Preview: Canada, Mexico and China have responded to Trump's long-promised tariffs on imports, with Canada immediately retaliating.

Preview: U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing ahead with long-threatened import tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China.

Preview: LinkedIn founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman has just launched drug discovery startup Manas AI, alongside Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist.

Preview: President Donald Trump signed orders on Saturday placing tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico. Here's how that may affect U.S. consumers.

Preview: Industry and corporate leaders are weighing in after the Trump administration confirmed it will move forward with tariffs on imported goods from Canada, Mexico and China.

Preview: President Trump's new tariffs war is just starting, but from the biggest companies to local family business owners, preparing for it began long ago.

Preview: TipRanks' analyst ranking service highlights three stocks favored by Wall Street, including Netflix and Intuitive Surgical.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada threaten to raise prices for toys, cars, shoes, french fries, furniture and beer.

Preview: Travel specialists weigh in with the most underrated places to visit, along with can't-miss activities in each locale and the best times to go.

Preview: Opendoor ranked the most popular ZIP codes by analyzing data from the local Multiple Listing Services where its brokerages operate.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

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.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

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.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

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

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: FUNDS BET BIG ON STOCK CRASH... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: SURGE IN SHORTS AGAINST US MARKET... Canada, Mexico Want America to Feel the Pain Too... Pump prices set to rise... Businesses lash out... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: SURGE IN SHORTS AGAINST US MARKET... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: FUNDS BET BIG ON STOCK CRASH... Canada, Mexico Want America to Feel the Pain Too... Pump prices set to rise... Businesses lash out...

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Preview: Pump prices set to rise... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: FUNDS BET BIG ON STOCK CRASH... SURGE IN SHORTS AGAINST US MARKET... Canada, Mexico Want America to Feel the Pain Too... Businesses lash out... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Businesses lash out... (Top headline, 5th story, link) Related stories: FUNDS BET BIG ON STOCK CRASH... SURGE IN SHORTS AGAINST US MARKET... Canada, Mexico Want America to Feel the Pain Too... Pump prices set to rise...

Preview: TRADE WAR 2025 (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: TARIFFS BEGIN CANADA RETALIATES MEX WARNING RELATIONS SPIRAL

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Preview: Thousands gathered at a chilly Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania on Sunday for the 138th prognostication, on Groundhog Day 2025.

Preview: Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book' and client list could be closer to public release thanks to new leadership in Washington, D.C., under President Trump.

Preview: Witnesses say they saw OJ Simpson driving near the crime scene without his headlights on and dumping a wrapped item in a trash can the night of the crime.

Preview: It’s been 18 years since Boca Raton, Florida, was rocked by two murder cases and a kidnapping at a local mall, and a retired FBI agent believes the unsolved crimes are connected.

Preview: A Colorado woman was convicted of murder after she and a stranger she met on a bus killed her boyfriend who was skeptical that she could land a job.

Preview: Experts believe a long-lost Vincent van Gogh painting, "Elimar," was found at a Minnesota garage sale in 2016, where it was sold for $50.

Preview: A Malibu homeowner attended a ceremony honoring the El Segundo firefighters who helped with Palisades Fire so he could thank the first responders who saved his ocean view house.

Preview: A Chicago-based subcontractor is suing one of the firms involved in managing the construction of the Obama Presidential Center for $40 million, claiming racial discriminatory practices.

Preview: These mugshots were taken for arrests made throughout the US the week of Jan. 26-Feb. 1, 2025.

Preview: Officials said on Saturday that they recovered 42 sets of remains amid the investigation into the Jan. 29 Potomac River midair collision, and plan on releasing more details in coming days.

Preview: Trump stretches trade law boundaries with Canada, Mexico, China tariffs  Reuters Trudeau Details Canada’s Retaliation Plans in Emotional Rebuke of Trump Tariffs  The New York Times Live updates: Trump deals with continued fallout from tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico  NBC News Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Imposes Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico and China  The White House Canada, Mexico Want America to Feel the Pain of Tariffs Too  The Wall Street Journal

Preview: Punxsutawney Phil predicts 6 more weeks of winter after waking up to see his shadow on Groundhog Day  ABC News What did the groundhog see? Punxsutawney Phil’s winter predictions are in  CNN Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil sees shadow, predicting longer winter  The Guardian Grading the groundhogs  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Did The Groundhog See His Shadow Today?  The Weather Channel

