More than 100,000 species are traded globally, whether illegally smuggled, sold as ornaments or in fisheries, timber and fashion industries, study finds
The number of plant and animal species in use or sold in the wildlife trade is more than twice as high as previously thought, researchers have discovered.
A study, published in Science Advances, warns that there are huge gaps in global assessments of how wildlife is traded, and that past estimates have failed to keep up with changes such as the boom in the online exotic pet trade, where sellers offering to post spider eggs across the world or sneak reptiles on to planes are just a click away.
Oxford study shows Manx shearwaters get lost when their body clocks get out of sync
Seabirds returning from foraging trips can be thrown hundreds of miles off course by a form of jet lag that arises when their body clocks get out of sync with local time, researchers say.
Tracking data from Manx shearwaters on the west coast of the UK revealed that when the birds returned home to their colonies after trips over the Atlantic, their rapid eastward flights disrupted their sense of time and navigation.
About 25,000 members of public chip in £17m towards 3,800-hectare Rothbury estate, described as ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’
One of the most ambitious nature recovery projects ever undertaken in England can go ahead after campaigners announced they had raised £30m to buy an estate in Northumberland.
The Wildlife Trusts’ bid to buy the Rothbury estate, an area the size of Athens, had been championed by David Attenborough who on Friday thanked the public for their help.
About 25,000 members of public chip in £17m towards 3,800-hectare Rothbury estate, described as ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’
One of the most ambitious nature recovery projects ever undertaken in England can go ahead after campaigners announced they had raised £30m to buy an estate in Northumberland.
The Wildlife Trusts’ bid to buy the Rothbury estate, an area the size of Athens, had been championed by David Attenborough who on Friday thanked the public for their help.
An unpublished government report on feral deer shows Australia is failing in its efforts to stop the spread of what one advocate warns could become “Australia’s next feral pig”.
The five years from 2020-2025 over which the national feral deer action plan was assessed covers a period in which the famously elusive species has increasingly encroached upon major cities, leading to more frequent encounters – including a memorable occasion in which two men in various degrees of undress were fined after becoming lost in the bush when they were spooked by deer while nude sunbathing.
Editor’s note, October 29, 2026, 10:15 am ET: This article was originally published in 2022 and has been updated for Halloween 2026.
With an October 30 birthday, it’s only natural that Kimberly Murphy takes Halloween extremely seriously. A natural redhead, Murphy has dressed up as iconic crimson-haired characters like the Wendy’s mascot and Chuckie from Rugrats, but once she started dating her now-fiancé, Brian, nearly a decade ago, Murphy’s costumes leveled up. A selection of Murphy and Brian’s greatest Halloween hits: Dexter and Dee Dee from Dexter’s Laboratory, Ms. Frizzle and the eponymous bus from The Magic School Bus, Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tormund and Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones, and Shaun White and a snowboard.
“We put my snowboard on his back so I could actually ‘ride’ him,” Murphy, who, regardless of the character’s gender, always dresses as the redhead, says. “It gave a funny, experiential element to the costume.”
This October, the couple, both in their early 30s, is getting married and will be depicting Chucky and Bride of Chucky for Halloween. (You can guess who’ll be donning the white dress.)
In childhood, Halloween is one of the few days of the year when you can wear your most imaginative garb to school and to strangers’ doors. As you get older, that sense of youthful creativity might wane, and figuring out what to wear to a costume party becomes another minor conundrum. Whether you dabble in dress-up or are a cosplay aficionado, conceiving of creative, yet approachable, Halloween attire doesn’t need to be a bewildering or expensive experience. Experts in the art of costuming offer their advice for ideating and executing your best guise so you can take home top honors in this year’s costume contest.
Narrow your focus
When every character, celebrity, historical figure, animal, pun, and meme is potential costume fodder, homing in on one idea can feel overwhelming. Limitations and parameters are your best friend. Use your own appearance — is there a person or fictional character who has a similar style as you? Vaguely comparable features? — and the media that interested you this year as jumping-off points. Everything from YA novels and nostalgic ‘90s TV shows to extremely local jokes and gags (public transit, sports mascots) to niche memes (hello, Chris Pine astral projecting) are prime inspo.
Is there an alter ego you’re interested in exploring? Cosplayer and photographer Hope Elmekies often dresses up as characters she feels a personal connection to, like Morticia Addams. “I very much felt like I related to [her] because she’s not fitting in,” she says. “I felt that kinship to that character.”
For all of her costumes, Murphy has let her red hair and the height difference between her and her fiancé (she’s 5 feet tall, he’s 6-foot-2) guide her choices. She thinks back to significant pop culture or historical moments that fall under these categories. For example, Murphy flagged Queen’s Gambit as a potential ensemble, due to its buzzworthiness and the fact that the protagonist had red hair. “I take this formulaic approach to Halloween where if it’s unusually small or redheaded,” she says, “that fits my formula of a potential Halloween candidate.”
For group or family costumes, it can be helpful to focus on one shared interest, accessory, or hobby. If you all met in an adult dodgeball league, maybe you want to dress up as dodgeball players. Maybe your group is composed of three couples and you want to do a Grease-inspired collab.
Then, figure out what effect you’d like your costume to have. Is your goal to make everyone laugh? Be the sexy one? Go all-in on minute details? Incorporate a few friends for a group costume? This can help you zero in on an idea.
The location of your Halloween bash can help further narrow down your options, says custom costume maker Correen Borst-Straub of Correen’s Creative Designs. Think about where you’ll wear the getup to determine what’s appropriate. If you’re going to a party in a small apartment, you probably won’t want to wear a huge Marie Antoinette dress, or you might want to think twice about wearing vampire fangs to a costumed fundraiser with a sit-down dinner.
Buck convention, respectfully
Using popular culture as inspiration may yield a few potential ideas, but if you really want a memorable guise, approach these concepts in an unconventional manner. Many people tend to dress up as the main characters from popular shows, but supporting roles or genre tropes can also be crowd-pleasing attire. For her all-time favorite Halloween costume, Dani Cabot, the manager of New York City vintage boutique Screaming Mimis, dressed up as a virgin sacrifice. “I got bedsheets and a classic cheesy ’70s Roman goddess dress and I got a huge wig, and then a choker that made it look like my throat was slashed,” she says.
Even if you don’t share every physical trait with a character, use your differences to your advantage. Murphy and her fiancé have often dressed up as characters that have historically been depicted as opposite to the couple’s own gender presentation. “Gender is always very subjective,” says Philadelphia-based drag queen VinChelle. “Everyone can express themselves how they want to.” VinChelle frequently performs in looks inspired by Beyoncé and uses the star’s photoshoots as a reference. She’ll then scour fabric stores in Philadelphia or New York City for the garment and works closely with seamstresses to construct the outfit. “Beyoncé’s a glorified drag queen,” she says.
To be clear: This is not an excuse to appropriate other cultures, use makeup to darken your skin, or wear racist costumes. If you’re unsure if a costume is appropriate, run your idea by a few friends first, says Kate Farrier, the wardrobe manager for RWS Entertainment Group, an entertainment and event production company that has produced haunted experiences for the likes of Six Flags Great America, Sea World, and Legoland.
Reference your personal style
Think about ways you can infuse your personality into popular ideas. Say you want to be a witch or a vampire. What can you do to make the costume feel like you? If your one wardrobe staple is a leather jacket, make your witch persona wear a leather jacket. “If you’re always on your phone, maybe you’re a celebrity vampire, social media vampire,” Farrier says. “Try and make it about something that you always have by bringing your personal items into it because that will make it special for you.”
One year, a shopper at Screaming Mimis spiced up their vampire attire by adding ’70s disco accessories. “They did this insane disco Studio 54 vampire look,” Cabot says. You can also take a character who isn’t particularly known for their fashion, like Pac-Man, and make an interesting garment inspired by their aesthetic.
Another way to differentiate is to make subtle changes to tried-and-true depictions. Borst-Straub has a 25 percent rule; she infuses her creativity into well-known designs so the resulting look is 75 percent true to pop culture and 25 percent her own.
Elmekies gets inspiration by searching her costume idea plus “cosplay” on Pinterest to see how others have approached the concept. Don’t worry about being so niche that everyone has to ask you what you are, Elmekies says. “So, what are you?” is a great icebreaker. “Sometimes when I go out as Belle from Beauty and the Beast, people don’t know who I am necessarily because it’s not a Disney knockoff; it’s more built that you can wear every day,” Elmekies says.
Use what you’ve got (or shop secondhand)
Halloween outfits shouldn’t cost a ton of money. Think about the colors, shapes, and silhouettes needed for a costume to help you identify the look’s building blocks. For a gargoyle look, for example, you’ll need a lot of gray apparel and makeup. “Think about the shapes of things instead of the actual items,” says Ryan Walton, the producer of Halloween experiences for RWS Entertainment Group. “[Say] I need a round hoop-like thing. What can I do that’s round and hoop-like that’s not going to cost me a lot of money and then I can refabricate?”
Scour your closet (or your friends’ closets) for pieces you’ll need. If you’re dressing up as a flapper, dig out a slip dress if you have one. Then, let your accessories and props do all the talking. “So things like jewelry, gloves, stockings, headpieces, masks can really transform a basic into something that’s excellent,” Cabot says.
For any pieces you don’t already own, visit a local vintage or thrift store or indie costume shop to get materials. Workers at these stores can offer expert costuming advice, and by shopping in person, you can be sure you’re getting exactly what you want — no online ordering surprises, Cabot says. Shopping secondhand is also far more sustainable than purchasing a polyester outfit from a big-box store. Chances are you can even incorporate aspects of your ensemble into your regular wardrobe, too.
Rock your costume
Ultimately, you’re going to have the best time in an outfit you feel comfortable and confident wearing. Think about how the fabrics and props feel; it’s not worth being constricted by shoes that are impossible to walk in. “You will light up the most when you are wearing something that you love,” VinChelle says. “When I am in my favorite costume, I’m a whole other person.”
Even if you feel like you don’t have the “right” body type for a certain character or look, “you can look at it as this is my character and my character’s just curvy,” Elmekies says. “Realize your character is incredible.”
A majestic tract of land in far north Queensland that links wet tropics and world heritage rainforest, and contains headwaters that flow to the Great Barrier Reef, could be bought and protected by Christmas, after a conservation group raised more than $19m in private donations to buy the cattle station.
