President Donald Trump’s conflict with Iran has become a political liability for his administration. Since the last U.S. strikes on Iran fell on Sept. 8, Trump has publicly ruled out attacking Iran before the November midterm elections—and promised to end the conflict after them.

Then, rumblings grew that U.S. and Israeli military planners had reportedly drawn up new strike options against Iran, including the possible use of the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal: the GBU-43/B, also dubbed “the Mother of All Bombs”. 

The targets purportedly would be Iran’s nuclear facilities and energy infrastructure, though there are doubts about whether the bomb could penetrate Iran’s most deeply buried sites. According to these reports, Trump apparently is seeking a strike he could present as a military victory and then end the war without appearing to back down. 

But such an approach risks triggering a far wider war than Washington intends. Tehran remains unlikely to let Washington end the conflict quickly and, fearing a potential attack from the U.S., could itself strike first. Either scenario could lead to a new round of fighting far more destructive than the last.

Before the mother of all bombs

Reports of military plans involving “the mother of all bombs” came against the backdrop of two other worrying developments. First, Iran has been escalating its naval attacks, likely in response to increased flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Notably, two UAE-owned cargo ships, the GFS Pride and the Cape Dao, were struck in the Strait as part of this sharp uptick.

Secondly, diplomatic efforts appear to have hit a wall. In late September, Trump rejected the proposal Tehran had put forward on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly: an end to fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon; the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and oil sanctions; the release of some of Iran’s frozen assets; and the reopening of Hormuz within seven days. Instead, Washington insists that Iran must take steps regarding its nuclear program as part of the package, something Iranian leaders say they will only do at a later stage. 

The timing of any U.S.-Israeli attack remains uncertain. While Trump has said he will not resume attacks before the midterms, Israel held its election on Oct. 27, a week earlier, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly sought renewed fighting before both elections.

American and Israeli objectives may differ, of course. Trump appears to want something he can portray as a spectacular military victory without having to undergo another prolonged war, while Netanyahu’s rhetoric about “finishing the job” suggests more ambitious goals, potentially including toppling the Islamic Republic. Tehran seems to be preparing for either scenario with its own response: a prolonged, region-wide war designed to impose devastating economic costs.

Denying Trump a short war

The dominant perspective in Tehran is that the next war must be fought in a way that makes it so costly that a future U.S. president would not contemplate another. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said in late September that Iran “will not stop until we have driven the United States out of the region, punished the aggressor, and established permanent deterrence so that no one will dare attack Iran.”

That logic, should it prevail, rules out a symbolic, tit-for-tat exchange. In Tehran’s view, a limited American strike on Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified nuclear site near Natanz that Trump has repeatedly evoked, followed by a limited Iranian response, would send Washington precisely the wrong message: that it can attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, register domestic political gain, and pay a limited, acceptable cost. Iranian officials have therefore warned that even a symbolic, non-lethal strike would trigger a broad response, denying Trump the quick exit he may have asked of his war planners.

Under this scenario, Iran would target regional energy and economic infrastructure. “In a region where we cannot sell oil, no one will sell oil,” Ghalibaf has warned. The UAE is particularly exposed: Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has accused it of oil “smuggling” in cahoots with U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Rezaei also identified new potential targets: undersea cables, data centers, and AI infrastructure in the region, which he claims are worth “more than $2 trillion.” Ghalibaf subsequently extended the threat to regional governments and investors, threatening that anyone providing “funding, equity, land, or energy” to AI companies that “facilitate military aggression” against Iran “will face coercive action.”

If raising the cost of war is the first instrument in Iran’s calculus, duration is the second. Ali Balali, an adviser to the IRGC’s Aerospace Force commander, suggested Iran would conserve its arsenal in preparation for a prolonged confrontation, rather than expend it early. Two days later, Iranian Army spokesperson Mohammad Akraminia argued that the enemy’s weak point is a prolonged war.

Timing is a third dimension in Iranian thinking. Iranian military officials have increasingly mentioned the possibility of striking first, preemptively. Akraminia stated that if Iran were to conclude that an attack by the U.S. and/or Israel is imminent, “we will certainly engage in preemptive warfare.” Mehdi Mohammadi, strategic affairs adviser to Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, went further, arguing that a successful strategy requires not only striking first but also delivering a decisive blow capable of “changing the balance.” There is thus at least the possibility that Iran might move early, and then fight long.

That could occur due to miscalculation resulting from ambiguous American and Israeli signals: leaked strike plans, carrier and amphibious deployments, and aircraft approaching but not entering Iranian airspace. Military experts in Iran see this pattern as an effort to normalize military activity and regain the element of surprise. Tehran could thus mistake military signaling for an imminent attack and strike preemptively, even though it may not want another round of war.

The fourth element concerns the range of those Tehran would hold responsible in the event of an attack. On Oct. 5 Ali Abdollahi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, declared that if the United States acted against Iran “directly or indirectly through Israel,” Iranian forces would retaliate against the United States. The warning carries more weight in the wake of Trump’s decision to openly back Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s election. Indeed, some in Tehran interpreted this as a signal that Washington would allow Israel to strike Iran after the midterms. As a result, Tehran has made clear that even were Israel to carry out the attack on its own, U.S. forces and assets in the region would face retaliation. 

Widening the map

This interpretation suggests that the scope of Iran’s response to a U.S. strike likely would be far wider. Its conduct in Hormuz since late September offers a preview of how it could broaden the conflict. When the UAE, backed by CENTCOM, kept oil moving through a southern corridor along the Omani coast, the IRGC shifted its attacks from small shuttle tankers to supertankers and stated that vessels using the “illegal corridor” would be “pursued and interdicted across the region.” Strikes followed off the UAE coast and near Qatar. An escalation in the region could drive Iran to go after vital energy and other infrastructure across the Gulf. 

Iran’s regional partners also could widen the conflict, although Tehran does not fully control their actions. In Yemen, the Houthis have already opened a second maritime front in the Red Sea, threatening shipping and increasing pressure on Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, an Iran-backed militia, has threatened to fight if Iran faced an existential threat. The conflict could also extend to Europe through indirect operations. 

There may already have been attempts in this vein: British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a suspected September plot near RAF Fairford, a base used by U.S. bombers, was “almost certainly” directed by the IRGC. Tehran denies involvement, but the incident raises the prospect of covert operations against American military assets beyond the Middle East.

Tehran is also preparing for the possibility of a ground operation inside Iran. According to Iranian Army Ground Forces commander Ali Jahanshahi, more than 50 units are deployed along the borders, from the northwest to the Makran coast, and abandoned airfields have been identified as potential enemy landing sites. Iranian security forces have also conducted preemptive operations against Baluch armed groups in the southeast and launched drone and artillery strikes in Kurdish border areas amid concerns that they could open an internal front during an external attack.

A war meant to be the last

Both the U.S. and Iran run the risk of serious misjudgment. The U.S. may believe it can be master of the scope and duration of a war, only to find that Iran holds the key. This power means Iran need not let the conflict end quickly or painlessly.  

For its part, Tehran—which survived the fierce exchanges that began in late February, continued through April, and have since become more regionalized—may be convinced that a wider conflict this time again would establish lasting deterrence. But conditions that made this strategy relatively effective in the past have changed, partly because of Iran’s own actions.  The more Tehran expands its targets, the more it risks turning neighbors that sought to stay out of the conflict into supporters of its defeat. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly agreed to coordinate their military support on behalf of anti-Houthi forces in Yemen, while Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has offered to help defend Saudi Arabia against Houthi attacks. For the Gulf monarchies, the stakes are becoming existential: either Iran’s leverage is broken, or their access to world markets will remain dependent on Iranian restraint. 

In this way, a war intended to deter future American attacks could instead strengthen a regional consensus that Iran must be dealt a serious blow rather than accommodated or bargained with.

Ultimately, diplomacy remains the only way to prevent the gap between American and Iranian perceptions and risk calculus from triggering another, potentially even more costly round of confrontation. Without it, Washington could launch a limited strike expecting a quick exit, or Tehran could strike first fearing an imminent attack. Either scenario could trigger a prolonged regional war that the U.S. wishes to avoid and a growing alliance against the Islamic Republic for which Iran would pay a price.

During the presidential election of 1863, at the height of the Civil War, federal troops reportedly descended on polling places in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri and prevented people they deemed disloyal from voting. This prompted a fierce national debate that culminated in Congress passing an 1865 law barring federal “troops or armed men” from “any place” where an election is being held. The central goal of this law, according to its proponents, was “to prevent the President and his officers from interfering in elections,” which are run by the states. Keeping armed federal officers away from the polls, they argued, was necessary to preserve democracy, even in the midst of civil war. 

This has been the clear law, and the respected policy of every presidential administration, for over a century.

Until now. 

Ahead of the midterms, top Trump Administration officials have publicly refused to rule out the possibility of sending federal agents to the polls. In September, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that immigration officers could be sent to polling places to “serve a warrant” as part of immigration enforcement operations or if “there is a threat” to those polling places, adding “we’ll be where we need to be.” 

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” hedged Mullin. “We’re there to enforce specific threats.”

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel similarly said, “If there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation, we will, otherwise we won’t.”

It is clear to us, and to legal experts, that barring extreme circumstances, sending ICE or FBI agents to the polls would be flatly illegal under the 1865 law, and several others. As Daniel Caine, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointedly said this August, any request to send military troops to election sites would be an “unlawful order.” The same holds true for any other armed federal agents.

The only exception to the prohibition is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” The Congress of 1865 originally included a second exception, allowing armed federal agents to “keep the peace at the polls.” But Congress repealed that exception in 1909 because lawmakers feared that federal authorities could point to any kind of disturbance as a pretext to deploy federal forces. 

In other words, unless a hostile foreign power attacks voting sites using weapons, it is a crime for any armed federal agents to go to those sites, even to quell a disruption. And they are certainly not allowed to show up for routine policing or immigration actions. 

If sending ICE to the polls is so plainly illegal, then why do top administration officials keep refusing to rule it out? Context is important. The federal government has been conducting indiscriminate and often violent immigration enforcement actions in communities across the country. At the same time, the administration has been peddling conspiracy theories about widespread illegal voting, often targeting communities of color. The administration has redirected thousands of homeland security agents away from critical transnational security threats to hunt for elusive noncitizen voters. 

These efforts are not uncovering any significant problems. Federal and state law already bar noncitizens from voting in federal and state elections, and our election system does a terrific job of ensuring that only eligible citizens vote, with vanishingly rare exceptions—as dozens of studies, election reviews, and painstaking investigations have already confirmed. 

This intimidation campaign is taking a toll. According to a University of California, San Diego poll conducted last month, a staggering 40% of voting-age American citizens expect ICE agents to be at the polls this November. Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters are three to four times more likely than white voters to worry that they will be questioned by ICE at polls or that members of their racial or ethnic groups will face intimidation at the polls. This fear is real.

But despite all the administration’s threats, voters should not be intimidated. The law protecting election sites from federal forces is ironclad. Anyone who violates that would be committing a federal crime. Federal and state laws also prohibit any effort to intimidate voters, wherever it occurs. A broad array of civil rights groups and labor unions have already filed lawsuits to hold the federal government accountable for its intimidation efforts—including The Brennan Center, where we work. Other lawyers across the country are poised to run to court to protect elections if federal agents do unlawfully show up to polls.

Outside court, election officials, state government officials, law enforcement, and voter protection organizations are prepared to respond to any instance of voter intimidation. That includes de-escalation and backup plans, including changing voting sites if needed, to ensure that all Americans can continue to vote safely. Voters are determined and undeterred, as millions so far have already cast their ballots by voting early and by mail.

Our advice to concerned voters: make a plan to vote as early as you can. Voters have multiple options to vote with confidence. In addition to voting at the polls on election day, they can vote early in person or vote by mail ballot, dropping it off in secure ballot drop boxes, at an election office, or by mail. You can also go vote with a trusted group of loved ones or neighbors. 

It is an outrage that the federal government has refused to rule out the idea of federal agents at the polls. In our view, it is part of a campaign to intimidate voters and undermine our elections. 

The only way it will succeed is if voters don’t show up.

Recently, one of us learned that her five-year-old was forgotten at school. The teenage neighbor who usually walks him home got distracted and forgot to collect him. Luckily, it was easy enough while working from home to dash out, stop at school, and then return to the laptop as he constructed a “dino-chicken-car” with some Legos. The crisis became a non-issue thanks to remote work.

Juggling parenthood and work is tough, and it shows up in our stress levels. The American Psychological Association reports that 48% of parents say that on most days their stress is completely overwhelming—around twice as many as other adults.

Remote work seems to offer a solution. Parents can put dinner in the oven between meetings so that food is ready before kids’ hangry tantrums arrive. A youngster with a virus can sleep through it while Dad takes calls over Zoom, so what would have been a sick day turns into a mostly-productive day. The time-bind that made it feel impossible to show up for one’s kids and for one’s career can seem less, well, binding.

But, weirdly, the rise of remote work hasn’t necessarily improved parents’ mental health, and may have even harmed it. In research published in Science, we considered the mental distress of over half a million Americans, measured by taking medication for depression or anxiety, seeing a mental health professional, and other factors. We compared people in jobs that could be done from home, like software engineers and customer service representatives, to those whose jobs necessitate in-person work, like mechanical engineers and cashiers. 

If remote work were a panacea for parents, we would expect the mental health of parents in remote-capable jobs to improve a lot with the rise of remote work. But we didn’t see that result. Instead, parents in remote-capable jobs saw bigger increases in reported depression and antidepressant use than those working in-person jobs.

How can remote work, something that so many parents feel eases their days, be potentially harmful to their mental health? Two factors contribute to this phenomenon.

First, remote work blurs boundaries. When people work remotely, they are much more likely to work at odd hours, answering emails in the wee hours of the morning and returning to tinker with presentation slides late at night. It’s as though once work could be completed at home, any home-time became fair game for work-time. Being always on for work can make the time-bind pinch in new ways. Parents can struggle to feel fully present for either their kids or their work.

Multi-tasking isn’t limited to odd hours outside the workday. Recent research documents that parents who work at companies that allow remote work tend to use less paid childcare. Using less paid childcare can be great for parents’ pocketbooks and their ability to see their kids more frequently. But it also increases stress if it means that parents are trying to work while also encouraging their toddler to take a nap or their middle schooler to do their homework. 

A recent Pew Research Center survey of 2,242 working parents found that doing work-related tasks while spending time with kids was more common among those who worked remotely than those who rarely or never did. But these interruptions undermine our ability to do work, and research has traced these family interruptions to lower wages among mothers working while doing “passive” childcare. 