Preview: Plane Crash That Killed at Least 7 Leaves Philadelphia Neighborhood Shaken  The New York Times Medical transport jet was in the air for less than a minute before crash in Philadelphia: NTSB  6ABC Philadelphia Philly plane crash investigation enters third day after 7 killed, 19 more injured  FOX 29 Philadelphia Live Updates: Investigators searching for clues after medical jet crash in Northeast Philly  NBC Philadelphia Seven dead, 19 injured in ‘high-impact’ air ambulance crash in Philadelphia  The Associated Press

Preview: How did racist mass texts bypass some anti-spam guardrails after the election?  NPR

Preview: China threatens countermeasures to combat Trump tariffs  Financial TimesView Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: ‘Minnesota nice has two sides’: Why some Dems see a ruthless leader in Ken Martin  POLITICO Ken Martin wins election as the next chair of the Democratic National Committee  NBC News Democrats Choose a Political Operator From Minnesota as Their New Leader  The New York Times Democrats elect new chair who branded Trump a 'traitor' as party aims to rebound from disastrous 2024 election  Fox News DNC Members Elect New Slate of DNC Officers  Democrats.org

Preview: Elon Musk's DOGE commission gains access to sensitive Treasury payment systems: AP sources  The Associated Press Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System  The New York Times Why Elon Musk's team now has access to Treasury's payments system  The Times of India How Elon Musk’s team gained access to US Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system amid spending battle  The Economic Times Trump administration gives Musk allies access to Treasury payment system  POLITICO

Preview: Gaza deal's future hangs on Trump-Netanyahu meeting  Axios LIVE: Israel’s Netanyahu heads to US to meet Trump before ceasefire talks  Al Jazeera English Netanyahu Heads to Washington at a Critical Juncture for Mideast  The New York Times Israel's Netanyahu departs for US to meet with Trump, hoping to strengthen ties with Washington  Fox News Live briefing: Netanyahu heads to Washington for Trump’s first meeting with foreign leader  The Washington Post

Preview: ‘Repulsive’: Top Democrats Blast Trump’s FBI Bloodbath  The Daily Beast Over a Dozen Prosecutors at U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. Are Dismissed  The New York Times Justice Department changes rattle current and former agency veterans  NPR Democrat calls firing of FBI officials ‘deeply alarming’ as some federal websites appear to go dark – as it happened  The Guardian US FBI Agents Are Stunned by the Scale of the Expected Trump Purge  The Atlantic

Preview: Russia, Seeking to Salvage Military Bases, Goes Hat in Hand to Syria  The New York Times Assad management. Why a deal that would allow Russia to retain its military bases in Syria looks unlikely  Новая газета. Европа Syria Demands Reparations From Russia  Newsweek Russia Offers to Help Rebuild Syria as It Bids for Deal on Bases  Bloomberg Syria asks Russia for reparations  Financial Times

Preview: PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump on Sunday defended his decision to impose sweeping tariffs on the United States’ top three trading partners, even as he acknowledged there may be “some pain” caused by the economic fallout. Trump took to Truth Social the morning after he signed off on 25 percent tariffs on Canada, 25...

Preview: Vice President JD Vance stood by President Trump’s remarks linking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices to the plane crash Wednesday night. In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Vance told Maria Bartiromo that Trump was not “blaming anybody” in particular but suggested that the DEI practices led to air traffic...

Preview: President Trump has declared a National Emergency over the immigration crisis, with Mexico, Colombia and Honduras cooperating with the U.S. and accepting deported migrants, while Trump's unconventional strategy is proving to be successful in Mexico and Central America.

Preview: China’s Ministry of Commerce said it would file a legal case against the United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO), in response to President Trump’s decision Saturday to impose 10 percent tariffs on Chinese goods. In a statement, the ministry’s spokesperson vowed further “countermeasures” against the United States but did not specify what steps...

Preview: Of all the dangers of reckless nuclear boosterism, the most insidious is disinformation.

Preview: Lawmakers in both parties say Congress is gearing up to play an aggressive role in the federal response to this week's deadly collision between a military helicopter and a commercial passenger plane over the Potomac River near Washington. The lawmakers are treading carefully in the early stages of that process, wary of getting ahead of...