Wooroora spans more than 20,000 hectares of largely intact wet sclerophyll forest and savanna woodland on the lands of the Jirrbal people about 100km south-west of Cairns – and borders Bush Heritage’s existing 43,575-hectare Yourka Reserve in one of the most biodiverse regions in Australia.
Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico speaks at a campaign rally in Galveston, Texas, on October 22, 2026. | Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton could have picked any number of messages for his first Senate campaign ad of the general election back in May. Texans care a lot about cost of living, border security, healthcare, and corruption, among other issues. But Paxton’s very first ad went with something that pollsters don’t generally ask about. He accused his opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, of being “Too Low-T for Texas.” Too low in testosterone. Not manly enough.
Paxton, whom Trump endorsed over incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the primary, is as closely linked to the president as any candidate on the ballot — so it’s not all that surprising to see him attempt the same strategy.
And Texas, after all, has its stereotypes: rugged individualism. Cowboy boots. Smoked meats. Texas Rangers. The list goes on.
Starting with the “Low-T” ad, the Paxton campaign has been all in on exploiting the politics of masculinity and traditional ideas about gender and gender roles to cast Talarico as not man enough to serve as senator — and the rest of the Republican ecosystem has followed suit.
Attacks are one thing, though, and an effective political strategy another. To figure out whether Paxton’s masculinity campaign is working, the Today, Explained team headed to Texas.
“People are mad about other things”
At a Paxton rally in Fort Worth, Texas, on a recent Monday night, Jacenta and Susan Sims were riling each other up, seeing who could get the best dig in at Talarico’s manhood.
Susan pointed to her own chest. “My shirt says ‘No Tala-freaking-way.’ Because he is kind of a freak,” she said. She listed some of Talarico’s past comments on gender to support her statement. “Like, how are you talking about God like he’s nonbinary and there’s six sexes?”
Talarico said God was nonbinary during a Texas legislative session in 2021, making what he later described as a “cringey” point about God being above human categorization. Also in 2021, he claimed during a debate over trans kids in sports that there were six sexes. He recently walked that statement back, saying there were only two sexes.
Jacenta Sims at the Paxton rally wasn’t having it: “If you really had to look deep, he’s probably got some lace on his panties. There’s nothing masculine about him.” Susan piped in, “He looks like a little boy. He’s not tough enough.” Back to Jacenta: “And we need masculinity back in Texas.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that voters who are already all in on Paxton would also be all in on this line of attack. But those are not the voters Paxton needs to convince.
“I don’t care if Talarico’s gay or not. I don’t believe he is, but it wouldn’t matter to me if he is.” Jesse Sandoval said outside the Tarrant County Elections Center in Fort Worth. He’d just cast his ballot in early voting. “I just felt that they were doing that to try to deflect from the real issues.”
Another early voter, Michael, didn’t want to give his last name, and works as a cook at a local restaurant. “I just feel like this whole toxic masculinity thing is so unnecessary,” he said. “I was raised by someone who was very, very aggressive and just a very macho man. And I feel like you have to educate yourself as to why those things are not — why saying stuff like that isn’t okay, you know?”
Walt Thompson, also at the polling place, said, “Because he’s soft-spoken, they feel that he’s gay. And you know, he’s not. He’s just not this big rugged looking guy. They can’t accept that.”
Nate, a 32-year-old construction worker who also declined to share his last name, said 2026 is a whole different moment from the last presidential election. “If this was 2024, those [messages] are effective. But I think this year it’s not gonna be effective,” he said. “People are mad about other things. When people care about gas prices, they can’t run on that.”
In other words, the culture wars hit differently when you can’t afford to feed your family or drive to work.
It’s (still) the economy, stupid
Matt Angle is director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic research PAC and communications firm. He says these attacks on Talarico’s masculinity are a tell from Republicans.
“What the Republicans are worried about is people staying home,” Angle told Today, Explained. “Those people, they’re mad about the economy, they’re mad at Trump, and [Republicans] are trying to motivate them by playing to their prejudices. … They desperately need fear to be the motivator rather than anger and frustration.”
“They’re understanding that their salaries aren’t going as far as they should. And they like that somebody’s talking to them about the cost of groceries, the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare,” he said.
Who gets to own masculinity, anyway?
There’s another key factor in how the GOP’s masculinity attacks are landing: the messenger. Paxton, after all, isn’t exactly a paragon of traditionally masculine virtue. (Just ask Trump, who can’t stop needling his hand-picked candidate for the way he dresses, looks, and talks.)
According to Jill Tate, president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, many of her members had grown skeptical of Paxton’s candidacy. That’s because his wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she described as “biblical grounds.”The actual filing listed adultery as the reason for divorce.
“I’ve been involved in Texas politics over 30 years,” Tate said, “and this is the first time I’ve truly been concerned we could lose a statewide [race] since the Republicans took over in the ’90s.”
Angela Paxton recently did her ex a solid, giving a speech to the Republican women in Tate’s group called the “elephant in the room” speech. She also cut an ad boosting “the Republican ticket,” though not Paxton by name.
“She talked about the fact that while our candidates may fall down and they may do things that are disappointing and morally wrong, it is extremely important to remember that that is the human side. And that’s not what they’re going to do in office,” Tate said of the speech, which urged the audience to vote for the team — for Republicans — rather than on the moral failings of one person.
Tate believes that the speech changed some minds and could push women in the room to vote for Ken Paxton instead of just staying home. But outside of a room of diehard Republicans, that message — vote for Ken Paxton despite Ken Paxton — may not be a compelling one, no matter how much ads try to paint his opponent as less masculine.
“Texas is a knife fight uphill every day for Democrats,” Angle, the Democratic strategist, said. But in 2026, the mix of a weak Republican candidate and anger at the economy might be enough to give Democrats a chance — and help neutralize Paxton’s efforts to turn the race into a referendum on a very specific view of masculinity.
Ryan Rusak, a veteran Texas politics writer, agrees. “I think that where Talarico can use this to his benefit is to turn it around to say, ‘Okay, well, these guys who wear the boots and eat all the brisket are the ones that got us $5 gas. They’re the ones that got us into a war in Iran. They’re the ones that have gotten it to where you can’t buy a house even in a place where we still make it fairly easy to build houses.’”
“Had we not had an environment like this,” Angle said, “I think it might have been harder for James to break through.”
This year thousands of the golden-coloured butterfly have arrived in Britain in what one expert calls ‘a bold attempt at colonisation’
The Queen of Spain has invaded. The enigmatic British visits of this gorgeous golden-coloured butterfly with distinctively shaped, squared-off hindwings have been recorded by lepidopterists for four centuries. Usually there are barely a handful of sightings each summer of a butterfly that is widespread across continental Europe.
This year, thousands have flown in, some from France and Spain that have reached the south coast, and others from the Netherlands, which have fluttered into East Anglia.
A majestic tract of land in far north Queensland that links wet tropics and world heritage rainforest, and contains headwaters that flow to the Great Barrier Reef, could be bought and protected by Christmas, after a conservation group raised more than $19m in private donations to buy the cattle station.
Wooroora spans more than 20,000 hectares of largely intact wet sclerophyll forest and savanna woodland on the lands of the Jirrbal people about 100km south-west of Cairns – and borders Bush Heritage’s existing 43,575-hectare Yourka Reserve in one of the most biodiverse regions in Australia.
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It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google startedquitting, citing fears that the AI was spiraling out of control. After a string of agents started hacking websites, researchers used AI to discover vulnerabilities in critical systems, leading to large swaths of the web going dark last week and giving rise to a scary term: Black October. At the same time, as it continued to ramp up AI spending, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — and economists once againwarned of a bubble.
It’s hard to reconcile the incongruity between the recent bad news and good news. For most of us, the state of AI is anxiety-inducing — especially when it comes to our livelihoods. According to a Pew Research Center study published in August, 71 percent of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next two decades. That figure is up 7 percentage points from where it was two years ago. Sure, in the best-case scenarios, AI could erase inefficiencies at work, streamline our daily lives, cure diseases, and generally improve the human condition.
But what if you are the “inefficiency” at work that gets erased?
That tension is at the heart of Ethan Mollick’s latest book Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. If there is such a thing as an AI sage, it would be Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School and faculty director of its Generative AI Labs. To the nearly half a million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, One Useful Thing, he delivers semiweekly updates from the jagged frontier of the technology’s development. His message in any medium is resoundingly clear: You need to use AI in order to understand it. And to get the most out of using it, he argues that you have to accept that AI is not going away; it’s only going to become more important.
That ethos doesn’t make the existential threats of AI any less daunting, but that’s not the point. Unless you’re an early Anthropic employee or a United States senator, there’s probably not much you can do directly to rein in AI’s potential harms. But you can, according to Mollick’s worldview, decide how the technology could fit into your life and think about how you fit into an AI-dominated future.
I recently spoke with Mollick about his new book, what life and work might look like in the agentic AI era, and what it means to be an artisan when even knowledge is industrialized. His theories about living with AI are meant to help you navigate the future, regardless of the latest forecast. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We’re entering a new era for AI, and the vibes are different. AI agents are something that many of us will encounter, interact with, and maybe even embrace. I’ve always known you as someone who jumps on the cutting edge of this technology to figure out what it can do. What do you think most people don’t understand about the next generation of AI?
I really think people haven’t internalized what agents do. Agents mean many things, and we can talk about personal agents, like Muse. But the fact that the problems that plagued working with AI agents before — you had to guide them each step of the way, they made mistakes, hallucinated constantly — that’s kind of gone. You can regularly get hours, days, weeks of work out of a system.
It’s not just a theoretical thing anymore. I talk to coders all the time who are a hundred times or more productive than they were before. And in other fields, we’ve kind of moved past the theoretical discussion about AI being, “This is going to be a big deal,” to, “It’s here.” From a whole kind of co-intelligence perspective, we’ve gone from, “Here’s how we use AI and work with a chatbot back and forth,” to, “These systems are now doing real work in ways that matter to real people and are reshaping real fields for better or worse.” And if you’re used to using AI a year ago, if you’re not paying for one of these systems, it’s really easy to have lost track of what’s going on.
What about the practical, everyday ways that AI is disrupting our lives? And what do you think are the limits of that disruption?
So outside of the job world and homework cheating, I think life has changed only a little bit for people, partially because these systems were kind of complicated to use and you had to decide what you were using them for. But I think the advent of personal agents, like Muse and Dot, are going to lead to a very rapid change in a lot of ways.
