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

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

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

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

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Preview: Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s lawyer and fixer, should wear a warning when he takes the witness chair in New York’s criminal hush money trial on Monday.

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Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened on Thursday during Day 15 of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened on Thursday during Day 14 of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during Day 13 of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during Day 12 of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during Day 11 of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day ten of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day nine of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

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Preview: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the biggest changes in more than a decade to the way U.S. power lines are planned and funded.

Preview: The meme stock sector is here to stay.

Preview: She'd never even hinted at this.

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Preview: They help explain why there’s still no cease-fire.

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Preview: A pedestrian wearing a protective mask walks past a GameStop store in the Herald Square area of New York City on November 27, 2020. | Gabriela Bhaskar/Bloomberg/Getty Images How a bunch of Redditors made GameStop’s stock soar, much to the chagrin of the hedge funds attempting to short it. Editor’s note, May 13, 2024, 2:35 pm ET: On May 12, 2024, Keith Gill, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, returned to social media, with a post on X indicating his possible reentry to the investing space, and set off a spike in so-called meme stocks, including GameStop and AMC theaters. GameStop’s stock had risen nearly 80 percent by mid-day May 13. Who knew the first big 2021 stock market story would be … GameStop? But here we are. Day trading and individual investing have boomed over the past several months, with activity often taking place or being discussed on platforms such as Reddit and Robinhood instead of in more traditional arenas. And one big question amid the frenzy has been how much the little guys really matter. Sure, small-time investors trade a lot, sometimes to the annoyance of more traditional institutions, but are they really consequential? In the GameStop saga, at least, the answer is yes. An army of traders on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets helped drive a meteoric rise in GameStop’s stock price in recent days, forcing halts in trading and causing a major headache for the short sellers betting against it and banking on the stock falling. It’s a captivating David vs. Goliath story, where David — at least on some fronts — appears to be winning. Famed investor and CNBC personality Jim Cramer called the GameStop drama the “squeeze of a lifetime.” Bloomberg opinion columnist Matt Levine posited that one possible explanation for what happened could be “utter nihilism” on the part of the Reddit crowd, a story “perhaps best told with a series of rocket emojis.” Or maybe one of the WallStreetBets moderators put it best to Wired: “It was a meme stock that really blew up.” There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the day-trading trend and this new crop of investors playing the markets, many of whom are treating stocks more like a spin at the roulette wheel than a long-term strategy to build wealth. It’s not clear how many of them are looking at the underlying fundamentals of companies, or whether they’re just “YOLO-ing” themselves across the market. On GameStop, the answer is probably a mix. There’s a reasonable business case to make for (some of) the game retailer’s valuation; there’s also a case that this whole thing has just been quite fun for everyone — the possible trolls of Reddit, market watchers, commentators, and certainly GameStop — except for the short sellers, who have been in for a pretty miserable ride. “It’s dramatic, and you don’t see this magnitude very often,” said Nick Colas, the co-founder of DataTrek Research. “But when it happens, it’s spectacular.” More traditional investors (and those with a lot of money) have wagged fingers. But giant banks and hedge funds aren’t exactly a bastion of responsibility — take a look at the role they played in the 2008 financial crisis. The animosity flows both ways. In a January 25 post titled “An open letter to CNBC,” one WallStreetBets Redditor pointed out that much of the network’s audience is composed of the retail traders who are now being criticized. “Your contempt for the retail investor (your audience) is palpable and if you don’t get it together, you’ll lose an entire new generation of investors,” the Reddit user, RADIO02118, wrote. The user pointed out that the hedge funds that take on big risks can get a bailout — as one of the ones shorting GameStop did — whereas everyday investors generally can’t: “We don’t have billionaires to bail us out when we mess up our portfolio risk and a position goes against us. We can’t go on TV and make attempts to manipulate millions to take our side of the trade. If we mess up as bad as they did, we’re wiped out.” And it’s far from certain GameStop’s stock price will stay high forever. On Thursday, January 28, its price began to fall, and trading platforms such as Robinhood began to clamp down on the trading frenzy around this and other volatile stocks — a move that sparked fury among some traders. That evening, Robinhood announced it would reinstate limited trading on those stocks the next morning. An attempt to explain what is going on here, for people who don’t follow markets at all Let’s back up a bit to go over the basics of what is going on here. GameStop is a video game retailer headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, that operates more than 5,000 stores. Between malls dying out and the pandemic, if you forgot the company existed, that would be fair. But it’s still out there, trucking along. GameStop has become a popular play among short sellers, who are basically investors who think a stock will go down. In Wall Street terminology, these investors are bearish on a stock’s prospects. Again, dying malls plus pandemic. You get the reasoning. (Plus, GameStop has had a rocky history and faces a long-term threat from digital game downloads.) Though the buying frenzy around GameStop hit in January, this one has been in the making for a while. Brandon Kochkodin at Bloomberg recently laid out how GameStop, which isn’t expected to even turn a profit until 2023, has seen its market skyrocket, and what Reddit has to do with it. By Kochkodin’s recounting, a bull case for GameStop (basically, an argument that its stock is good) started showing up on WallStreetBets about two years ago and has, off and on, been bubbling up. Scion Asset Management, the hedge fund run by Michael Burry, who you might know from The Big Short, revealed he had a position in the company, which inspired some confidence, and then Ryan Cohen, the co-founder of the pet e-commerce company Chewy, disclosed last August that he had a big stake in GameStop. Earlier this month, he was added to its board. That’s been interpreted as positive for GameStop. As Reddit and retail traders started to take notice of GameStop, they also took notice of how heavily shorted the stock was — information that’s generally pretty easy to get. And they figured out a way that, if they acted all together, they could sort of screw the shorts over and make a profit doing it. Kochkodin points to a post from four months ago as an instigator. Its subject: “Bankrupting Institutional Investors for Dummies, ft Gamestop.” How a short squeeze is making Reddit happy and short sellers sad GameStop’s stock price has skyrocketed from where it was at the start of the year, at under $20, to nearly $350 at market close on January 27. The stock slid to under $200 at market close on January 28, the day Robinhood clamped down on buying it, and after that was lifted, the stock shot up again. The stock’s volatility is the result in no small part of Redditors and the short sellers they went after. WallStreetBets has an antagonistic relationship with shorts — many retail traders are betting stocks will go up, not down. Lots of hedge funds and investors are shorting GameStop, but at the center of the current saga is Citron Research, which is run by famed short seller Andrew Left. Last week, Citron announced on Twitter that it would be hosting a livestream event laying out the short case against GameStop and arguing people buying the stock were “suckers at this poker game.” They predicted shares would go back to $20. The event was put off, first because of the presidential inauguration, then because of attempts to hack Citron’s Twitter. Eventually, they got the video out, and the battle has continued. Left said he’ll no longer comment on GameStop because of the “angry mob” that’s formed against him and complained he’d “never seen such an exchange of ideas of people so angry about someone joining the other side of the trade.” Retail traders have been able to orchestrate what’s known as a short squeeze against Citron and the others betting against GameStop, which screws up the short trade and drives the stock price up. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain what that is.) When a hedge fund or investor shorts a stock, they basically speculate that its price will go down. They do that by borrowing, usually from a broker-dealer, shares of a stock that they think will lose value by a set date and then selling them at the market price. “It’s a much more sophisticated investor kind of play,” Colas said. “[The bet] has to work pretty quickly, because what you don’t want is your short stock at $10 and it goes up to $100, because you can lose more than 100 percent of the capital that you put down.” When you short a stock, you have to at some point buy back the shares you borrowed and return them. If the trade works, you buy them at a lower price and get to keep the difference. But if the price of the stock goes up, it doesn’t work. At some point, you’ve got to buy the stock back and return it, even when the price is higher and you’re going to lose money. What happens with a short squeeze is that when the price of the stock being shorted starts to climb, it forces traders betting it will fall to buy it, to try to stem their losses. That drives up the price of the stock even higher, so it’s a bit of a double whammy for shorts. The worst-case scenario is, theoretically, unlimited. “The short squeeze is when somebody says, ‘Oh, I know a lot of guys are short. I’m going to go long and make them buy the stock back even higher,’” Colas said. To add another layer to this, a lot of the activity around GameStop hasn’t been people directly buying the stock, but also buying call options, where they basically gamble that it will go up. It’s complicated, but the takeaway is that call option buys may have also driven up the stock because the market maker selling those options hedges by buying more stock. And there was a lot of options buying, namely among day traders — volumes have skyrocketed, and one WallStreetBets trader claimed to have turned $50,000 into $11 million playing options. Levine summed up what amounts to a snowball effect: Something started the ball rolling—the stock went up for some fundamental or emotional or whatever reason—and then the stock going up forced short sellers and options market makers to buy stock, which caused it to go up more, which caused them to buy more, etc. The shorts are definitely hurting: Melvin Capital Management, a hedge fund betting against GameStop, was down 15 percent in just the first three weeks of 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s had to call in some help and finally closed out its position altogether. Left, the Citron short-seller, announced his shop would stop publishing “short reports,” ending a practice it’s undertaken for 20 years. Meanwhile, many big names are following along. On Tuesday, January 26, Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and the founder of VC firm Social Capital, tweeted that he was buying GameStop calls. And Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose tweets often move stocks, tweeted, “Gamestonk!!” with a link to r/WallStreetBets. Gamestonk!! https://t.co/RZtkDzAewJ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021 The White House said it was monitoring the GameStop situation, and the Federal Reserve and Sen. Elizabeth Warren weighed in as well. On January 27, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it was “monitoring market volatility.” Two days later, it put out a lengthier statement warning that “extreme stock price volatility has the potential to expose investors to rapid and severe losses and undermine market confidence.” It also said it would “protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading.” “They’re smarter than we think” The GameStop episode is a mix of factors serious and silly — part retail traders demonstrating some actual power in the market, part accepting that some of this just makes no sense. Whether GameStop took off because it’s a meme stock — a stock in which interest is as much cultural or social as it is financial — or because there is something to the business case is unclear. There is a business case, there is a cultural interest; the balance between the two in driving the price is indeterminate. Part of it might basically be a joke. What is clear is that a lot of what’s happening with the stock now isn’t because of a potential turnaround; it’s because the trade went viral. “It doesn’t make business sense,” Doug Clinton, co-founder of Loup Ventures, told Bloomberg. “It makes sense from an investor psychology standpoint. I think there’s a tendency where there is heavy retail interest for those types of traders to think about stocks differently than institutional investors in terms of what they’re willing to pay.” Day traders are hardly a monolith, including the ones at WallStreetBets, which boasts nearly 3 million members, or as they refer to themselves, “degenerates.” But though this is a bit of an odd (and somewhat inexplicable) episode, it still involves some bigger issues. For one thing, it seems like the WallStreetBets crowd has learned a tactic that it can replicate in orchestrating short squeezes. “What they’ve done is target large short positions,” Cramer said on CNBC on January 25. “They’re smarter than we think. They’re after the ones that are too shorted.” Following the GameStop episode, retail traders have also piled into stocks such as AMC, BlackBerry, Express, and even Tootsie Roll. Robinhood and other trading platforms have begun to restrict trading on certain volatile stocks, including GameStop and AMC. That has prompted blowback from retail traders and some high-profile figures, such as Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy, who say platforms are unfairly barring them from opportunities and siding with hedge funds and institutions. The reasoning for clamping down on trading is unclear; Robinhood’s stated mission, after all, is to democratize finance. The company could be trying to protect traders from taking on too much risk (though the accessibility of its platform arguably pushed those traders toward risk in the first place). Or there may be concern about potential legal repercussions from users if stocks go south. There’s also been some speculation about Robinhood’s relationship with a major investment fund being a factor. Robinhood raised $1 billion from investors overnight on Thursday, January 28, and drew on bank credit lines to shore up its operations and make sure it has enough money to let people keep trading. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev also appeared on CNBC to address the matter. “We just haven’t see this level of concentrated interest market wide in a small number of names before,” he said. In other words, individual investors haven’t worked together to impact specific stocks like this before, at least not to this magnitude and with this level of technology. Robinhood did not respond to a request for comment. Some observers have raised questions about whether what’s happened with WallStreetBets and GameStop might draw regulatory scrutiny around possible market manipulation. Colas said he’s doubtful there’s much of a case for that. “Everything is known. There’s no insider information here,” he said. If a hedge fund shorting a stock can put out a presentation and video about why a company is bad, why can’t random people talking to each other on the internet talk about why a company is good? But of course, on the legal front, reasonable minds might disagree. One of WallStreetBets’ moderators addressed the impression that the community is “disorderly and reckless” in a post on January 24, while pushing back against any suggestions there is an organized effort among moderators to promote or recommend any stock. “What I think is happening is that you guys are making such an impact that these fat cats are worried that they have to get up and put in work to earn a living,” the moderator wrote. “Some of these guys [who] traditionally used the media as a tool for them to manipulate the market have failed to further line their pockets and now want to accuse you guys as being manipulators.” GameStop has been the perfect storm for the current retail trend. It’s a recognizable name, there’s some business case for it, and it’s turned into a meme. And it’s heavily shorted, which is bound to irk the recent crop of retail traders who subscribe to the mantra that “stocks only go up.” On January 26, I reached out to the moderators of WallStreetBets to see what they make of what’s happening. One moderator, Stylux, suggested there wasn’t much mystery. “We aren’t looking at anything other than what is right in front of us, which is the same thing you are seeing. It’s up to the user base to pick stocks — we only moderate a forum for them to do that,” they wrote, adding that they have made efforts over the years to enforce rules aimed at preventing schemes and barring certain investment vehicles. “Everyone plays by the same rules,” Stylux wrote. Their takeaway: What you are seeing is conviction from some traders in the subreddit coupled with the pure greed of short sellers who had an opportunity to cover and refused to do so. It looks to me that institutional money is now moving against the short sellers. An example of this is the breaker that occurred shortly before close which looked like a 2.3M share market sell to me. The stock plunged instantly, and when trading resumed it was right back to where it was before that sale. I would be very skeptical of anyone who tries to tell you that retail is making GME move at this point. Some users got the ball rolling and here we sit — with $GME at $209 after hours. Some of the users can now pay off their car notes, student debts, feed their kids and pay their mortgages. Who can feel bad about that? WallStreetBets has been feeling the heat, too. The Reddit forum briefly went private on January 27, and the messaging platform Discord shut down the WallStreetBets server in its app the same day due to “hateful and discriminatory content.” The Verge reports that Discord is now working with WallStreetBets to help moderate its content. This isn’t the first time day trading has become trendy, nor is it the first time day traders have been accused — often rightly — of being a little bit reckless. Last summer, some of them piled onto bankrupt Hertz, for which there was really no good case. Many of them treat trading like a game, which can obviously be dangerous. But it’s hard to root against them. Plenty of hedge funds, short sellers, billionaires, and institutional investors treat investing like a game, too. And every once in a while, they’re bound to lose, too, even to the little guys.

