Ministry of Justice figures show recalls rose 27% in year to June despite emergency measures to ease overcrowding
More people were recalled to jails in England and Wales in the first half of this year than were released, despite government efforts to reduce the prison population, according to figures released on Thursday.
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data shows that 12,338 people were recalled to custody between the beginning of April and the end of June, while 12,278 people were released. It continues a trend set between January and March, when 13,193 people were returned to prison and 12,977 released.
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© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
Move comes as Philippines police investigate alleged child sexual abuse images reportedly found at Thomas Markle Sr’s former home
The Metropolitan police has referred itself to the police watchdog over potential errors in its handling of a 2019 letter warning of dangers to the security of the Duchess of Sussex posed by her father.
The letter made allegations about Thomas Markle, the father of Meghan, who is facing claims of child sexual abuse images offending linked to the Philippines, which he denies.
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© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA/AP
© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA/AP
© Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA/AP
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again.
He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.
Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)
The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”
When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans.
That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations.
But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.
Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office.
Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.”
Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.)
Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.)
These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations.
Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.
➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious.
It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google started quitting, citing fears that the AI was spiraling out of control. After a string of agents started hacking websites, researchers used AI to discover vulnerabilities in critical systems, leading to large swaths of the web going dark last week and giving rise to a scary term: Black October. At the same time, as it continued to ramp up AI spending, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — and economists once again warned of a bubble.
Yet, a lot has happened recently to make AI genuinely useful for more people. AI agents are getting better and can now make restaurant reservations for you. Walmart made it possible for agents to shop on behalf of humans, a bold move since Amazon banned the practice. Apple announced an AI-ready home display that can turn on your lights. And let’s not forget that AI is also helping scientists find cures for formerly incurable diseases and mathematicians solve previously impossible problems.
It’s hard to reconcile the incongruity between the recent bad news and good news. For most of us, the state of AI is anxiety-inducing — especially when it comes to our livelihoods. According to a Pew Research Center study published in August, 71 percent of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next two decades. That figure is up 7 percentage points from where it was two years ago. Sure, in the best-case scenarios, AI could erase inefficiencies at work, streamline our daily lives, cure diseases, and generally improve the human condition.
But what if you are the “inefficiency” at work that gets erased?
That tension is at the heart of Ethan Mollick’s latest book Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. If there is such a thing as an AI sage, it would be Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School and faculty director of its Generative AI Labs. To the nearly half a million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, One Useful Thing, he delivers semiweekly updates from the jagged frontier of the technology’s development. His message in any medium is resoundingly clear: You need to use AI in order to understand it. And to get the most out of using it, he argues that you have to accept that AI is not going away; it’s only going to become more important.
That ethos doesn’t make the existential threats of AI any less daunting, but that’s not the point. Unless you’re an early Anthropic employee or a United States senator, there’s probably not much you can do directly to rein in AI’s potential harms. But you can, according to Mollick’s worldview, decide how the technology could fit into your life and think about how you fit into an AI-dominated future.
I recently spoke with Mollick about his new book, what life and work might look like in the agentic AI era, and what it means to be an artisan when even knowledge is industrialized. His theories about living with AI are meant to help you navigate the future, regardless of the latest forecast. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We’re entering a new era for AI, and the vibes are different. AI agents are something that many of us will encounter, interact with, and maybe even embrace. I’ve always known you as someone who jumps on the cutting edge of this technology to figure out what it can do. What do you think most people don’t understand about the next generation of AI?
I really think people haven’t internalized what agents do. Agents mean many things, and we can talk about personal agents, like Muse. But the fact that the problems that plagued working with AI agents before — you had to guide them each step of the way, they made mistakes, hallucinated constantly — that’s kind of gone. You can regularly get hours, days, weeks of work out of a system.
It’s not just a theoretical thing anymore. I talk to coders all the time who are a hundred times or more productive than they were before. And in other fields, we’ve kind of moved past the theoretical discussion about AI being, “This is going to be a big deal,” to, “It’s here.” From a whole kind of co-intelligence perspective, we’ve gone from, “Here’s how we use AI and work with a chatbot back and forth,” to, “These systems are now doing real work in ways that matter to real people and are reshaping real fields for better or worse.” And if you’re used to using AI a year ago, if you’re not paying for one of these systems, it’s really easy to have lost track of what’s going on.
What about the practical, everyday ways that AI is disrupting our lives? And what do you think are the limits of that disruption?