Most people I know who aren’t experts who use these systems, like my parents, are using these things spontaneously. They’re finding that once you know how to prompt the AI to do something, it can do things spontaneously and come back to you because it has your email and everything else. Just as one example, I was unable to figure out how to cancel my standing $8-a-month wifi subscription from my airline, and I was like, figure this out. And it went to customer service, joined chats, then I have no idea what it did, but now I don’t have a subscription to wifi anymore, thank goodness.
“I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.”
So there is this sort of lowering friction piece that’s super interesting, with good and bad elements to it. The bad side of lowering friction is both that every article gets written by AI, so there’s no human thinking in it anymore, and that companies don’t want 10,000 customer service agents coming to them demanding new things. So I think we’re just on the edge of seeing the mass change in everyday life. Right now, AI is a really good second opinion on everything. As agents become more popular, they start to take action.
How do you know when to let AI do the work, though? We know that offloading certain tasks to AI can make you worse at doing those kinds of tasks in the future. How do you take advantage of AI’s ability to do drudgery but also hold onto your own expertise?
If there’s a personal theme underlying Co-Existence, it’s that one. That is an incredibly hard choice to make, and we’re historically very bad at making it.
Students are the No. 1 case because they’re willing to offload homework because homework sucks and because the incentives for doing any piece of homework are terrible. But overall we need to do it to learn. So people offload that, but even if you’re trying to do the right kind of thing, like using AI only to help you learn and not to replace learning, it turns out that when chatbots are in assistant mode, as opposed to using them as a tutor, it feels like you’re learning even though you’re not. You feel like you’re in the loop even though you’re not. And so that assumes that we both know we want to offload and we do it intelligently and that we do it in a way that helps our long-term gain.
I am worried about us being able to do that. You have to draw lines for yourself about what skills matter to you or not, and you have to be thoughtful, in a way that we’re usually not, about what we’re giving up and what we’re not. Technology’s designed for us to give up stuff. We don’t walk 50 miles a day anymore in forced marches. I don’t know how to weave clothes. There’s a lot of stuff I’m very happy to not know: how to maintain my computer in some ways, even though that’s dangerous. I let Codex scan for security issues because it does a better job than me faster. But I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.
So I don’t have an easy answer, but I think that that will be the defining question for most people in their career paths right now and their lives: What do I give up? I think we can be too sentimental about things that we’re giving up. It’s okay, but we don’t know the full chain of consequences. I think that struggle is going to be central to a lot of people’s experience. I wish I had an easy answer, but now that AI can do so many things, de-skilling is a real problem at this point.
We’re living through a huge transformation. That’s increasingly clear. Besides losing their jobs, a lot of people are scared of losing the sense of what makes them human and what makes them valuable. How do people hold onto that in the years to come?
There’s a transformation happening, and for some people, the work will get more satisfying. There’s a lot of coders who did not like writing lines of code, but they did like summoning software and figuring out what they wanted to build. Their lives are much better because the AI does all the tedious work. They can command things to be built, and it’s so much more exciting than it was before. It lets people who didn’t code start to do incredible coding projects. So on one hand, that’s deeply freeing of the kinds of work that we did. On the other hand, there are people who love writing those lines of code and that’s gone now. You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms. Your stuff might be elegant and beautiful, but it is not going to last in a world where industrialization happens.
Industrialization versus craft is a way to think about this. There’s a lot of craft that we’ve grown to really appreciate, like the handcrafted sentence. Those things will be under threat from the logic of industrialization, which is that we need to do more of it. I think that there’s going to be a shift. There’s satisfying work to do, but I think a lot of what was satisfying human work will be under pressure to disappear, because you took pleasure in something that was not automatable, but now is.
We’ve been through this in industrial revolutions before. This is happening at a very large scale to intellectual work, where craft was a very important part of what we did. Mathematics was craft, software engineering was craft. I think that we’ll be under pressure to produce more of it, which is what industrialization’s about, even if that destroys the value of doing this as a person. You get paid to do it now, but you’re not getting the same value you did before.
“We’re no longer in a place where AI is going away.”
I think we’re going to find lots of crises of meaning. Some people are going to find huge amounts more meaning in their work, either because the work itself is now much more interesting. Work is a lot of crap, too. We can say great things about it, but people spend a quarter of their work life saying they’re bored. It’s not like this was a great job for everybody. So some people will have much more excitement in craft. Some people will have it extracted out of their job, and it’s all going to be happening at once. I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but that’s what’s happening.
Forgive me for saying so, but that was an anxiety-inducing answer. It’s an anxiety-inducing time. I wonder what advice you have for us anxious people?
I think anxiety is real, and there’s different levels of anxiety. We’re going through a wrenching change, or we will be going through one that we’re on the edges of now. There is also existential risk about whether AI will kill us all, where we clearly need more regulation. The answers are unclear. Smart people seem to think that that’s a real danger. It’s hard to know. But leaving that aside, there’s anxiety about our own transformation, our jobs. I mean, the industrial revolutions worked out great in the end, but during it, [that] was the time of Marx and anarchists and Dickens writing about London. There’s a transition we have to go through here.
I don’t think we can pretend it’s not happening, and I see a lot of people taking comfort in the idea that maybe this all will collapse and AI will go away. Even if there was a bubble financially, we’re no longer in a place where AI is going away or stopping development. I worry a lot about people doing that. Once you face that, though, I find people often reconstruct meaning in very exciting ways. Thinking about what more you can do and where you find joy in this is actually quite exciting. So I think that anxious optimism is a reasonable place to be.
What I worry about is sticking your head in the sand saying, “I’m not going to learn AI. This will go away. I’m going to pretend it’s not happening.” I mean, I wish I could give you that option. I think there’s a lot of people who wish we could slow things down or turn a dial down, but there’s also a lot of exciting things. There’s a lot of hard problems in the world that are unsolved.
If you lean into the positive pieces, you can ask how we mitigate risk but also think about how we can build a better world. Part of what makes me nervous is people sitting out that second question and just filling up with anxiety rather than believing we have a tool that can rebuild things. How do we rebuild a better world for journalism or for nonprofits or whatever it is? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and I worry it’s asked too little.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who is weighing a presidential run, told Vox that he believes Congress “should take action to make sure that every state provides pre-K for 4-year-olds.” | KC McGinnis/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The midterms are racing to their conclusion, but the presidential contest is right around the corner. As the next primaries begin to take shape, how Democratic hopefuls intend to address childcare is already shaping up to be a major question.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who is weighing a run for president, is one of the potential contenders with hands-on experience around this issue. Facing Republican opposition in the state legislature, he recently redirected federal funds to launch a pre-K pilot program, standing up 3,000 new seats since May. And he believes national Democrats should be making a push to expand access to preschool as well.
We wanted to better understand not only how Beshear is thinking about early childhood initiatives, but also his approach to spending on new federal programs more broadly, and what he’s learned from past efforts to expand access to families that failed. On Tuesday, we spoke with Beshear remotely about his work in the state — and his message to Democrats outside of it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Since 1991, Kentucky has supported voluntary preschool, yet today still only about a quarter of 4-year-olds can attend the state-funded program. Why has it been so hard to make preschool available to every family who wants it?
Well, it shouldn’t be hard. You know, pre-K is an opportunity for every child to get off to a good start. And right now in Kentucky, because of the history you just mentioned, over half of our Kentucky children show up not ready for kindergarten. So before they’ve ever walked into a public school they are already behind.
So why has it been hard to make that happen?
Well, so at least in my tenure, somehow pre-K has become political. You know, 4-year-olds aren’t registered to vote. They’re not Democrats or Republicans. But I’ve pushed every year to get this in the budget. We can easily fund it given that I’ve produced a surplus every year I’ve been governor, yet our Republican leadership simply will not let it happen.
So, as you mentioned, there have been attempts at expanding this before. What have you learned from those earlier attempts, and what are you doing differently now?
So it’s interesting you bring that up. The same leadership that will not pass pre-K funding in our current budget cycle voted for it under the last Republican governor, but won’t vote for it under me. The last Republican governor vetoed the expansion, and they expressed their displeasure. So the only thing that’s changed here is the party of the person in charge. And what I hear is our Republican leadership saying they don’t want to give me a win, but they’re willing to hand a loss to all of these 4-year olds.
But for me as governor, I don’t get to accept excuses. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken flexible workforce training funds called WIOA funds, which you can use for a lot of different things. They’re used in a number of states for pre-K. And we have launched five pilot programs in different parts of the Commonwealth that are already a stunning success.
The smallest county in Kentucky is called Robertson County and has zero childcare. You have to drive 40 minutes one way or an hour another way just for any form of child care. It’s one of the places we started this and just to see the parents and the impact that it has on them — most of those parents don’t share my political party — but this is a great opportunity for them that they’re embracing.
It sounds like it’s gotten pretty polarized in your state. When you talk with Republican lawmakers privately, what do they tell you about why they won’t support expanded preschool?
Well, many rank-and-file Republicans in our state legislature want pre-K, and a number of them helped us to push for it this time. But leadership that’s been here for far too long and gotten far too partisan is simply blocking it at this point. What we need is for it to get to a vote, because this is the top polling education issue among Republicans. Again, because it’s not political.
If we had ballot measures and we put this on there, it would pass 80-plus percent because everyone wants that opportunity for their children. My hope is now that we have started these pilot programs, including one in Franklin County, which is where the seat of government is, that they can go and see how good this program is and not allow the next set of 4-year-olds or the next set of 4-year-olds or the next set of 4-year-olds to miss out on it. But I’m gonna do everything I can with the funding that I can find to provide as much of this opportunity as possible.
So there’s a lot of speculation about whether you might run for president. Without asking you to make any announcements here, I wanted to ask how you’re thinking about these issues nationally. You recently called yourself a more “practical” candidate when explaining your concerns about Medicare-for-all. When you look at something like childcare or pre-K from a federal perspective, what does being practical mean?
I think it means that there is a role for the federal government, and I’m supporting a number of congressional candidates right now and talking to all of them about pre-K. When people talk about the different sides of the Democratic Party — which I think is an overblown story, but still — like when Elizabeth Warren and I get together, we try to find some different things that we both agree on that we could work together on, and pre-K is one of those areas, so is housing.
“I do believe that Congress should take action to make sure that every state provides pre-K for 4-year-olds.”
I do believe that Congress should take action to make sure that every state provides pre-K for 4-year-olds. That’d be something that would be good for the United States that could actually bring Democrats and Republicans together and lift up people in all 50 states. And wouldn’t that be nice? To do something that is the right thing, that is the smart thing, and to do it in a nonpartisan way.