Preview: With new dynamics emerging between Silicon Valley and Washington, some advocates for stronger social media regulations and parents are concerned their cause will get lost in the dust despite past momentum. Friday marked one year since the leaders of five major social media companies — Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X — were grilled by...

Preview: President Trump campaigned on a pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. But since taking office, he’s primarily targeted several longstanding programs that give migrants lawful ways to come to the U.S. Trump has boasted he would target immigrants not legally in the country, denouncing them as criminals and threatening swift deportation. But a flurry of...

Preview: Tensions are spilling out into the open between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and members of his own party in the Sunshine State, pointing to a new discordant era of GOP-led politics in a state that has trended red over the last few cycles. The rare intraparty fighting came to a head this week when...

Preview: President Trump made good on his campaign promise and enacted steep tariffs on the country’s top three trading partners Saturday. Trump hit Canada and Mexico with a 25 percent import tax and China with a 10 percent one on Saturday. Canadian energy sources will have a 10 percent tariff, the White House announced. The tariffs...

Preview: Stewart-Binks said she went public after seeing a lawsuit filed by a former Fox hairstylist who made similar claims.

Preview: Jo Ellis, a Black Hawk pilot with the Virginia National Guard, shared a "proof of life" video in response to social media users linking her to the deadly midair collision.

Preview: There was no immediate word whether anyone on the ground was killed, but at least six people were treated for injuries at a hospital.

Preview: Charlie Angus, a member of Canada's Parliament, suggested his country put tariffs on Elon Musk's "douche Panzer" should Trump follow through on his plans.

Preview: The letter was meant to lend credibility to Kennedy’s nomination, which has faced strenuous opposition from experts due to his decades of anti-vaccine activism.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for a New York doctor indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for allegedly prescribing an abortion pill online to a pregnant minor.

Preview: A medical transport jet crashed in Philadelphia on Friday about 30 seconds after taking off.

Preview: Atlanta leaders are reconsidering how they dismantle homeless camps after the death of Cornelius Taylor, who died after the tent he was inside collapsed on Jan. 16.

Preview: American Airlines Flight 5342 is seen appearing to descend into the Washington airport as the Army Black Hawk helicopter travels straight into it.

Preview: Tariffs are "not what we want, but if he moves forward, we will also act,” he said.

Preview: “My student loans are burying me.”

Preview: “The agreement was that, as soon as they sold their home, they would refinance the mortgage.”

Preview: “I worked in a remote call center for almost five years and applied for 25 positions without a callback.”

Preview: President Trump announced new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and Canada Friday afternoon, opening up the first fronts in a trade war that could soon engulf numerous U.S. trade partners, including allies and enemies alike.

Preview: ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Yellowjackets’ and ‘Invincible’ are back for new seasons, while Robert De Niro stars in Netflix’s ‘Zero Day’

Preview: “I discovered that the default deed in Illinois is tenants in common — not joint tenants with the right of survivorship.”

Preview: ”I kept my finances totally separate in my first 20-plus year marriage — and I’m going to do it differently this time.”

Preview: Retirees need to tackle four tasks to thrive in retirement

Preview: Subjecting the Super Bowl Predictor to statistical scrutiny.

Preview: “I have $150,000 left on my mortgage with 7.3% interest.”

Preview: UPDATE (Feb.

Preview: It’s barely been two weeks, but Elon Musk’s attempts to run the federal government like one of his businesses have already resulted in a level of chaos and inefficiency we’ve never before seen in Washington.

Preview: The Democratic National Committee elected Ken Martin as its chair on Saturday afternoon, as the party looks to new leadership to help steer it through President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

Preview: Before Trump granted clemency to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, his wife and children had to make a daring escaped.

Preview: Shaboozey has five Grammy nominations tonight, including song of the year for “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Will we watch him achieve country stardom like Jelly Roll?

Preview: Following Trump's anti-DEI executive order, the Defense Intelligence Agency banned employee celebrations for Black History Month and other cultural events

Preview: It is shameful that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth politicized a tragedy that killed 67 people in the crash of an American Eagle flight and an Army Black Hawk.

Preview: Though he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. in his inaugural address, President Trump has pursued a vision focused on undoing much of the progress King worked for.

Preview: FCC chairman Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 author and right-wing critic of the media, launched probes into National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, outlets that have been often been targeted by conservatives.

Preview: The White House fired multiple FBI officials and federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases on Friday, as President Donald Trump continues to upend the federal government to align with his agenda.