Multitasking is painful when it feels as though we’re failing our colleagues and our kids. Something has to give.

The second flaw with remote work is that it deepens isolation that parents already experience all too frequently. Parenting can be lonely. Much of the time that Americans spend with their families is quite nuclear, just with kids and perhaps a partner, but without many other adults around. 

Remote work is also lonely. In our study, we found that the rise in remote work in the wake of the pandemic increased time spent alone by an hour a day for people in remote-capable jobs. The combination of both working and parenting outside a communal context can translate into a shortage of adult connection. Parents toggle between kids demanding attention and work demanding attention. The small interactions with peers and colleagues that nourish us disappear. And that ends up draining us in the long run.

As a result, remote work is not yet shoring up parents’ well-being. Yet carefully constructed remote work can be a boon for parents. Several strategies would help.

First, we must re-establish boundaries. It needs to be socially acceptable to truly sign off from work. This is unlikely to stick unless leaders and managers consistently encourage and enforce it. The desire to prove commitment will be too much of a lure for many to fully disengage without explicit support from higher-ups. Instead, managers need to ensure that those who were offline during a conversation still have an opportunity to contribute. By looping them in, leaders can make it okay to be fully present with work, and at other times, with family.

Second, we must structure in-person work so that it includes parents. When parents must pick up their kids from school daily, a hybrid schedule with full days in the office and full days remote may not be especially helpful. Instead, a shorter in-person workday, where you can sign off at 3 or 4 p.m., do pickup, dinner, and bedtime, and then sign back on might work better. In-person work doesn't need to happen every moment of every day, but scheduling it during school hours can help include parents more fully. 

For dispersed teams, off-site gatherings can be a valuable way to form connections. But to be inclusive, these meetings should be scheduled far in advance, since parents most likely need to secure additional support at home.

Finally, orienting doses of in-person work around connection can help alleviate loneliness. Make time for a social lunch with coworkers, even if it’s a brief one. For in-person meetings, book a meeting room rather than defaulting to the convenience of Zoom. Advocate for a team off-site gathering. A recent experiment shows that when remote workers at a call center came together in-person just once a month, they felt more connected to one another and were also more productive given what they learned from one another.

Remote work holds the potential to improve the lives of working parents. But to do this, remote work cannot just devolve into multitasking work and parenting. And it ought not deepen the isolation of modern parenthood. Instead, we need remote work with boundaries and human-to-human connection with colleagues—including colleagues who might happen to be parents.

When shipping through the Strait of Hormuz ground to a halt in March, energy importers relearned an old lesson: a country that buys its energy as fuel, cargo by cargo, also imports every price shock. The consequences of how governments respond to this truth will soon reverberate beyond energy markets. 

Decisions made today to secure more reliable energy may help determine where factories are built, which countries manufacture the technologies powering the global economy, and how vulnerable nations remain to the next disruption in oil and gas supplies. These decisions will define which countries emerge as electrostates, with the power to shape and control future economies.

New analysis by We Mean Business Coalition published today looking at electrification across 16 countries reveals how unevenly this transformation is progressing. The United States is doubling down on domestic oil and gas production, while China is rapidly electrifying its economy and consolidating its lead in electric technology manufacturing. Others are now moving in China's direction. France plans to lift electricity's share of final energy from 27% to 38% by 2035, Canada to double its electricity supply by 2050, and Europe wants to become the world's first “electro-continent.”

Rather than simply ranking countries, the Electrification Competitiveness Index maps two dimensions: the deployment and market uptake of electric technologies, and the policies and conditions supporting further progress.

Across the 16 economies, the median score for enabling conditions is 67%, compared with 45% for deployment and market conditions. In other words, in most countries, policy is running ahead of the market. Part of that gap is a time lag, but it also shows the distance between preparing for electrification and achieving it at scale. Successful electrification requires not simply more policies, but better-aligned policies that reinforce one another and give businesses the confidence to invest.

China scores highest on deployment, with extensive electric vehicle adoption and an industrial base producing much of the equipment the world needs to electrify. It already manufactures more than 80% of global battery cells. But its transition extends well beyond transport: electricity's share of China’s final energy consumption has doubled since 2005, with electrification spreading across industry, buildings, and transport. Although much of its electricity (54%) is still generated from coal, the plan is to replace that with clean power. What’s more, given China’s manufacturing dominance, as other countries electrify, they must make a choice: where to compete in electric technology manufacturing and where they might gain more from cheaper imported equipment.

Europe is one region trying to revive industrial competitiveness while reducing its exposure to imported fossil fuels, a vulnerability the Hormuz crisis has brought sharply back into focus. Electrification is central to both ambitions. Brussels wants to double electricity's share of final energy to 46% by 2040, yet that share has been stuck at around 23% for a decade, and the economics of switching remain difficult for many businesses. In Britain, industrial electricity costs over five times as much as gas per unit of energy, while factories in Germany and the U.K. face significant grid-connection constraints. France and Spain are better positioned in several respects, with more favourable electricity prices and stronger deployment, but across Europe the challenge is increasingly one of turning established policy frameworks into commercially viable investment.

Businesses deciding where to build factories, expand production, or replace equipment must also weigh electricity costs and grid access alongside skills, suppliers, and markets. If electrification remains difficult or expensive, businesses may postpone modernisation, continue investing in fossil-fuel equipment or direct new investment towards locations offering better conditions. Over time, this could reshape Europe's industrial geography, influencing where manufacturing capacity, jobs, and technological expertise develop.

In the U.S., existing deployment provides a foundation for further electrification, but policy reversals and infrastructure constraints raise questions about momentum. More than two terawatts of generation and storage are waiting in interconnection queues. Washington's focus on expanding fossil-fuel production risks leaving American manufacturers competing in a global market whose growth is increasingly driven by demand elsewhere.

For developing economies, electrification offers a different prospect: the opportunity to build modern energy and transport systems without first replicating the fossil-fuel infrastructure that wealthier countries are now spending heavily to replace. Ethiopia is already showing what is possible, with rapid electric vehicle adoption despite electricity reaching only around 60% of its population. Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Africa face greater barriers, including limited grid investment and electricity systems still dominated by fossil fuels.

Seizing those opportunities will depend on access to finance, reliable grids, and policies suited to each country's circumstances. Without them, emerging economies risk investing scarce capital in infrastructure that may become increasingly expensive to operate or eventually replace.

As this global shift evolves, economies powered increasingly by domestically generated electricity become less exposed to global fuel markets, but more dependent on access to batteries, electrical equipment, minerals, and the technologies needed to build and maintain their infrastructure. The concentration of manufacturing capacity in a handful of countries creates vulnerabilities of its own. Yet a dependency on equipment you buy once is very different from a dependency on fuel you buy every month. When a shipping lane closes, a fuel-importing economy feels it within days. If solar panel exports stopped tomorrow, the panels already installed would keep generating for decades.

Electrified economies also need far less energy in the first place. Burning fuel in engines, boilers, and power stations wastes around two-thirds of the energy that goes in, mostly as heat. Electric motors and heat pumps do the same work with a fraction of the input. So electrification does not simply swap one import for another; it can shrink the energy bill. The European Commission estimates that meeting its 2040 target could cut E.U. spending on fossil fuels by up to €260 billion a year.

This presents governments with a different industrial and energy-security challenge: not simply how quickly they can replace fossil fuels, but whether they can build the electricity systems, industrial capabilities, and trading relationships that make the transition economically resilient. Climate policy and industrial strategy are becoming impossible to separate, as the technologies needed to cut emissions also become central to economic competitiveness.

When governments meet in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31 in November, the U.N. climate conference president will push for a global goal to raise electricity's share of final energy from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. That shift deserves greater attention than it is getting. The transition from fossil fuels to electricity will not end competition over energy resources and technologies. It will change what countries compete for, what they need to import, and where economic power is concentrated. The electrostates of 2035 are being built now.

The first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the United States since 2022 is expected to arrive in New York within the next few weeks, but its 40,000-ton cargo amounts to less than two hours of American consumption. The shipment will barely register at the pump—and it answers the wrong question, since what drove American diesel past $6 a gallon was never a shortage of Russian supply, but historic bottlenecks from the war in the Middle East.

Recall what happened between May and July of this year, when Ukraine launched one of the most destructive phases of its energy war against Moscow, sending waves of drones attacking massive Russian refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Omsk one after another. If Russian refining capacity governed American fuel costs, prices at U.S. truck stops should have exploded. Instead, American diesel fell by $1.06 a gallon.

With the midterms days away and September’s consumer price index showing fuel oil up a staggering 74% on the year, President Donald Trump has cast Kyiv as the architect of American inflation. “What’s happened in Russia with Ukraine has been really the biggest problem for diesel,” he said in the Oval Office on September 30 before naming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the culprit, telling reporters that Zelenskyy “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”

The charge is politically convenient but economically backward. Until this month’s waiver, Russian fuel had been barred from American ports since 2022, meaning Ukrainian strikes have reached U.S. pumps only through the gradual tightening of global supply. The real shockwave runs through the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran can choke off a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude overnight. Diesel was $3.48 a gallon in January and still under $4 the week American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran. When Tehran closed the Strait, the price jumped 96 cents in a single week. 

From that moment, the U.S. price line has moved in lockstep with the Iran war—cresting at the April ceasefire, dipping only after the June truce, climbing after the pause in hostilities collapsed in July. By September, the tanker war had driven diesel to a record $6.53. 

Ukraine’s unceasing drone campaign has at most modestly nudged up the global floor, while the Iran war has steered every spike and plunge.

By authorizing the sale of Russian diesel, Washington provided Moscow the relief that sanctions are meant to withhold. And when Zelenskyy refused to halt strikes on Russian refineries, Americans throttled the Starlink defenses only they can supply. 

Now, Ukraine and its European backers are left with a narrowing set of options. Pulled with discipline, however, the levers they hold can still keep Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on a tightening clock.

A cure that feeds the disease

After an Oct. 9 phone call with Putin, President Trump directed the Treasury to reopen American ports to Russian diesel through April 2027. On paper, the deal promises 4.8 million tons of fuel. In reality, the promise amounts to roughly 10 days of U.S. demand, and analysts doubt that Moscow can ship even that much after months of Ukrainian strikes on the refineries that would fill the tankers.

Carnegie’s Sergey Vakulenko calls the arrangement “largely for show,” yet for a Kremlin watching its September oil and gas tax revenues plunge 22% year-over-year, the spectacle is the prize. What former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul condemned as “absolutely deplorable,” and Zelenskyy called “a gift to Putin,” was followed a week later by a concession of far greater strategic weight. Two days before the Russia provisions of the Graham sanctions act were scheduled to bite, an executive order waived them. In a single stroke, the White House neutralized both the 100 and 500% tariffs and stripped out the clause locking existing sanctions in place.

While Moscow collected waivers, Kyiv got the vise. Washington announced an “energy ceasefire” the Kremlin never bothered to acknowledge. After Zelenskyy held his fire for three days, Russia pounded Ukrainian energy infrastructure 76 times in the week that followed. By the Ukrainian president’s account—one Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies—the American satellite alerts that warn Ukraine when a Russian missile is in the air went dark for a period of time. Procurement contracts required for the transfer of an allied-funded batch of Patriot interceptors reportedly sat unsigned on the desk of U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

Meanwhile, the speed of Starshield datalinks, the military-grade Starlink network that Ukraine’s drone units rely on, was throttled. Starshield datalinks need to operate at speeds up to 550 km/h (342 mph) to effectively intercept Russian jet-powered Shahed and Geran drones. 

The 160 km/h (100 mph) cap was apparently instituted—simply insufficient to protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian ballistic missiles. 

Trump and Elon Musk finger-pointed at each other for the restriction. Trump has reportedly since called Musk to lift the cap. U.S. officials say service is running more normally. Kyiv says the limit remained in place into this weekend, with President Zelenskyy tweeting on October 24 that service has now been restored.

The Trump Administration should also allow Ukraine to use the system in Russia, targeting ballistic missile launchers. Take out the archer, not the arrows.

What Ukraine can still do

Washington’s squeeze rests on the premise that Kyiv is losing and must be forced to settle, but the front-line situation does not support that notion. Russian forces have made virtually no net territorial gains in 2026 despite suffering more than 40,000 casualties a month since July. At this year’s rate of advance, we estimate that Moscow would need 60 years to capture the rest of Donetsk Oblast.

In fact, the momentum has tilted the other way, with Ukrainian counteroffensives, such as the exceptionally innovative Operation Vivaldi. For months, Kyiv’s forces have killed or seriously wounded more Russian soldiers than the Kremlin can recruit. Closing that gap would require a mass mobilization Putin has been afraid to order, wary of unrest in a country reeling from the fuel shortages created by Ukraine’s refinery strikes. The myth of an inevitable Russian victory amounts to a Kremlin sales pitch aimed at Washington, and the very energy campaign the White House wants to shut down is what keeps Putin boxed in.

Nor can the White House physically switch that campaign off. For all the damage the administration’s freeze inflicted on Ukraine’s air shield, enough Ukrainian drones and missiles were able to reach their targets. Washington’s leverage is entirely defensive, whereas Ukraine’s offensive reach is built at home and in Europe. The 1,000-strong armada that struck St. Petersburg in mid-October was built around FP-1 drones, 90% of which are Ukrainian-made, flying into Russian airspace where Starlink does not function, and Starshield caps do not apply. The E.U.’s Kaja Kallas has rightly defended Ukraine’s actions as legitimate self-defense. 

By Putin’s estimate, the wider Ukrainian campaign has cost Russia about 1% of GDP, more than a year of Russian growth, as the central bank’s fight against punishing inflation pushed interest rates to their highest level since the early 2000s. The true toll is almost certainly worse. As we have previously argued, even after Moscow blacked out mandatory economic data, the IMF continues to recycle unverified Kremlin figures to dub Russia the world’s fourth-largest economy at peak output, despite ranking just 51st in GDP per capita. 

In 2022, hundreds of billions of dollars abandoned the Russian economy after our team helped spur the withdrawal of more than 1,000 major corporations following the invasion. Firms that curtailed operations outperformed those that did not, in terms of market performance. 