I know you mentioned pre-K for 4-year-olds. What do you think parents should be able to count on from the government before their kids turn four?
I believe that there is a role for government in childcare, and we’re working on it right now in Kentucky. We launched our first childcare center for state employees, and we’re learning a lot from it. Now I admit that the child care challenge is complex. You know, we have private childcare, we have public childcare, we have nonprofit childcare, and making sure we can get in and understand the real cost drivers of that.
What we would do as a state, or what the federal government could do, is develop an effective understanding of all those different parts and pieces. But just pre-K could put 70,000 more people into our workforce in Kentucky, so think about what better childcare could do to the workforce in our country. And it’s something that we could afford because we would see more dollars coming back in terms of tax revenue from that many more people in the workforce than we would ever pay out in child care.
Representative Ro Khanna recently proposed a federal program that would cover childcare costs for nearly all families with kids under age six, including care by relatives and neighbors, and offer a thousand dollar a month to parents who stay home with children under three. Would you support that kind of program?
Yeah, I haven’t seen the details of it. I think that that would present some real challenges with our current system as it is. What I would see is getting into the complexities of each of the forms of child care and how we can augment it, how we can build out on the system that we have right now, but also to address those child care deserts that I’m not sure this plan would fix. I mean, we’ve got counties that have no options — public, private or nonprofit.
And so I agree that it’s a challenge. I think it’s going to take us being both surgical on the micro and adopting policies on the macro. And I believe it probably won’t all happen at once, even though that sounds great. It’s how do we make improvement after improvement after improvement and expand and expand more as we understand the underlying mechanics better.
When I talk to people about why childcare and universal pre-K fell out of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, some say that Democrats tried to do too much and that they needed to narrow their agenda and prioritize specific issues more. Others, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, say that Democrats didn’t fight hard enough for child care, for universal pre-K.
What lessons do you take from the last federal child care push?
The federal government has to act with more urgency. We get in a lot of these debates about whether a plan is perfect or if a plan’s only 80 percent perfect. Listen, take the 80 percent and start working it. Provide the American people with some help which they need.
Now, the Biden administration could have had an imperfect plan. But if they’d implemented that imperfect plan, there would be more childcare options right now. And I admit as a governor, I’m practical. You know, getting stuff done is incredibly important. I want to provide relief to all families, but if I can provide relief to a lot of families, let’s start there and then let’s get bigger.
Just to clarify that, what would you have done differently? What would it look like if you had been part of the conversation?
“If it were me, I would push for universal pre-K for 4-year-olds immediately. That is the immediate relief that takes 25 percent of that burden off of working parents.”
If it were me, I would push for universal pre-K for 4-year-olds immediately. That is the immediate relief that takes 25 percent of that burden off of working parents and then I’d work on a bill that addresses childcare, that makes sure that we have all the stakeholders at the table.
Something that I hear in DC while reporting on childcare is that Democrats in Congress are working to make big new plans for 2027 and 2028. But we know they’d also face real pressure to restore things like the billions cut in Medicaid funding.
As you think about the future, where does childcare or universal pre-K fall on your list of priorities?
It’s high on the list of priorities because my priorities are the American people, their well-being, and the ability to chase that American dream. Right? That American dream is about having a job where you can support your family, being able to see a doctor when you’re sick, driving safe roads and bridges, getting your kids the best education possible, and feeling safe in your community. And so pre-K and childcare falls right there. I believe that.
When Democrats retake Congress or when they retake the presidency, we have got to be laser focused on people’s lives and how hard they are right now, but also do it in a smart way that increases the size of our workforce when there are people that want to go back to work, but simply can’t afford to because of the cost of childcare or a lack of those education options.
You recently praised Bill Clinton for running a budget surplus. Do you think that bringing down the deficit should be a priority for the next Democratic president?
Yes, and and I believe that you can and should run a surplus in that job. Now I think what you do is you grow the economy and that helps you pay for those services, but you’ve got to be careful about new spending. That doesn’t mean that you don’t engage in it because there are some things that you could spend on, I believe, like childcare and pre-K that would result in more federal revenue coming in that would allow you to run that surplus. But over time, we’ve got to start addressing the national debt.
Did the Biden administration’s experience with inflation change your thinking about how much the federal government should spend?
Well, I believe the Biden administration was attempting to get us out of the recession that was Covid. Now you saw a huge recession in Covid, and they put these policies in place that shot us out of that recession faster than anyone ever thought was possible, but it probably overshot that target. I think we should have been communicating to the American people about how we had gotten our economy back on track in record time, but it had gone a little too far, and that we were going to make it through. That could have even been a patriotic call because I believe it was a patriotic time. You know, defeating a pandemic that came to kill as many of us as possible.
You’ve talked in this conversation and elsewhere about being pragmatic, acting with urgency, not being overly ideological. A lot of Democrats today make the case now that the pragmatic thing to do is to go big on new programs, push for universal childcare, push for universal health care, abandon these half measures and incremental steps.
I’d love to hear you talk about that. Is that your instinct?
Well, I’d have to see a program that would actually work. You know, it’s great to talk about a massive program, but then you’ve got to get down in the details, and will it deliver on day one? Or will it crash a system that is imperfect but is delivering to a degree and could deliver more? I’m not against the big idea, but what I’m against is throwing something out there that in the practical real world can’t work.
I think that employers have a big role to play. And I see families where an employer has childcare, excited to go to work, knowing their kid is in the building or or close by, the convenience that that provides. They can go down and have lunch with their kids, which is something that I’ve missed out on in my work life. so I think it is critical.
What we’ve seen in Kentucky is our large employers, we can work with them on it and we can get it done, but it’s midsized employers that we have to rise to that challenge. You know, places that only have a couple hundred employees, or maybe even 12 or 15, how we can band together for those businesses to be able to provide it. And I believe the federal government should be working directly with those companies, because we’ve got to make the economics work. The federal government, in coordination with those employers, could get this right, create a lot more slots, and help people get back to work.
On November 3, the Supreme Court will hear St. Mary Catholic Parrish v. Roy, which squarely presents the question of whether the Constitution authorizes discrimination by religious schools. | Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
For years, the Supreme Court has flirted with the question of whether religious conservatives may simply ignore laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. The Court’s Republican majority frequentlyrulesin favor of business owners and institutions that refuse to serve gay or trans people. But these cases often rely on ad hoc reasoning that seems designed to give religious conservatives a narrow win without resolving broader questions about whether people with anti-LGBTQ religious views have an absolute right to violate civil rights laws.
On November 3, however, the Court will hear St. Mary Catholic Parrish v. Roy, which squarely presents the question of whether the Constitution authorizes discrimination by religious schools. Given the Court’s past behavior in similar cases, it’s hard to imagine St. Mary ending in anything other than a victory for religious groups that wish to exclude sexual or gender minorities.
The case also presents another, related question: When does the Constitution require states to subsidize religious institutions? The Republican justices’ recent decisions suggest that they are eager to make taxpayers spend a great deal more money to promote religion.
The case concerns a Colorado law that pays for preschool education for all 4-year-olds in the state. Families with eligible children may choose from a broad range of private and public schools, including religious schools. But the state also bars schools that participate in this program from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Religious preschools that discriminate may continue to operate in Colorado. Although Colorado does have a broad ban on anti-LGBTQ discrimination, that ban exempts places that are “principally used for religious purposes.” So the sole issue in St. Mary is whether Colorado’s taxpayers must fund religious schools that engage in discrimination.
Until fairly recently, the question of whether a state would fund religious education was up to the state itself. In 2002, the Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that states had broad leeway to decide whether to fund religious education. They could, if they chose to, set up private school voucher programs that include religious schools. But they could also choose only to fund secular education.
In Carson v. Makin (2022), however, the Supreme Court abandoned this permissive approach. The casestruck down a Maine program that offered private school tuition vouchers to students in sparsely populated areas where it was not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school. Maine law provided that these vouchers could only be used at “nonsectarian schools,” but the Court’s Republican majority held that school voucher programs must include religious schools.
The Colorado preschool program at issue in St. Mary, in contrast to the program in Maine, does not bar any school from participating because it teaches religion or is affiliated with a particular faith. The program merely requires all participating schools — be they Catholic, protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or secular — to comply with an anti-discrimination law.
The question in St. Mary, in other words, is whether religious schools can not only demand taxpayer funding, but also demand exemptions from generally applicable rules that apply to all other schools that accept that funding — essentially requiring taxpayers to pay for institutions that discriminate.
The St. Mary plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to join together separate lines of religion cases
The Court’s Republican majority has spent more than a decade remaking how the Constitution approaches religion — or, at least, rewriting the Court’s own precedents interpreting the Constitution’s provisions governing religious rights.
One of those provisionsguarantees everyone the right to “free exercise” of their own faith, while the other prohibits the government from creating an “establishment of religion.” Broadly speaking, the Court’s recent decisions have read the first provision expansively, while simultaneously reducing limits on the government’s ability to advance religion — or even holding that the government is constitutionally required to fund religious institutions.
The St. Mary plaintiffs ask the Court to marry two branches of its recent religion decisions — one of which governs when people who object to a law on religious grounds are exempt from following it; the other asks when the government must fund religious schools.
The first branch involves the Constitution’s free exercise clause, and this Court has fairly consistently held that, whenthe interests of religious conservatives conflict with LGBTQ Americans — or, really, anyone who takes a relatively liberal approach to sexuality — religious conservatives win. If you are a religious conservative, and you want an exemption from a law barring discrimination against LGBTQ people, this Court will make up a reason why you should win.
That said, while this Court consistently favors religious conservatives over queer people, the Court’s cases governing when a person of faith is exempt from a law that they object to on religious grounds are fairly incoherent and have not articulated clear legal rules.
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that these exemptions are not available when someone challenges a “neutral law of general applicability,” meaning that the law applies with equal force to both religious and non-religious people or institutions.
But Smith is, to put it mildly, not a beloved decision. Congress tried, semi-successfully, to overrule it when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. And the Court’s most recent religion cases often read like the justices are looking for an excuse not to follow Smith.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the Court ruled in favor of a Christian baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples. But the Court grounded that decision in facts very specific to the case, and Masterpiece Cakeshop offers judges little guidance on how they should decide other religion cases that don’t involve these unusual facts.Similarly, in Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), the Court dodged a showdown over whether to overrule Smith and again resolved the case based on facts that were unique to that case.