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife Nadine Arslanian arrive for a state dinner in honor of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2023. | Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images Was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair bought by the Egyptian government? Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is on trial for corruption — again. The trial for Menendez kicked off Monday, as the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair faces allegations from federal prosecutors that he and his wife Nadine accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to benefit three business associates, as well as the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Prosecutors have asserted that Menendez and Nadine accepted “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value” from the business associates. They’ve said federal agents found almost half a million dollars in cash during a search of the couple’s home (including some inside Menendez’s jackets), as well as more than $100,000 worth of gold bars. In return, prosecutors claim, Menendez did favors for the foreign governments his associates were in business with: Egpyt and Qatar. Prosecutors also allege that Menendez tried to scuttle investigations into two of the associates. Menendez has defiantly denied the charges, but he has stepped down as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and declined to run for reelection as a Democrat —though he added the caveat that, if acquitted, he might jump back in the race as an “independent Democrat.” Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) is the frontrunner to succeed him. Menendez and Nadine were originally set to face trial together, but she requested and received a postponement for health reasons. There is some intrigue around this, as filings from Menendez’s legal team suggest his defense at trial may involve foisting the blame on his wife — an “I had no idea my wife was accepting so many pricey presents” kind of thing. But the evidence against Menendez appears extensive and damning. Prosecutors quote repeatedly from text messages exchanged among the alleged conspirators, and even from internet searches by Menendez (including “how much is one kilo of gold worth”). And they spend a great deal of time pointing out how specific gifts or payments happened immediately before or after Menendez intervened in a way the businessmen wanted. Menendez did end up beating separate corruption charges back in 2015, when the jury at his trial deadlocked — but soon, we will learn whether his luck has run out. Bob Menendez’s rise to power, and his first indictment, explained The son of Cuban immigrants, Menendez rose to power in the Democratic machine of Hudson County, New Jersey, serving as a mayor and then a member of Congress. Corruption rumors have dogged him since he was first appointed to the US Senate in 2006. When he was running for a full term that year, word leaked that federal prosecutors were scrutinizing a nonprofit he had helped get millions in federal grant money — and that had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent. No charges were brought, and Menendez won a full term. He quickly rose through the Democratic ranks in the Senate and became chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2013. A standard-issue Democrat on most domestic issues, he was sometimes a thorn in the Obama administration’s side on foreign policy, criticizing deals Obama struck with Iran and Cuba. He also started living large, taking lavish trips and accepting gifts funded by a campaign donor, wealthy Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen. This again drew federal prosecutors’ scrutiny, and in 2015, Menendez got his first indictment on bribery and corruption charges. But prosecutors’ case ran into a problem. They presented ample evidence that Menendez used the power of his office to help Melgen out — he advocated on Melgen’s behalf in a billing dispute he was having with Medicare, and intervened in various matters pertaining to a cargo screening contract Melgen had with the Dominican Republic. But they needed to prove a quid pro quo — that Menendez was performing “official acts” specifically in return for the gifts and donations. And defense attorneys argued that they were just good friends helping each other out. Their argument prevailed: In 2017, the prosecution ended in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury. Menendez now seemed vindicated. He soon regained his former post as top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee (he had stepped back from it while his prosecution unfolded). There was no serious Democratic effort to dislodge him; he only faced an unknown in his 2018 primary, though he got a surprisingly weak 62 percent of the vote against her — and he beat his Republican challenger pretty easily in the general election. Prosecutors’ explosive allegations against Menendez Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife Nadine Arslanian arrive for a reception honoring the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his wife Mareva Mitsotakis in the East Room of the White House on May 16, 2022, in Washington, DC. Also in 2018, Menendez started dating the woman who would soon become his second wife — and alleged partner in crime — Nadine Arslanian. Before Nadine began dating Menendez, she had “lived a mainly private life” focused on raising two children rather than working, and had struggled financially after a divorce, the New York Times reported. She was unemployed before dating Menendez, and faced foreclosure on her home soon after — so she needed money. Soon, the money — and more — started rolling in. Prosecutors argue that it did so because Menendez and his wife made corrupt deals with three businessmen. 1) Wael Hana, his halal business, and the Egyptian government Wael “Will” Hana was a longtime friend of Nadine’s who had ties to Egyptian government officials. Shortly after Nadine began dating Menendez in 2018, she helped Hana arrange a series of meetings between Egyptian officials, the senator, and Nadine, often discussing arms sales and aid. Per prosecutors, Hana promised Nadine payments in exchange for facilitating these meetings and said he’d give her “a low-or-no-show job” at his company. In spring 2019, Hana scored: The Egyptian government granted his company an exclusive monopoly on certifying that US food exports to Egypt were compliant with halal standards in Islamic law, even though he had no experience in this business area. Prosecutors do not say specifically why they believe Hana obtained this contract, but the implication is that his ties to Menendez were crucial. And Nadine sounded excited — per the indictment, she texted Menendez, “Seems like halal went through. It might be a fantastic 2019 all the way around.” The US Department of Agriculture looked askance at the news, believing it would raise costs for US meat suppliers, so multiple officials contacted the Egyptian government to object. Menendez then called a high-level department official and demanded they back off. And once money was rolling in to Hana’s company, he began paying Nadine — including paying, through his company, $23,000 of her mortgage that was being foreclosed on. Prosecutors claim that, in total, Hana paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks, cash, and gold to the Menendezes. In return, they claim, Menendez used his office to help the government of Egypt in various ways, including by providing non-public information about US embassy personnel and planned changes in arms policy. At one point, for instance, senators were holding up military aid to Egypt in protest of their government’s handling of a 2015 incident where April Corley, an American roller skater, was shot and maimed by a (US-provided) Egyptian military helicopter. Per the superseding indictment, after a meeting with Hana and Egyptian officials, Menendez searched Corley’s name. One week later, an Egyptian official texted Hana in Arabic that, if Menendez helped resolve the Corley incident, “he will sit very comfortably.” Hana answered: “Orders, consider it done.” All this, in prosecutors’ telling, amounted to a conspiracy where the Egyptian government effectively bought the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair — with Hana as the middleman. Hana will face trial alongside Menendez. 2) Jose Uribe’s legal trouble, and a Mercedes-Benz Separately, Hana also connected the Menendezes with Jose Uribe, another businessman working in trucking and insurance (and who had previously been convicted of fraud). Uribe had some associates in legal trouble, with one already being prosecuted by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office and one being investigated by that same office, and he was concerned the cases could implicate him. Hana told the senator and Nadine about all this, and soon afterward, Menendez called the New Jersey attorney’s office, urging them to wrap up the prosecution. Meanwhile, Nadine had gotten into a car accident and needed a new car, and texts suggest that Uribe had promised to pay for it. Eventually, he gave Nadine $15,000 that she used for a down payment on a Mercedez-Benz convertible (after which Nadine texted him, “I will never forget this”) and continued to make monthly payments on the car afterward. Prosecutors argue that this all amounts to Menendez trying “to disrupt New Jersey state criminal matters” in exchange for a car. Uribe was initially indicted alongside Menendez, but he has since pleaded guilty and will likely testify against Menendez at the trial. 3) The prosecution of Fred Daibes, and the Qatari goverment Finally, there’s Fred Daibes, a longtime fundraiser for Menendez, who is also facing trial alongside the senator. Daibes had two things going on. First, Daibes was being prosecuted for bank fraud by the US Attorney’s office for New Jersey, and he wanted that prosecution to go away. With President Biden set to take office in 2021, it was time for a new US Attorney. Traditionally, senators from a state are deeply influential on the US attorney’s choice. Menendez, prosecutors say, badly wanted it to be someone who would go easy on Daibes. He interviewed one candidate, attorney Philip Sellinger, and urged him to do so. When Sellinger said he’d probably have to recuse from the Daibes case, Menendez said he wouldn’t recommend him for the post, per the indictment. Later, a Menendez adviser spoke to Sellinger about the case again, and the adviser reported back to Menendez that he might not have to recuse after all. Menendez eventually did recommend Sellinger for the post, and he was confirmed (and did end up recusing, to the senator’s frustration). The second thing Daibes had going on was that he was seeking a big investment in a real estate project from a Qatari royal family member. Menendez initially connected the two, and while the investment was under consideration, Menendez “made multiple public statements supporting the Government of Qatar” — making sure to send them to Daibes so he could send them to the Qataris. Daibes messaged Menendez pictures of luxury wristwatches, asking Menendez which one he wanted, and also messaged him requesting updates on a Senate resolution supportive of Qatar. At one point, Menendez and Nadine returned from a trip to Qatar and Egypt, and Daibes’s driver gave them a ride back to their house. The next day, prosecutors say Menendez did a web search for “how much is one kilo of gold worth.” In March 2022, Nadine brought two one-kilogram gold bars (then worth $60,000 each) to a jeweler to be sold. The serial numbers on the gold bars, per prosecutors, indicate Daibes had previously possessed them. Agents who later searched Menendez’s home discovered an envelope full of cash with Daibes’s driver’s fingerprints and Daibes’s DNA and return address. What it all means It’s pretty rare these days to get an old-fashioned bribery scandal at this level of national politics. Of course, there’s endless amounts of “legal corruption” going around. Politicians regularly do favors to donors who fund their campaigns, since this is legal as long as there’s no direct quid pro quo. Ex-politicians or officials become lobbyists in industries they’d overseen. Foreign governments pay Donald Trump’s businesses. Hunter Biden rakes in big bucks for questionable work. Justice Clarence Thomas takes luxury trips. But even compared to Menendez’s last indictment — based on his accepting trips and gifts in a Clarence Thomas-like way — this seems to be at a new level. Envelopes of cash and gold bars for a sitting national politician seem like something out of an earlier era. The Democratic Party stuck by Menendez during his first indictment back in 2015 — when, notably, Republican Chris Christie was governor of New Jersey and would have filled Menendez’s seat if he resigned. Some may also have feared crossing the famously vindictive senator. This time around, they bailed, with top leaders calling on Menendez to resign. He refused, but his polling numbers plummeted and he eventually said he wouldn’t run as a Democrat again. Yet he’s left the door open to jump back in the race as an independent if he’s exonerated. Is this the final act of Bob Menendez’s political career or is there another twist coming? Update, May 13, 2024, 11:30 am ET: This article was originally published on September 22, 2023, and has been updated for the beginning of Menendez’s trial.