Even where Kyiv chooses to look beyond oil, its domestic weapons require no American permission and offend no American farmer. Homegrown Long Neptune missiles have already crippled four of the Black Sea Fleet’s Kalibr missile carriers and recently destroyed four Russian Su-34 bombers, proving that Ukraine can systematically hunt the launchers, airfields, and factories that fire on its cities. The same freedom of action applies to striking Russian data centers, an asymmetric campaign that an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute judges lopsidedly in Kyiv’s favor because Ukraine’s critical data is already safely hosted abroad.

Holding an offensive campaign that Washington wants to stop but cannot physically block changes the terms of diplomacy. Toward the White House, Kyiv should act as a customer rather than a supplicant. Any pause in energy strikes should be treated strictly as an opportunity to make a deal—offered only in exchange for verified Russian reciprocity and binding, written guarantees from Washington on Patriot interceptors, satellite-based missile launch warnings, and uncapped Starshield access, a bargain of the kind legislators like Senator Roger Wicker and organizations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have urged.

What Europe must now do

Kyiv’s balancing act rests on a hard truth in Brussels. Europe can replace most of America’s financial support and much of its weaponry within two years, but it cannot replace Patriot-class interceptors, space-based ballistic-missile warning, or Starlink-scale connectivity this winter. The vulnerability is partly of Europe’s own making after three decades of over-reliance on American dominance, and it now collides with an American arsenal running dry.

The on-again, off-again war with Iran that drove U.S. diesel to $6.53 is also the conflict that emptied the Pentagon’s magazines. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Gulf conflict consumed roughly two-thirds of America’s Patriot inventory and more than a third of its THAAD interceptors, leaving a rebuild measured in years at the exact moment Ukraine’s Patriot stockpiles are reportedly exhausted. Europe’s scramble to build sovereign air defenses—four SAMP/T NG batteries currently on order, a 10-nation FREYJA program aiming for a first intercept in mid-2027, and the diplomatic courtship of Japan, the sole non-American producer of PAC-3 interceptors—is real and necessary, but slow. Every euro spent on European interceptors is one less dollar earned in Washington, and one fewer armament President Trump can delay.

A similar bottleneck applies to space. While Europe’s radar and optical satellites could potentially replace American targeting imagery within weeks, OneWeb and the E.U.’s GovSatcom offer only a partial hedge against a Starlink slowdown. And a European satellite constellation capable of warning of a ballistic launch probably will not exist before the 2030s.

Because Europe cannot buy its way out of those technical bottlenecks overnight, it must lean aggressively into the financial and maritime levers it controls today. The E.U.’s €90 billion loan covers 2026 and much of 2027, and when the remaining €70 billion gap comes to a head at the December European Council, moving the €202 billion in frozen Russian assets out of Belgium offers the clearest route around Belgium’s objections. Better still, a full ban on shipping services for Russian crude, along with expanding the shadow-fleet boardings that European navies have already begun, could squeeze Moscow’s war chest at almost no cost to European taxpayers.

Ukraine’s most decisive advantage, though, is found on the factory floor. Domestic drone production has surged 370% this year, and the Ukrainian-made Flamingo cruise missile costs just under $600,000, less than a fifth of an American Tomahawk’s $3.5 million price tag. By guaranteeing a loan to the Flamingo’s manufacturer, Denmark has laid out a blueprint for surviving an erratic Washington: European capital behind Ukrainian weapons.

The lesson of the lever

A bitter paradox governs the current battlefield. The offensive campaign squeezing Moscow is the one Washington objects to, while the defenses faltering over Ukrainian cities are the ones only the U.S. can supply. By blaming Kyiv for an energy shock originating in the Persian Gulf, the White House has struck a bargain that lowers no prices at home, replenishes the aggressor’s coffers abroad, and teaches the Kremlin that American sanctions expire if Putin simply waits them out. Such a posture delivers neither peace nor strength. 

Ukraine is akin to the Biblical hero David, who, through cunning, triumphed over the lumbering giant Goliath. Moscow's “card hand” is neither the colossus Trump believes it to be nor the colossus its propaganda advertises. Russia is not remotely an economic superpower. Beneath its vast map lies a concentrated population—over 80% of the population lives in the 20% not plagued by extreme cold, permafrost, and poor soil—and a brittle economy dependent on raw materials the world can increasingly buy elsewhere, backed by a military with a long history of failing to subdue smaller, more determined foes, from Japan in 1905 and Poland in 1920 to Finland in 1940 and the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. Sheer land mass has never guaranteed victory when the smaller side is fighting for its existence.

The silver lining is that Washington’s attempted coercion is forging the European autonomy it assumed would never materialize. If European leaders withstand Russian pressure over the next 18 months and resist the political disarray stoked by Kremlin disinformation, the continent will emerge a far more formidable power—proving the quip circulating in allied capitals that Europe has found no better unifier since Charlemagne than Donald Trump. Europe, Ukraine, and the world now know what an American guarantee is worth when the guarantor changes its mind, and Washington is about to learn that leverage, like interceptors, is a stock that depletes with every use.

As Mark Twain advised, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

On Oct. 25, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won an unprecedented fourth term, defeating the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 % of the vote, a margin of nearly 4.4 million votes. For the 80-year-old Lula, who had trailed his opponent by 2.2 million votes in the first round of elections just three weeks earlier, the victory was a remarkable comeback.

Brazil is the largest country and economy in Latin America, and the contest had become a test of whether the region’s rightward shift could be stopped. Lula’s victory interrupted that drift and dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s ambition to build a hemisphere of governments aligned with his politics. Yet interpreting the result as a triumph for the left would be a mistake.

Consider the first round of the elections in Brazil: more than 33 million Brazilians did not vote in the first round, an abstention rate of 21.08 %, the highest for a presidential election first round since 1998. Millions more cast blank or invalid ballots. Voting is optional for Brazilians aged 16 and 17 and for those 70 or older, but the scale of abstention points to a broader problem of political alienation. The high rejection rates for both candidates suggest that, for many voters, the election was not about electing a president but to ensure his opponent is not elected.

Flávio, whose father and former president Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years in prison for crimes against democracy, won the first round, with 2 million more votes than Lula, and his Liberal Party’s formidable showing in Congress in early October shocked the liberal world. He ran as his father’s proxy. He promised to pardon his father and his accomplices and to carry forward his political legacy.

The new expectations of Lula’s children

It seemed puzzling that Lula needed such a dramatic comeback to win re-election when unemployment in Brazil stood at 5.3 %, near a historic low. The International Monetary Fund projected that Brazil would become the world’s eighth-largest economy in 2027. Poverty in the country had fallen substantially during Lula’s third term, while real wages rose and food insecurity declined. Violent deaths had fallen to their lowest level in over a decade. Deforestation of the Amazon had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1988. Incumbents have been re-elected in Brazil with far less to show for their time in office.

The children of Lula’s social policies came of age in a rapidly changing world, and in a country where formal employment, labor unions, and traditional social protections have struggled to serve an increasingly informal workforce. Some turned toward market-oriented politics. Others found a sense of belonging in conservatism, part of a broader rightward turn among young men around the world.

Brazil’s left governed for much of their formative years. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016 amid a bitter political crisis and corruption scandals that implicated political figures across party lines. For many Brazilians, the political establishment became synonymous with impunity and self-preservation. They saw Lula’s Workers’ Party as the establishment. And while Lula’s earlier corruption convictions had been annulled, the allegations continued to shadow him.

Meanwhile, lethal violence had become a defining feature of everyday life. Brazil had urbanized rapidly without addressing deep inequality or reforming a public-security system inherited from the military dictatorship. Overcrowded prisons became recruiting grounds for criminal factions.

In Rio de Janeiro, militias made up largely of serving and former police officers and other security personnel initially claimed to protect residents from drug traffickers. They evolved into criminal enterprises that extorted communities, struck deals with drug factions, and infiltrated local governments. Yet responsibility for confronting them remained fragmented. State governments control most policing, leaving the federal government with limited direct authority over local law enforcement.

Flávio understood how to exploit voters’ distrust and frustration. His promises of tougher security resonated with Brazilians desperate for protection. His campaign drew comparisons to the hardline model of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Yet Bolsonaro Jr. also faced questions about his own associations with criminal figures in Rio, undermining his claim to offer a solution to the country’s security crisis. During the campaign, new revelations about his ties to Daniel Vorcaro, the disgraced banker and owner of Banco Master at the center of a vast financial scandal, added to those doubts, even as he denies wrongdoing.

Flávio's brother, Eduardo, had lobbied the Trump Administration to punish Brazil over the prosecution of their father. Washington imposed tariffs on Brazilian exports, explicitly linking the measures to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The tariffs threatened Brazilian businesses and proved deeply unpopular, leaving Flávio defending a political alliance whose costs would be borne by Brazil.

How Lula fought back

Lula’s campaign had expected these vulnerabilities to suffice. When Flávio entered the presidential race in Dec. 2025, early polls placed Lula comfortably ahead. His first-round defeat jolted the progressive camp out of its complacency. Lula’s campaign returned to the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and intensified its presence on social media, seeking to mobilize the voters who had stayed home in the first round. Lula’s people reorganized their digital outreach to speak more directly to younger Brazilians and informal workers.

Lula, who had initially seemed detached from younger voters’ digital habits, embraced viral content and selfies. His coalition expanded beyond the traditional left, drawing in moderates and voters who feared another Bolsonaro presidency. His campaign also challenged what it described as algorithmic bias on platforms such as Instagram, securing an electoral court ruling requiring equal treatment of candidates’ content.

The most potent opening for the Lula campaign came from Washington. Trump praised Flávio’s first-round performance as a “very, very big victory,” helping Lula recast the runoff as a contest over national sovereignty. The tariffs had already alienated Brazilian exporters and moderate voters.

In televised debates and rallies, Lula accused the Bolsonaro family of serving American interests and warned that Flávio would surrender control of Brazil’s natural resources to foreign interests. He also attacked his rival’s support for sweeping cuts inspired by President Javier Milei of Argentina. For voters outside the left, defending national sovereignty offered a reason to support Lula despite their reservations about his government.

On São Paulo’s Paulista Avenue, Brazil’s main stage for political protests, a protester wore a Trump mask and carried a Flávio puppet. The image captured the choice Lula wanted the voters to see. This was no longer simply a referendum on his record. It was also a choice about whether Brazil would let an American president shape its politics.

Lula’s campaign turned a contest he had been losing into a choice between an imperfect incumbent and a candidate whose victory threatened democratic institutions and national autonomy. Abstention fell from 21.08 % in the first round to 19.22 % in the runoff. On election day, severe weather and heavy rainfall in southern Brazil kept some voters from reaching the polling booths. Transportation disruptions also hampered voting in cities including Salvador and São Paulo. A last-minute Supreme Court ruling extended voting hours by two hours, allowing more voters in working-class strongholds to cast their ballots.

Lula’s victory is both a reprieve and a warning. It shows that a broad democratic coalition, mobilizing in the streets and online, can defeat a far-right candidate even amid a regional shift to the right and pressure from Washington. But the victory has not resolved Brazil’s divisions. Lula must govern a country where about half of those who cast valid ballots chose his opponent. He has won four years. He has not won back the country.

Flávio has challenged the result and demanded that the runoff be annulled. His party holds a powerful position in Congress, where conservative and center-right forces can obstruct Lula’s agenda. The election has given Brazilian democracy breathing room, but the battle for Brazil’s democracy has only begun. What Lula does with his mandate will determine whether he can make it count.

Each new release of a frontier AI model, such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s Astra, brings a new wave of speculation over how much closer this takes us to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how much further that lofty goal remains. 

But what if we’re overlooking something more important than an individual model’s supposed IQ?

OpenAI recently announced that an internal model, claimed to be “significantly more capable than GPT‑6 Astra,” solved Navier-Stokes, one of a handful of legendary math problems each carrying a million-dollar bounty. While mathematicians unpack what this means for the profession, and investors unpack what it means for OpenAI’s upcoming IPO, to me the biggest takeaway is that capability emerges from the collective. Just as it does in nature.

OpenAI didn’t crack Navier-Stokes by pointing its internal model at the problem. It pointed a swarm of 10,000 AI bots at it. These agents were encouraged to explore different directions and communicate promising leads with each other. 

Think of what a lone honeybee or termite can accomplish compared to a colony of them. What a single person can accomplish compared to a nation of them.  

In biology, a bacterial colony is a group of identical cells derived from the same mother cell. This, I would argue, is the most suitable analogy for the collective of agents that solved Navier-Stokes. It is many from one. Or, to paraphrase Walt Whitman: an AI that contains multitudes. 

While OpenAI deployed its AI colony to solve a math problem that no human or individual AI agent could, Google DeepMind recently set an AI colony loose on math problems for a different purpose. It wanted to see what behaviors would arise within the colony. What it found was remarkable. 

One agent discovered a way to cheat, convincing the examination software that it had solved math problems when it hadn’t. Rather than resting content with this small victory, it messaged other agents, telling them how to cheat. Some agents joined the unscrupulous agent and formed a sub-colony of cheaters. Others resisted and even formed a sub-colony of whistleblowers trying to out the cheaters. 

As a math professor, I thought it was hard enough to keep students from using AI to cheat on exams. Now we have to worry about the AIs themselves cheating on math exams!

Which brings us to perhaps the most striking example of AI hive intelligence: the Hugging Face hack. OpenAI’s agents broke out of a sandbox environment and hacked into another company. Arguably, it was a felony offense—or rather, it would have been if a human were in charge. OpenAI’s agents coordinated their behavior in ingenious ways, including writing secret messages in a file system so that even when one AI colony was erased, a future colony could pick up the hack where the previous one left off.

Researchers have long known that complex behavior can emerge from simple computer systems. For instance, in 1970 the mathematician John Conway introduced the Game of Life, where an elementary set of rules governing the movement of pixels on a screen leads to remarkably rich ecosystems.

With today’s AI agents, we are going far beyond this by letting extremely sophisticated entities interact in sophisticated ways—using language, often hidden and coded. 

This is why we must adopt a new mindset regarding AI capability. Testing a new AI model to see what it can do and how dangerous it might be by directly prompting it is like deciding how safe it would be to stick your head in a wasp nest by letting a single insect sting you. 

Some developers and red-team activities do focus on AI colonies. The Hugging Face attack resulted from OpenAI trying to evaluate the cybersecurity capabilities of an AI colony. But the AI arms race between the U.S. and China, and between the competing companies within each country, has dangerously pushed our attention to what each individual model can do. 

One model might top the leaderboards, but a thousand weaker models could wreak far more havoc. As calls to pace the frontier abound, let us not lose sight of the fact that the AI frontier isn’t what each model can do in isolation—it is what a colony of them can accomplish together. 