So outside of the job world and homework cheating, I think life has changed only a little bit for people, partially because these systems were kind of complicated to use and you had to decide what you were using them for. But I think the advent of personal agents, like Muse and Dot, are going to lead to a very rapid change in a lot of ways.
Most people I know who aren’t experts who use these systems, like my parents, are using these things spontaneously. They’re finding that once you know how to prompt the AI to do something, it can do things spontaneously and come back to you because it has your email and everything else. Just as one example, I was unable to figure out how to cancel my standing $8-a-month wifi subscription from my airline, and I was like, figure this out. And it went to customer service, joined chats, then I have no idea what it did, but now I don’t have a subscription to wifi anymore, thank goodness.
“I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.”
So there is this sort of lowering friction piece that’s super interesting, with good and bad elements to it. The bad side of lowering friction is both that every article gets written by AI, so there’s no human thinking in it anymore, and that companies don’t want 10,000 customer service agents coming to them demanding new things. So I think we’re just on the edge of seeing the mass change in everyday life. Right now, AI is a really good second opinion on everything. As agents become more popular, they start to take action.
How do you know when to let AI do the work, though? We know that offloading certain tasks to AI can make you worse at doing those kinds of tasks in the future. How do you take advantage of AI’s ability to do drudgery but also hold onto your own expertise?
If there’s a personal theme underlying Co-Existence, it’s that one. That is an incredibly hard choice to make, and we’re historically very bad at making it.
Students are the No. 1 case because they’re willing to offload homework because homework sucks and because the incentives for doing any piece of homework are terrible. But overall we need to do it to learn. So people offload that, but even if you’re trying to do the right kind of thing, like using AI only to help you learn and not to replace learning, it turns out that when chatbots are in assistant mode, as opposed to using them as a tutor, it feels like you’re learning even though you’re not. You feel like you’re in the loop even though you’re not. And so that assumes that we both know we want to offload and we do it intelligently and that we do it in a way that helps our long-term gain.
I am worried about us being able to do that. You have to draw lines for yourself about what skills matter to you or not, and you have to be thoughtful, in a way that we’re usually not, about what we’re giving up and what we’re not. Technology’s designed for us to give up stuff. We don’t walk 50 miles a day anymore in forced marches. I don’t know how to weave clothes. There’s a lot of stuff I’m very happy to not know: how to maintain my computer in some ways, even though that’s dangerous. I let Codex scan for security issues because it does a better job than me faster. But I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.
So I don’t have an easy answer, but I think that that will be the defining question for most people in their career paths right now and their lives: What do I give up? I think we can be too sentimental about things that we’re giving up. It’s okay, but we don’t know the full chain of consequences. I think that struggle is going to be central to a lot of people’s experience. I wish I had an easy answer, but now that AI can do so many things, de-skilling is a real problem at this point.
We’re living through a huge transformation. That’s increasingly clear. Besides losing their jobs, a lot of people are scared of losing the sense of what makes them human and what makes them valuable. How do people hold onto that in the years to come?
There’s a transformation happening, and for some people, the work will get more satisfying. There’s a lot of coders who did not like writing lines of code, but they did like summoning software and figuring out what they wanted to build. Their lives are much better because the AI does all the tedious work. They can command things to be built, and it’s so much more exciting than it was before. It lets people who didn’t code start to do incredible coding projects. So on one hand, that’s deeply freeing of the kinds of work that we did. On the other hand, there are people who love writing those lines of code and that’s gone now. You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms. Your stuff might be elegant and beautiful, but it is not going to last in a world where industrialization happens.
Industrialization versus craft is a way to think about this. There’s a lot of craft that we’ve grown to really appreciate, like the handcrafted sentence. Those things will be under threat from the logic of industrialization, which is that we need to do more of it. I think that there’s going to be a shift. There’s satisfying work to do, but I think a lot of what was satisfying human work will be under pressure to disappear, because you took pleasure in something that was not automatable, but now is.
We’ve been through this in industrial revolutions before. This is happening at a very large scale to intellectual work, where craft was a very important part of what we did. Mathematics was craft, software engineering was craft. I think that we’ll be under pressure to produce more of it, which is what industrialization’s about, even if that destroys the value of doing this as a person. You get paid to do it now, but you’re not getting the same value you did before.
“We’re no longer in a place where AI is going away.”