Preview: Melissa Mattola-Kiatos, RN, removes the pig kidney from its box to prepare for transplantation as part of Mass General’s historic pig kidney transplant surgery on March 16, 2024. | Massachusetts General Hospital We eat pigs. Do we need them to process our urine too? No one tells you, when you donate your kidney, that from that point on you’re a Kidney Guy. When kidney things happen in the news, everyone you know will text you. When a friend of a friend is diagnosed with kidney failure, as about 136,000 Americans were in 2021, you’ll hear about it. When acquaintances are thinking about donating, you’ll get a call. It’s been nearly eight years since I donated mine in 2016, and my Kidney Guy status has not faded. The flurry of kidney texts started anew at the end of March when researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced that they had transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a living human for the first time. They weren’t the first to try something like this. In 2021, researchers at NYU conducted the first pig kidney (or “pigney”) donation to a brain-dead patient, finding that the transplant took and the kidney was producing urine, the way kidneys should. They also used a genetically engineered pig to reduce the odds that the human immune system would reject the organ. In 2023, the NYU team repeated the experiment and found that a pigney could last for over two months. But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. Slayman died about two months after the surgery; the hospital claims there was no indication the procedure contributed to his death. In any case, for two months he was producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him. While routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, not least due to how the experiment with Slayman ended, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options. We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends. Why pigneys are a game changer The Mass General surgery was big news for one simple reason: Not enough humans are donating their kidneys. While some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed in 2021 with end-stage renal disease, a condition that you need either dialysis or a transplant to survive, only 25,549 transplants took place that year. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis. Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead by 2022. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later. Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining. Pigneys are exciting because they represent the possibility of a world where dialysis is a relic, like iron lungs for polio. There’s still a ways to go before this future is realized. Technically, pigneys aren’t even in the clinical trial stage — to date, experiments have been allowed under “compassionate use” rules, and those participating have either been already dead or without any other option for survival. Researchers will need years to conduct formal trials and evaluate the approach for safety and complications. But these early indications are promising, and logistically, it would be feasible. We can easily have farms breed 68,000 pigs a year, each giving its kidneys to two deserving human recipients as soon as they’re diagnosed with kidney failure. The US has 75 million pigs alive now for meat production; a few dozen thousand more for transplantation is a drop in the bucket. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. We shouldn’t need pigneys But there’s something sad to me about the pigney moment, too. Partly this is because I’m an animal lover who thinks there’s something wrong with killing pigs, which are intelligent animals capable of tasks like playing video games, for meat. And while I argue there’s obviously less wrong with killing them to harvest lifesaving organs, it seems like a necessary evil at best. Maybe we’ll take one kidney each from the pigs and then send them off to live on a beautiful farm, but I have my doubts. The bigger issue is that we should not have to rely on pigs at all. There are more than enough human beings walking around with spare kidneys who could donate them to strangers in need. They simply choose not to. Getting 136,000 human kidneys for transplant every year in the US is very possible. We can make up part of the gap by collecting more organs from deceased patients. Organ procurement organizations, which distribute organs from dead people, have been very conservative about which organs they’ll use; federal agencies are now investigating them for fraud. There are likely thousands more organs we could be recovering every year by reforming these groups — but not enough to wipe out the kidney backlog. We can’t rely on dead people, or pigs, to close the kidney gap in the near term. We need living people. We could do more to encourage donations. Going through a nephrectomy is real work, and it deserves compensation. Many kidney donors have rallied behind a proposal to give a $10,000-a-year tax credit for every donor for five years, to make up for lost wages and other costs incurred due to donating. This would go a long way toward filling the shortage But that kind of policy change will take time as well. In the meantime, we could eliminate the backlog, this year, if a tiny share of adult Americans agreed to donate their kidney to someone who needs one. Not everyone is eligible, but far more than most people think are. Maybe a friend of yours could. Maybe a family member. Maybe you. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. Update, May 13, 10:03 am: This story has been updated to include news about the kidney recipient’s death.