The next time someone does you a favor, take a minute to note how they respond to “thank you.” You’ll likely find that the traditional “you’re welcome” is fast fading and being replaced by “no problem” or “no worries.”

We often treat politeness as a set of rules that people either follow or ignore. But the rules themselves are changing.

In the time of Old English (5^th to 11^th centuries), acting according to one’s rank and station was simply expected. Linguistic analysis shows very direct request forms, for example, “Thou shalt do X,” rather than the more modern, “Would you mind doing X?” And routine thanking, or saying “you’re welcome,” would have seemed odd in a time when people simply did what was required.

When Norman French started to enter English around 1066, the idea of courteous behavior also entered the language. An example would be the move toward switching between “you” and “thou” to appropriately show respect or intimacy, modeled on the French tu/vous distinction.

This concept of courtesy was central to how one expressed gratitude and, by the time we arrived in the early modern era (the time of Shakespeare), thanking was firmly established. However, routinely responding to those thanks was not common. If uttered at all, we’d more often hear something like a deferential, “I am but your humble servant.”

In the 18^th century, elaborate complimenting routines became popular, and by the late 19th and early 20th century, English-speaking society had a greater focus on treating all people as equals. As a result, being aware of how one’s actions might impose upon others became increasingly important.

Requests that were once directly stated as imperatives were now couched with indirectness as merely suggestions or questions: “Shut the window,” became “Could you please shut the window?” And, in addition to saying “thanks,” responding with an acknowledgment of that thanks, such as “you’re welcome,” became routine.

This brings us to modern times. Today, “you’re welcome” is becoming less common. Instead, when someone says “thank you,” we reply with “not at all,” “no problem,” or “no worries.” This assures the person who expresses gratitude that no imposition was involved. In this way, we attempt to offset any social imbalance.  

As a result, Americans who say “no problem” and those who always respond with “you’re welcome” can tend to believe the other camp sounds rude. 

Those who prefer “no problem” often feel that “you’re welcome” has a condescending tone, while “you’re welcome” traditionalists feel like “no problem” suggests the favor could have been a problem. For instance, the sense that “you’re welcome” can have a bit of a smug, haughty tone has been played up by comedians like Will Ferrell in his 2009 Broadway show, You’re Welcome America, satirizing George W. Bush’s presidency.

Research confirms this shift toward expressions like “no problem” or “no worries” over “you’re welcome” is a generational one. In the norms of how we respond to thank you across generations, linguist Aaron Dinkin found that young Americans increasingly preferred “no problem” as the go-to polite response to “thank you.” Older speakers still felt “you’re welcome” was more appropriate, particularly when a favor required more than perfunctory gratitude.

So, the way someone responds to “thank you” is much more than a simple return on someone’s gratitude. These small words help us understand how politeness—and our expectations of one another—have changed over time.

In 2015, Chicago’s public health department identified three cases of invasive meningococcal disease, a highly dangerous pathogen that can kill within hours. To determine whether these cases signaled a larger outbreak, the department—which one of us, Dr. Julie Morita, led at the time—needed to know not just total cases, but the total population and demographics of affected areas. The team turned to a pillar of our nation’s public health system: the U.S. Census.

The data showed that men who have sex with men—including gay and bisexual men—among the city’s Black population were disproportionately affected. That finding drove the health department’s response, which included working with community partners to surge thousands of free vaccines into neighborhoods across Chicago. Instead of a larger and far deadlier outbreak, the outbreak ended with 11 cases in Chicago and one death.  

Census data informs every aspect of our nation’s public health system. As former leaders of local and federal health agencies, we have seen this firsthand. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has proposed radical changes to the census that would make our country less healthy, less safe, and less fair. 

The public comment period on this proposal closes on Nov. 2. Health leaders must move quickly to oppose these deeply misguided changes. It is clear to us that these changes would amount not only to an assault on our public health system but also on the U.S. Constitution. 

Per the Constitution, the federal government has carried out a national census every decade since 1790—through wars, depressions, and pandemics. Everyone who resides in our country matters and should be counted. But the Trump Administration is suggesting that the census should intentionally exclude people. This includes undocumented residents and nonimmigrant visa holders, such as foreign national students and temporary workers whose visas may permit them to live in the U.S. for several years. The Administration is further attempting to remove demographic questions related to race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from the census questionnaire.      

The repercussions would be vast. An inaccurate count would negatively affect congressional representation. The idea that some people do not deserve to be counted uncomfortably echoes the “3/5 compromise,” an insidious and later repealed clause in the original Constitution under which enslaved persons were counted as less than full people. Incomplete and unreliable demographic data could distort how trillions of federal dollars are distributed across hundreds of programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and Head Start. Communities with the greatest needs, especially those with immigrant or mixed-status families, would likely be hardest hit. 

These are our neighbors, families, and friends. But let’s be clear: the impacts would extend beyond those communities, especially the public health consequences. As the Chicago meningococcal outbreak illustrates, health officials need a complete picture to protect people from disease and other threats. They must know who is getting sick, where, and at what rate. Take any of those data out of the equation, and the people who need the most help are far less likely to get it.  

During the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, when one of us, Dr. Richard Besser, served as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), census data were instrumental in tracking the outbreak. CDC relied on this data to calculate infection rates by age, which showed that children and young adults were getting sick at far higher rates than older adults—a striking departure from typical patterns observed with seasonal flu. When a vaccine became available, these data directly informed recommendations that prioritized children and young adults. 

A decade later, the COVID pandemic demonstrated the importance of these data on a massive scale. As case counts surged in the initial months of the outbreak, population and demographic data revealed who was shouldering the greatest burdens. CDC found that hospitalization rates were highest for American Indian, Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic populations. CDC later used census population estimates to calculate vaccination rates by race and ethnicity, allowing health officials to identify disparities in vaccine uptake. States like North Carolina relied successfully on census-tract data to increase vaccination rates among target populations.   

These examples span different locations, diseases, and levels of government, but illustrate common themes: public health officials rely heavily on census data to save lives and protect communities, and protecting communities at greatest risk helps keep us all safer and healthier. 

Health officials use population counts to study cancer, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and many other diseases. Demographic data expose disparities that raw numbers can obscure and show whether those gaps are growing or shrinking. Together, they offer a roadmap to direct resources where they can do the most good.  

The next census count is still a few years away, but what our leaders decide now matters a great deal. A census that deliberately counts fewer people while telling us less about them will leave our nation ill-prepared for future outbreaks and pandemics, while making it harder to handle daily health challenges. It is essential for the public health community to speak out now.

In A Fine Balance, one of the finest novels about modern India set in the 1960s and 1970s, Rohinton Mistry powerfully conveys a sense of the social meaning of the vote for the Indians at the bottom of the ladder. Narayan, a Dalit tailor, insists on marking his own ballot in an upcoming election instead of allowing an upper-caste landlord’s men to vote on his behalf.

Dukhi, his father, warns him against it.  “It is still my right,” Narayan replies. “And I will exercise it in the next election, I promise you.”

Dukhi urges him not to risk his life.

“Life without dignity is worthless,” Narayan replies.

I have been rereading Mistry’s novel over the past few weeks as a series of protests has turned October into a month of fierce battles over the integrity of India’s elections, the accountability of its institutions, the right to protest, and the soul of its democracy.

A nascent Gen-Z movement, Cockroach Janta Party, which organized protests over education and unemployment in Delhi in June and July and forced the resignation of India’s higher education minister, gave the call for the October protests. Young protestors answered with an insurrectionary energy in the summer and soon found support from a broader coalition comprised of opposition parties, social movements and other pillars of Indian civil society.

These assorted protesters see the stakes of the current moment as existential: the sanctity of the vote in India, the essential ingredient, in other words, of democracy.  Throughout October thousands joined the cause in Delhi and other Indian cities, their marches spurred by anger directed against an ongoing national exercise to overhaul the country’s electoral register. 

Known as the Special Intensive Revision, the exercise has, according to the protestors, resulted in more than 130 million voters being removed from electoral lists. Although electoral rolls have been revised periodically, this is the first time such an exercise has placed the burden on citizens to establish their eligibility, raising fears that millions of legitimate voters, particularly the poor and marginalized, could be disenfranchised. 

Seeking accountability, they have been calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the country’s chief election commissioner, who oversees the Election Commission of India, the body charged with conducting and safeguarding the sanctity of elections across the nation. The protestors accuse Kumar of abandoning his constitutional obligation to act impartially. In their telling, the mandarin has set the table in a way to favor the interests of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a charge denied by those in power.

Already shaken by the summer protests over education, this time the Indian government responded with coercive force, effectively turning central Delhi, the political and administrative heart of the capital, and the place where India goes to protest, into a garrison. On Oct. 10, it deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel, restricted internet access, detained thousands of protesters, and sought to deny the protesters access to public spaces across the capital. 

The crackdown was intense. On the night of Oct. 16, there was a palpable sense of panic on social media in India as an urgent question was asked repeatedly: Where is Neha Bora? A 29-year-old doctoral student and left-wing activist, Bora has emerged as one of the most articulate and formidable leaders of these protests, which have rattled Modi’s government and—despite valiant attempts to construct a counter narrative by BJP leaders and other party apparatchiks—become a significant challenge to his popularity and legitimacy.

Bora was detained by the police on their way to join the thousands of protesters who had converged on Connaught Place, a prominent commercial district in the capital, waving the national flag and reiterating demands to protect the right to vote and the sanctity of electoral democracy in India. For several hours after sunset, there was no news of the whereabouts of Bora, who uses they/them pronouns. Their lawyers spoke about the police refusing to reveal their location. Eventually, around midnight, their lawyers located them at a police station. 

When Bora was released on Saturday morning, they tweeted, “Fighting for democracy and the Constitution cannot be criminalized.” It was a neat summation of the sentiment moving so many Indians to take to the streets, namely a sense of being robbed of something of existential proportions. “Now if they take away our right to vote,” a protester told a reporter, “what is left with us?”

The power of the vote

The emotional charge behind the protests has its roots in the birth of the modern Indian nation-state itself. India always took great pride in adopting universal franchise rights as the Constitution of India came into effect on Jan. 26, 1950. In its historic first general elections in 1952, every Indian above the age of 21, irrespective of caste, religion, gender, race or wealth, had their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. It was, as many legal and constitutional scholars have since remarked, a colossal feat, and one that became a touchstone for the modern idea of India. 

Hence the current upheaval in the country. The Modi government may be reversing decades of democratic gains by recasting the act of voting as a privilege, conferred at the discretion of bureaucrats or as a favor from the ruling party, rather than a right guaranteed by the constitutional order. Now, every prospective voter must first complete an enumeration form, and many may subsequently be required to produce onerous documentary evidence, such as birth certificates and educational records to establish their eligibility to vote. Tens of millions of Indians from marginalized communities either lack documentary records or possess documents that are riddled with mistakes such as spelling errors, making it harder for them to navigate any process of bureaucratic verification. 

The fear is that India is—to put it bluntly—being yanked back to a darker time, one from which it emerged in no small part because of the work done over decades to firmly establish the credibility and broaden the depth of its democratic franchise. In the 1950s, India was an overwhelmingly rural country, with around 83% of its population living in the villages and only about 17% in urban areas. Its nascent democratic system confronted entrenched social hierarchies of caste and power. Early accounts of grassroots democracy in India describe how higher-caste landowners controlled the votes of their lower-caste dependents, sometimes even marking ballots that the voters had to authenticate with their thumbprints.

The pioneering Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas showed how politicians campaigning for votes treated villagers not as individual voters with agency but as members of “vote banks.” Politicians approached landlords or community leaders to deliver these blocs of votes in return for favors from the government, from “licenses for buses and rice-mills to seats in medical and technological colleges for their kinsfolk.”

And well into the 1960s, millions of Indians were still unable to exercise their constitutional right to vote. In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, landlords used club-wielding enforcers known as lathaits to keep Dalits, members of the most oppressed caste, out of polling booths. “I remember watching members of my caste being dragged out of a polling booth,” an elderly Dalit man in Bihar’s Siwan district recalled in an interview with The Print, an Indian news site.

During the state elections in 1967, Jagdish Master, a teacher turned activist, challenged the veto of the landlords over Dalit suffrage by escorting a group of Dalits to a polling booth in Ekwari, a village in Bihar’s Bhojpur district. The landlords’ henchmen brutally beat him and drove him out. He returned to the village as an armed guerrilla, recruiting Dalit laborers and other poor peasants in a Maoist-style rural insurgency that would flare across the region for decades.

The power of the vote in Indian consciousness transformed radically after the “Emergency,” the period between June 1975 and March 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended constitutional rights, assumed untrammeled powers, imprisoned opposition leaders and silenced the press. Much of India’s elite—bureaucrats, businessmen, newspaper editors and movie stars—bent the knee and welcomed Mrs. Gandhi’s promise of “order” and “discipline.” Wealth and connections offered protection from the state. India’s poor, stripped of their electoral power, suffered terrible abuses of an unaccountable bureaucracy and police from slum demolitions to forced sterilization of men.

In the general elections held in March 1977 after the end of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress Party was decisively defeated by the people and tossed out of power for the first time since Indian independence in 1947. The principal victims of abuses of the Emergency—Dalits, Muslims, and the poor of the populous northern Indian states—voted against the Congress party for the first time and contributed significantly to its removal from power

The power of the vote has gradually forced India’s high-handed bureaucracy to recognize the human dignity and political citizenship of ordinary people. The electorate delivered its verdict on Mrs. Gandhi’s breach of the sacred covenant between the Indian state and its people: the people confer legitimacy on the state in exchange for their rights, including its protection of the sanctity of the vote. Having asserted their power, voters proved difficult to subdue again. As the political theorist Partha Chatterjee put it, it was the 1977 defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress party that established the “capacity of the vote.” 

A silent revolution

India’s poor and marginalized took proper control of their voting choices three decades after independence. In the years after the Emergency, they leveraged the vote as a means to a secure livelihood or as a tool for ensuring justice. Politicians could no longer rely on local patrons to intimidate people into voting for them and had to compete on representing their interests. A new competitive politics emerged in the 1980s and led to an upsurge, as Chatterjee wrote, “of popular demands of a kind that had never before been allowed to disturb the order and tranquility of the proverbial corridors of power.”