I think we’re going to find lots of crises of meaning. Some people are going to find huge amounts more meaning in their work, either because the work itself is now much more interesting. Work is a lot of crap, too. We can say great things about it, but people spend a quarter of their work life saying they’re bored. It’s not like this was a great job for everybody. So some people will have much more excitement in craft. Some people will have it extracted out of their job, and it’s all going to be happening at once. I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but that’s what’s happening.
Forgive me for saying so, but that was an anxiety-inducing answer. It’s an anxiety-inducing time. I wonder what advice you have for us anxious people?
I think anxiety is real, and there’s different levels of anxiety. We’re going through a wrenching change, or we will be going through one that we’re on the edges of now. There is also existential risk about whether AI will kill us all, where we clearly need more regulation. The answers are unclear. Smart people seem to think that that’s a real danger. It’s hard to know. But leaving that aside, there’s anxiety about our own transformation, our jobs. I mean, the industrial revolutions worked out great in the end, but during it, [that] was the time of Marx and anarchists and Dickens writing about London. There’s a transition we have to go through here.
I don’t think we can pretend it’s not happening, and I see a lot of people taking comfort in the idea that maybe this all will collapse and AI will go away. Even if there was a bubble financially, we’re no longer in a place where AI is going away or stopping development. I worry a lot about people doing that. Once you face that, though, I find people often reconstruct meaning in very exciting ways. Thinking about what more you can do and where you find joy in this is actually quite exciting. So I think that anxious optimism is a reasonable place to be.
What I worry about is sticking your head in the sand saying, “I’m not going to learn AI. This will go away. I’m going to pretend it’s not happening.” I mean, I wish I could give you that option. I think there’s a lot of people who wish we could slow things down or turn a dial down, but there’s also a lot of exciting things. There’s a lot of hard problems in the world that are unsolved.
If you lean into the positive pieces, you can ask how we mitigate risk but also think about how we can build a better world. Part of what makes me nervous is people sitting out that second question and just filling up with anxiety rather than believing we have a tool that can rebuild things. How do we rebuild a better world for journalism or for nonprofits or whatever it is? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and I worry it’s asked too little.
© Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images
Royal tour of Caribbean comes as poll suggests majority support among younger Britons for dialogue on slavery reparations
King Charles has confirmed he will discuss the legacy of slavery at a summit with Commonwealth leaders as he begins his Caribbean tour.
The king arrived in the Bahamas on Tuesday to a ceremonial welcome and attended a youth rally at Clifford Park, the site where the country officially gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1973.
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© Photograph: Ben Stansall/PA
© Photograph: Ben Stansall/PA
© Photograph: Ben Stansall/PA
© Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
© Janice Chung for The New York Times
Commanders suspected of sexual violence during the largest and fastest slaughter of civilians in more than 30 years have been subjected to travel ban and asset freeze
Senior Sudanese commanders implicated in a “campaign of rape” have been targeted by the UK on the first anniversary of a mass atrocity that saw tens of thousands of civilians killed over several days.
A year after the fall of El Fasher, the British government said it had sanctioned military leaders from both sides in the country’s ongoing conflict whom it suspected of sexual violence during the siege of the city.
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© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images
Calculations from the Center for Global Development say spending next year is likely to be £410m less than anticipated
The UK is on course to miss its target of spending 0.3% of national income on international aid by an estimated £400m by the end of next year.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development (CGD) found the UK was on course for a large shortfall in promised official development assistance at the end of 2027.
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© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
© Photograph: Patrick Ngugi/AP
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I am someone who notoriously struggles with big decisions. Over a year ago, I found a wonderful partner, who very much feels like they could be my soulmate. We’ve been dating three time zones apart for a while. Being near our families, communities, and aging parents is a shared value — unfortunately one that makes it hard to compromise on location. Either way, I have to give up something I want and value — a wonderful partner who I can see a life with (the first time I’ve felt this way about someone), or the place I’ve always imagined settling down and that represents the person I am becoming and values I want to live. Two good things are pulling me toward opposite paths and there’s not much room for compromise. How do I make the “right” decision?
Dear Fork in the Road,
You’ve found a place in the world that you feel connected to and you met a person you envision spending the rest of your life with. Geographically restless and lonely people everywhere are jealous! But with your good fortunes seemingly at odds with one another, it feels that by choosing one, you’ll forsake the other — and doom the choice you did make to feel like a sacrifice.