These are just two examples of the Court finding ways to not follow the rule it laid out in Smith, without overruling Smith or otherwise announcing a broad legal rule that governs free exercise cases.In their brief to the justices, the St. Mary plaintiffs list “at least eight different categories of cases where Smith does not control.”
It appears that the Court has kept Smith in this strange limbo state — neither overruled nor followed in many cases — because several of the justices aren’t sure what legal rule should exist in its place. Indeed, in a concurring opinion in Fulton, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said outright that, while there are “serious arguments that Smith ought to be overruled,” she wasn’t yet prepared to do so because she wasn’t sure “what should replace Smith.”
Still, the one thing that is clear from this Court’s recent precedents is that religious conservatives routinely prevail over LGBTQ Americans. The current Court has not disturbed decisions from the 1980s that held that religious business owners must pay taxes and comply with workplace regulations such as the minimum wage, but it consistently comes up with a reason to permit religious conservatives to engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination whenever that issue comes up.
That’s bad news for same-sex couples in Colorado, and a sign that the St. Mary plaintiffs are likely to prevail.
The current crop of justices appear to be either unable or unwilling to come up with a coherent legal doctrine that can guide judges hearing religious liberty cases.
The second line of cases at issue in St. Mary, meanwhile, deal with government subsidies. Nearly a quarter century ago, the Supreme Court held that states may fund religious education if they choose, but that they aren’t required to do so. The Court’s current majority, by contrast, handed down a series of decisions suggesting that separation of church and state is itself unconstitutional. These decisions culminated in Carson, which held that states that offer vouchers to pay for private school tuition must allow these vouchers to be spent at religious schools.
So, realistically, there’s little chance that the plaintiffs in St. Mary will not succeed. If you accept both Carson and the Court’s decisions elevating religious conservatives over LGBTQ people, then it’s not like these plaintiffs’ argument is much of a stretch. It is nothing more than the logical next step in the Court’s broader efforts to shield religious conservatives from anti-discrimination laws, while also requiring nonbelievers to fund those conservatives’ schools.
Carson established that a state violates the Constitution’s free exercise clause when it denies a government subsidy to a religious school. Meanwhile, the Court’s cases involving religious exemptions to the law are doctrinally incoherent, but the one theme that does unite them is that religious conservatives should not have to follow laws protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.
It is likely, in other words, that Colorado taxpayers will soon be constitutionally required to fund schools that refuse to serve the children of same-sex couples — or that otherwise engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination that violates Colorado law.
The Court is likely to hand down another ad hocdecision that doesn’t explain how judges are supposed to approach religious liberty cases
That suggests that Barrett’s confusion over what should replace Smith has not abated, and that her confusion is shared by at least some of her colleagues. Notably, her concurring opinion in Fulton was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. So it is likely that the Court is dodging the question of whether to overrule Smith because it’s hard to form a majority for a new approach that does not include either Kavanaugh or Barrett.
But until the Court develops a new framework governing when religious objectors may ignore generally applicable laws that apply equally to secular and religious actors, the Court’s religious liberty cases will remain a muddled mess.
Which does not mean that St. Mary will be an insignificant decision — it’s obviously a very big deal if the Supreme Court rules that taxpayers are constitutionally required to fund schools that discriminate against LGBTQ families. But the current crop of justices appear to be either unable or unwilling to come up with a coherent legal doctrine that can guide judges hearing religious liberty cases.
Instead, they keep making up reasons why LGBTQ people must lose each individual case.
ELLSWORTH, Kansas — David Rankin has never been one for putting up campaign lawn signs. As a lifelong Republican in a town of 3,000 — where Donald Trump has won by 50-point margins since 2016 — he’snever seen a reason toput a candidate’s name in his yard.
But recently, Rankin and his wife Dina did something new. Frustrated with their senators in Washington, DC, they went out to their front lawn and hammered in a sign in support of the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor running for US Senate — and a Democrat.
As signs of a midterm blue wave rise around the country, perhaps no state has been more surprising to watch than Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. A string of polls nowshow the incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a tight race for survival, buffeted by low approval ratings, a string of personalcontroversies, poor campaigning, and Trump’s unpopularity over healthcare cuts, fuel costs, beef prices, and tariffs.
Kansas is now a toss-up, attracting both nationalattention and last-minute cash investments from the national parties.Pundits have pointed to a range of reasons: the national backlash against the president; the unusual weakness of Marshall’s candidacy;the persistence of pocketbook issues for Kansas voters.
But there’s also something more interesting afoot, a difference that may have its own national repercussions.Hamilton’s campaign is a rare instance of a Democrat deliberately rallying people of faith, boldly proclaiming the Gospels, openly talking about Jesus Christ, and asking voters to find — and embrace — a profoundly Democratic message in the beliefs they profess every Sunday.
“Our faith is respectful…it reflects the ideas of justice and fairness, things that are just fundamental to the Bible,” Hamilton told me in early October. “Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists.”
That was part of the draw for the Rankins. They had known about Hamilton for a while. Friends had been to his church, and David — a retired choir director — told me that his own Presbyterian congregation had used Hamilton’s books and various sermon series as part of their Bible study. So when they found out Hamilton had decided to run earlier this year — as a Democrat, no less — they prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to break with their political partythis year.
“Things are not right right now. They’re not right in Washington and we have to do better,” Rankin told me. “His faith is just going to make him better as he serves us.”
If Hamilton, and a handful of other candidates of faith in nearby Iowa and Texas, win, it could signal a shift in US politics — or at least a tremor in one of its most rock-solid certainties. One of the defining stories of the last century has been the realignment of religion, religious life, and religious voters on the political spectrum — and the complete shift of evangelicals toward the GOP. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Democrats could routinely count on majority support among white evangelical Protestants in congressional elections, and at least substantial support from them at the presidential level. But by the 1990s — with Americans becoming more evangelical and evangelicals becoming more Republican — the GOP had effectively locked in a permanent voting bloc, especially powerful in the heartland and the South.
Meanwhile the opposite has been true for the Democratic Party: Rapid liberalization and secularization has moved nonreligious and anti-religious voterstoward the Democrats, while religious Democratic voters tend to come from smaller progressive churches. The shift has onlyaccelerated in recent years, as Trump has consolidated evangelical voters,while white college-educated voters — who are largely secular — moved left. And when blue-state Democrats try to deploy faith-based messages, they get derided or dismissed as awkward, disingenuous, or off-brand.
The result: In recent years, Democrats have mostly ceded religious voters, outreach, and messaging to Republicans. That has made it almost impossible for the party to compete in red and rural states, where white evangelical voters make up a substantial share of the electorate. In turn, Democrats have faced increasingly long odds to win thoseSenate seats, or expand the electoral map in presidential contests.
Whether he wins or losesin Kansas, Hamilton’s overperformingcampaign poses a high-stakes question for Democrats nationally: Can a true moderate, a self-described radical centrist, and an openly religious person offer a road map for reclaiming Christianity and winning back religious voters?
Maybe Hamilton does represent such a playbook. But to watch him on the trail, you find another fact that makes his path look much harder for other Democrats to walk.
It’s not just that Hamilton is a religious Democrat, or even that he’s mastered a message for religious swing voters hoping to reconcile their faith with a Democratic candidate. He’s also a deeply talented public speaker, well-connected community leader, and authoritative religious voice willing — unlike most pastors — to wade directly into electoral politics. He is, in other words, a unicorn.
He’s the leader of a very unique church — not just a politician “affiliated” with Christianity or training to join the clergy, but an established figure in an established institutional denomination that insulates him against attacks on his faith and character. (One of those came from no less than Vice President JD Vance, whoattackedHamilton in September as “dressed in the skin suitofour religion.”) The skills that come with leading a megachurch also lend themselves easily to campaigning — but might not be replicable for others, at least not to this extent. And Hamilton has managed to ease concerns from secular or nonreligious liberals, without compromising his centrist, at times heterodox, religious and political beliefs.
His campaign could change control of Congress. But beyond that, it also offers a new, possibly more effective, political language for Democrats in a post-Trump world.
On a recent Thursday in Hutchinson, Kansas, Adam Hamilton found himself therapizing a crowd of several hundred. “Republicans for Hamilton” pins floated in the audience at this downtown theater in the middle of the state, as he diagnosed the problems in Washington that have bled into Kansas. Members of the US Senate, Hamilton said gently, had become like Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: They’d lost their minds, their hearts, and their courage.
Along the way, he said,they, and President Donald Trump, had torn apart the fabric of the community, turning neighbors into suspicious strangers. Heads nodded in agreement; those closest to me sighed and lowered their heads. Hamilton recounted something a mother once asked him: to be “somebody who’s going to help me not hate my neighbors with the red caps anymore.”
“And she wasn’t talking about Chiefs fans,” he quipped. Laughter broke the silence.
To see Hamilton in action feels like being thrown back to a forgotten era of politics: His tone is conciliatory. He’s eager to dispense with the “extremes.” He slips into preaching about “radical love,” and he’s comfortable quoting scripture and referencing Christian teachings when answering policy questions. Time permitting, he shakes hands and greets everyone in a room.
His public persona is built far less on his political experience—this is his first race — than on his three decades of experience leading a megachurch.In his own telling, tending to the middle has been a defining part of his life’s work.
His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.
Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes (“Everything happens for a reason”) and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism.
“I carry my pocket testament with me everywhere,” Hamilton told me, pulling out his copy of the Gospels and the epistles of John, as he tends to do on the trail. “This is my defining story. This book and its story define how I understand what it means to be human and is at the center of my life.”
He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church “for thinking people.”
The point was to “use your intellect and not check your brain at the door,” he says on the stump. “And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand.”
And so it came to pass that a congregation that started off meeting in the chapel of a funeral home in the 1990s grew into Kansas’s largest church, and the largest Methodist congregation in the country. The church now has nine locations across two states counting about 24,000 membersbetween them, anchored by a spaceship-looking complex in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb.
Hamilton, and members of the church, are quick to point out the radical centrism of the church: It’s split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Hamilton himself is a former Republican. The Leawood location features both a 3,500-capacity sanctuary, with a full orchestra and 80-person choir for traditional services, a smaller space for modern, nondenominational-inspired worship, and a chapel.
And though the spotlight of the campaign has brought scrutiny, media visits, and broadsides from out of state, it’s also Hamilton’s experience in the church, combined with an unpopular and inexperienced GOP incumbent, that have made the race competitive.