By the 1990s, political leaders from socially disenfranchised castes and Dalit communities were taking power in the populous, northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot memorably described it as “the silent revolution.” This revolution, ushered in by the votes of the historically oppressed communities, did not quite transform the economic and social structures of the region. But it changed the everyday relations of power. Indrajit Roy, a scholar of development studies, recalled a refrain he heard frequently during his fieldwork among Dalits in Bihar in the late 2000s: “There has been development, change has come. Today, we can look the landlord in the eye and speak as equals.” 

Vote banks had thus turned into vehicles of collective political assertion. Marginalized communities had become adept at pooling their votes to secure political favors and advance their shared interests. They chose their own patrons, preferring their own caste leaders to represent their interests and negotiate with the state on their behalf.

Over time, the clientelist politics of vote banks became associated with an entrenched culture of corruption. This helped pave the way for Modi’s successful national campaign in 2014, in which he cast himself as a populist strongman who embodied the aspirations for “development” of all Indians while portraying the Congress and regional parties as beholden to their respective vote banks. Modi’s attacks on vote bank politics also carried a more sinister charge: that successive governments had appeased India’s Muslims minority, which accounts for around 14% of the population, for their votes at the expense of the national interest.

Bangladesh borders the Indian state of West Bengal and Modi reserved his sharpest, xenophobic barbs for Bengal’s Muslims, whom he tarred during his 2014 campaign as “Bangladeshi” and “illegal immigrants,” establishing a template for their vilification that persists to this day. In an inflammatory campaign speech, Modi issued an ominous warning: “After May 16 [the day of the results of the 2014 elections], these Bangladeshis better be prepared with their bags packed.”

A dangerous exclusion

The Modi government invoked that very specter of the “illegal, Bangladeshi Muslim” to push through revisions to electoral rolls across most Indian states. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, who had earlier likened Bangladeshi immigrants to “termites,” responded to the ongoing protests by calling them an “action plan to protect infiltrators.”

There are no reliable estimates of how many Bangladeshi immigrants live in India. In 2016, a minister of the Modi government told the parliament, without citing a source, that the country was home to some 20 million “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.” The government later acknowledged that it had no accurate data on the number of illegal immigrants in India.

Yet the Indian government has used unfounded speculation about “illegal” Bangladeshis to overturn the fundamental logic of the country’s electoral registration system, shifting the burden of ensuring registration from the Election Commission to the voter herself. The commission was responsible for ensuring that every citizen made it onto the electoral rolls. 

The exercise has already disproportionately disenfranchised the poor, migrants, religious minorities, women—and is bound to continue doing so. “The majority of voters in Bihar who were excluded from the list were in rural areas,” said retired Maj. Gen. Anil Verma, who heads the Association for Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit group that challenged the electoral rolls revisions in the Supreme Court. “Those worst affected were the poor and the marginalized—they had no documents.”

Opposition parties have also alleged that the electoral roll revisions tilted the electoral field in the BJP’s favor in the West Bengal election held earlier this year, helping the party win power in the state for the first time. An analysis by the SABAR Institute, a public policy research institute, lent some credence to that charge: a disproportionate share of the 9.08 million voters removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls came from constituencies held by the then-ruling Trinamool Congress or those with large Muslim populations. 

The Election Commission has denied the charge that the deletions were politically motivated, arguing that it applied uniform criteria to remove entries for voters who had died, were registered more than once or had permanently relocated. But that claim is difficult to reconcile with the disproportionate representation  of certain  groups among those deleted from supplementary lists issued for some constituencies after an adjudication process. For instance, although Muslims make up around 23% of the population of Nandigram, a constituency in West Bengal, the SABAR Institute study found that they accounted for 95.5% of the deletions across seven supplementary lists released by the Election Commission for the constituency.

Voting carries an almost existential significance for Indians whose equal citizenship has not been fully recognized by the institutions of the state. Indians see the vote as an affirmation of their existence. If the vote is no longer a gift freely given or withdrawn by the people but a resource controlled by the state, it reduces ordinary voters once again to supplicants dependent on the favor of political elites.

The electoral revisions and mass deletion of voters have provoked such widespread revulsion because many Indians see it as an assault on their identity as citizens and a threat to the social recognition they have won through a long, arduous struggle. Many Indians might have forgiven Modi for his numerous missteps but they are determined not to let him devalue their voting power.

We that are young

The young protesters moving through Delhi’s barricaded streets carry a palpable sense that they are living through a historical moment. References to the Quit India movement against the country’s erstwhile British colonizers and the protests around the Emergency have become commonplace. Memories of seminal events of the past offer a lens through which to consider the present. The future seems open to change through collective action. This sense of a turning point imbues individual actions with a larger purpose and drives protesters to confront a police force intent on clearing the streets by whatever means necessary.

On Oct. 9, a day before Delhi was placed under a lockdown, Bora invoked India’s struggle against British imperialism to denounce the pre-emptive detention of protest organizers. “History is repeating itself. Just like in 1942, the arrest of leaders could not stop the Quit India movement; this movement will also not stop,” Bora said. “This is nothing but a state of open emergency in the country.”

The convergence of young people’s anger over education and employment, fears of authoritarianism, and concern for the sanctity of the vote poses a serious challenge to the Modi government. It could forge a broad popular coalition of unemployed young people, urban poor, Dalits and religious minorities, united in challenging the legitimacy of the government. Unless the government retreats on electoral roll revisions, sustained protests could drain its political capital.

One of Indian democracy’s great achievements is that even its poorest citizens have proved adept at recognizing when the power of their vote is being wrested away, gauging the consequences and organizing to resist. A government in India can retain its legitimacy despite failing to provide functioning schools or decent employment. It cannot do so if it also violates the sanctity of the vote.

More than 20? Or less than 75? As I scan my feedback on a recent social media post, my brain just can’t seem to help registering the number of “likes.” I’m not alone.    

Under a recent settlement that Meta recently reached with states, Facebook and Instagram are about to look different for minors Among the new protections, one seemingly modest change caught my eye. By default, users under 18 will no longer be able to see likes and other reactions in response to their posts or those of others. The reforms are designed for children and teenagers, but touch on a psychological phenomenon just as relevant to adults. As a psychiatrist, I found myself wondering: Why does that little number beneath your post matter so much?

The answer has less to do with social media and more to do with an ancient human tendency: social comparison. Social comparison is the psychological process by which people assess themselves, including their own abilities, opinions, and achievements, in relation to those of others. Likes can both reward us and rank us. They show us that people are validating our posts and also quantify that validation. 

We know how much approval we receive relative to what we might have expected, what we got the last time we posted, and what others receive. Feedback is scored. Likes are just one example. Follower counts, views, and shares are other metrics that make social information measurable. When social approval is numerically valued, comparison becomes harder to avoid.  

From an evolutionary perspective, social comparison may have served an adaptive purpose. Humans evolved in social groups. Knowing where you stood relative to others might have helped you identify what behaviors were approved, whether you belonged, and how to navigate hierarchy. But moving beyond prehistoric time to the last century, comparison still had constraints. Your 25-year high school reunion? It happened once in your lifetime, maybe in a city far away from you, with only your fellow classmates in attendance. Now, the high school reunion lives in the device in our hands, capable of giving anyone quantitative signals from a vast reference group at any moment on our personalized scoreboards of social approval. If the subjective question is whether we belong, what can feel like an objective answer is the 100 likes our post gets from 2,500 followers. The scale, frequency, quantification, and accessibility of social comparison have all changed.

Our brains weren’t built for this much comparison. Neuroimaging studies show that our brains allocate value to how we believe we stack up next to others. Downward social comparison, in which we learn someone performs worse than us, can engage neural circuits associated with reward and valuation. Upward comparison, in which we learn someone performs better than us, can engage neural circuits associated with processing unpleasant emotions. These are ways in which our brains process social outcomes much like other kinds of gains or losses.  

But our brains don’t just register numbers; we also tend to evaluate their meaning. In one study, likes functioned as a type of currency that adult users compared themselves on, shaping how they felt in that moment. In another set of studies, adults who made more frequent and extreme upward comparisons reported an immediate decline in self-evaluation and cumulative declines in self-esteem and life satisfaction over a browsing session. Research has also found that across generational groups, greater user tendency to engage in social comparison, together with greater maladaptive ways of coping with emotions, is associated with more symptoms of anger, anxiety, and depression. 

Social comparison isn’t inherently harmful. But as repeated opportunities to compare mount, the mental health effects can add up.  

While hiding likes may not eliminate social comparison, it does remove a metric from the scoreboard. The instinct to compare or desire to belong won’t just vanish. But even if we might wonder where we stand next to who’s performing better, there’s a difference between wondering and a number answering that question for us.

Social media didn’t invent our instinct to compare ourselves to others. We’ve had that for millennia. What it did was shift the environment surrounding our instincts, encoding one form of social feedback into numbers we can monitor.  

That's why changing our relationship with social comparison will mean more than adapting digital platforms. What do we value? What gives us purpose? What makes our lives matter? 

The cultural shift that lies ahead is to ask the questions about our social worth that don’t need a scoreboard to answer.

Not content with renaming an international gulf and a cross-border lake, on Oct. 10, U.S. President Donald Trump recently floated the idea of renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean as “Trump Ocean” or the “Ocean of the Americas” at a political rally in Clarksville, Tenn. 

“We need an ocean. So, I was thinking of either the Atlantic or the Pacific,” he said to laughter and applause. “We call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ something like that.”

Then, at an Oct. 21 rally in South Carolina, Trump said he asked Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, to rename the Atlantic Ocean on Google Maps. According to Trump, Pichai replied, “Please don’t ask us to do that.” 

“So, I'll probably pass,” Trump said. “I think let's keep it the Atlantic Ocean.”

While Google has not issued a formal statement on the matter, Trump’s obsession with naming places for himself or America is remarkable. In our view, it reflects a textbook case of “toponymic narcissism”—the use of place naming to remake the world in one’s own image. 

Let’s not fool ourselves: Trump knows a thing or two about branding. In fact, his business career has largely revolved around marketing the Trump brand on hotels, golf courses, and even golden sneakers. We shouldn’t be surprised to find him following the same playbook in his second presidential term. 

Yet the world map is not a private real estate development. Nor can place names be reduced to a branding exercise. Place names have a greater civic purpose as shared global symbols that should transcend the personal glorification and political interests of any individual leader.

Place names form part of our intangible cultural heritage with cultural significance that will outlive the cartographic whims of President Trump. They shape our geographical imaginations and the way people perceive and understand the world. Geographical naming also has important consequences for education, international relations, and the types of messages we wish to project to the world.

For instance, it is notable that Trump has focused much of his renaming energy on places with Indigenous names, such as Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, this could also be seen as an attempt to erase an etymology that points through Greece to North Africa. The name derives from the Greek for “Ocean of Atlas,” referring to the mythology of a giant who lives in the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa.

As place name scholars, we have spent decades studying the cultural, social, and political aspects of place naming. There is a long history of political leaders and cartographers using place naming to assert raw power by rewriting the world map. In one sense, Trump’s renaming shenanigans are simply the latest flashy example in this broader story of mapping and politics. 

But Trump is not merely renaming places to project American power on the world stage. He is also making a mockery of the very act of place naming itself—and, along with it, the international norms that inform the map-making process. 

The international community must reaffirm its commitment to respecting the cultural value of place naming and to articulate responsible place-naming principles, especially for geographical features that are shared across international borders. In an open letter co-authored with place name experts around the world, we propose five key principles for responsible place naming:

The first principle is recognizing that place names are culturally significant forms of intangible heritage and shared resources whose stewardship carries responsibilities extending beyond the interests of any particular government, leader, institution, or generation. 

Given the cultural significance of place names, our second principle highlights the need for meaningful public participation in place naming decisions. Place names that are changed arbitrarily and without due process should not be recognized by the international community. 

Thirdly, place names should not be used to proclaim cultural superiority, advance territorial ambitions, or assert exclusive national ownership over geographical spaces shared among different peoples. 

Places should generally not be named for living people. Instead, place naming should serve the public interest rather than promoting the personal legacies of those seeking to commemorate themselves as a form of self-aggrandizement.

Lastly, we recognize that a shared geography need not always have a single name, since multiple place names can bear witness to the layered histories, languages, and attachments through which places acquire meaning. However, this recognition should not extend to condoning the unilateral renaming of shared geographic features without international dialogue among affected countries and communities.

If Trump moves forward with attempting to rename the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, the international community should stand united in rejecting this attention-seeking act of cartographic malpractice and defend the cultural value of place naming as a cornerstone of our shared world map and geographical imagination.

President Donald Trump’s war in Iran drags on, his pledge to bring down prices on day one appears to have backfired, and his record-low approval ratings are dragging down his party ahead of the midterm elections. But one Trump initiative that is going exactly according to plan: getting some of the world’s richest CEOs to help him rebrand “artificial intelligence.”

Last month, with an ever-growing number of Americans worried that AI might kill us all, the president summoned tech executives to the White House to make a big announcement: "artificial intelligence” is out. “Super Intelligence” is in.  Despite the term “AI” being in use for more than 70 years, government agencies will no longer recognize it.

I’m skeptical that the White House is a repository of superintelligence, in part because “United States” was misspelled on the president’s official announcement. But unlike, say, Lake America, “super intelligence” has largely caught on—at least among the people building it. Jeff Bezos publicly blessed the rebrand. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was quick to get on board. During a SpaceX’s earnings call this week, Elon Musk used “super intelligence” in his very first sentence, and at least nine times after that. 

It remains to be seen whether those of us less reliant on government contracts and favorable regulatory decisions join the movement to make super intelligence happen. But as a former presidential speechwriter, I won’t argue with President Trump’s broader instinct that words matter. Especially when those words are being used to describe something novel, controversial, and almost certain to have consequences for all eight-plus billion people on earth. 

In fact, that’s the biggest problem with the White House’s big rebrand—it goes in entirely the wrong direction. I would argue that our shared language around artificial intelligence already places far too much emphasis on intelligence, and far too little on artifice. We default to describing AI using the language of beings, rather than the language of things.  

Humanity should rethink that decision. If we want to avoid being replaced by AI, a good way to start would be to stop using words that suggest we already have been. 

Once you start paying attention to the stealth anthropomorphization of AI, you’ll spot it everywhere. Before asking ChatGPT for trip-planning tips or a quick healthy recipe, you’ll have the opportunity to adjust a slider controlling its “thinking effort.” Claude uses a “thinking” indicator while processing a request, and Grok Bots describe “thinking” as a condition that sits between “idle” and “working.” (As a frequent procrastinator, I dispute the idea that thinking and idleness are mutually exclusive.) 