Preview: A periodical cicada in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the spring of 2021. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Billions of these bugs are about to erupt from the Earth — and they rule. Right now, something magical is underway across vast stretches of the eastern US: The soil is beginning to erupt with trillions of periodical cicadas that have been growing underground for either 13 or 17 years, waiting for this exact moment to crawl out of the Earth together. This particular burst of life is incredibly rare. The two groups that are emerging, known as Brood XIX and Brood XIII, appear together just once every 221 years. Brood XIX are 13-year cicadas, and are showing up in southern Illinois, Missouri, and parts of the southeast, whereas Brood XIII are 17-year cicadas that live in and around northern Illinois. That makes this event more rare than a total solar eclipse in North America. And depending on who you ask, it’s just as spectacular. Cicadas are, in fact, spectacular bugs. Although they have tiny insect brains, they can count and sense temperature; males have built-in drums that make noises so loud they can damage human hearing; and in just a few short weeks they transform entire forest ecosystems. Sean Rayford/Getty Images Carcasses of Brood XIX cicadas in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. So yes, while they may be obnoxiously loud and, to many people, extremely icky, periodical cicadas are an ecological wonder — and one that we arguably take for granted. It’s worth getting to know these bizarre bugs a bit better, starting with these eight incredible facts: 1. Cicadas count years, likely using the flow of tree sap. Eastern North America is the only place in the world where you find periodical cicadas — groups of cicadas that emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood, or group. Slightly different kinds of cicadas, known as annual cicadas, appear every summer and have a global distribution. For all of those years, periodical cicadas are several inches or more under the soil, sucking sap from the roots of plants using a straw-like mouth. Then, at the same time and in the right year, they all surface together. And it’s important that they do: Bursting from the ground all at once overwhelms their predators, which include birds and squirrels (and dogs). There are simply too many cicadas to eat, so plenty of them survive and can seed the next generation. But how do they pull off such a stunt of time-keeping? The key may be in the root sap, known as xylem fluid, that cicadas drink while they’re underground. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images A cicada from Brood X mid-molt in Washington, DC in 2021. Throughout the year, as trees grow and shed leaves through the seasons, the flow and makeup of that fluid changes. It functions like an internal clock. Cicadas can likely detect those changes to keep track of the years, according to Martha Weiss, a cicada researcher at Georgetown University. The bugs then use their ability to sense soil temperature (among other things) to know when in the year they should emerge. Typically, it’s when soil reaches roughly 64 degrees Fahrenheit. 2. Sometimes their clocks screw up (courtesy of climate change?). The numbers 13 and 17 are important for these bugs, though it’s not totally clear why. Scientists suspect that surfacing at this unusual cadence makes it hard for their predators — which include basically everything in the forest — to anticipate their emergence. Birds and other animals that eat them typically won’t experience more than one eruption of a particular brood in their lifetimes. “Their ability to track [the emergence] is almost impossible,” said John Lill, a biologist at George Washington University who studies cicadas. On occasion, however, periodical cicadas seem to get their math wrong. Some come out of the ground at nine years, whereas others will emerge at 21 years, Weiss said. It likely has to do with their size: If the young cicadas are growing faster than normal, they might come up four years early, whereas if they’re developing more slowly, they may wait another four years to emerge. The reason they choose four-year intervals is a mystery. “There’s something magical about four years and four-year intervals, and we don’t know what it is,” Weiss says. Remarkably, because climate change is extending the growing period for trees in temperate regions, it might make cicadas develop faster, potentially turning some 17-year cicadas into 13-year cicadas, according to Weiss. 3. The current cicada explosion gets a lot of attention, but there are actually two of them. The second one goes largely undetected. The big cicada emergence is starting now in warmer parts of the southeastern US. That’s when billions of bugs crawl out of the Earth, sometimes from little mud turrets that they build. Once they emerge, the cicadas scale plants, molt into winged adults, mate, lay eggs, and die. But that’s not the end of it. Several weeks later, the babies hatch from slits on tree branches — filling the forest once again with bugs. “That’s a whole second pulse of cicadas,” Weiss said. This second pulse goes mostly unnoticed because hatchlings are mere whispers of the buzzing hordes they will one day become. These newborns are white and just a couple of millimeters long. After hatching, they scurry along twigs in the canopy and they jump off, “floating like snowflakes down to the ground,” Weiss said. Then they’ll burrow into the Earth, assuming they don’t get eaten first by ants and other predators waiting on the forest floor. Few scientists have studied this second emergence, said Weiss. She’s traveling to Illinois later this month with Lill to figure out how these baby bursts might impact a whole range of services that ants provide, from spreading seeds to protecting aphids (and sucking sweet honeydew from their rear ends). 4. Cicadas are incredibly bad at not being eaten. During a cicada emergence, the forest is chaos — everything from large and small birds to lizards and squirrels shovels the bugs into their mouths. For animals, these broods signify the coming of an incredible, singular feast. This is an eating holiday in the animal world that we humans can’t rival. Sean Rayford/Getty Images An adult Brood XIX cicada on a sidewalk at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on May 1. While great for hungry animals, this isn’t good for cicadas, which couldn’t be easier targets. They’ve got bright red eyes, which pop against the forest palette. They’re also extremely, irritatingly noisy, making them easy to locate. Plus, they have no defense — no bite, no sting, no venom. Adding to their woes: They’re not even good fliers, Lill said. What’s interesting, he said, is that annual cicadas are much better at defending themselves against predators than the periodical ones. They’re larger, well camouflaged, and better fliers. And that points to a difference in strategy: Periodical cicadas rely on defense in numbers, whereas the annual ones have evolved more bug-level predator avoidance systems. 5. They rewire entire ecosystems. Although periodical cicadas only appear for a few weeks, their blip above ground can rewire entire forest food webs, with knock-on effects that last for years. Consider birds. They have so much to eat during cicada eruptions that they may actually produce more chicks in the months that follow. A study from 2005 linked cicada emergences to a population bump in a number of species including red-headed woodpeckers and common grackles. “Following emergences, you do tend to get an increase in a lot of the apparent avian predator populations,” Walt Koenig, the lead author of the 2005 study and an ornithologist at Cornell University, told me in 2021. In fact, the birds are eating so many cicadas that they’re consuming much less of everything else — including caterpillars. That means caterpillars get a rare reprieve from the constant threat of attack, at least from birds. Scientists, including Zoe Getman-Pickering, an ecologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst, actually measured this caterpillar effect during the Brood X emergence in 2021. Here’s how I described their experiment in a recent story. In the years surrounding Brood X, Getman-Pickering and her collaborators filled forests in Maryland with fake caterpillars made of clay. They then measured how many of them had signs of bird strikes — beak marks indicating that birds tried to eat them. In May, when Brood X was emerging, the portion of caterpillars with strike marks fell dramatically, from about 30 percent in a typical year to below 10 percent during the emergence, according to her study, published in 2023. She also looked at real caterpillars. Remarkably, the number of them roughly doubled in the forests she studied during the emergence, relative to the two following years. The large number of caterpillars also impacts trees, because these larvae eat leaves. Getman-Pickering’s research showed that oak trees experienced “a spike in cumulative leaf damage” after Brood X debuted. Cicada booms can also shape forests in more subtle ways. This spring, Weiss and Lill will study how eruptions influence ants and their behavior in the forest. Ants help wildflowers disperse their seeds. Many of those seeds have little growths on them called elaiosomes. Elaiosomes are rich in fats, and they look and smell a bit like dead insects, making them appetizing to ants. The ants bring them to their colonies, remove the growth and eat it (or feed it to their larvae), and then discard the seed outside their nests, where they sprout. The scientists suspect that if ants have an endless buffet of cicadas they might be less likely to disperse plant seeds. 6. A weird fungus can turn cicadas into zombies. Most animals, like birds, just eat cicadas because they’re there — they’re everywhere. But there is one enemy that specializes in periodical cicadas: Massospora cicadina, a fungus. It’s a bizarre species with a very smart strategy. The spores, which lay dormant in the soil for years underground, infect the cicadas after they emerge. The fungus then grows within their abdomens and eventually bursts out of their rear-end, causing their sexual organs to fall off. But wait, there’s more: Males infected with the fungus not only call to females, as is expected, but also start mimicking female sounds (made with a flip of their wings) to draw in males. This helps the fungus spread. When two bugs try to mate, they spread the infection to one another. It’s essentially a sexually transmitted infection that benefits by juicing this insect orgy. 7. Different species have different songs. The hum of periodical cicadas in the summer is loud and perhaps obnoxious but it is, in fact, a serenade. It’s produced by males who are calling to attract females. The insects make those sounds by vibrating membranes inside drum-like organs called tymbals, which are then amplified by their mostly hollow abdomens. Interested females will then respond with a far more subtle wing flip that makes a clicking noise. The eastern US is home to seven different species of periodical cicadas. And remarkably, the sound of each is slightly different. All seven species are emerging this year, and somehow these insects can tell each sound apart. Not only that, but males have different calls for different phases of their courtship. 8. They are very much edible and tasty.* *...According to one person I talked to. But really — some people do eat them and say they taste good. The key is grabbing the insects right after they’ve molted, Weiss said, before their bodies harden and they become fully formed adults. From there, you can choose whether to go the sweet or savory route. “The chocolate-covered cicadas are kind of the entry level insect,” said Weiss. Dry roast the bugs and dip them in chocolate, she said. “They taste like a chocolate-covered pecan.” Alternatively, you can pluck up the nymphs before they’ve molted, toss them briefly in a pot of boiling water, marinate them in teriyaki sauce, and then pop them on the grill. “They’re crispy and crunchy,” Weiss said. “They don’t have as much meat as shrimp but they’re not that different.” “We’ve rebranded them as tree shrimp,” Weiss said. “There’s a slight hypocrisy in that people are happy to eat shrimp and lobsters but are grossed out by cicadas.” A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Preview: Justice Samuel Alito. | Alex Wong/Getty Images This is what happens after four years under an insurrectionist president. It will get much worse if he gets eight. Former President Donald Trump’s four years in the White House were, in many ways, a revolution interrupted. They transformed the federal judiciary and led to the fall of Roe v. Wade, the end of many gun laws, and a sweeping transfer of power away from the elected branches of government and toward a Republican-controlled judiciary. Yet while Trump’s single presidential term remade much of US law, it did not allow the judiciary’s most reactionary elements to declare total victory. This June the Court will likely hand several high-profile defeats to the conservative movement. Even this Court is unlikely to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, for example. It’s also likely to reject a decision, by three Trump judges, which threatens to trigger a second Great Depression. While there is daylight between the median justice on the Supreme Court and the most reactionary minds on lower courts, US democracy is still in extraordinary peril. The Court has thus far tripped over itself to protect Trump from any criminal consequences for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and the unelected justices are widely expected to transfer a tremendous amount of policymaking authority to themselves, at the expense of the two elected branches of government. The federal courts, in other words, are increasingly anti-democratic and increasingly eager to consolidate power within themselves, but not nearly as anti-democratic as they will become if Trump gets to appoint more judges. Below is a list of nine cases that represent the very worst work the federal judiciary has produced since Trump left office. These are not simply cases that are wrong or harmful to many Americans, they are cases that are fundamentally at odds with the idea that the United States is a constitutional democracy, with a government that is simultaneously bound by written legal texts and fundamentally accountable to the American people and not to an unelected oligarchy. These cases also highlight specific problems within the judiciary, such as the extraordinary steps many judges have taken to protect Trump, or the fact that many judges and justices have abandoned the judiciary’s longtime commitment to free speech. Although many of these cases are likely to end in defeat for the far-right litigants behind them, the list represents how much American law has changed since Trump started to remake the judiciary and how much more it could change if he gets another chance to appoint judges and justices. Fringe ideas that today enjoy only minority support within the courts could soon garner five votes on the Supreme Court — and that includes ideas that are at odds with the notion of government of, by, and for the people. These nine cases, in other words, are as much a warning about America’s potential future as they are a window into the present state of the law. 1) Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson: The abortion bounty hunter case Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021) isn’t just one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of the post-Trump era, it’s one of the worst decisions in the Court’s history. If taken seriously, its reasoning would allow any state to neutralize any constitutional right. Decided months before the Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the case involved SB 8, a Texas law that relied on a very unusual mechanism to ban nearly all abortions in that state. Under SB 8, any person other than an employee of the state of Texas could bring a private lawsuit against an abortion provider. There was no limit on the number of lawsuits that could be filed, and the first plaintiff to prevail in a suit claiming that the provider performed “an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy” would collect a bounty of at least $10,000 from the defendant. There was also no limit to this bounty, so a court could potentially order every abortion provider in the state to pay millions of dollars, and that’s on top of the legal fees the provider would have to pay defending against dozens or even hundreds of lawsuits. Jackson ruled that Texas abortion providers could not file a federal lawsuit seeking to block this law before it was brought to bear against them. Instead, they had to violate the law, wait to be sued — again, potentially by hundreds of different plaintiffs — and then pay a small army of lawyers to defend against all of those suits. Thus, even if an abortion provider successfully convinced a court to declare SB 8 unconstitutional, the provider still risked bankruptcy in the process. If taken seriously, Jackson’s reasoning would allow any state to neutralize any constitutional right. Imagine a state law permitting SB 8-style bounty hunters to sue anyone who criticizes the governor, or one allowing suits against any Black family that sends their child to a white-majority public school. 2) Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Public Policy Panel: An existential threat to the nation’s most important voting rights law The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most successful civil rights law in US history; it broke Jim Crow barriers to Black voting rights in the South. It’s also fared very poorly in front of this Supreme Court, which has neutralized at least one key provision of the law and narrowed other provisions in ways that cannot be squared with the law’s text. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit’s decision in Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Public Policy Panel (2023) comes just inches away from repealing this landmark law in its entirety, making it the worst voting rights opinion in an era marred by terrible voting rights decisions. The Arkansas opinion, authored by Trump Judge David Stras, would strip private parties of their ability to file suits enforcing the law — a law which has been understood for pretty much its entire existence to allow such suits to move forward. In this way, Stras’s Arkansas decision closely resembles the Court’s decision in Jackson: It seeks to neutralize an important civil right by preventing the courts from enforcing that right. The reasoning underlying Stras’s decision is quite complicated, though if you care to read an explainer on how he reached his conclusion and why that conclusion is wrong, I wrote that explainer here. Under Stras’s approach, only the Justice Department may file suits seeking to enforce the Voting Rights Act — the primary law prohibiting race discrimination in US elections. But the DOJ lacks the resources to police every voting rights violation in the country. And even if it had unlimited resources, it’s unlikely to do much at all to enforce the law during Republican administrations. During the Trump administration, the DOJ’s voting section brought only one lawsuit alleging discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, and that was a minor suit involving a South Dakota school board. It is likely that Stras’s attempt to neutralize this law will prove too much, even for the current Supreme Court. Only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have previously shown any sympathy for Stras’s reasoning. Still, Stras’s opinion could easily become law in all 50 states if Trump appoints more justices to the Supreme Court. 3) Trump v. United States: The Aileen Cannon special master debacle Aileen Cannon has become a household name among the set that closely follows the many civil and criminal legal proceedings against Donald Trump. For everyone else, Cannon is a Trump appointee presiding over his criminal trial for deliberately retaining classified documents after his presidency ended. She has consistently handed down rulings that suggest she also seems to think she’s a member of the former president’s defense team. Among other things, she recently put Trump’s classified documents trial on hold indefinitely, citing a backlog of motions that she’s been unable to resolve in a timely manner. This is an enormous gift to Trump, who hopes to delay his federal criminal trials until after the election — when he may be able to order the Justice Department to drop the charges against him. The earliest sign that Cannon wasn’t up to the task of fairly presiding over one of the most significant criminal prosecutions in American history came shortly after the FBI executed a search warrant that uncovered more than 100 classified documents at Trump’s home in Florida. Like any other criminal defendant, Trump enjoys certain constitutional protections. His home cannot be searched unless the FBI had probable cause to believe that such a search would uncover evidence of a crime. And it must obtain a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate before the search may occur. No one seriously contests, however, that the FBI complied with these requirements. Nevertheless, Cannon concluded that Trump is entitled to additional protections not afforded to any other criminal suspect, in part because of Trump’s “former position as President of the United States.” She then ordered the criminal investigation into Trump’s possession of the classified documents to be put on ice until an official known as a “special master” reviewed the documents. An appeals court panel that included two Trump appointees plus Chief Judge William Pryor, a prominent figure in the conservative Federalist Society, eventually smacked down Cannon’s move — labeling her special master decisions “a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations.” But, despite her incompetence and likely bias, Cannon continues to preside over Trump’s criminal trial, one that may never happen because of that very incompetence and bias. 4) Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA: The mifepristone case Another Trump-appointed judge you might have heard of is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for Christian right causes with a long history of hostility toward abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and even most forms of heterosexual sexuality. Because of a quirk in how Kacsmaryk’s Texas federal court assigns cases to judges, any case filed in Amarillo, Texas, automatically lands in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom. As a result, right-wing litigants routinely make a pilgrimage to Amarillo to obtain legally indefensible court orders implementing policies favored by the rightward fringes of the Republican Party. (A governing body within the judiciary has tried to end this practice of “judge-shopping,” but Kacsmaryk’s court has thus far refused to comply with those efforts.) The most well-known of these court orders is a 2023 decision in which Kacsmaryk attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, a medication used in nearly two-thirds of all US abortions that has been legally available in the United States since 2000. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked Kacsmaryk’s attempt to ban the drug and is widely expected to toss out the case later this year. One reason why even this anti-abortion Supreme Court may be unwilling to tolerate Kacsmaryk’s move is that, if his decision is upheld, it endangers Americans’ access to countless other medications. If judges can second-guess the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve a drug, especially based on the spurious objections raised by Kacsmaryk, thousands more drugs could be pulled from the market. Kacsmaryk’s opinion was also stunningly inept. Among other things, he relied on two discredited studies that have since been retracted by their publisher, and he cited another “study” that collected “data” entirely from anonymous blog posts published on an anti-abortion website. Kacsmaryk, in other words, is very much an outlier even in a judiciary dominated by conservative Republicans. Should Trump prevail in November, however, he could fill the bench with people just like this Texas judge. 5) Doe v. Mckesson: The anti-free speech wing of the federal judiciary lashes out at the right to protest The Fifth Circuit is a recurring villain in any saga about the post-Trump judiciary. Dominated by Trump appointees and other MAGA allies, this court, which oversees all federal cases arising in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, is a major reason why judges like Kacsmaryk thrive in these three states. Far-right trial judges in the Fifth Circuit receive very little adult supervision unless their decisions are reviewed by the justices, and more moderate trial judges in the Fifth Circuit often have their decisions torn apart by partisan goons. One area where the Fifth Circuit has been particularly aggressive is the First Amendment. Before Trump, there was a bipartisan consensus that speech of all kinds is protected by the Constitution, regardless of who it offends; the Supreme Court handed down a couple of 8-1 decisions in the early 2010s driving this point home. On the high Court, the pro-free speech majority has shrunk to 6-3. But in the more reactionary Fifth Circuit, its judges often apply vastly different rules to liberal and conservative speakers. Among other things, the Fifth Circuit ruled that Republican lawmakers in Texas may seize control of content moderation at the major social media sites, while also ruling that the Biden administration is forbidden from even asking social media outlets to remove content that promotes terrorism or that spreads false health information. The worst example of the Fifth Circuit’s partisan approach to free speech is Doe v. Mckesson, a decision that effectively eliminates the constitutional right to organize a mass protest. In Mckesson, the Fifth Circuit ruled that a police officer who was injured when a protest attendee threw a rock could sue the organizer of that protest. This decision contradicts a Supreme Court case that is directly on point, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982), which held that protest leaders cannot be held liable for the actions of individual protest participants, absent unusual circumstances such as if the leader “authorized, directed, or ratified specific [illegal] activity would justify holding him responsible for the consequences of that activity.” Mckesson is such a severe blow to the right to protest because no one in their right mind will organize a mass event of any kind if they know they can be held legally responsible for illegal acts committed by any attendee. And there truly is no way to justify the Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision under Claiborne Hardware. Yet, while the Supreme Court has not affirmed the Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision, it also recently turned away a request to review (and reverse) the lower court’s error in this case. So, while a majority of the justices have not yet embraced the Fifth Circuit’s anti-free speech stance, they’ve been surprisingly tolerant of it. And the Court’s pro-free speech majority is only two Trump appointees away from breaking. 6) Community Financial Services Association v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: The Fifth Circuit flirts with a second Great Depression Speaking of the Fifth Circuit, that court recently declared an entire federal agency unconstitutional. It did so by simply making up a new, unwritten constitutional limit on Congress’s power to spend money. And, in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court affirms the Fifth Circuit’s decision, that risks the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Briefly, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Community Financial Services Association v. CFPB imagines that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is constitutionally problematic because of its “perpetual funding mechanism” — meaning that the agency has a permanent stream of federal funding and does not shut down if Congress fails to appropriate new money in any given year. The idea that Congress cannot fund a government institution in perpetuity is completely made up. Nearly two-thirds of all federal spending is perpetual, including spending on programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Perhaps recognizing that the nation would revolt if the courts tried to abolish Social Security, after announcing this novel new limit on federal spending, the Fifth Circuit immediately tried to cabin it. The unique problem with the CFPB, Trump Judge Cory Wilson wrote, isn’t just that it receives perpetual funding. It is that this funding first passes through another agency, the Federal Reserve, before landing in the CFPB’s bank account. This claim that an agency’s funding somehow becomes more constitutionally suspect if it passes through a different entity is also completely made up. Even this more limited application of the Fifth Circuit’s make-believe Constitution would lead to disaster. As a brief filed by the banking industry explains, the CFPB doesn’t just regulate that industry, it also provides the industry with instructions on how it can comply with federal lending laws without risking legal sanction — establishing “safe harbor” practices that allow banks to avoid liability so long as they comply with them. If the CFPB were to suddenly cease to exist, in other words, banks will have no idea what rules they need to comply with in order to issue loans. Moreover, because home building, home sales, and similar industries that depend on the mortgage market make up about 17 percent of the US economy, a decision eliminating the CFPB could cause nearly a fifth of the nation’s economy to dry up overnight. The good news is that most — though not all — of the justices appear likely to put an end to this madness. But that doesn’t change the fact that some of the most powerful judges in the country thought it was their job to light a simply enormous segment of the US economy on fire. 7) Biden v. Nebraska: The student loans case Another judicially created legal rule, and one that has already been embraced by the Supreme Court, is the “major questions” doctrine, which limits which policy decisions can be made by federal agencies. As the Republican justices who invented this doctrine describe it, the Court requires “Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Like the Fifth Circuit’s idea that “perpetual” funding laws are constitutionally suspect, this major questions doctrine appears nowhere in the Constitution or in any statute. It is a very recent invention, which has largely been used by Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to invalidate policies created by Democratic administrations — and especially by the Biden administration. The worst example of the Court’s major questions decisions is Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the decision striking down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program. Reasonable minds can disagree on whether canceling student loans was the best use of the federal government’s resources, but there should have been no doubt of the program’s legality under a federal law known as the Heroes Act. That law gives the Secretary of Education sweeping authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs ... as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” including an emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the Heroes Act does far more than give the secretary this power. It explicitly removes procedural hurdles that federal agencies ordinarily must clear before they can change government policy. It states that the secretary may dole out student loan relief en masse. The law even permits the secretary to exercise their authority “notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to” the Heroes Act. Thus, even if Congress had passed a law that expressly forbids that secretary from creating a program like the Biden administration’s student loan program, the program would still be legally valid unless that law also contained a provision stating that it overrides the Heroes Act. So, even if you treat the major questions doctrine as legitimate — that is, even if you accept that Congress must “speak clearly” in order to authorize a significant student loan forgiveness program — the Biden administration’s program should still have survived judicial review. How could Congress have possibly spoken more clearly than it did in the Heroes Act? More broadly, the Nebraska decision exposes a Supreme Court that is willing to simply ignore the text of the law altogether in order to achieve policy goals it views as sufficiently important. 8) United States v. Texas: Who controls law enforcement? In 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued an innocuous memo instructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to prioritize enforcing immigration law against undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.” Mayorkas’s memo closely resembled similar memorandum setting enforcement priorities in 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017. It was also clearly authorized by a federal law which states that the homeland security secretary “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Nevertheless, because Texas federal courts often allow litigants to choose which judge will hear their case, the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Louisiana selected Drew Tipton, a Trump judge with a history of anti-immigrant rulings, to strike this memo down. Tipton’s decision, which effectively seized control of the Biden administration’s authority to set the priorities of a law enforcement agency, was legally indefensible for a whole host of reasons, and the Supreme Court eventually reversed Tipton in an 8–1 decision. As a practical matter, Tipton’s suggestion that the government cannot set enforcement priorities was unworkable. As the Justice Department explained in a 2014 memo, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to “remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.” So someone had to decide how ICE focuses its limited resources, and Congress decided that this decision should be made by Mayorkas and not Tipton. More broadly, Tipton’s decision removed an important limit on the government’s power to make arrests or otherwise exercise force. Though the power to adjudicate whether a particular individual violated the law often rests with judges, the power to make arrests, bring enforcement actions, or seek an official penalty normally rests with the Executive. That means that all three branches typically must agree that a particular individual should be arrested and tried before such an arrest can take place. Congress must pass a law making a particular action illegal. The Executive must decide to enforce that law against a particular individual. A judge or some other adjudicative body ordinarily must determine that the individual broke the law. By placing himself in charge of a law enforcement agency, however, Tipton eliminated one of these safeguards, effectively allowing the judiciary to act both as law enforcer and adjudicator. It’s not hard to imagine how certain judges — perhaps Tipton himself or someone like Kacsmaryk — could abuse this power. 9) New York State Rifle v. Bruen: The Court’s completely unworkable Second Amendment decision Many of the Court’s Republican appointees claim to be “originalists,” meaning they believe that the Constitution must be interpreted as it was originally understood when it was drafted or ratified. But if these justices actually intended to discredit originalism as a method of judging, they would have written a decision much like New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Bruen held that, for virtually any gun law to survive a Second Amendment challenge, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending gun laws must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed, particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down. This approach makes no sense for a whole host of reasons. Even if you agree with the originalist view that the Constitution must mean the same thing today as it did in the 1790s, the fact that a particular gun law did not exist more than 200 years ago does not mean that the generation that framed the Constitution would think it unconstitutional. Among other things, early America did not have police forces until the early-to-mid 1800s, so the government lacked the state capacity to enforce the kind of gun laws that exist today. Early America also did not have large cities like the ones that exist today — New York City had only 33,131 residents in the 1790 census — so we simply have no idea how the framers would have dealt with the problem of guns in a modern urban setting. Judges have struggled so much to apply Bruen that many of them complain about how unworkable the decision is in their published opinions. By announcing “an inconsistent and amorphous standard,” wrote Judge Holly Brady, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Indiana, “the Supreme Court has created mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.” And Brady’s hardly the only judge with such complaints. Bruen has also led to ridiculous and immoral results, such as a Fifth Circuit decision holding that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders — meaning that a court determined that they are a violent threat to others — have a right to own a gun. In any event, the Supreme Court appears likely to reverse that Fifth Circuit decision. It should go further and confess that it made an egregious error when it handed down Bruen and that the decision must be overruled. These cases are a mix of legally indefensible outcomes that have already been imposed on the entire nation and potentially disastrous lower-court decisions that will most likely be reversed by the current Supreme Court. Trump transformed the federal judiciary, but he has not yet turned it into a playground where MAGA bullies can take whatever they want. The rule of law cannot survive long, however, in a nation whose leaders do not embrace it. In a hypothetical second Trump term, judges like Kacsmaryk or his enablers on the Fifth Circuit are likely to thrive, and could eventually dominate the Supreme Court.