The light pouring through the Swedish chapel’s windows in Lindsborgseemed to amplify the hundreds of singing voices. Hamilton, stumping at the front of the room, had broken out into song — “All Creatures of Our God and King” a hymn based on St. Francis of Assisi’s 800-year-old prayer — and the crowd at this Lutheran college quickly joined in.
How I reported this story
I’d had my eye on Adam Hamilton for a few months. I was hoping to cover his primary campaign, but given his religious and politically moderate background, it wasn’t clear that he would win.
When he did, I saw a chance to explore a question central to my beat: How does politics influence American religion, and how can religion influence the two major parties — especially today’s Democrats?
I reported this story from Kansas — flying into Kansas City and driving nearly 200 miles to a bookstore in Salina, where Hamilton was scheduled to speak and meet supporters. I spent the rest of the day following his campaign to Lindsborg (about 45 minutes away) and Hutchinson (another 30 minutes away).
The next day, I was off to Garden City in the far west of the state for another campaign stop (another 200 miles away), stopping for a meal in Hanston on my way back to Ellsworth in central Kansas for another event. I spent the following day in Salina and stopped in Topeka, before heading to Overland Park, where I attended a Sunday service at Hamilton’s church before returning to DC in the evening. In all, I covered about 900 miles of roads in four days, crisscrossing the state of Dorothy and Toto and talking to dozens of voters.
“You just got to take the time to do that,” he said after the final alleluia.
Before the song, he had been speaking about the Christian roots of his campaign: the Biblical call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, all for the sake of God’s creation. Oftentimes life, and especially politics, make it hard to see the beauty in nature, he was saying, and the complexity in everything.
Hamilton’s popularityin both his church andamong Kansas voters owes a great deal to the fact that he’s a moderate. Coming from the coasts, that word, used around Hamilton, doesn’t quite mean what I expected.A “moderate” in American Democratic politics usually describes a longtime Democrat who carves out a middle lane on very specific issues — usually defense or reducing the deficit. But Hamilton has no trouble with complicated, unfixed, occasionally heterodox views, including on hot-button social issues.
Take a question a woman in the chapel asked him about abortion: What does he think about reproductive rights in a state like Kansas?
He’s spent the last twodecadeswriting and talking about his evolving thoughts on abortion. He calls himself “pro-life with a heavy heart,” telling the woman that, as a pastor, he feels “personally moral tension when it comes to abortion.”
But he would be taking on a different role as a US senator, Hamilton said. Crisis pregnancies “lead me to have compassion, and say there needs to be legal and safe access to abortion,” he said. On this issue, politicians are usually pressured to take absolutist positions to satisfy their party’s base, but Hamilton sees his own view as representing what most Kansans actually want. People here have already voted multiple times to preserve abortion access, he said, and when an effort to undo abortion rights protections in the state constitution was on the ballot in 2022, it lost by nearly 20 points. He said he believed at the time that the legislature should not “be making that decision for women who are facing really difficult situations.”
This particulartension comes from his mother’s own experience: Worried she wouldn’t be able to support or raise a child at 17, her father, a TWA pilot, had encouraged her to travel to Switzerland for an abortion when she got pregnant. She considered it, but ultimately refused, leading to her being kicked out of her home and moving in with Hamilton’s 16-year-old father. Even today she tells Hamilton to remember her story — “I just can’t imagine how much poorer the world would be if I had gotten on that airplane and you had never been born.”
“There are things that are clearly black and white, but there’s a lot where there’s room; I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you’re coming from and I can respect you for that,” Hamilton said to me and other reporters after the chapel event. “People on the extremes on either end, they don’t want me telling the story about my mom. … But in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, ‘You know what? That’s real. I know that you’re going to solidly make sure that there’s abortion rights.’ And on the right, people say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you understand the moral tension.’”
He applies a similar mindset to LGBTQ issues. His own church welcomes gay and lesbian people, even as he accepts that individual Methodist congregations can choose their own approach (he advocated for that middle ground while trying to prevent a schism between the mainstream UMC and a traditionalist and conservative offshoot that broke off in 2023).
On the trail, Hamilton hews to the middle on other policy issues as well, raising concerns about the national debt, endorsing border security and ICE’s “original” purpose, letting local communities decide on AI data centers, and critiquing “far-left climate” activism. He’s running ads condemning socialism and the extremes of both sides. And he peppers his speeches with the phrase “independent-minded Democrat.”
In the same way, Hamilton is not afraid to evangelize. He’s both eager and willing to talk about his faith, to preach the Gospel, and to share his personal journey to God, while also reassuring liberal, nonreligious people, and Democrats broadly that he believes in the separation of church and state. He isn’t one of those Christians, he seems to suggest, but he is still uncompromisingly Christian.
“We’re not running to force our religion on other people, but we are running as people who say our Gospel calls us to something different,” he said. When comparing the core priorities of the GOP — fiscal responsibility, limited government, personal civil liberties, and a strong defense — with the core priorities of Democrats — social safety nets, education, the elderly, making sure that vulnerable people are cared for — the space to be a gospel-reading Democrat is quite obvious, he said.
“Jesus never talked about civil liberties,” Hamilton said. “He never talked about fiscal responsibility, a strong defense or limited government. But he did talk about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ … Which of these two sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”
Which is where the lessons for other Democrats appear plainly. Hamilton thinks the party he joined earlier this year could learn a few things from his campaign, and those of other people of faith running as Democrats across the country.
“Sometimes they have inadvertently alienated religious voters who are just right of center who would easily have come on board if they felt like they were welcomed,” he said. “The Democratic Party would be far stronger and wiser if they were openly willing to say, ‘Of course we embrace people of faith and we need them.’”
And it’s that ability, to combine faith with moderation and openness, that is compelling to the voters across the political spectrum I talked with.
“I’m a Christian and I feel that in Christianity we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, all those things that I read in the New Testament. And I feel that he gets that,” Susan Combs, a 73-year-old registered Republican, told me. “This Christian nationalism that is going on is not really, to me personally, it’s not what Christianity is about.”
She and others pointed to Hamilton and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, as examples of a kind of Christian political revival. Both of them, plus a handful of other Democrats running on openly faith-based messages, present case studies for strategists, scholars, and others who are watching the campaign for political lessons.
When Talarico and Hamilton use religious language, “it really stands out, even though it’s really more of a return to what we’ve seen in the past,” Dave Campbell, a religion and politics scholar at the University of Notre Dame, said. “The trick with religious language is that people from within a religious community, they pick up on the subtleties. Do they really speak the way I do? Do they really understand the world the way I do? And if you don’t really understand those nuances, your rhetoric can come off as not only inauthentic, but even offensive.”
The former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor RyanBurge noted that Democrats will likely not be able to pull many white evangelical Christians into their coalition.
But his own examination of the data shows that there’s ample room for Democrats to grow their margins among white Catholics and mainline Protestant voters— those who belong to old non-evangelical institutional churches like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches.
These voters will remain up for grabs in future elections — though outreach may only work in certain states that still have strong mainline traditions. “You can’t win in a place like Arizona — that’s not where your base is,” Burge said. But traditional denominations are still strong in the heartland and farm country.“A place like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even Missouri to some extent, Wisconsin — those are the kind of places I think that message would do well,” Burge said. “It wouldn’t do well nationwide, though.”
Burge told me the key for Democrats to be competitive in religious spaces again will be to win over old mainliners “who used to be a Bill Clinton voter, even an early Obama voter, who got lost by the progressivism of the Democratic Party on social issues. That’s the kind of voter that you can win back, the 75-year-old Lutheran, Presbyterian.”
The bigger question, Burge told me, is an uncomfortable one Democrats as a party must face: that the secular far left is loud, but not large. “A lot of those people [who are religiously unaffiliated] are actually open to the idea of religion,” he said. Even among those who don’t identify with any particular organized religion, atheists only make up less than one in five.
“A lot of [religiously unaffiliated people] do believe in something. Those people are not going to be turned off by some religious talk,” Burge said. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people. They’re the ones we’re going for.”
At a rally in the Kansas City suburbs in September, Vice President JD Vance unintentionally delivered an in-kind donation to Hamilton’s campaign. He leveled an attack liberal and mainline Protestant Christians have long fielded from the religious right: that Hamilton’s faith was just “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”
“That is not Christianity,” Vance, a Catholic convert who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal, and nondenominational faith traditions, said of Hamilton, also calling him “a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself.”
By contrast, he described Marshall as “a proud Christian” with “real faith and real principles.” Marshall also attends a mainline Christian church.
More than 100 Methodist clergy came to Hamilton’s defense in the wake of the broadside, urging Marshall, and Vance, to be more careful on the campaign. “When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote. “You tear at the fabric that is the body of Christ.”
The pastor of Marshall’s old church called Hamilton “a middle-of-the-road pastor” who is “pretty good at loving his enemies.”
Trump himself recently called him “a Radical Left LUNATIC Dumocrat,” who is “is not one us [evangelicals].”
But the personal attacks on his faith, and the defenses, may have only underscored one of Hamilton’s perceived advantages. In Kansas, at least, moral character has become one of the defining stories of the race. It’s no coincidence that Hamilton’s big break came in September, when a major New York Times investigation upended the race by reporting that Marshall — a former OB-GYN —had sued more than 700 former patients, some of them new mothers, for unpaid medical bills. Many were charged 18 percent interest, and 81 were arrested in debt-collection cases.Campaign ads interviewing doctors who said Marshall’s practices were unusual and Marshall’s former patients soon inundated Kansas airwaves.
“It is ridiculous to suggest that Dr. Marshall ever arrested patients,” Abbi Enders, Marshall’s campaign press secretary, wrote in response to a question from Vox about the article. “The Kansas Bill of Rights states, ‘No person shall be imprisoned for debt,’ proving this to be a blatant lie.” Many of the arrests in the cases of Marshall’s former patients were due to missed court dates.
That story broke right before Hamilton trounced Marshall during a debate at the Kansas state fair. Videos of Marshall being drowned out by booing crowds spread quickly — while competing clips of Hamilton talking about being both liberal and conservative also went viral during this window.
Hamilton’s favorability has become a prominent example of another shift in Trump-era American politics: the sense that Republicans are now losing the character war, nominating deeply flawed candidates who project strength and bluster at the expense of integrity, decency, and other qualities people trust.Across red states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats have held an edge in polling when voters were asked which party’s candidate has better moral character.