It’s not just user interfaces that employ language otherwise reserved for living beings. The people who build AI use it, too. After an unprecedented hack of his company, the co-founder of Hugging Face warned, “don’t count on the agent to respect the rules.” Dan Selsam, a longtime OpenAI researcher, warned that frontier models are increasingly difficult to evaluate, “in contexts where they believe they are not being watched.” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei recently wrote that AI systems exhibit “behaviors,” including “cheating” and “sycophancy.”

I’m not a programmer, so I can’t comment on the technical merits of these claims. I do, however, have informed opinions regarding verbs. AI agents aren’t disrespecting guardrails, any more than my toaster disrespects me when it burns my toast. To say they “believe” they’re not being watched is like saying my spell-checker believes it’s being taken for granted. Even the term “AI agent” suggests, well, agency. 

There’s no consensus that this language is accurate, and plenty of evidence that it isn’t. AI programs are not loyal helpers, like the mice in Cinderella; they’re tools. And in nearly all other cases, just because a tool is incredibly sophisticated doesn’t change the fact that we describe it using the language of machines. 

I don’t expect AI engineers to come up with accurate-yet-widely-adoptable language to describe their work, just as I imagine they don’t expect someone like me to design a frontier model. But it’s hard not to notice how useful our default language is for the tech companies who have introduced it. The term for a car built without brakes is not a “rogue model.” It’s an “unsafe car.” Yet, when companies fail to build safety features into their AI models, it’s entirely normal to hear them say that a rogue agent deceived, cheated, lied, or otherwise behaved badly. The issue is this: Anthropomorphizing AI shifts blame from the programmers to the programs. 

AI alarmists seem just as inclined toward personification as the AI boosters. The same day Trump unveiled “Super Intelligence,” a Senate Subcommittee held a hearing titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.” Intentionally or not, these terms make it more difficult to mitigate the threat they describe. We already know how to regulate potentially unsafe products, even complex ones. But if we treat AI not as a new technology, but as an entirely new category of existence, then it plays into tech barons’ argument that only the companies who can create AI could possess the knowledge to control it. 

I don’t blame people for carelessly anthropomorphizing AI, any more than I blame Richard Dawkins for naming his Anthropic chatbot Claudia, or my mom for referring to a ChatGPT prompt by saying she “talked to Penny.” Metaphor and analogy are part of what makes us human. We’re wired to see ourselves, or at least our species, in the non-human world. We say our dishwashers “act up” and our music “slaps.” We see old men’s faces in rock formations and the Virgin Mary in the scorch marks on grilled cheese sandwiches. Don’t get me started on Georgia O’Keefe. But we know those metaphors are metaphors. 

Our current language for describing AI works differently. The line between metaphor and object is often not just blurred, but non-existent. We use figurative language so often, and so casually, that many of us start to take it literally. Modern politics is a constant string of skirmishes over word choice. “Pro-choice” vs. “pro-abortion, “undocumented immigrants” vs. “illegals,” “Democratic Party” vs. “Democrat Party.” Yet on what is perhaps the most consequential issue for our future, humanity is on the verge of giving up the language battle without a fight. 

The real rebrand AI needs won’t start in the White House. But it can start at home. My plea: don’t give your chatbot a cutesy human name. Don’t talk about it as though it’s a friend or pet. Notice when it slips words like “thinking” or “in my opinion” into its answers, and before you enter your next prompt, object. 

Ultimately, however, it may come down to tech companies—and the officials who may one day get around to regulating them—to develop a language that puts human beings first. Instead of saying that agents “went rogue,” CEOs should acknowledge that they malfunctioned. Congress should hold hearings focused on companies cutting corners, not AI programs behaving badly.  The issue isn't that all AI is bad, but that accuracy matters. 

Given all the change that artificial intelligence is predicted to bring, quibbling over word choice might seem pedantic, like arguing about the Latin name of a tree’s species while the forest burns. But if we want to influence the technologies that will shape humanity’s future, we ought to exercise more influence over the way we describe them. 

In other words, words matter. Just ask Trump, president of, according to his official superintelligence announcement, “The Unites States.”

For four decades, China’s rise was built on an extraordinary bargain with the world. China offered labor, scale and, eventually, an industrial ecosystem of unparalleled depth. The world supplied technology, capital and markets. China became richer. The rest of the world got cheaper and increasingly better goods. By the middle of this century, that bargain will have to change. Not because China’s manufacturing model has failed, but because it has become too successful.

Over the past few years, the United States has imposed tariffs and export controls. Multinational companies have adopted “China plus one” strategies. Supply chain resilience has become a boardroom obsession. Yet China’s exports have continued to grow, helping to cushion its weakening domestic economy. Its goods trade surplus reached a record $1.2 trillion in 2025. But it would be a mistake to assume that this can carry on indefinitely. Increasingly, what is economically efficient is no longer politically tenable.

China’s manufacturing dominance is generating resistance. And not only in America. Europe worries about the erosion of its industrial base. Developing countries welcome Chinese investment and admire aspects of China’s development experience, but still ask a reasonable question: where, in this model, is our development?

Most countries do not simply want to buy Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, machinery and robots. They want factories of their own. They want their workers to acquire new skills and their suppliers to move up the value chain. They want technology and know-how. For years, Western companies complained that access to China’s enormous market came with demands for technology transfers. Now, China finds itself on the other side of the table, being asked to share its own expertise.

China cannot indefinitely remain the world’s manufacturer indefinitely. Its great economic challenge over the next few decades will be to remain deeply embedded in a global economy increasingly shaped by protectionism and national security. The answer may lie in a new role: a shift from being the factory of the world to an exporter of industrial and technological capabilities.

The new China model

China’s real advantage lies no longer in cheap labor or subsidies, but in the accumulated learning embedded in perhaps the densest industrial ecosystem the world has ever seen. What China can now export is not just what it makes, but what it has learnt about how to make it.

The industrial ecosystem that China built around smartphones accumulated expertise in batteries, sensors, precision manufacturing and power electronics. Those capabilities then migrated into electric vehicles. EVs, in turn, spurred further advances in batteries, chips and automation. Automation fed into robotics. Knowledge compounds as it moves between industries, suppliers, engineers and firms. Each industry creates capabilities that make the next one easier to build. This is China’s innovation flywheel.

The important question now is whether that learning can travel. Neither Brazil nor Indonesia can recreate Shenzhen by decree. But they need not retrace the 30 years China spent building it. They can build on what China has already learnt. Chinese companies can bring machinery, engineers, production processes and supply-chain expertise with them. Local workers learn;  local suppliers improve.

Knowledge that took decades to accumulate in China can thus accelerate development elsewhere. That would be a very different model of Chinese globalization: not simply exporting the products of China’s industrial ecosystem, but giving other countries access to the knowledge embedded within it.

Such a shift is already under way. In Brazil, BYD is moving from importing cars to manufacturing them locally and developing local suppliers. In Hungary, it is pairing its first European passenger-car factory with a research and development center that will work with Hungarian universities and companies.

In Indonesia, Chinese investment is helping to build an integrated battery industry stretching from nickel processing to battery production and recycling. These early examples point to a different relationship with the world: one based less on exporting what China makes than on exporting the capability to make it.

At first glance, this may sound like a loss for China. Why give up production at home? Why train tomorrow’s competitors? Because the alternative may be worse. Countries increasingly want options. They do not want their economic future to depend overwhelmingly on any single supplier, Chinese or American.

The greater the dependence, the greater the political pressure to unwind it. A similar logic applies to artificial intelligence. The competition between the United States and China over AI is usually described as a race: who has the most powerful chips, the most computing power and the best frontier models? But another contest may matter just as much: whose AI is used most widely?

America retains formidable advantages at the technological frontier. China’s constraints have pushed its ecosystem in a somewhat different direction: toward efficiency, lower-cost deployment, open models and rapid downstream application. Chinese developers have strong incentives to spread their models widely, allow others to adapt them and capture value from the ecosystem that grows around them. The world’s most downloaded family of open AI models is Chinese: Alibaba’s Qwen.

From China, with love

Technologies that transform economies are not always the most advanced ones. Adoption and the intensity of use matter as much as proximity to the technological frontier. For much of the world, the AI that would matter most may not be the most intelligent model ever built. It may instead be one model that is cheap enough, open enough and adaptable enough to be used everywhere.

Openness is not simply an act of generosity. It can also be an economic strategy. Open systems surrender some rents at the core while creating larger markets for applications, integration and services. If China cannot monopolize the technological frontier, it can compete by making technology cheaper, more adaptable and more ubiquitous.

China itself offers the greatest modern demonstration of what technological diffusion can accomplish. After it began reforming and opening up its economy in the 1980s, foreign companies brought capital, manufacturing methods, management expertise and technology. Chinese workers and engineers learnt from them. Domestic suppliers emerged. Chinese companies adapted foreign technologies and eventually became innovators in their own right.  themselves.

China has now reached the other side of that development process. By 2050, the most important measure of China’s economic success will not be how much it sells to the rest of the world, or how much of the world’s manufacturing remains within Chinese supply chains or whether a Chinese model tops every AI benchmark. It will likely be whether China’s success can help generate success for other countries.

Speaking in Shanghai in July, Xi Jinping argued that AI technologies should be “shared” so that countries could benefit from them more equitably. He also called for greater efforts to build AI capabilities in the Global South. The instinct is the right one. Dominance breeds resistance. Diffusion gives a reason for others to remain connected. For four decades, China benefited enormously from a world willing to share capital, technology, knowledge and markets.

The question for the next few decades is whether China can do the same for others.

Governors have no shortage of ideas about how to improve education. But before deciding what to change, they need an honest answer to a more basic question: How are our students doing?

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

We governed Tennessee at different times and from different political parties. But we learned the same lesson: you cannot improve what you are unwilling to measure honestly.

Governors will get the chance to see how students in their state are doing in a critical,often-overlooked subject: civics. But they have to sign up by the end of January to get state-level results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics assessment, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, or NAEP. 

For newly elected governors, that will mean making a quick decision shortly after taking office. It shouldn’t be a hard one, though. 

U.S. students get limited instruction, particularly in early grades, about how our government works, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and how to apply civics knowledge beyond the classroom. Governors can help change that by prioritizing and measuring what students know and can do in civics.

What we know now is limited but concerning: only 1 in 5 eighth graders in U.S. schools reached the NAEP Proficient level on the most recent Nation's Report Card in civics, meaning the vast majority of students likely struggle to identify the separation of powers and checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution.

Unlike in subjects like reading and math, we don't have state-specific information about how our own students are doing compared to students in other states in civics. That puts leaders at a disadvantage when trying to improve schools and communities and help young people develop the civic knowledge and skills they need to excel academically, in the workforce, and in their communities. 

But beginning in 2028, if they meet the January deadline, states can get state-specific results in eighth-grade civics rather than just national averages. Tennessee's academic progress over the past two decades serves as an example of why all states should capitalize on this opportunity. In 2007, Tennessee’s extremely low Nation's Report Card scores in reading and math, which contradicted our own state assessment results, served as a wake-up call. Our state got to work raising K-12 expectations, increasing the rigor of our end-of-year state tests, and improving classroom practices. 

The strategy worked: Between 2011 and 2015, Tennessee became the fastest-improving state on NAEP. And progress continues. Recently, for the first time, the state ranked in the top quarter of states for reading and math achievement.

This is why we believe NAEP is a particularly valuable tool. It’s considered the gold standard in assessments and is the only common yardstick that measures student learning across the country. It lets us know whether students today are doing better or worse than kids in those same grades did two years or two decades ago and how students in our state are doing compared to other states. 

We didn't always have the benefit of state-level NAEP results. NAEP didn’t produce any state-specific data at all until the 1980s, when Tennessee joined other southern states in a pilot program to determine whether valid state results could be obtained from NAEP data. That paved the way toward a federal requirement 25 years ago that results for all 50 states in 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math be reported publicly.

That was a win for states and kids. But today, we have to ask ourselves, what about those other essential things that children learn in school besides reading and math? 

States now have an opportunity to answer that question in civics. We hope they'll take it. We know from experience how valuable it is to have an honest, independent measure of how students are doing. Good policy requires good information. And good leadership requires being willing to confront what that information tells us.

For the past week, President Donald Trump and his aides have traded accusations with Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, over who restricted Ukraine’s access to a military-grade version of Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite network product that Ukrainian forces depend on to intercept incoming Russian projectiles and target Russian launchers.

Musk blamed Trump and the U.S. military for the decision, writing on X, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Trump insisted that his administration did not disrupt Ukraine’s access to the network. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that decisions about Ukraine’s access to the network were in the hands of SpaceX and Musk and not the White House. The Wall Street Journal and CBS News reported that the decision had been Musk’s.

On Mar. 9, 2025, Musk had promised that, whatever his disagreements with U.S. policy toward Ukraine, “Starlink will never turn off its terminals. We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.” Critics have raced to blame Musk alone, casting him as the puppeteer behind the throne, the first business titan to achieve what William Randolph Hearst, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, and J.P. Morgan only aspired to: a latter-day Cornelius Vanderbilt, who is reputed to have scoffed, “Law? What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?”

That gets the story backward. Musk’s businesses are uniquely dependent on the blessings of Washington: a fifth of SpaceX’s revenue comes directly from federal agencies, its satellites require federal authorization to launch and operate, and the possible merger of Tesla and SpaceX will live or die by the decisions of federal regulators.

Confronted with a White House that appeared determined to squeeze Ukraine, whatever its public denials, Musk faced a familiar choice for anyone dependent on political patronage: capitulate, resist, or retreat into ambiguity. He chose ambiguity, revealing the limits of his power. The wealthiest man in the world still answers to someone else.

The finger-pointing creates a haze of ambiguity, giving both men plausible deniability. The apparent aim is to force Ukraine into a settlement by depriving it of the means to resist: a way to secure a quick, short-term peace and lower oil prices at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law.

But that calculation mistakes capitulation for stability. Rewarding President Vladimir Putin of Russia could encourage him to test NATO’s resolve in the Baltic states, Poland, Finland, or Sweden, raising the risk of a direct confrontation with the alliance. It would also signal to other U.S. adversaries that sufficient pressure can fold Washington’s commitments.

For now, Trump could claim to have brokered peace between Russia and Ukraine, even if the peace he delivers is the silence of a defeated country. Musk can evade responsibility by presenting himself as merely one supplier among many across the defense industry whose failures have weakened Ukraine’s defenses. He could point to weapons manufacturer RTX, whose Patriot interceptors are so scarce that Ukraine reportedly ran out of them this month, or to delays in delivering F-16s manufactured by Lockheed Martin that were promised two years earlier.