Preview: When President Trump finished taking the oath of office last week, all I could think about was how my fellow students would react at school the next day. It wasn’t just about whether my 11th-grade classmates in New York supported him — it was the tension that I knew would fill the air. People don’t...

Preview: "Each one of us had to deal with things in our own way," she tells Page Six in an exclusive interview.

Preview: Music’s biggest night is upon us!

Preview: President Trump acknowledged that the across-the-board tariffs he ordered into effect Saturday on imports from Canada, Mexico and China might cause some “pain,” but argued that they will pay off in the long term. “This will be the golden age of America! will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!). but we will...

Preview: On December 6, 2016, Masayoshi Masa — founder of Japanese investment company SoftBank — was due to visit the headquarters of WeWork in New York City. As usual, he was running late, and his subsequent meeting with president-elect Trump loomed large. The planned two-hour at WeWork tour turned into a 12-minute walk-about. Unabashed, Masa invited WeWork’s...

Preview: After LeBron James dominated the Knicks and MSG again Saturday night in a 128-112 Lakers win, much of the talk surrounded his son, Bronny.

Preview: Page Six forecasts a big night for Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan at Sunday's 67th annual awards show.

Preview: Roxburgh plays the younger sister of Justin Hartley and Jensen Ackles in Tracker.

Preview: Jasson Dominguez is finally about to get his chance to live up to his otherworldly fanfare.

Preview: "They didn't like the decision that Issa makes in the end."

Preview: With Canada, Mexico, China, Colombia and the Middle East, President Trump has wasted no time threatening to use American might to force recalcitrant countries to back down and do what he wants.

Preview: Canada, Mexico and China account for more than a third of the products brought into the United States. Tariffs could lead to higher prices for consumers.

Preview: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

Preview: The Education Department told employees of the suspensions in letters on Friday. Some of those put on leave said they had only a minimal connection to diversity or equity efforts.

Preview: A sense of crisis among aid groups was growing as U.S.A.I.D.’s website went dark.

Preview: Senator John Curtis prides himself on collaborating with people who disagree with him. But with a Republican trifecta in place, it’s not clear whether Mitt Romney’s successor will follow in his footsteps.

Preview: More than 50 interviews with Democratic leaders revealed a party struggling to decide what it believes in, what issues to prioritize and how to confront an aggressive right-wing administration.

Preview: A poll from The New York Times and Ipsos found that Americans believe abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and climate change concern Democrats more than the cost of living.

Preview: Transportation safety investigators are seeking to determine if the pilots of the American Airlines plane detected danger just before the midair crash with a helicopter.

Preview: Sixty-seven people were killed after an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army helicopter collided and crashed into the Potomac River.

Preview: I'm rethinking everything.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Feb. 2, 2025.

Preview: Finspan may not always reach the heights of Wingspan, but it seems sure to reveal hidden depths.

Preview: Ed Zitron is worried about the “future that tech’s elite wants to build,” and thinks you should be too.

Preview: Did DeepSeek put China ahead in the A.I. Cold War?

Preview: “You know, all I really gotta do is convert one person, and I get to go through the pearly gates.”

Preview: Whatever its motivations, the 5th Circuit’s opinion has little to do with the reality of gun violence with which all Americans live.

Preview: There’s not a lot of evidence that the resignation offer will be honored.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: 2/2/1790: Justice William Cushing takes oath.   The post Today in Supreme Court History: February 2, 1790 appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: The right to a reasonable accommodation has produced some absurd results.

Preview: Almost exactly one year after Congress swore off self-inflicted fiscal crises, we're back to the same tired theatrics.

Preview: What's on your mind?

Preview: A majority of the en banc court instead seeks to explain away the panel's conclusion as dicta. Will the Supreme Court agree?

Preview: The government would have a much stronger interest to ban a Chinese AI app that collects proprietary information than to ban a social media app that displays dance videos.

Preview: The company is worried that the president's complaints about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris could block a pending merger.

Preview: FIRE, which represented the student (Kimberly Diei) reports: After her First Amendment lawsuit set precedent last fall for student free speech rights,… The post U Tenn Pharmacy School Pays $250K Settlement for Trying to Expel Student for Sexually Themed Tweets appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: There's still a lot we don't know and initial speculation from the media and the president about the causes of Wednesday's disaster appear off-base.