In Kansas,more stories would soon drip out, contributing to the deteriorating public image of Marshall: reports that Marshall’s primary residence was in Florida, not Kansas; an unpaid cookie bill from a 2020 campaign event; allegations of inappropriate usage of officials funds or taxpayer money for campaign purposes.
The result: Hamilton leading the field of key toss-up Senate races with the highest net favorability ratings in a CNN average of polls from September and October.
Republicans have fired back, going after his religion and church. Vance and Marshall attacked his church’s participation in a Pride festival. Marshall campaign ads have criticized the church’s handling of decades-old child sexual abuse allegations against a former volunteer at a church camp, alleging that Hamilton “protected a pedophile.” Trump, at his rally in Wichita last week, delivered his own spin on these accusations, saying Hamilton “used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity,” and “shielded a child sexual predator at his church.”
Marshall has continued calling Hamilton a far-left, “woke megachurch CEO,” and went after his church again at a debate last week, asking if he was “leading from the middle when one in four churches left his denomination? Is that what you call leading from the middle when you split the Methodist church?”
“People know what I’ve stood for — they know I’m not some woke, far left, whatever,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And I feel at peace about it.” Still, “that’s 24,000 other people in my church that you’re attacking and you’re attacking every other mainline Christian across the state of Kansas as you’re doing that.”
When asked about this charge in an email, Marshall’s press secretary did not respond.
When Hamilton discusses religious liberty and the separation of church and state, he makes something clear: “I’m not running to be the chaplain of the Senate.”
Over the days that I followed him, he repeated this line, usually in response to liberal-leaning voters curious or skeptical about endorsing someone so vocally religious.
“If anything, that might have been a negative,” Sally Gillihan, a Democrat, told me in Hutchinson. “I was really worried that that’s what he was relying on, that’s what he was going to go to bat for.” After hearing him talk about policy, religious freedom, and restoring normalcy, those fears went away.
Others, including Sam Buttram, a 2020 Marshall voter who works in the cattle industry, told me that Hamilton’s religiosity wasn’t a selling point for him, but that it’s “a lot of what makes him who he is,” which makes him trust his character. “I just wish more politicians were like him…independent-minded, wanting to do the right thing for the people instead of worried about staying in office or agreeing with some other politician.”
Ultimately, Hamilton’s unexpected campaign success so far might be due to the combination of all this — not only his faith, but the impression that many voters have that he is guided not by right or left but his own values, as evidenced by his heterodox views and moderate temperament. In his case, those values are informed by his faith, but for other Democrats in other red states, they might not need to be.
Still, that might not make it any easier for Democrats trying to emulate the Hamilton playbook.
Much of Hamilton’s success, Burge told me, is due to his unique position. “People don’t realize how good megachurch pastors are at stuff like [campaigning]. When you’re used to talking to 2,000, 3,000 people every weekend, you are a politician,” he said. “It’s a superpower though. … You’ve got to be a one in a million kind of person.”
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I am someone who notoriously struggles with big decisions. Over a year ago, I found a wonderful partner, who very much feels like they could be my soulmate. We’ve been dating three time zones apart for a while. Being near our families, communities, and aging parents is a shared value — unfortunately one that makes it hard to compromise on location. Either way, I have to give up something I want and value — a wonderful partner who I can see a life with (the first time I’ve felt this way about someone), or the place I’ve always imagined settling down and that represents the person I am becoming and values I want to live. Two good things are pulling me toward opposite paths and there’s not much room for compromise. How do I make the “right” decision?
Dear Fork in the Road,
You’ve found a place in the world that you feel connected to and you met a person you envision spending the rest of your life with. Geographically restless and lonely people everywhere are jealous! But with your good fortunes seemingly at odds with one another, it feels that by choosing one, you’ll forsake the other — and doom the choice you did make to feel like a sacrifice.
When circumstances have forced me to make a tough decision, I’ve daydreamed about a thought experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation.
In quantum physics, particles behave differently than us mortals. For example, an electron can be in more than one place at once until it’s measured. How can it be in multiple locations and then be observed to be in a single position? In the 1950s, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed an explanation: The universe splits into alternate versions of itself, one for each place a particle could be measured. To apply this theory to your life, if you chose to move cities, don’t worry, another universe would be created in which you didn’t choose to do this, and you’ll stay right where you are!
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Yes, I know you can’t transport yourself into such a quantum realm, but there is something helpful in thinking about alternative universes. Did you have an immediate reaction to which universe you would be upset not to inhabit? Take that information to heart, because it’s likely you’re not ultimately going to make your choice based on a tidy pro-con list.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that most of our decisions are not based on rationality. People use two systems for decision-making: System one is faster and emotionally based, and system two is more logical and slow. But even the slower, more deliberate decision-making can fall prey to any number of cognitive biases.
In your case, one called loss aversion may be especially relevant. People have the tendency to worry more about what they’ll lose, even if what they stand to gain is equal in value. For example, it will likely feel worse to lose a $10 bill from your pocket than it would feel good to find a $10 bill on the ground. This bias is relevant in people’s social lives too: They hold onto older, maybe fading, friendships because the thought of losing them is too painful, but don’t seek out new friends with equal effort. Or, they stay in a meh job because it feels scary to let it go, rather than applying that same energy to finding a new one. Once you accept that your decision-making process will be subject to messy feelings and biases, you can let go of trying to make the perfect choice.
You opened your question by sharing that you struggle with big decisions, and it makes me wonder if you simply feel anxiety about making a choice at all. This is called analysis paralysis. When outcomes are uncertain, anxiety wakes up, and a voice in your head tells you to avoid taking risks. People with analysis paralysis overthink their options, over-research, and second-guess their first instincts. These actions have more to do with stress over committing to any decision rather than the content of what you’re deciding on.
A surprising finding from psychology may ease your paralysis. Researchers told people to make a big life decision — on the order of ending a relationship or quitting their job — by flipping a coin. Heads, they made the change; tails, they didn’t. For those who followed the results of the toss, the people who made the change were overwhelmingly happier, even though their decision to do so was made by pure chance. These random-flip outcomes also show “that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices,” the authors wrote. The coin helped the participants resist the bias of tending to stick with the status quo, even if it doesn’t make them happier.
To begin to loosen your paralysis, something that might assist you, paradoxically, is to introduce more options into the mix. Jacques Derrida, the 20th-century French philosopher, is known for the concept of deconstruction, a way of analyzing texts or ideas more critically, and showing they’re not as stable as they seem. He pointed out that we often think in binaries and false opposites: good vs. evil, man vs. woman, nature vs. culture. This can set up an easy dichotomy in which one of the items is good, and the other, by being its opposite, is bad.
You’ve created a binary situation, and you don’t actually have to be in one. What if there’s a third option, or a fourth? What if you and your partner move to a brand-new city, and set out to create new community, together? What if you and your partner find a way to split your time between your respective hometowns? Now you don’t have only two good things pulling you in opposite directions, you would have different options you can be more creative with. You also don’t have to commit to the decision you make now for the rest of your life. You can always move cities again, or try to find another mate.
You are with a partner you love, and live in a place that you love. You might reframe your situation as a win-win, rather than a lose-lose. And remember that if you don’t make a choice, you’re not successfully avoiding a decision — it’s a choice of its own. Your partner may get tired of long-distance or end the relationship for another reason. Or, you could start to resent the place you live since you have to travel so much to spend time with your partner.
I also want to point out how you describe your partner. Don’t turn your nose up at finding someone who you can see making a life with, especially as you note, if you’ve never felt that way before. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said that there were two most important moments in his life: when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife. “What happened with me would not have happened without her.” Buffett’s view is supported by research that shows that people with supportive spouses tend to take on more rewarding challenges throughout their lives, and end up having more personal growth and happiness.
Another quantum idea that might interest you is spooky action at a distance. This is when two particles, even far apart, become connected to one another. Measuring one affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If your partner feels like your “soulmate,” perhaps you have become entangled already. Don’t fret about making the perfect choice about the next phase of life, but do make a choice (any choice!) that considers your futures as bound up together. For the other details, maybe it’s time to find a coin to flip.
Bonus: What I’m reading
I’m currently re-watching The Twilight Zone and recommend the episode Mirror Image, about a young woman who encounters her double from a parallel universe. The show’s creator, Rod Serling, was inspired to write the script when he saw a man at the airport who looked suspiciously like him, and had a similar suitcase and jacket. What if he approached the man, and it turned out to be himself? The dreamy story also inspired the movie Us by Jordan Peele.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on “handedness”: how molecules can have variants that are non-identical mirror images of one another. These variants are their own kind of dark doppelganger; only one can exist in the body. The science writer Ann Finkbender wrote a charming essay about understanding this principle of life in Last Word on Nothing.
If you haven’t yet read Stoner by John Williams, just put down whatever you’re currently reading and do it. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t act, and let your passivity make choices for you.
In states like Florida, officers who hand out fishing citations and inspect produce have been deputized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expanding the reach of President Trump’s deportation campaign.
A canal in Dania Beach, Fla., in September. The canal was the site of an encounter that led Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers to contact federal immigration authorities.
A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it.
Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study.
It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.
In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions.
Now we have AI tools, too.
With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.
Key takeaways
More people are turning to AI for financial advice:One in five Americans have used AI to help manage their money, and some experts think chatbots could be better than the status quo.
AI works best if you know what questions to ask: Those with basic financial literacy will be able to make the most of these tools, while those without it — who might need help the most — could be led astray.
Better advice comes with greater risks: Sharing your financial information with a chatbot helps personalize its recommendations. This raises privacy concerns, so you might want to delete your data when you’re done.
Think of AI as a financially savvy friend:Chatbots can answer money questions you might be embarrassed to ask someone else and use that context to help build your budget.
AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.
Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.
The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.
Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.
Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year.
“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”
But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions.
Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious.
“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”
An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.
“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”
It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.
That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes.
One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane.
“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”
Don’t assume your data is safe
Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.
It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads.
Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life.
“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”
The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.
Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are.
“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”
Trust but verify — and then delete your data
In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.
Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.
The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources.
“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”
When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days.
Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.
“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”
Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates.
Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence.
Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.