When circumstances have forced me to make a tough decision, I’ve daydreamed about a thought experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation.
In quantum physics, particles behave differently than us mortals. For example, an electron can be in more than one place at once until it’s measured. How can it be in multiple locations and then be observed to be in a single position? In the 1950s, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed an explanation: The universe splits into alternate versions of itself, one for each place a particle could be measured. To apply this theory to your life, if you chose to move cities, don’t worry, another universe would be created in which you didn’t choose to do this, and you’ll stay right where you are!
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Yes, I know you can’t transport yourself into such a quantum realm, but there is something helpful in thinking about alternative universes. Did you have an immediate reaction to which universe you would be upset not to inhabit? Take that information to heart, because it’s likely you’re not ultimately going to make your choice based on a tidy pro-con list.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that most of our decisions are not based on rationality. People use two systems for decision-making: System one is faster and emotionally based, and system two is more logical and slow. But even the slower, more deliberate decision-making can fall prey to any number of cognitive biases.
In your case, one called loss aversion may be especially relevant. People have the tendency to worry more about what they’ll lose, even if what they stand to gain is equal in value. For example, it will likely feel worse to lose a $10 bill from your pocket than it would feel good to find a $10 bill on the ground. This bias is relevant in people’s social lives too: They hold onto older, maybe fading, friendships because the thought of losing them is too painful, but don’t seek out new friends with equal effort. Or, they stay in a meh job because it feels scary to let it go, rather than applying that same energy to finding a new one. Once you accept that your decision-making process will be subject to messy feelings and biases, you can let go of trying to make the perfect choice.
You opened your question by sharing that you struggle with big decisions, and it makes me wonder if you simply feel anxiety about making a choice at all. This is called analysis paralysis. When outcomes are uncertain, anxiety wakes up, and a voice in your head tells you to avoid taking risks. People with analysis paralysis overthink their options, over-research, and second-guess their first instincts. These actions have more to do with stress over committing to any decision rather than the content of what you’re deciding on.
A surprising finding from psychology may ease your paralysis. Researchers told people to make a big life decision — on the order of ending a relationship or quitting their job — by flipping a coin. Heads, they made the change; tails, they didn’t. For those who followed the results of the toss, the people who made the change were overwhelmingly happier, even though their decision to do so was made by pure chance. These random-flip outcomes also show “that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices,” the authors wrote. The coin helped the participants resist the bias of tending to stick with the status quo, even if it doesn’t make them happier.
To begin to loosen your paralysis, something that might assist you, paradoxically, is to introduce more options into the mix. Jacques Derrida, the 20th-century French philosopher, is known for the concept of deconstruction, a way of analyzing texts or ideas more critically, and showing they’re not as stable as they seem. He pointed out that we often think in binaries and false opposites: good vs. evil, man vs. woman, nature vs. culture. This can set up an easy dichotomy in which one of the items is good, and the other, by being its opposite, is bad.
You’ve created a binary situation, and you don’t actually have to be in one. What if there’s a third option, or a fourth? What if you and your partner move to a brand-new city, and set out to create new community, together? What if you and your partner find a way to split your time between your respective hometowns? Now you don’t have only two good things pulling you in opposite directions, you would have different options you can be more creative with. You also don’t have to commit to the decision you make now for the rest of your life. You can always move cities again, or try to find another mate.
You are with a partner you love, and live in a place that you love. You might reframe your situation as a win-win, rather than a lose-lose. And remember that if you don’t make a choice, you’re not successfully avoiding a decision — it’s a choice of its own. Your partner may get tired of long-distance or end the relationship for another reason. Or, you could start to resent the place you live since you have to travel so much to spend time with your partner.
I also want to point out how you describe your partner. Don’t turn your nose up at finding someone who you can see making a life with, especially as you note, if you’ve never felt that way before. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said that there were two most important moments in his life: when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife. “What happened with me would not have happened without her.” Buffett’s view is supported by research that shows that people with supportive spouses tend to take on more rewarding challenges throughout their lives, and end up having more personal growth and happiness.
Another quantum idea that might interest you is spooky action at a distance. This is when two particles, even far apart, become connected to one another. Measuring one affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If your partner feels like your “soulmate,” perhaps you have become entangled already. Don’t fret about making the perfect choice about the next phase of life, but do make a choice (any choice!) that considers your futures as bound up together. For the other details, maybe it’s time to find a coin to flip.
© Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
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