Preview: Right whales, premium cigars, and tax evasion.

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: The link between childhood poverty and poverty during adulthood is much more persistent in the US than in peer countries. | Alex Wong/Getty Images The classic promise of the American dream is that no matter where you grew up, no matter how poor you were as a kid, you can still have a path to financial stability in the United States as long as you work hard. But the truth is that poverty in the US is much more persistent than it is in other high-income countries. In fact, a poor American kid is much less likely to escape poverty in adulthood than a poor kid in Denmark or Germany or the United Kingdom.  Obviously, that’s not because Americans aren’t willing to work hard. Many studies have shown just how big a role your early years — and things like the quality of the school you attended, the safety of your childhood neighborhood, and the social networks you had access to as a kid — play in your future economic outcomes. So the hope has been that by focusing social programs on reducing childhood poverty, we can reduce adult poverty in the long term. But while directing government resources toward reducing child poverty is crucial, childhood poverty alone doesn’t explain why poverty is so much more likely to follow you through life in the US than it is in peer countries. A recent study underscores one major factor that makes poor American kids so likely to stay poor, and it’s strikingly simple: It’s not just that the US government doesn’t provide kids with enough support, but that adults are also in need of a much more generous social safety net. To better understand the links between childhood and adult poverty and what can break that cycle, I spoke with the study’s lead author, Zachary Parolin, an associate professor at Bocconi University and a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. The US prides itself on being a place where there’s a lot of upward mobility. But how does the US actually compare to peer countries when it comes to upward mobility? There are a lot of studies that focus on intergenerational mobility broadly defined, maybe based on your earnings in adulthood compared to your parents’ earnings. We know from that literature that, in general, the influence of your parental background tends to matter more in the US than other high-income countries.  One slight difference in our approach of looking at this is saying, “What if we just care about the intergenerational persistence of poverty?” In other words, if you’re born into poverty in the US, what are your chances of escaping poverty in your own adulthood relative to, say, children who grew up in poverty in Denmark, Germany, Australia, or the United Kingdom? And what we find is that poverty in the US is much, much stickier than in other high-income countries, and by a substantial margin. So if you grow up poor in the US, your odds of being poor in adulthood are a magnitude of two to four times higher than some of the other high-income countries we looked at. So the topline findings are that growing up poor in the United States is particularly consequential for your adult economic outcomes, undermining this idea that the US, relative to peer nations, is some land of great upward economic opportunity.  We often focus on how important factors in childhood are to someone’s prospects of escaping poverty later in life — things like zip codes, schools, social networks — but what you found is that there’s one thing missing from those conversations, and that’s government support during adulthood, not just childhood. How did you reach that conclusion? I want to start by saying I don’t want to undervalue the importance of income support provided during childhood. Reducing child property, direct income transfers, or other service-oriented provisions remains incredibly important.  What we show is that if you want to explain why the US has a much higher persistence of poverty than other high-income countries, a really large part of that equation is that if you grow up or in the US and you’re in adulthood — and maybe you don’t have full-time work, maybe you didn’t get that college degree — the state is doing much less to support you. Just to try to contextualize this a little bit more, imagine two people — one in the US, one in Denmark. They both grow up spending maybe half their childhood in poverty. In both countries, they’re less likely to go get a university degree relative to other kids who didn’t grow up in poverty. They might be less likely to work in full-time employment. But that Dane who still suffers the consequences of having grown up in poverty, in their adulthood, they still might get some generous social assistance whereas the similar adult in the US just isn’t getting access to the same type of support.  So the lingering consequences of child poverty for one’s income in adulthood happen to be stronger in the US in part due to the reduced economic assistance provided by the state, and that’s what we find explains the large part of the variation. One surprising thing your study found was that while Black kids are much more likely to grow up in poverty than white kids, racial discrimination doesn’t actually make poverty persist more. White kids are just as likely to be stuck in poverty well into adulthood. Can you explain why that is? Yeah, we were actually surprised by this finding, and we try to be cautious in how we explain it. It’s certainly true that Black children in the US are much more likely to be poor than white individuals. We see that clearly in our data. But the link between that child poverty and adult poverty is roughly similar.  In our data, if you have a Black child and a white child who spend half their childhoods in poverty, the association of spending half your childhood in poverty and the likelihood that you’re poor in adulthood is pretty much the same for those two kids. But it is in fact true that Black children and adults are much more exposed to poverty overall.  It’s absolutely true that discrimination still exists and discrimination is a big part of why Black individuals are exposed to more poverty both in childhood and adulthood. But what we find empirically is that, given a certain amount of exposure to poverty, it’s bad for you regardless, and it’s not just racial discrimination that explains why the US is so much worse relative to other countries, even if that, of course, is a factor in many other dimensions of economic opportunity in the US. So a lot of this seems pretty obvious: It’s very logical to say that if you provide people with more public support in adulthood, then they’re less likely to be poor. So why is it important for people, and especially policymakers, to pay attention to your study? What’s the lesson here that we didn’t already know?  I think the big lesson is related to some of these intergenerational outcomes. In other words, understanding how the conditions you grow up in are going to influence the conditions you face in adulthood. Understanding how we think about that from the lens of fairness and equity concerns and then: What can we do about it?  The reduction of poverty through income transfers [like unemployment insurance benefits] in itself is a good thing, but what we show is that beyond reducing hardship, these transfers have the ability to reduce that link between childhood poverty and adult poverty. In other words, they have the ability to reduce that link between conditions that you didn’t choose, that you inherited as a result of your birth and your parents’ economic circumstances when you were young, and your ability to meet your basic needs in your own adulthood.  Beyond the million other reasons to care about reducing poverty in the short run, here is another reason that some of those income transfers in adulthood are important, and in general, understanding why this link between childhood poverty and adult poverty is so much stickier in the US than in other countries. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