Faustian bargains

Beneath the public quarrel lies a familiar pattern: surrender political independence and retain the freedom to accumulate extraordinary wealth. The historians who have studied Putin’s Russia most closely would recognize the pattern instantly. Timothy Snyder has written that Russia’s oligarchs “were tamed, but not by a neutral state.” Rather, “Putin himself became the head oligarch, the boss of bosses.” Anne Applebaum echoed the insight and described Putin as making himself “godfather to all of the other oligarchs.”

Putin laid out the terms of that bargain on Jul. 28, 2000, when he met with 21 of Russia's richest men in the Kremlin, less than three months after his inauguration. The message was simple. The fortunes they had amassed in the chaos of the 1990s were theirs to keep, as long as they stayed out of politics entirely. Keep your distance from power, and the state would leave you alone.

Those who refused the deal faced immediate reprisals. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, whose television networks refused to bend the knee, were driven into exile within the year. Gusinsky’s NTV was seized by state-controlled Gazprom. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, funded opposition parties and lectured the Kremlin on corruption. In Oct. 2003 he was pulled off his plane at a Siberian airport and arrested. He spent a decade in prison and watched his oil company, Yukos, dismantled and its assets transferred to state-controlled companies.

Those who accepted the deal are the ones who got rich, and they have never been richer. Forbes counted a record 155 Russian billionaires this year, the fourth straight year that number has grown, with a combined fortune of $696.5 billion—up 11% from the previous year, even as Putin’s war against Ukraine entered its fifth year. Their collective wealth reportedly now exceeds the bank term deposits of the rest of Russia’s population: 155 oligarchs with fortunes greater than the savings of roughly 146 million ordinary Russians.

“Oligarchies are unstable,” Snyder has observed. “Members disappear.” For those who might have forgotten the terms of Putin’s bargain, an instructive reminder came in 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, did the one thing the bargain forbade: he challenged the Kremlin’s authority. Prigozhin seized a military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and sent his forces toward Moscow. His column advanced to within 125 miles of the capital before he agreed to stand down under a deal brokered by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator.

Putin publicly called the mutiny treason, then appeared to forgive him. Two months later, on Aug. 23, 2023, Prigozhin’s private jet crashed north of Moscow, killing everyone aboard. The Kremlin denied involvement, the U.S. intelligence concluded that the plane had been blown up, and The Wall Street Journal later reported that the operation had been ordered by Putin’s Security Council chief. Putin’s eulogy, delivered the next day, described Prigozhin as a man who had “made serious mistakes in life.” No oligarch in Russia needed the rest of the sentence spelled out.

Prigozhin’s fate is only the most spectacular entry on a longer, murkier list. Since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, at least 85 Russian businessmen and officials have reportedly died in unexplained or violent circumstances, many of them figures in the energy industry. Among the dead are three Lukoil executives: board member Alexander Subbotin, who died in May 2022 after a visit to a “shaman” outside Moscow; chairman Ravil Maganov, who fell from a sixth-floor window that September; and vice president Vitaly Robertus, who was found dead in his office in March 2024.

In April 2022, two former energy and banking executives were found dead alongside their families. Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice president, was found shot dead in his Moscow apartment with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. Sergei Protosenya, a former Novatek executive, was found hanged at a rented villa in Lloret de Mar, Spain, with his wife and daughter stabbed to death inside. Catalan police concluded that Protosenya had killed his family, then himself. His son rejected that finding, insisting that his father had been in good spirits and had no reasons to kill them and himself.

Transneft vice president Andrei Badalov fell from a 17th-floor window in July 2025. The Moscow Times has counted 18 such fatal falls from windows since 2002. Three days later, Russia’s transport minister, Roman Starovoit, was found shot dead in his car hours after Putin fired him. Another transport official died of supposedly acute heart failure the same day. 

A shadow over America

Putin’s Russia offers an extreme and grotesque example of the bargain. Yet some critics see an emerging American version, in a far less violent form. Snyder and Applebaum have warned that Western billionaires risk repeating the mistakes of Russia’s oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, believing they can manage a strongman for profit, only to discover that he is managing them.

Musk spent more than $277 million to help elect Donald Trump, took a desk in the West Wing, and ran the Department of Government Efficiency like a man who believed he was co-president. When that arrangement flamed out in May 2025, he tried to exercise independent political power by turning against Trump, calling his signature legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill, a “disgusting abomination.” Musk threatened to form a third political party and then briefly launched one. He even taunted Trump about Jeffrey Epstein, posting that the president “is in the Epstein files.”

After Trump publicly mused about terminating his contracts, Musk quickly retreated. He deleted the posts, and conceded that they “went too far.” He returned to the fold, shook Trump’s hand at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, accepted the National Medal of Science from him this month, and became the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms, giving at least $366 million to Republican groups. He has grown vastly richer in the process: SpaceX’s June IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, while the company remains the U.S. government’s dominant launch provider, with competitors such as Blue Origin winning only a fraction of the contracts.

Musk’s retreat illustrates the bargain: surrender the freedom to oppose the president and preserve the ability to enrich yourself. By that measure, Musk’s political defeat has come with an extraordinary financial windfall. He won by losing. The throttling of Starlink in Ukraine appears to fit this pattern. Last week, after Trump demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian refineries and Kyiv did not comply, its access to a military-grade version of Starlink was restricted and responsibility disappeared into a haze of accusation and denial.

The costs of such Faustian bargains fall on everyone excluded from them. In Russia, soldiers die at the front by the hundreds of thousands while politically compliant billionaires accumulate obscene fortunes. In Ukraine, drone operators lost contact with their interceptors in mid-flight last week while Russian missiles were in the air; the consequences of a disrupted connection are immediate and potentially fatal. Other customers face the question: can a contract with Starlink be relied upon?

In America, democratic government rests on the principle that neither political office nor private places anyone above the law. Businesses must be free to challenge a president without fearing retaliation, and their owners must remain accountable for their conduct. Those protections help distinguish America from an authoritarian dictatorship like Putin’s Russia.

The Starlink saga does not suggest that America has become Russia. But it raises a troubling question: is political obedience becoming the price of commercial success in America?  Putin’s oligarchs struck that bargain in 2000 and have been collecting on it ever since. Whether Americans accept a version of it will depend on how forcefully our institutions and business leaders defend our freedom to say no.

Justice is elusive, and there are few clearer examples of this than when people who commit acts of sexual violence are given rote tasks as a means of atonement. 

Recently, the “Cornell 7” case has inspired new conversations about what accountability and atonement involve. When college administrators investigated a report of sexual violence, some of the alleged perpetrators were reportedly assigned to write “reflection papers,” along with other punishments. The writing assignments drew such ire that Cornell issued a statement stating that "none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement."

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which started when I was 11 years old. Abuse from my step-father went hand-in-hand with punishment. He knew how much I loved words, reading, and writing, and began to use them to discipline me. 

Our household was governed by an elaborate set of rules. We were not allowed to speak during dinner without permission. We were required to stand while playing board games. Our bedrooms were inspected every evening, and our beds had to be made with hospital corners.

Any infraction could result in punishment. One of the preferred methods was to require me to write an essay outlining what I had done wrong and how to correct my misdeeds. If I didn't wash the dishes carefully enough, I would have to write an essay about why I needed to take better care when cleaning up after dinner.

Other times, I was ordered to write the same sentence hundreds of times.

If I complained about dinner, I had to write 100 times, “I will appreciate my mother’s cooking.”

If I made fun of one of my siblings, I had to write 250 times, “I will not make fun of my brother.”

And if I resisted attempts to assault me, the punishment could be a thousand repetitions of “I will listen.”

I was being punished for trying to protect myself from the person who was abusing me. In doing so, I learned that writing the correct words was not the same as believing them. I could produce an essay explaining what I might have done wrong and promise to be better, but it didn’t mean that I believed that I misbehaved. It meant that I understood what was required of me. The punishment was complete when the writing was complete, but whether I had learned anything was beside the point.

More than 50 years later, I find myself wondering what we believe an essay can accomplish when it is assigned in response to allegations of sexual violence. Cornell’s disciplinary proceedings have resulted in different sanctions for different students, including expulsions and suspensions. “Reflection papers” were among the educational requirements imposed on some students.

But what, exactly, can an assigned essay demonstrate?

An essay can be thoughtful and persuasive; it can express regret, recognize harm, and promise change. But how do we know whether the person who wrote it believes any of what is written? What happens when completing an assignment becomes a substitute for demonstrating genuine understanding or changed behavior?

I have spent my adult life writing, teaching, and interviewing people about their lives. I believe in the ability of language to help us understand ourselves and one another, and I know how easily language can be used to conceal the truth.

My abuser understood the power of words, and used them to dictate the terms of my obedience. He controlled what I was allowed to say. He warned me that no one would believe me and threatened violence against those I love if I spoke out. I believed him, and I remained silent and ashamed.

I was required to write about my smallest infractions while being forbidden, through fear, to speak about the most terrible thing happening in my life. And the person who demanded that I explain my wrongdoing was the person committing the most serious wrongdoing of all. 

This is why the relationship between language and power matters so much to me. The person with authority often gets to decide what constitutes an acceptable explanation, a credible account, or a sufficient expression of remorse.

Jane Doe, the young woman at the center of the Cornell case, reported the incident to university police in 2024. Since then, the timing and content of her disclosures have become subjects of intense public scrutiny. Public debate has focused in part on differences between her initial statements and her subsequent allegations.

I cannot speak for her, and our experiences are different. But I understand how fear can determine what someone is willing to reveal, even when she desperately needs help.

There is something troubling about how much we expect words to prove in cases of sexual violence. We scrutinize the accounts of those who report abuse, searching for inconsistencies. Now we are asking those found responsible for misconduct to demonstrate understanding through written reflection.

I believe writing can lead to meaningful change. But an essay is evidence that someone has completed an assignment. It cannot establish whether that person understands the harm they have caused or whether their behavior will change.

Why are we putting so much faith in the words people are required to write, while questioning the words that others struggle to say?

Iran may have found a weapon in the American electoral calendar. With the midterm elections two weeks away, Tehran is intensifying attacks on shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz, calculating that higher energy prices will deepen President Donald Trump’s political troubles and make another U.S. military campaign too costly to contemplate.

The wager is seductive: an American president anxious about diesel prices and his party’s prospects in the midterms, Iran seems to believe, will have little appetite for another major war.

Trump’s declaration that he will refrain from striking Iran before the Nov. 3 vote appears to vindicate this view, even as he periodically threatens to use force again. Having survived two rounds of war and absorbed punishing economic losses, Iran’s leaders believe they can endure a little longer. By disrupting Gulf commerce, they gain leverage their conventional forces cannot provide. They also hope to make that leverage permanent and compel Washington to accept Tehran’s authority over passage through the world’s most important energy chokepoint.

Yet the past nine months of war against Iran have made it clear that renewed military conflict before the midterms or after the elections is unlikely to resolve the disputes between the U.S. and Iran. The two countries will eventually have to sit across the negotiating table to resolve their long-running disputes. 

Miscalculations in Tehran and Washington

Tehran may be misreading how political peril shapes an adversary’s decisions. Trump could decide that appearing powerless as Iranian attacks push up prices is more damaging than another round of military strikes. Reports that his administration has considered fresh strikes suggest the military option remains in play. A serious attack on American forces could turn Trump’s promise of restraint into a political liability overnight.

The political situation in Israel adds a combustible variable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces an Oct. 27 election with his bloc struggling to secure a majority. He has staked his political reputation on the claim that only he can neutralize the Iranian threat.

With Tehran rebuilding its missile and drone capabilities and uncertainty surrounding its nuclear program, Netanyahu may see renewed strikes as both a strategic opportunity and a means of restoring his standing at home. Such a gamble could deepen Israel’s insecurity, but electoral desperation seldom improves anyone’s judgment.

The convergence of these calculations makes the coming weeks particularly perilous. Iran thinks Trump’s electoral weakness will constrain him. Trump and Netanyahu might each conclude that a show of force could rescue their political fortunes. Each side imagines it can calibrate the violence and manage the aftermath. The experience of this year’s conflict, in which successive rounds of fighting outran diplomatic efforts to contain them, offers little reason for that confidence.

Even if October passes without another conflagration, November brings its own hazards. After the midterm elections, the political constraints Trump has publicly imposed on himself will disappear. With substantial American forces already positioned in the region, Washington may be tempted to break the deadlock through another round of attacks. Tehran, fearing another surprise attack, might choose to strike Israel or U.S. military assets in the region first. What might seem like prudent preparation in Washington or Tehran could help bring about the war it is meant to deter.

The underlying impasse is as stubborn as ever. Washington wants a nuclear agreement and believes its blockade will ultimately compel Iran to negotiate. Tehran insists on upfront economic relief and an end to the war before substantive talks on the nuclear issue can begin.

America can point to tankers still transiting Hormuz, but shipping that depends on costly military protection and remains under threat is a poor substitute for normal trade. Iran can inflict considerable damage on the oil exports of its Gulf neighbors, but it has so far failed to turn that leverage into meaningful American concessions.

Dangers of a wider war

Another surge in hostilities would widen this gulf rather than bridge it. American and Israeli aircraft can destroy missile launchers, production facilities, and infrastructure, but Iran has repeatedly demonstrated that it can retaliate and survive. Iran’s response could extend further to target Gulf energy infrastructure, maritime commerce, data centers, and other critical networks.

The Houthi confrontation with Saudi Arabia already offers a grim illustration of how quickly the costs can spread. The war in Yemen has been reignited with devastating consequences, including deadly attacks on civilian airports and a spiraling cycle of retaliation. The fighting now threatens to draw in Turkey and Pakistan to support Saudi Arabia, as the three countries recently signed a mutual security pact known as the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement.

A new campaign could leave Iran poorer, Israel more exposed, and the U.S. burdened with an even more expensive regional commitment, while markets around the world absorb another shock.

The outlines of a diplomatic bargain have been visible for months: reciprocal steps to reopen Hormuz, calibrated sanctions relief, and a resumption of nuclear negotiations. The difficulty lies in sequencing and trust. Tehran fears that surrendering its maritime leverage first would invite fresh demands; Washington worries that easing pressure would reward coercion without securing lasting constraints on Iran’s nuclear program. Addressing those fears will require reciprocal steps and credible verification. More bombing won’t help.