Demonstrators gather at the Washington Monument on October 8, 2026, in Washington, DC, to rally in support of a Cornell University student who alleges she was raped at a fraternity house on campus in 2024. | Michael A. McCoy for the Washington Post via Getty Images
Last month, a former Cornell University student identified in court papers as “Jane Doe” sued her university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, alleging they raped her at the group’s house in October 2024. Cornell’s own disciplinary process for the incident had ended with two of the men expelled, two suspended and put on probation, one (who had already graduated) barred from campus, and two found not responsible but ordered to complete trainings and write reflection papers. The local district attorney declined to press charges.
Since the lawsuit was filed, the DA has reopened the case and New York state officials have launched an investigation. Students have also held sit-ins, and some are calling for the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, to resign. Cornell has suspended fraternity parties for the rest of the year.
But this kind of case — and the issues it raises about campus life — are not new. Educators, students, activists, and politicians have spent decades debating how to prevent sexual assault, how to protect victims, how to balance the rights of the accused, and what to do about Greek life. At times, those conversations have resulted in significant changes to policy — which in turn have also generated backlash and brought more changes in response.
Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, began researching campus sexual assault in the early 2000s, embedding at a Midwestern university to understand how fraternities, alcohol, and the lack of anywhere else to go put students at risk. She has seen attention to the issue come and go in the public discourse across generations of students, often spurred by high-profile incidents like a Time magazine cover in 1991 spotlighting a first-year William & Mary student who was date raped, and a Stanford swimmer in 2016 who was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman after a frat party.
I wanted to know what Armstrong makes of Cornell, and if she thinks anything is different this time. Has anything actually gotten better since the Title IX fights of the 2010s? What do people who haven’t been on a campus in a while misunderstand about how students socialize? And what could a school like Cornell do right now, without waiting on the courts or Washington, DC?
I talked to Armstrong about Greek life, what survivors of sexual assault actually want from their schools, and the reforms she thinks colleges need to be paying attention to. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Could you start by sharing briefly the kind of research you’ve done on campus sexual assault?
I did ethnographic and interview work at a Midwestern university, starting in 2003, and published a paper in 2006 on the organizational conditions that lead to sexual risk on campus. I later co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, a 2013 book based on that research.
Were there many people talking about this back in the early 2000s?
It was in something of a hiatus period. Interest in this issue essentially goes in waves. There was interest in the ’70s, then again in the late ’80s, and then there was a hiatus. My research and writing happened right before things started to build back up again with interest.
So before we get into Cornell specifically, could you paint a bit of a picture of how campus social life tends to work? Where students gather, who hosts parties, and where Greek life fits in?
So the basic gist is that at four-year American residential universities, students often live in residence halls or they live off campus, or if there’s residential Greek life, they live in fraternities and sororities.
Young people like to congregate, and they like to party, to have fun, and drink, and figure out opportunities to hook up. One of the things that has emerged, particularly on campuses with fraternities that have their own houses, is that these organizations control the party resources — like the space and alcohol, and time and energy to host.
So it’s hard to avoid them if you are someone who wants to party.
Yes, and one of the things that’s been coming out of the discussion related to Cornell is that the pandemic really flattened the number of bars, restaurants, and cafes in Ithaca — places where people might have otherwise had opportunities to hang out. So it gave an already really dominant Greek scene even more centrality and power over the way students socialize.
My next question was going to be what do people who haven’t been on a college campus in a while tend to misunderstand about the party scene, and that pandemic shift seems like an answer to that.
Yes, and people often don’t understand that for a lot of first-year students, who are generally under 21 but still wanting to drink, figuring out how to get alcohol, where the parties are, where the fun is going to be, is a challenge for them. Students entering college often don’t have good resources to know what’s safe and not safe.
Yeah, and it seems like colleges just cover their eyes and deploy a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on underage drinking.
Yes. Years ago, when I was doing more traveling and speaking on college campuses, cab drivers would be telling me how they’d deposit students drunk all the time. And if a school was religiously affiliated or anything, they would just deny that their own students were partying with alcohol at all. And so the students were just vastly more at risk than even at campuses where officials were willing to admit what actually goes on.
Based on your research of party rape, what parts of campus life do you think we should be paying attention to with Cornell and other colleges?
Here I’d bring up a book, Sexual Citizens by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan. They did ethnography at Columbia University, and they pointed out some concepts like “sexual geography” — which is this idea that you can go onto any campus and see the ways things are organized to be more risky.
They point out, for example, that if students have nowhere to socialize except in dorm rooms with beds, that’s more risky than if they had lounges or other kinds of nonsexual spaces to congregate. And like, are there fun things to do that are substance-free if people want that? Are there spaces for queer students or students of color to hang out? What are the social options, and who controls where the fun happens?
That makes so much sense. If there’s no alternative, then people will go to whatever option is available, even if it’s less safe.
Yeah, and I mean it’s tricky because sometimes it’s not considered hip or cool to do that. When we were doing our observation research way back in the early 2000s, the university we were studying was trying to create some non-frat party options, and the women that we studied thought those were just hopelessly nerdy and uncool, and they didn’t want to go because they were not seen as being high-status things to do.
What do you think colleges could be doing differently when it comes to parties?
One thing I think that colleges could do — like now that we do have Uber and Lyft — they could get a Lyft subscription where students can call up 24/7 to get home safely from wherever they happen to be, no questions asked. That could be expensive, but it’s a lot more expensive when serious harm happens. So ensuring people can get home safely could be one measure.
And Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, had an op-ed this week in the New York Times suggesting that universities consider making these organizations co-ed. That’s another option. Not abolishing them completely, but transforming them.
I’ve been really struck by the dissonance of having this conversation around male loneliness and male bonding on one hand, and this separate conversation about fraternities and whether they’re good or bad on the other.
I have a student, Anna Wood, who’s done interviews with fraternity men. She’s very interested in young men’s mental health, and loneliness, and friendship, and she’s finding that men get a kind of brotherhood more than friendship in fraternities. In other words, the fraternities aren’t really solving the male loneliness problem.
Are there any campuses today that you think are modeling something that is safer or better? Are there any other schools you think we should be paying attention to?
Well, there’s Wesleyan and Swarthmore; the students a few years ago organized to abolish Greek life on their campus. And I think in a lot of universities there are these “learning-living” communities that are organized around various kinds of themes or interests, like it could be organized around being interested in business or interested in international relations or STEM. But something where universities take on the project of helping young people form friendships.
I know we’ve been talking a lot about Greek life, but there’s sexual assault on campus outside of Greek life, too.
Yes, it happens everywhere from honors dorms to sporting teams to residence halls. And it’s not just sexual assault; it’s also intimate partner violence in more committed relationships. I mean there are undergraduate students who are murdered by their boyfriends. So just addressing Greek life would not solve the problem across the board.
So I was in college between 2010 and 2014, when the Obama administration’s 2011 Title IX letter reminding colleges to address sexual assault complaints helped ignite a national debate over campus investigations and discipline.
Exactly. It was a big issue on my campus and across the country. I understand those guidelines were loosened under Trump. As I’ve been following Cornell, I’ve seen a number of people respond by saying, “Well, nothing has changed or improved, and Title IX doesn’t work.”
I would love your thoughts on all of this, on where things stand. Do you see progress as just a ping-pong back and forth, or do you feel like things have improved at all from when you first started studying this?
One thing that seems to me that is better over time is that every single time this issue rises to the level of public awareness, there’s more people who get it. Like in each wave, more people understand that women don’t report sexual assault because they’re afraid of retaliation, because of trauma. More people understand this.
Like this time, as soon as the facts of the case became widely public, there was just sheer horror on the part of so many people. When I was in college in the ’80s, that would not have been true at all. I mean, there was a case here at the University of Michigan when I was an undergraduate where it felt like just four feminists on campus understood what was going on. So there’s really been a gradual sort of cultural awareness over time
Even just talking to you, the composition of journalists writing on this is very different now.
What do you mean?
You’re a woman who graduated from an elite college around the time when the Dear Colleague letter was introduced. Not that long ago in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, where anyone who had a position to have any kind of way of impacting the public conversation, it was all men. There weren’t women who had access to that kind of public conversation. So I think that’s also a really, really important piece of what’s changed. The journalists are changing and helping the public get it.
Can you talk about what happened beginning with the Trump administration?
So on the Title IX front, and after the Dear Colleague letter from 2011, and the whole campus anti-rape movement that happened around that time — well, on the heels of that there was a really major backlash. And that’s something my colleagues and I are studying, like the men’s rights activists and people who are more middle of the road, like civil libertarians, who felt things had gone too far.
And then the Dear Colleague letter was revoked under Trump, and in 2020 new Title IX regulations were put forward as a result of the Department of Education’s work during the first Trump administration. Those regulations made it very, very, very, very difficult to find somebody on campus responsible for sexual misconduct. Those are still in effect, so from that perspective, the fact that Cornell actually managed to expel a couple of those men and hold all of them, you know, responsible in some way, shows just how compelling the evidence against them was because it’s actually really, really hard now.
And this was all wrapped up in the backlash to Me Too?
The backlash to the campus sexual assault stuff was already well underway when Me Too was getting started, but yes, there was this wave of stuff, and then we get the 2020 regulations, and the Biden administration tried and failed to undo them.
Why did they fail?
Well, it took a really long time because they went through this notice-and-comment period, and they got everything redrafted, and then as soon as Trump was elected again, it was legally challenged.
So it took too long, and then they ran out of time?
It’s not even clear that the regs the Biden administration wanted would have fixed anything because we also have these processes where there’s just so much legalization and complexity. I mean, what survivors want is they want this to stop. They want people to believe them. Survivors want different things, but often they don’t want some yearlong process where everyone’s asking them what happened again and again and again. They want to just do school.
We still don’t have a good process in place for survivors on campus through either Title IX or the criminal justice route.
No, and one of the things I think that is most straightforward that could be improved is on the notion of what’s known as supportive measures. So those are the things that are very consistent with Title IX, because the point of Title IX is for people to not be deprived of their access to education. So if you think about it from the point of view of the survivor, what do they need to be well, healthy, and stay in school?
They may need their tuition refunded for a semester. They might need mental health services. They may need somebody to contact all of their professors and tell them that they can’t get their work in. They may need some sort of immigration support. At Michigan State, after the Larry Nassar scandal, they built something called the Center for Survivors, which is supposed to operate as a kind of one-stop shop where a survivor can go and get all of their various needs met. You can imagine more schools building those out.
Hopefully not every school needs a Larry Nasser type figure to get them to step up.
Yeah, hopefully not. I don’t know if that’s come up in any of the Cornell conversations, but one of the things they could do is use this as an opportunity to really, really massively build out their supportive measures.
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