Preview: Chris Hayes, seen here in November 2016, is the author of the new book The Sirens’ Call. | Jim Spellman/WireImage A friend of mine once told me that “You are where your attention is.” That line always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all make is also the most common one. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. One of the primary features of this age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of distractions. Your phone is ringing, your Apple Watch is blinking, you got a ping on Slack from a coworker, you’re getting an email notification as you’re sitting down for dinner… it’s always something. This level of distraction is not an accident. Our devices have engineered the incessant need for stimulus and a whole industry has emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention and then selling it to the highest bidder. Chris Hayes is the host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the author of a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. The discourse on attention is, shall we say, crowded, but Hayes makes an interesting — and novel — argument about how the rearranging of social and economic life around the pursuit of attention represents “a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism.” I invited Hayes on The Gray Area to talk about what that actually means and why he thinks we haven’t fully appreciated the significance of this transformation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the more useful or practical ways to think about what it means in human life? Chris Hayes There’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s not really even a coherent concept. And some of those critiques I take seriously. In some ways I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it is naming something real.  So one way to think about attention is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope. There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about attention quotes because it’s so good, which is: withdrawal from certain things to focus on others.  If you think about what a stagehand with the spotlight does in a Broadway play… I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So that’s how we think about attention: the ability to willfully focus, basically.  But then there are other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Right now, if someone busted into my studio and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible. Before I had any conscious will over it, no matter how disciplined I am, pre-consciously a system would fire that would wrench my attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary attention.  And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention, which I think has its own particular weight and depth. It’s not just that we can pay attention to things and people in the world, it’s also crucially important that people can pay attention to us. We can be on the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so psychologically and socially and emotionally rich. Sean Illing Is it too much to say that you think attention is the most important thing we have? Chris Hayes I think it’s the most important thing. And I go back to William James. One of his philosophical preoccupations is free will — whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him attention is indistinguishable from will because that ability to focus is the essence of will. And for me, if you are not a religious person and you don’t think that the meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power, what we get is one life. And what we do during that one life is we go around through the world in this one body and brain and from moment to moment we’re paying attention to this or that, and what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. It’s elemental in that sense. I don’t think there’s any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty. Sean Illing The book is obviously about the rise of the modern attention economy and you make the case that this transition is comparable to the emergence of wage labor in the Industrial Revolution. How so? Chris Hayes So labor is the product of a specific set of legal market social institutions that produce this thing called a “wage” and a “laborer.” Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it, exists prior to that. Labor has turned into a commodity and there are a bunch of weird things about that. I’m not a Marxist personally, but I think his observations here are quite prophetic. First of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a guy who runs a shoe shop, who’s a cobbler — which existed prior to industrial capitalism — making the whole shoe. First you’re cutting the sole, then you’re putting the upper on, then you’re putting it together. In the end, you’ve got this thing, it’s a shoe, and now you own it and then I sell it to you. You pay me money, now you own it. We go from that to working in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where someone just stamps soles all day. It’s completely alienating and also it’s a much different experience of life.  The other thing that’s weird about it is that labor in the aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. It’s incredibly valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially valueless. But if you’re an individual shoemaker, this is all you’ve got. I have this one body and I go and stamp soles 12 hours a day and I get nothing for it. But that’s it. From my perspective, that’s all I’ve got.  