Preview: Police investigate the scene of a collision between an electric scooter rider and vehicle in Queens, New York, in March. New York last month made it possible to lower speed limits in the city — an effort to prevent crashes like these from becoming fatal amid a rise in deaths on America’s roads. | Shawn Inglima/NY Daily News via Getty Images Drivers don’t need to go faster than 20 mph on most city streets. Last month, a group of families whose loved ones were killed by drivers successfully lobbied the New York state legislature to pass a law allowing New York City to set its own speed limits. Sammy’s Law allows city officials — rather than the state’s Department of Transportation — to determine the speed limits on their streets with input from community members. The bill will allow the city to drop the speed limit to 20 miles per hour on some streets in an effort to reduce pedestrian deaths. New York’s not alone in its efforts to lower speed limits. California lawmakers announced new legislation this year to cut speed limits in school zones to 20 mph or less. The city of Oakland also reduced speed limits in several corridors following a new state law that gave local governments the ability to determine speeds on their roads. Washington, DC, reduced the city’s default speed limit — in other words, the speed limit anywhere where there isn’t a sign posted saying otherwise — to 20 miles per hour in 2020, and slowed traffic on major corridors from 30 mph to 25 mph in 2022. These efforts have become especially important in the last few years, as the number of pedestrian deaths in the US has reached a 40-year high. There’s a reason why cities and states are lowering the speed limit to 20 mph: It’s the speed at which most pedestrians who get hit by a car still have a good chance of survival. Above that, risk rises exponentially: A person hit by a vehicle going 30 miles per hour is 70 percent more likely to be killed than by a car going 25. The average risk of death reaches 50 percent when the driver is going 42 mph, and 90 percent at 58 mph — above that, a pedestrian’s chances of survival get very slim. There’s a good case to be made that speed limits are too high on city streets. Speeding was a factor in almost a third of all traffic deaths in 2021, and the US has a traffic fatality rate that’s 50 percent higher than it is in other comparable countries in Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. And there are signs that lowering the speed limit can help. Research shows that cities that reduced speed limits to 20 miles per hour saw a 67 percent reduction in collisions involving children. Speeding isn’t the only reason why the US has such high road fatality rates. American streets are designed in ways that encourage drivers to go too fast. State departments of transportation typically set speed limits on roads maintained by the state, and the proliferation of roads that are built like highways but still used by lots of people on foot has helped to create the pedestrian fatality crisis. Increasingly, Americans are also driving bigger, heavier vehicles, which are more dangerous to people outside of the vehicle than sedans and other small cars. Making matters worse, drivers in the United States have gotten more reckless and distracted since the start of the pandemic. A breakdown in traffic enforcement has only contributed to a general sense that there aren’t serious consequences for dangerous driving. Anyone who’s engaged in activism knows how difficult it is for their efforts to result in meaningful change in public policy. This campaign to get Sammy’s Law passed in New York was no exception. Families for Safe Streets, the organization that pushed for the law, came together in 2014, led by Amy Cohen, whose son, Sammy Cohen Eckstein, was killed by a driver in Brooklyn in 2013. In the year after Sammy was killed, the group successfully lobbied to lower the city’s default speed limit from 30 miles per hour to 25, but the push for the city to lower its speed limits further took years. Despite Gov. Kathy Hochul including Sammy’s Law in her budget, support from the city council, and a hunger strike by Cohen and other mothers last year, the bill was held up by the legislature, thanks to concerns about political backlash from drivers. As a consequence, Sammy’s Law didn’t make it to a vote until this year. “I’ve come to learn, painfully, that change is slow,” Cohen told Vox in 2022. “Knowing that it could be done so quickly, and we’re not moving quickly enough, is heartbreaking. Every day we are continuously welcoming new members to this horrible, horrible club.” That year, pedestrian fatalities in the US rose to the highest they’d been in four decades. Other parents, like Jessica Hart, whose daughter Allison was killed by a driver in Washington, DC, in 2021, began speaking out and demanding their local governments do more to ensure safe streets. Reducing speed limits on city streets is a good first step, but it’s not enough to end the pedestrian fatality crisis on its own. Meaningfully reducing deaths requires redesigning roadways in ways that force drivers to slow down — by reducing the number of lanes, building out curbs and raised crosswalks, or adding bollards and bends to roads. Lowering the speed limit also doesn’t do much good if people believe they can speed without consequences. In Europe, speed limits are consistently and reliably enforced via speed cameras, resulting in lower traffic deaths. In the US, speed cameras tend to be unpopular both with politicians and the public, in part because no one likes getting a ticket. But investing the funds raised by cameras directly into road safety improvements would help reduce public cynicism that they’re just ripping off drivers. The automotive industry could make a big difference, too, if it wanted to. Auto manufacturers could put speed governors in cars, something the European Union is requiring of new vehicles beginning this summer, to prevent people from driving at deadly speeds — but the effort has not gained serious traction in the US. What will ultimately work is likely a combination of several different safety reforms. “It will take a long, sustained effort to change driver behavior if we want to have fewer deaths in this country,” says Michelle May, manager of the Highway Safety Program at Ohio’s Department of Transportation. But lowering speed limits on city streets is an important first step, one that will likely save lives. And it’s especially meaningful to parents like Cohen and Hart, who are determined that no parent should suffer a loss like they did. In a video uploaded to X following the passage of Sammy’s Law, Cohen noted that her son would have been 24 this year, near the same age as some of the legislative staff she worked with to get the bill passed. “Sammy would have loved to be a changemaker,” she said. “For him, I will fight for change.”