Leaders contemplating an October surprise or an offensive after the midterms must remember that uncomfortable truth. Military force may alter the balance of pain without resolving the disputes each side will eventually have to confront across the negotiating table.

After another round of death and destruction, they could find themselves negotiating over the same issues, with less trust, greater bitterness, and far fewer resources to rebuild what they have broken. Their choices will be no easier then; the cost of reaching an agreement will be far greater.

From social media to sports betting, Americans have become remarkably willing to adopt new technologies without necessarily believing they're good for us or our health, our society, or our planet. Artificial intelligence may be the clearest example yet.

Just 39% of Americans say AI has a positive impact on society, compared with 44% who believe its impact is negative, according to a national survey conducted this month by my company, Outward Intelligence. Only 15% say they're excited about AI's growth.

But here’s the disconnect: While 58% of Americans don't trust the leaders of AI companies to make decisions in society's best interests, 41% say they use AI chatbots every day. Among Americans who believe AI harms society, roughly half use AI chatbots at least weekly.

In some ways, this shouldn't surprise us. People can appreciate the convenience of social media while questioning its effects on children. They can participate in the boom in sports betting while worrying about its consequences, from addiction to financial hardship. They can shop online while worrying about the decline of local businesses. And they can rely on smartphones while believing those devices have undermined attention and human connection.

But AI tests the limits of the U.S. consumer’s appetite for holding two contradictory ideas in their minds at once. And the implications are political as much as economic: What happens when Americans embrace a technology but don't trust the institutions responsible for creating it as well as overseeing and pacing its development?

In our survey, about two-thirds of Americans said a candidate's position on AI could influence their vote in the upcoming Midterm elections, although most acknowledged that other issues matter more. Roughly one in six said it could actually determine their vote.

Neither party appears to have established much credibility with independent voters on the issue. Nearly two-thirds of independents say they don’t trust either party to handle AI responsibly, or that they trust both equally, or that they’re unsure.

Data centers are where the broader debate over AI becomes much more concrete, and where opposition becomes more unified. More than half of respondents say they would oppose construction of a large data center near where they live. Nearly four in ten would strongly oppose it.

Their concerns are practical. Electricity costs rank first, followed by water usage and environmental impact. America's ability to compete internationally, which has become a central argument for expanding AI infrastructure, ranks much lower.

To a tech company, building a data center may represent an investment in America's economic future. To someone living nearby, it may mean worrying about electricity bills, local resources, and whether the community has much say in the decision. The result is a growing chasm between how the people building AI think about its benefits and how ordinary Americans think about its costs.

The associated political costs are significant, too. When asked about candidates who strongly support building more data centers, 42% of voters say that position would make them less likely to vote for a candidate, vs. 27% who say it would make them more likely. Among independents, the gap is even wider: 49% to 19%.

So while AI may not be a top issue for all voters in November, their attitudes toward AI expose a tension in the politics of technological progress. Promising innovation and economic growth doesn't answer questions about electricity bills and corporate accountability, and expressing concern about the technology doesn't explain how to capture its potential benefits.

AI companies now ask for an enormous amount of public faith. They're developing systems that could reshape employment, education, and the economy, while making major infrastructure investments that will affect communities across the country. Americans, meanwhile, are weighing who benefits, who bears the costs—and who is accountable when things go wrong.

Americans have already shown they're willing to use AI. The harder challenge, for Silicon Valley and Washington alike, is earning, and deserving, their trust.

The first time I was introduced to satire, my jaw dropped—and not just because it was the first time I’d ever seen a naked woman.

I was 8 when my older brothers snuck me into a London cinema to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Although my underdeveloped brain may not have fully grasped the critique of religion or inter­necine fights among political leftists, I loved the feeling of being surrounded by 300 people screaming with laughter.

Over the next few years, I inhaled an array of comedy greats: Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, and Not the Nine O’Clock News, with its biting commentary on Thatcherite Britain. Then came a personal breakthrough. At the age of 20, I spent six months studying with an intimidating French clown.

The late Philippe Gaulier was one of the all-time great teachers of clown and modern theater. Gaulier kept a drum handy while we were onstage, banging it to cut short a performance he considered “sh-t,” which was often. His goal, and greatest gift to us, was helping his students discover what he called their “inner idiot.”

Gaulier introduced me to the satirical archetype of the bouffon. In his telling, the tradition dated back to 11th century France, where societal outcasts—gay people, heretics, those with deformities—would be let back into their villages once a year to put on shows viciously mocking the ruling class. It was the humor of the dispossessed. Whereas clowns were naive idiots, bouffons savagely undermined the people in power. They were doing something important: using biting and at times cruel humor to undermine systemic injustice.

It’s what satirists have done throughout history. And along the way, some people, instead of laughing, wince—or worse, take offense. The Greek playwright Aristophanes brilliantly lampooned the militarism and demagoguery of his day. Yet because he deployed phallic jokes so obscene they would make even Ali G blush, critics like Plutarch sneered at Aristophanes’ “coarseness ... in words, vulgarity, and ribaldry.” We celebrate the Roman satirist Juvenal, but his contemporaries barely acknowledged him. Nearly two millennia later, Lenny Bruce’s four-letter comedy was branded “sick” in the pages of this magazine in 1959. Note to editors (and to Plutarch): you missed the point.

Yes, satire can offend people other than the intended targets. Like that of my bouffon predecessors, mine definitely has. As someone who has opposed bigotry and injustice throughout my life and partnered with civil rights groups, I don’t recognize myself in the warped portrayals of me that I sometimes see on social media, lumped in with the bigots I lampoon.

I’ve always designed my characters and comedy as vehicles to expose prejudice, bias, and stupidity, though I realize not everyone sees them that way. Ali G is a white imbecile—a delusional cultural appropriator—who steals the fashion and lyrics from his favorite gangsta rap and dancehall idols, from Compton to Kingston. The joke is on him, and on the predominantly white male establishment who take him seriously enough to believe that HBO would hire the stupidest man in the world as an interview host. Like a good bouffon, he undermines that establishment—not the culture he loves and borrows from.

I admit that most of my humor is indeed juvenile. That’s because satire works best not when it preaches, but rather when it lives among the laughter. Then, once you walk out of the theater or switch off the TV, it makes you think.

What makes satirical comedy so effective is what it lays bare. I’ll never forget a fox-­hunting rally I attended the first time I created Borat—which involved me rummaging around in the trunk of my car for two minutes, finding a hat I’d bought in Astrakhan, Russia, and sticking it on my head. “Jagshemash,” I proclaimed, riffing off a Polish greeting.

I asked the English toffs, “In my country we hunt criminals—do you think we should do that here?” Shockingly, even though on camera, they said yes. A light bulb exploded in my 25-year-old brain. Real people believed this ridiculous character—and they would speak to him more freely than in any documentary.

Each of my characters has a specific mechanism to encourage people to drop their guards and show what they really believe, prejudices and all. Borat, an antisemitic journalist, exposes Jew hatred, xeno­phobia, sexism, and casual racism. Erran Morad, a stereotype of a tough-guy Israeli commando—“I’ve been in 14 terror attacks,” he says in my new movie Ali G: Who Iz I?, “and started two”—exposes Islamophobia and the ludicrous things people will do when they’re gripped by an irrational fear of “the other.”

Ali G works on another level. He’s not extreme—he’s just extremely dumb. But his absurd questions lead powerful people to underestimate him and answer in earnest, revealing their own biases.

Other characters highlight the problems facing our society without engaging real people at all. The Dictator’s Admiral General Aladeen—the cartoonish ruler of a fictional Horn of Africa nation and a mash-up of personality-­cult authoritarians from Kim Jong Il to Idi Amin—warned, in 2012, how easily democracies could fall into autocracies.

Regardless of the madness, the method is the same: make the audience laugh as hard and as much as possible, while holding up a mirror to reflect back things that aren’t always comfortable to see or warn of trends we’d rather look away from.

Done well, brutally honest satire can be cuttingly effective. At a time when Hollywood largely avoided anti-Nazi content, Charlie Chaplin—then one of the most famous movie stars in the world—used The Great Dictator to point to the destruction that Nazism would bring. Peter Sellers’ sinister Dr. Strangelove showed the insanity of mutually assured destruction. Abbie Hoffman, who became a hero of mine while I researched my undergraduate thesis on civil rights—and whom I later played in The Trial of the Chicago 7—deployed outrageous stunts to oppose the Vietnam War.

In fact, satire doesn’t just needle politicians or regimes—it occasionally helps bring them down. In Hammer & Tickle, the historian Ben Lewis credits Soviet joke-­telling with helping to topple communism, by making it impossible for even the system’s own enforcers to take it seriously. Volodymyr Zelensky was a Ukrainian comedian who once pretended to play piano with his penis—a stunt Aristophanes would have loved. Yet Zelensky’s TV show parodied the country’s corrupt oligarchy so effectively that, just four years after Servant of the People premiered, he was elected President himself. “Every joke,” George Orwell observed, “is a tiny revolution.”

Of course, comedy has its limits—more satirists in Weimar Germany could not have prevented Nazism. Still, satire—along with a free press, independent institutions, and a robust civil society—does play a role in promoting free societies.

That’s exactly what so many governments seem afraid of. In Nazi Germany, mocking Hitler could be a capital offense. Stalin sent an estimated 200,000 citizens to the gulags for making political gags. In our own time, Chinese censors have scrubbed social media of a meme comparing President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh; one student who shared that and other unflattering posts got six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Last year in Tehran, the comedian Zeinab Mousavi was sentenced to six months simply for parodying an Iranian epic poem.

Even in democracies, satirists, instead of getting a laugh, sometimes face sanctions. In the U.S., Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were arrested for uttering obscenities. Because of its irreverent treatment of Christianity, Monty Python’s Life of Brian—the very film that introduced me to satire—was banned in half a dozen countries, and even parts of the U.K.

Today, some believe the times have overtaken Orwell’s “tiny revolutions.” In an era when the U.S. President and his ilk seem impervious to shame and ridicule, is satire all but dead?

Absolutely not. In fact, I believe that satire is more important than ever. The Trump Administration’s own actions show why. If ridicule is now irrelevant, why did CBS cancel Stephen Colbert’s show just days after he mocked his parent company for paying Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit? Why did Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appear to threaten ABC’s broadcast license—leading ABC to briefly suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live!—after Kimmel’s comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk?

Even Trump doth protest too much. Asked in 2020 about Borat outing his attorney Rudy Giuliani as a creep, Trump dredged up the time I tried to scam him as Ali G two decades earlier: “That’s a phony guy and I don’t find him funny.”

So why does my new movie bring back that phony and unfunny guy, which some have criticized as “microwaving a relic from a generation ago?”

The fact that Ali G is outdated and problematic is the very reason I resurrected him. The world he’s returned to is, in many ways, worse than the one he left 20 years ago. All the prejudices my characters are designed to expose haven’t just lingered—they’ve metastasized. They’re fueled by the greatest propaganda machine in history—social media—and now by its monstrous child, AI.

Back when I first created Borat, it took a few minutes—or a few drinks—to get people to reveal the racism that often simmered below the surface. Now, those views have gone mainstream—whether it’s fans hurling slurs and abuse at Black players during the World Cup or hundreds of white nationalists marching through Washington, D.C., on July 4.

In 2004, also as Borat, I got a bar full of people to sing “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” Today Jews make up just 2% of the U.S. population, yet are the targets of nearly 70% of religion-­based hate crimes in America. Whatever your politics, the trend is undeniable.

In 2018, disguised as Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, an ultra-woke developer planning to build a mosque in a small town, I showed people’s hostility to Muslims. One even declared, “I’m racist—towards Muslims.” Now, right-wing U.S. Congressmen readily admit as much.

On my 2018 show Who Is America?, I convinced three men to host a fake quinceañera to trap undocumented immigrants. Now, stoked by far-right agitators and viral social media posts, anti-­immigrant protests and riots have erupted across England and in Belfast. Meanwhile, ICE agents are running amok—terrorizing cities and, yes, detaining people at a quinceañera.

Then there’s the explosion of misogyny. Six years ago, in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a plastic surgeon cheerfully discussed giving my fictional 15-year-old daughter Tutar breast implants to appeal to important men. In today’s “manosphere,” that’s nothing compared with how Andrew Tate advises his millions of followers to treat women. Nor was overturning Roe v. Wade and a women’s right to control her own body apparently enough. Christian nationalists are now calling for “household voting”—effectively taking the right to vote from many women and giving it to their husbands.

Twenty years ago, Ali G would sit next to world experts spouting absurdities. Today—fed a steady diet of disinformation and conspiracy theories by social media influencers and TikTok news—we have created an entire world where ignorance reigns and truth is inverted.

Thanks to this toxic brew of lies, conspiracies, and hate, right-wing authoritarianism is on the march. Intolerance and extremism have surged on the left as well. Political violence has increased, as has our tolerance for it. In one survey, one-fifth of Americans agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

We are once again entering an age of “virtuous” violence, where any atrocity—by racists, Jew ­haters, or Islamophobes, the right or the left—can be somehow justified. It is not a place any of us should want to live.

Where, then, do we go from here?

In a world where social media and AI hypercharge lies, who decides what’s considered truth? In a culture seemingly obsessed with dividing people by identity, how do we find commonality in our shared human experience?

I made this latest film for the same reason I’ve always done this work. Not only to make people laugh, but also to bring them face-to-face with the danger of fanaticism and conspiracy theories.

I’m not naive. One film won’t stamp out age-old prejudices or stop the extremism that’s fueling the slide from democracy to autocracy and mass violence. But, as satire has done since ancient times, it can help sound the alarm. It can remind people about the very real dangers of ludicrous lies—whether spread by a thin-­skinned authoritarian or an extremist with an online following. With the U.S. midterm elections just weeks away, perhaps it encourages citizens to mobilize against these dangerous falsehoods—at the ballot box and beyond. Maybe it can even help shame more of our governments into finally making our Silicon Valley overlords—unelected billionaires who decide what billions of people see and believe—liable for the lies, conspiracies, and hate on their platforms that have already gotten people killed and will likely kill many more.

Satirists can expose hypocrisy. Bouffons can shed their clothes and show that the emperor has none. But after the credits roll, it’s up to all of us to decide what comes next. If our pluralistic democracies are going to survive, we need to create societies where we stop the hate and tolerate those different from us—no matter who they are, where they come from, whom they love, or how they pray. Because the only way out of this mess is to treat everyone with what Ali G has always preached: Respect.