The True Cost,” “Textile Mountain” and Netflix’s recent “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy,” which opens with the confessions of a former employee of (what else) Amazon and also includes testimony from former Adidas, Apple and L‘Oréal executives about techniques used to lure shoppers into buying more stuff. Not surprisingly, an anti-haul movement has grown in response, at least in a limited way. The hashtag #antihaul has almost 3,000 posts on TikTok; #deinfluence, about 4,500. There are even #thrifthauls, which is somewhat confusing, since they celebrate getting a lot of new old stuff, which may be better than a lot of new new stuff but still puts the emphasis on “a lot.” Treats are treats precisely because they aren’t available all the time. Shopping sprees used to be exciting because they were rare. Black Friday had meaning because it happened once a year. Haul may be a good name for a store — it may even be the store we not just want, but deserve. But it’s also a “Black Mirror” episode waiting to happen. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.