Preview: Vartika Sharma for Vox More animals can occasionally reproduce asexually than scientists realized. Charlotte the stingray was pregnant. That in and of itself was not all that exciting but, according to the staff at the North Carolina aquarium where she is based, Charlotte also hadn’t come into contact with a male of her species for eight years. She’d been living in a tank with two sharks, and no male rays. Which left people all across the internet wondering: Who was the father of her embryos? The most likely answer, according to most researchers, was ... no one. There was no father. Charlotte, they believed, had produced these embryos solo, in a process known as parthenogenesis — a form of asexual reproduction. More specifically, Charlotte probably engaged in something called facultative parthenogenesis, where a species that normally reproduces sexually decides to take this more DIY route. In this particular form of parthenogenesis, a female creates an egg, but instead of the egg merging with a sperm cell, it somehow merges with another egg-like cell. It’s not cloning — the egg and the egg-like cell have a mixed-up version of the female’s genes — but the end result is that the female makes an embryo all by herself. As the aquarium explained in a video, Charlotte’s unusual pregnancy isn’t predictable, so researchers aren’t sure when Charlotte will give birth. But once scientists test Charlotte’s progeny, she may prove to be the first documented case of facultative parthenogenesis in her species, the round stingray. Mystery solved. Except ... Charlotte’s story actually points us to a bigger mystery that some scientists are puzzling over: not so much how animals like Charlotte are getting themselves pregnant as why they are doing it. It might seem, based on the fact that Charlotte could be the first documented case of a round ray reproducing this way, as though parthenogenesis is a really rare, special occurrence. Miraculous, almost, like the stingray equivalent of the immaculate conception. (And believe me, on places like TikTok, the comparison was made. A lot.) But Alexis Sperling, a University of Cambridge biologist who studies parthenogenesis, says Charlotte’s situation is actually not as unusual as we might think. “[Parthenogenesis] is probably a lot more common and a lot more widespread than we even know yet,” she told me. Parthenogenesis is fairly common and varied in insects, but lots of vertebrates can do it too. Decades ago, scientists noted that they’d found examples in every vertebrate class except mammals. (Sorry, Mary.) In 2011, a review paper found more than 80 examples. But even then, scientists started to realize that they may have “underestimated” how common it is in vertebrates, and they keep adding new examples to the record: the parthenogenetic condors a few years ago, the parthenogenetic crocodile last year, new and old examples in species of sharks, snakes, lizards, and even other species of ray. One researcher I spoke to, Warren Booth at Virginia Tech, told me he once believed parthenogenesis was pretty rare in snakes. Then he published a paper about parthenogenesis in one species, and suddenly snake breeders and researchers started sending him specimens and accounts of parthenogenesis from all kinds of reptile species. “I had a freezer full of parthenogens, just chilling out,” he told me. Eventually, he changed universities, but until that point, he claims, “I had a hundred and something parthenogens that were sitting in that freezer.” So all sorts of vertebrates seem to at least be capable of knocking themselves up through parthenogenesis. But again: Why? On this week’s episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, we talk to two scientists, each with a very different answer to that question. Parthenogenesis, less as a “Virgin Mary” situation and more as a “Hail Mary” pass Christine Dudgeon is one of the people poking around on the question of why so many vertebrates can do this solo tango. She’s a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, who studies sharks and rays, and as she explains it, she stumbled into studying parthenogenesis by accident. She was trying to study some zebra sharks at an aquarium in Queensland. And while she was doing her work, a zebra shark named Leonie, who was living in a tank with no males, had not one but two rounds of parthenogenetic eggs. Parthenogenesis had been observed in zebra sharks before. But, as Dudgeon puts it, “In all the previous cases, the documents were of animals who reached maturity in an aquarium setting and had never had exposure to a male.” This shark, however, was no Virgin Leonie. She had been exposed to males before. In fact, she had had some babies previously, the old-fashioned way. So it was almost like she was toggling parthenogenesis on after having had it shut off, like flipping a switch. And while this kind of switching between sexual and asexual reproduction had been documented in, for example, insects, and would soon be documented in both a snake and an eagle ray, Dudgeon was really surprised to see it in a shark. It got her thinking. “Rather than it just being this kind of anomalous thing, like a mistake, which was the prevailing concept,” she says, “perhaps this is actually some sort of strategy.” This is all speculative, but the hypothesis that Dudgeon is playing with is that, for some vertebrates, facultative parthenogenesis might be like the evolutionary equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. Her logic goes like this: For most animals, sexual reproduction is a better option than parthenogenesis. It gives their babies more diverse genes, and that makes them stronger. But if there are no males around and sexual reproduction is off the table, then maybe something can be triggered in some females’ bodies, letting them pursue this alternative. So a shark like Leonie, removed from males for a long time, could start taking new measures. “Rather than it just being this kind of anomalous thing, like a mistake, which was the prevailing concept, perhaps this is actually some sort of strategy” For some species, like chickens, parthenogenesis would actually allow a female to make a male to reproduce with. Which is kind of incestuous, but — at least hypothetically, Dudgeon says — it might be better than nothing. For other species, like zebra sharks, the babies that come out of these parthenogenetic births are always female. So the females can’t make themselves incestuous mates. But Dudgeon still thinks that parthenogenesis could be useful here. “My current thinking,” she says, “is that it essentially extends the life of the egg cell.” If the egg cell stays inside the mother and no male shows up, the egg cell dies when the mother dies. But if the mother turns that egg into a female baby, then that female could outlive her and carry her genetic information out into the world. “And then, hopefully, the female would find a male to reproduce with to then maintain that genetic diversity,” Dudgeon says. She can imagine a lot of instances where this might be useful. First, in the context of the immense ocean, Dudgeon says it could be hard to find mates across great distances, and this kind of trick to extend your genetic information into another generation might come in handy sometimes. But she’s also interested in the idea of founder populations, where an animal is, say, blown across a barrier like the ocean and on to an island, where it then multiplies, and eventually differentiates into a new species. “Has [parthenogenesis] had a role in that in some way?” she wonders. “Does it play a role in that for vertebrates as well as invertebrates?” If Dudgeon’s hypothesis is correct, then this form of parthenogenesis might be a new reproductive strategy for biologists like her to explore. Some of the researchers I reached out to thought this was plausible. Others, though, were more skeptical. Parthenogenesis as a vestigial tailbone Much like Christine Dudgeon, Warren Booth also stumbled into parthenogenesis by accident. It all started around 2010, when Booth was a postdoctoral student, and a breeder called him up, asking him to do a paternity test on her snake. She was reaching out to Booth specifically because he had developed a set of DNA markers that would let him trace genetics in boa constrictors. This wasn’t his main focus. Technically, Booth is a bug guy. His research focus is urban entomology — that’s what he studies now at Virginia Tech, and what he was studying as a postdoc. But, as a kind of hobby and side project, he also keeps and breeds snakes because he enjoys them and likes producing different kinds of colors and pattern variations. So he had, and has, a toe in the world of reptiles. This breeder told him that her boa constrictor had had a bunch of albino babies; they were caramel albinos, which not only gives them a pretty pink and yellow pattern, but also makes them fairly valuable. And she had housed her boa with a bunch of males, so she wanted to know which of those males was the father of these special, pricy snake babies. As a postdoc, Booth was trying very hard to find a faculty job, to keep pursuing the science that he was so interested in. Running paternity tests on a snake wasn’t exactly what he was hoping to do with his career. “I thought it was just the end of the end of the world,” he jokes. But he figured, sure. He could be the Maury Povich of snakes and figure out who this snake’s dad was. The breeder sent him some snake skin — skin from the mother, her offspring, and the males she’d been housed with — and he ran some tests to compare bits of their DNA. And then he got the results: None of the males was a match. “It turned out ... there was no father,” Booth says, “It was parthenogenesis.” This was the first documented case of parthenogenesis in boa constrictors, so he wrote it up in a scientific article. That’s when people started contacting him about all kinds of parthenogenetic snakes and reptiles. It’s also when he started getting the firsthand experience with parthenogens that makes him doubt that vertebrates use parthenogenesis as a Hail Mary pass to keep their genes going for another generation. Booth actually asked the snake breeder if she would send him one of the albino snake babies so he could learn more about it. She agreed to ship him one in the mail, which is apparently a thing you can do with snakes. (Warren assures me you can easily “overnight them with FedEx.” I have not tested this, but there are lots of instructions online.) When this baby snake arrived, Booth was, in fact, able to raise it. But the snake was kind of odd. “It was shorter than similar-aged, sexually produced individuals,” Booth remembers, “And when it reproduced it behaved totally differently.” Normally, Booth told me, when boas are pregnant, they kind of bask in the hotter end of their tanks. But he says that this snake stayed in the cool end instead. And when it did finally produce its offspring, he says the litter was small, and half the offspring were stillborn. Then, he says, there was the parthenogenetic ball python family from the UK. Someone sent him a python that was born via parthenogenesis and her daughter, who was also born by parthenogenesis — first- and second-generation parthenogens. Booth says the second-generation parthenogen died relatively quickly. He was, however, able to get the first-generation parthenogen to reproduce again — sexually, this time. But like the albino boa constrictor, Booth says, this parthenogen was super weird about things. “She sat in the cool end instead of the hot end,” he remembers, “She produced six eggs, of which five died, essentially. [They] went bad within the first couple of days.” According to Booth, this all fits a bigger pattern. A lot of parthenogens die as embryos, and those that make it don’t do all that well. And this kind of makes sense when you look at the genetics. Because, in this form of parthenogenesis, the babies wind up with less genetic variation than their parents. “It makes them the most inbred thing that you can think of in a vertebrate system,” Booth says, “So they’re ... they’re not that great.” That’s why Booth doesn’t think it really makes sense to think of this as a reproductive Hail Mary pass. At least in the snakes he’s looked at, he thinks these offspring are just too inbred to meaningfully carry along the torch to another generation. Instead, he thinks that this ability to sort of randomly, occasionally reproduce parthenogenetically is genetic. (This has been demonstrated to be true in fruit flies, but not in other animals.) If that’s the case, he says, then this is potentially just a vestigial thing that popped out in some ancient vertebrate ancestor and that it’s being passed along from generation to generation. But the species would be fine if it eventually faded out. “My feeling is that these are very ancient traits that are not detrimental, they’re not beneficial. As a result, they’re just kind of meandering their way along through lineages,” Booth says, “They’re not being lost because they don’t kill the female, right? So therefore it’s a trait that is just maintained.” This would be the equivalent of, say, our tailbones. They’re not actively harming us, so there’s no evolutionary push to eliminate them. But no one’s saying, “Check out the tailbone on that guy. I would really like to tailbone him immediately.” They’re not helping us thrive or reproduce. And if parthenogens are inbred weirdos that can’t really reproduce successfully, then maybe parthenogenesis isn’t a strategic ploy. Maybe, it’s just a tailbone. Parthenogenesis is an encyclopedia waiting to be researched Dudgeon is happy to admit that Booth might be right. “It [parthenogenesis] could be sort of an evolutionary artifact,” she says. But she doesn’t think that Booth’s weird snakes totally undermine her hypothesis. Basically, she says that yes, most vertebrates produced through this kind of facultative parthenogenesis might be inbred flops. She acknowledges that most parthenogens die early. But the whole point of a Hail Mary pass is that it’s a long shot. It is probably not going to make it, but it’s better than not doing anything at all. “It might be a case that this is the ultimate lottery,” she says. “That if you are a parthenote embryo and you’re the one that actually makes it through to adulthood, maybe you got all the good genes, right? Perhaps the ones that do make it are the superstars genetically.” So maybe Dudgeon is right and there’s some kind of an evolutionary strategy at play here. Maybe Booth is right and parthenogenesis is just a vestigial relic. Maybe both of them are right and parthenogenesis is more of a strategy for some vertebrates than others, say. Or maybe they’re both wrong and something else is going on. One thing they both acknowledge is that there just needs to be a lot more research done here to get better answers. “Most of the work that we have really is from animals in human care,” Dudgeon says. “So what about the wild? What’s going on in the wild?” There are only a couple of papers documenting vertebrates doing this type of parthenogenesis in the wild — one of them co-authored by Booth. In part, that’s just because it’s really hard to spot parthenogenesis in the wild. Researchers cannot monitor wild animals as easily as they can in zoos and aquariums, to know whether or not they’ve been near males, or to check out their eggs to see if they have some surprising embryos in there. But if they want to really answer questions about what role parthenogenesis plays in vertebrate reproduction, they need to know way more about what it looks like in nature. They also need to answer questions about which species can do this, and why it seems like mammals don’t do it. They need to figure out how, exactly, this particular form of parthenogenesis works and what role genes play. That’s work that Alexis Sperling started on, investigating the workings of parthenogenesis in fruit flies. And, as she puts it, there’s lots more research to do on animals outside of just vertebrates; animals like insects. In fact, when I asked Sperling if she thought that research into parthenogenesis might be a whole new chapter in our understanding of reproduction, she went even bigger. “There’s like ... a whole set of encyclopedias waiting to be fully researched,” she said.

Preview: Migrant people of different nationalities seeking asylum in the United States travel on freight cars of the Mexican train known as “The Beast” as they arrive at the border city of Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua, Mexico, on April 24, 2024. | Herika Martinez/AFP via Getty Images For all the attention on the border, the root causes of migration and the most promising solutions to the US’s broken immigration system are often overlooked. There is a crisis on America’s border with Mexico. The number of people arriving there has skyrocketed in the years since the pandemic, when crossings fell drastically. The scenes coming from the border, and from many US cities that have been touched by the migrant crisis, have helped elevate the issue in voters’ minds. But for all the attention the topic gets, it is also widely misunderstood. The last few decades have seen a series of surges at the border and political wrangling over how to respond. The root causes of migration and why the US has long been ill-equipped to deal with it have been overlooked. Understanding all of that is key to fixing the problem. Yes, border crossings are up. But the type of migrants coming, where they’re from, and why they’re making the often treacherous journey to the southern border has changed over the years. The US’s immigration system simply was not designed or resourced to deal with the types of people arriving today: people from a growing variety of countries, fleeing crises and seeking asylum, often with their families. And that’s a broader problem that neither Biden, nor any president, can fix on their own. Here’s an explanation of the border crisis, broken down into eight charts. It’s true, more people have been coming The reality at the border has fundamentally changed in the years since Biden took office. Former President Donald Trump effectively shut down the border during the pandemic. He instituted the so-called Title 42 policy, which expelled asylum seekers under the pretext of protecting public health. As the pandemic subsided, migrants started attempting anew to cross the border in the last year of Trump’s presidency. When Biden won the 2020 election on a pro-immigrant platform, many migrants reportedly assumed (and were advised by smugglers) that his policies would be more welcoming, resulting in a sharp increase in crossings. That assumption proved faulty. Biden maintained Trump’s Title 42 policy for more than two years after taking office, ending it only in May 2023 when he also terminated the national emergency related to the pandemic. Border encounters climbed even higher that fall. By December, immigration authorities recorded a record number of more than 300,000 migrant encounters. The number of encounters has been so high that it’s clear more people have been coming under the Biden administration than during the Trump years, even accounting for seasonal fluctuations in migration. (Note: The same person can account for multiple encounters if they attempt to cross the border and come into contact with officials more than once. While the Title 42 policy was in place, migrants were not penalized for attempting to cross the border multiple times, and many did, though it’s hard to say exactly how many.) In recent months, however, that trend has started to slow for a few reasons. The Biden administration has instituted its version of Trump’s asylum transit ban. That rule allows immigration enforcement officials to turn away migrants for a number of reasons: if they do not have valid travel and identification documents, if they’ve traveled through another country without applying for asylum, if they don’t show up at a port of entry at an appointed time, and more. More so than Biden’s asylum policies, the biggest factor in declining border encounters by far is Mexico’s efforts to step up enforcement, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. Mexico has prevented some migrants from traveling north, bused and flown others back to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, and recently reached an agreement with Venezuela to deport its citizens. That has made this spring so far the quietest at the US southern border in four years. There is a question, however, of how long this can last — and at what cost to asylum seekers. “Despite Mexico going through the cycle of periodic crackdowns, none of them has lasted for longer than a few months or produced sustained, yearslong drops in the number of migrants arriving at the border,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “That’s why I call it a Band-Aid.” Compared to past surges, different types of migrants are coming from different places and seeking different things The last time the US immigration system was significantly reformed in the late 1980s, migrants arriving at the border were primarily single adult males from Mexico looking for work. That is no longer the case. More people are arriving at the US southern border intending to apply for asylum than ever before. That means instead of coming here claiming to look for work, they are seeking refuge because they have what the US government determines is a “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a “particular social group,” such as a tribe or ethnic group. The number of asylum applications filed as part of immigration court proceedings — where migrants encountered at the border are often referred after being found to have credible claims for protection — skyrocketed in recent years through the end of 2023. Under the Trump administration, most migrants arriving at the southern border were from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. In the last few years, however, the number of migrants coming from those countries has been eclipsed by those coming from South America — particularly Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua — and the Caribbean, including Haiti and Cuba. They have been driven out by recent compounding political and economic crises and natural disasters in their home countries. Mexican nationals are still showing up at the border, but rather than coming for economic reasons, they’re being driven out by shifting patterns of cartel violence. Migrants are increasingly coming from much more far-flung areas of the world. Migrants from China are among the fastest-growing populations at the southern border. There is also rising migration from India and Europe. Smugglers at the southern border have started marketing their services to these populations in a bid to expand their business. More families are also coming. This might be due to the correct perception that families have a better chance of remaining in the US if they travel together than if they travel separately. All of this seems to reflect the understanding that, for many of these migrant populations, there are no other good options but to go to the southern border, even if they may qualify to enter the US legally by other means. US refugee resettlement typically takes years. Wait times for some family-based green cards for some countries can take decades. “There’s an increasing number of people that need protection, and they view that the fastest and clearest way to protection is to go to the US-Mexico border,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. The immigration system is struggling to absorb these migrants The US immigration system is not designed to process so many people arriving at the southern border, especially not from such a broad array of countries and as part of families. That has created a variety of new challenges: Some countries generating large numbers of migrants, like Venezuela, Cuba, and China, have refused to receive more than a few, if any, of their citizens whom the US wants to deport. Processing migrants who don’t speak Spanish or English may require bringing in a certified translator who isn’t always readily available. Families and children are vulnerable populations with a unique set of needs, and the infrastructure does not exist to keep them in government custody long-term. The Biden administration has recently introduced a pilot program to process and monitor families without having to detain them, but like the rest of the immigration system, it is under-resourced and therefore has only covered a fraction of families arriving at the southern border. These challenges have deepened the immigration court backlog, which has grown to over 3 million cases. The immigration courts handle cases in which the Department of Homeland Security does not have the authority to deport an immigrant unilaterally, and they consider any potential relief from deportation for which they may qualify, including asylum and protections for victims of torture. So far this year, resolving those cases has taken more than a year on average, during which time migrants may have been detained or released into the US. This is despite the Biden administration’s efforts to slow the growth of the backlog, including removing cases from the docket that are not a high priority for enforcement and involve people who do not have a criminal record or have been in the US for a long time. The Biden administration started processing more asylum applications as the pandemic waned, leading to an increase in grants and denials. However, because of a lack of resources in the immigration courts and at US Citizenship and Immigration Services’s asylum office, the number of cases that are not adjudicated or temporarily closed has gone up even higher. Biden has tried a variety of different approaches to handling the asylum backlog, including marking more cases under that non-adjudicated status and proposing to change the processing rules to allow the government to more quickly expel people who are potentially ineligible to remain in the US. The thinking is that fewer people will be interested in crossing the border if they don’t expect to be able to spend years in the US before ever having to litigate their asylum claim. But it remains to be seen if that’s really working. Absent real solutions to these issues, border states started busing migrants from the border to blue cities in 2022. Some of those cities, many of which have been sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants over the years, have implemented policies to evict migrants from public shelters after a certain period of time due to a lack of capacity. That even these pro-immigrant cities are struggling indicates how stressed the system has become. Biden has also started sending more migrants, most of whom have no criminal record, to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. The number of immigrants in ICE detention was at historic lows during the pandemic due to public health concerns associated with confining people in close quarters. But that changed when the pandemic subsided and the number of people arriving at the border increased, creating both real and perceived pressure for the government to increase its capacity to detain migrants, said Tom Jawetz, former deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. At Biden’s urging, Congress raised the number of authorized ICE detention beds from 34,000 in fiscal year 2023 to 41,500 in 2024, close to historical highs. Public opinion on immigration has soured The challenges at the border and throughout the immigration system have led more Americans to sour on immigration itself. A long-running Gallup survey has shown that, of late, Americans increasingly want to see immigration levels decrease. Jawetz said that Americans’ dissatisfaction with the immigration system is “totally fair.” “The immigration system is not working as you might want it to work. And that’s what people have meant for many, many years when they said the immigration system is broken,” he said. That dysfunction predates Biden, but has now compounded to the point that members of both parties recognize the status quo is untenable. Most recently, a solution seemed within reach when a bipartisan group of lawmakers reached a deal that traded sweeping border security measures for aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. But Republicans in the House ultimately tanked the bill so that Donald Trump could keep the issue alive on the campaign trail this year. The fact is that responding to the global surge of migration requires major reforms that no one president could enact unilaterally. That includes providing adequate resources to the most overburdened parts of the system, ensuring the Border Patrol officers can perform more inspections, and staffing enough asylum officers and immigration judges to process migrants’ claims for protection. By itself, enforcement is insufficient to resolve the problems at the border, Ruiz Soto said. “Even the most strict policies of a potential future Trump administration would not be enough if the resources and infrastructure continues to be the same,” he said.

Preview: Getty Images You can have healthy disagreements with the people in your life. Because humans are imperfect, complex social beings, we argue. We disagree. We butt heads. If you’re not fighting every once in a while, congratulations for being perfect or extremely conflict-averse. Ideally, on the other side, we come to an agreement everyone is satisfied with: a shared understanding, an apology, a more efficient workflow. Even in the worst-case scenario, each party should feel heard, even if disagreements linger. “A good argument is one in which both sides walk away feeling like they would do that again,” says Bo Seo, author of Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard, “not that it’s life-changing or a hugely positive experience.” As many of us know from our own experiences, though, most arguments fail to meet that standard. John Gottman and his wife Julie Schwartz Gottman have seen their fair share of argumentative blunders in their decades of research on couples. This history has earned them a reputation as two of the most popular and well-regarded experts on love and relationships. One of the biggest mistakes people make in disagreements is fighting to win — to prove the other person wrong and persuade — rather than to understand, Gottman said. We may be tempted to levy personal attacks and blame the other person. We might dismiss and interrupt them. We may play the victim or completely shut down. The good news is it’s possible to have better, more effective fights. No relationship is without conflict, but a little conversational fine-tuning can transform an often frustrating experience into a fruitful one. Here’s what to keep in mind. Understand what you’re really arguing about Because no one truly anticipates an argument, it can be difficult to zero in on what you actually want to get out of it. Your motivation may be something concrete — wanting to finish the bathroom renovation — or more amorphous, like getting an apology. Regardless of your desired outcome, there is often a deeper meaning behind the intricacies of the fight, says Chris Segrin, head of the University of Arizona’s department of communication. Although you may be arguing about what color to paint the bathroom, there is likely a larger symbolic issue at play. “‘We live in this apartment and everything in here is the way you set it up and the way you want it,’” Segrin notes as an example. “‘I don’t feel like I have any opportunity to have my style in here.’” The Gottmans refer to this as the “dreams within conflict.” To determine the dream behind the other person’s argument, they suggest asking questions like, “Tell me why this is so important to you,” or, “Is there a story behind this for you?” One partner should do all the listening at first and then be given the space to answer the same questions, uninterrupted. “You come out of that with much deeper understanding of your partner,” Schwartz Gottman says, “and oftentimes more compassion, as you understand, for example, that they may have some baggage or traumatic history that influenced their position now on an issue.” Ask yourself if you’re butting heads over a difference in worldview or in values, says friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships. Sometimes the people in your life make different choices that may be annoying but ultimately don’t impact you. Other times, major gaps in core values may threaten the relationship. You should feel empowered to bring up how you feel their views impact you; you might consider whether you can continue to be in a relationship with them if they continue to hold these opinions, Bayard Jackson says. Typically, people want one of three things out of an argument: to make a point, make a difference, or be heard. Wanting to make a point, to be right, or to prove the other person wrong is not an effective strategy, Segrin says. “People just don’t respond well to that tactic,” he says. If you find yourself in this camp, consider why it’s so important for you to express this point and why getting the other person to change their mind is the right way forward. There are, of course, very crucial reasons to change someone’s mind: maybe they’re at risk of hurting themselves or other people, for example, or you’re their parent and you need to guide them. Generally, though, attempting to force someone to see things your way may drive a deeper wedge in the relationship. Making a difference means transforming the relationship or the outcome in some way: hearing what motivates them, collaborating on how to move forward, and growing closer in the process. It’s also possible that you don’t want anyone to debate you — or to change anything about the situation — but to make your voice heard. This can be an effective approach in professional settings, says Alison Green, creator of the work advice column Ask a Manager. If you’re on the other side when someone’s venting — especially if that person is a subordinate at work — make them feel heard, that you’re interested in understanding their perspective and how you might learn from it, Green says. Sometimes our goals aren’t necessarily realistic: You probably can’t duck out of that company retreat or convince a lifelong vegan to eat meat. Understanding how much sway you actually have to change a person’s behavior or an unsatisfying situation can prevent a ton of frustration, especially at work. “The more detached you can be about it, the better,” Green says. “Ultimately, it might not be your job to make that call. It’s your job to give your perspective and your recommendation. If you can be okay with washing your hands of it and letting someone else make that decision regardless of what that decision is, you come away feeling better about it.” Practice active listening Because a fight is a two-way exchange, listening is crucial. “Listening isn’t about doing a favor to the other person,” says workplace expert Amy Gallo, author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People). Truly hearing someone better enables you to come up with a solution. Rather than just waiting to talk, take deep breaths while the other person is speaking, Bayard Jackson suggests. In professional settings, you might jot down a few notes about what the other person has said and how you want to respond, Gallo says. The Gottmans also suggest note-taking and reading back what you heard to ensure you’re grasping their argument. You won’t be as reactive when you’re focused on transcribing the conversation. One of the most effective forms of active listening involves repeating what you heard. Try saying, “Let me see if I heard that correctly,” or, “I think what I’m hearing is [the reason they’re upset] was really frustrating for you.” You can ask follow-up questions like, “Why do you think [the issue they’re concerned about] is happening?” or, “I know that’s hard. Why do you feel that way?” to signal you’re paying attention to their concerns. As difficult as it may be, avoid interrupting. If the other party seems particularly inflamed, let them express all of their concerns so you can get the full picture of their argument, Seo says. Try asking them, gently, “Do you have anything more to add?” before recapping what you heard. Try to be as objective as possible when hearing out the other person, Seo says. If you assume they’re acting in bad faith, you’re less likely to come to an agreement. Focus on areas of agreement and negotiate where you don’t agree In the heat of an argument, people feel the need to counter every detail their conversation partner brings up, Gallo says. Fight this urge and start by addressing where you agree, no matter how small. You can say, “That point you made about not wanting to go over budget is so important. I’m glad you said that.” Now, you have a shared goal. Agreement is an olive branch. Acknowledging the other party’s good ideas may lower their defenses and make them more receptive to other points you have to make, Segrin says. In instances where you seemingly disagree on every point, work hard to find some common ground. Maybe you both are working in service of the company’s or your family’s broader goals. It’s worth it to ask, “What are we hoping to get out of this as a family? What path will serve those goals?” You can also invite them to imagine other people’s perspectives without directly getting other people involved: “How would our boss/teammates see this? What ideas would they come up with?” “Rather than getting into a tug of war of just your perspective and their perspective, you’re inviting other people into the room, not literally, but in terms of their perspective,” Gallo says. “That will help expand the other person’s thinking about what’s possible and what are the options for resolution.” One strategy the Gottmans use to facilitate compromise calls to mind the image of a bagel. Draw (or imagine) two concentric circles. In the smaller center circle, write what you don’t want to compromise. In the outer circle, write down all the ways you can compromise. Schwartz Gottman recalls a couple who were arguing about how to spend their retirement: The woman wanted to retire to a family farm in Iowa, while her husband hoped to sail around the world — these were their nonnegotiables. The timing, duration, and expenses were all flexible. The couple compromised by agreeing that they’d sail for a year, and then spend a year on the farm. In conflicts where you are diametrically opposed to the other person’s point of view, restrain from tearing down the other person or insulting their intelligence. Attacking the person and not the argument is a sign of an amateur debater, Segrin says. Even if there is a wide divide between your opinion and a friend’s, consider whether it’s worth the energy of an argument at all. Ask yourself how much of a margin do you give your loved ones to think differently than you, Bayard Jackson says. We expect our friends to agree with us most of the time, she says, but it’s unrealistic to be on the same page as someone all the time. Where are you willing to diverge in opinion from your friends? How to handle your emotions Arguments are inherently emotional: It can be difficult to hear how we’ve hurt someone or have our opinions challenged. Sometimes your body might have a physiological reaction called flooding, where your heart rate rises, your muscles tense, and you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode, says Schwartz Gottman. In these situations, you should step away from the conversation. Say, “We should take a break,” and set a time for when you’ll return to discussions. This allows you to cool off, reconsider the situation, and/or get an outsider’s perspective. To blunt the impact of emotions in workplace conflicts, Green suggests thinking of yourself as a consultant: to provide recommendations and leave it up to the client (a.k.a. your boss) whether to take them. “But you’re not so invested because you’re not part of their day-to-day team who feels that same emotional investment,” Green says. If you’re nervous to even start the conversation, Bayard Jackson recommends front-loading the conversation with reassurances that your goal is to strengthen the relationship, and to even highlight your trepidation. Try saying, “I’d love to talk to you about something and I don’t want it to be awkward between us or for you to think I’m pulling away from the friendship.” What to do if you really can’t see eye to eye It’s also entirely possible that the other party does not offer you the same respect and courtesy during a disagreement. If the person you’re arguing with is extremely critical and interrupts you, you might say, “Can we slow this down? I really want a chance to finish what I’m saying before I hear your response,” or, “I really want to understand you. Can you say it another way?” Schwartz Gottman suggests. Maybe the other party is resorting to lies during the disagreement. Try not to respond to every single falsehood, Seo says, but instead pick a representative lie that demonstrates how their other arguments are untrue. Similarly, avoid going tit-for-tat with someone who’s particularly combative. “You can do real damage by either being drawn to brawling with the other side or continuing to be reasonable when clearly that’s no longer the nature of the conversation,” Seo says. Try saying, “I think we’re disagreeing in a way that’s not going to help us understand each other or to reach a good outcome. Let’s come back to this later. But before we finish I’d like to get a few things off my chest and I’d rather we didn’t argue about it.” “Then you can have the last word,” Seo says. However, if the other person’s values and beliefs consistently make you feel unsafe or inadequate, you might consider ending the relationship. But for many other relationships — professional connections in particular — you may just need to agree to disagree. If both sides can respect each other’s point of view and accept how it differs from their own, the relationship can continue so long as there is mutual respect, Segrin says. “There are going to be things, when we have a relationship with another human being, we just have to accept about them,” Segrin says. “It’s not always bad. It’s not about who’s right. It’s just acceptance.”

Preview: Cassandra Peterson, Sarah Silverman, and John Mulaney at John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA for the Netflix is a Joke Festival at the Sunset Gower Studios on May 8, 2024, in Los Angeles, CA. | Ryan West/Netflix Everybody’s in LA’s week-long stint is over. It still might point toward the streamer’s future — and the comedian’s. John Mulaney’s new, just-concluded Netflix comedy limited series, Everybody’s in LA, felt experimental in a number of ways. It’s not only Netflix trying out an interesting format — the show debuted live on May 3 and played out over the past week in a series of six nightly live episodes — but it also feels like Mulaney soft-launching a side gig. As the host to a motley crew of Los Angeles natives and town-invading comedians, Mulaney seems to be testing the waters for what kind of comedy his audience wants from him now. His 2023 confessional special Baby J won an Emmy for outstanding writing and delved into his recent struggles with sobriety, but it brought mixed reviews from critics — some of whom seemed skeptical at best that Mulaney had done enough to bare his soul for the rest of us. After a rough few years for Mulaney, such cynicism about the comedian seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. In particular, 2021 saw him enter rehab for drug addiction. Shortly after his release, it became clear that Mulaney had chosen to end his marriage to his then-wife of six years, Anna Marie Tendler, and begun a relationship with actor Olivia Munn — the timeline of which has been described as “tight.” No sooner had Mulaney filed for divorce than rumors of an affair leaked, followed by news that Munn was pregnant. The scandal hit the public unusually hard in a pandemic-era culture that clung to its heroes, and Mulaney’s transgressions spawned both intense backlash and intense discourse about whether our parasocial relationships have gotten too warped. The period severely damaged Mulaney’s relationship with his core audience, once full of people who responded to his idealistic charm. Those folks didn’t seem to move on easily — not even by April 2023, when Mulaney, through Baby J, proffered a way forward via the more traditional route: a redemptive confessional. Jump ahead to May 2024, and perhaps, if attempt one didn’t totally set a clear path forward for the comic, attempt two will: enter, an intentionally random daily comedy talk show built around the threadbarest of excuses. The show’s raison d’être: LA is weird. The solution: gather an unexpected bunch of funny people and locals together to talk about how weird LA is. The host: a comedian famed for his own likable random weirdness. Mulaney seems to be covering his bases. “We are only doing six episodes,” he explains in the introduction to Everybody’s in LA, “so the show will never hit its groove.” If this flops, it’s fine. Mulaney jokes that he doesn’t know why he’s doing the show, which functions as a side event for Netflix’s elaborate LA comedy festival, Netflix Is a Joke. “I need structure,” he says, a non-justification that also doubles as a subtle reminder for some viewers that we’re looking at a person who has a history of addiction and is presumably in recovery. That’s about as deep as this show gets, however; though we do get some gestures to sociocultural topics like environmentalism and the incessant problem of LA traffic, they’re handed to us in the guise of, for example, a coyote wrangler or a gonzo helicopter journalist. Mulaney features famous comedians, yes, but also everyone from hypnotherapists to former OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark. (And really, what could be more LA than that?) In between conversations, Mulaney features pretaped sketches from more guest comedians and Daily Show-style comedy correspondents. As if that’s not chaotic enough, he also has call-in guests. At one point during episode five, a seismologist sits quietly by while a caller recounts being awakened by an earthquake while sleeping in the nude. These probably aren’t the talk show beats you’re used to. Mulaney’s one-week fling with the city also works out well for Netflix. Despite trying on and off for years to make Netflix talk shows a thing, and despite intermittently bringing David Letterman back to do one-off long-form interviews, the platform has never nailed the format before this. The nightly show seems to be making a small impact; it’s currently hanging around at No. 10 on the Netflix US Top 10 shows for the day, and it’s moved up and down the chart for most of the week. Not a bad beginning; the beginning of what, exactly, remains somewhat unclear. Netflix could also be using this show as a pilot entry for similar themed efforts from other temporary hosts — in other words, more appointment TV. It certainly seems that the entire week, beginning with Katt Williams’s live standup special Woke Foke and the jarringly uncomfortable Roast of Tom Brady, was an experimental make-or-break week for Netflix and live programming. Or perhaps Netflix will do this again next year during its next comedy fest; perhaps in a few months, Mulaney will move to another quirky American city with another quirky band of guests. It’s an interesting concept: What would this type of series be like if it took both it and the city it’s in a little more seriously? What would viewers make of it if we didn’t know as much about the city itself as we’ve absorbed about Los Angeles from decades of cultural osmosis? I’m not saying Everybody’s in Boise is the way to go, but I am saying I’d probably watch it for the local color. Whether this is enough to restore Mulaney to the top of the comedy world seems equally uncertain. The main charm of the show, all told, has less to do with the assemblage of guests than watching Mulaney’s effortless wrangling of them. Night after night, Mulaney embraces all the awkwardness of live comedy, and it doesn’t always embrace back: Often the guests are hostile; the sketches don’t always land; the callers are too eager to grandstand. Mulaney sidesteps it all like it’s Dance Dance Revolution and he knows this particular song by heart. As a host, he’s fab. Yet the idea of Mulaney as a talk show host on an ongoing basis feels like a net loss rather than a gain. Sure, he can bring together comedy titans and make sure they don’t run over an hour, but he’s probably fit for better things. If the dominant criticism of Baby J was that it coasted too lightly over Mulaney’s self-recrimination, then Everybody’s in LA directs his talents entirely outward; it’s intentionally lighthearted, deliberately shallow. There’s meaning in the edges, but that usually has little to do with why we love Mulaney himself. The arguable best moment in the series, in fact, doesn’t involve Mulaney at all, but rather a pretaped segment in episode two that reunites core members of the LA punk scene. They sit around reminiscing, then write a silly punk song together on the fly. It’s fun, it’s poignant. But it’s not as fun or poignant as Mulaney himself can be when he’s alone onstage with only his flaws and a thousand people willing to laugh at and then forgive them. If Everybody’s in LA brings his audience closer to a suspension of hostilities, then it will have been well worth it.

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