All of these attributes are there for attention. Attention existed before its marketization. It now has a value out in the world. It’s now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate, it’s wildly valuable. Google, Meta, all their money comes from this. I argue in the book that Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. Individually, they’re paying tiny slivers of cents for your attention at any moment. But to you, it’s all you’ve got. What you’re paying attention to at any given moment is all you’ve got. Sean Illing And what do you think is the biggest difference between an economy built around a resource like attention and previous economies built around different kinds of material resources? Chris Hayes The argument I make in the book is that what we commonly think of as “The Attention Age” is truly the information age. There’s a switch from physical market production to non-material market production — information economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters like you and I, all doing these things that don’t amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And in that world, we think of information as the defining feature, but information is limitless. There’s tons of information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone has to fight over that.  And the more information there is — the lower the barriers are to get it in front of someone’s face — the more competitive it becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now, as more and more of the world moves from industrial modes of production to post-industrial modes of production, that the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the most valuable, is our attention. Sean Illing I am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us, but I don’t really have a compelling response to the arguments that no one’s forced to stare at their phones all day. We’re choosing this. We want this. And that’s not exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so exploitable that even though we’re not being forced in the literal sense, I’m also not sure we’re really free in any meaningful or recognizable way. At some point, the question about free will becomes hopelessly blurred and maybe even incoherent. Chris Hayes I don’t think I can resolve the free will question, but I think you’re right. It implicates our freedom in a profound and deep way. I was joking with my wife the other day that I feel like I’ve written a recovery memoir and I’m still drinking. I’m still fighting all this stuff. I’m not great about it. So I don’t want anyone to think that I’m on some elevated plane here. I’m in the muck with everyone. But when you get that screen time notification that this was your average screen time for the week, that is a profound moment of, “Who am I and what is my will?” Sean Illing If we also lack the capacity to pay attention together, what does that mean for democracy?  Chris Hayes There’s a few things I’d say. One is that I want to try very hard to resist the temptation to dehistoricize everything. As I say in the book, they didn’t need Facebook in Salem to start having viral rumors that so-and-so was a witch. People are very good at spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is the core of the human condition, and that’s our lot. And democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just want to say that.  But yes, I think there is a profound question about what this is doing to our democracy. And this is particularly true because attention is not a moral faculty. It is distinct from what we think is important. Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion whines about this. He’s talking about Versailles, actually, about the end of the war and the reparations. He says Americans have an incredible interest in this, but they’re not interested in it. He’s like, The same way the child has an enormous interest in his father’s business that he will inherit but is not interested in it.  So this problem is old, but I think it’s so sheer right now. Overcoming the compulsions, the siren’s call, the lowest-common-denominator, tabloid, casino effect of everything in a very competitive attention environment where we’re driven toward the lowest common denominator.  It malforms the public’s ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what just sustains our attention from moment to moment. Because what sustains our attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we all know that. Everyone understands that. And yet it’s very hard to counteract what’s being done to us through the technologies. Sean Illing How do we really know what’s new here and what’s not? As you say, people freaked out about comic books and that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect. But people also worried about cigarettes and that was clearly wise in retrospect. So how do we know the attention economy is cigarettes and not comic books? Chris Hayes One way to answer this is to look at the empirical research, like Jonathan Haidt does in The Anxious Generation. Like, what is this doing to us? In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence: This is terrible for our health. Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 16th century who were like, Boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do. You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs? I don’t think that’s going to work out well. I think in some ways the empirical question, while important, is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like, is this good? Do we like this? Is this forming my soul well? I don’t need data to tell me that. That’s a human question. That’s why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy. You could come back and tell me that the empirical data shows that this isn’t causing more anxiety, it isn’t causing more depression, and fine, that might be true. But the bigger question is that our experience of modernity is an experience of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation that we then have to wrestle with as people. And whatever the data says in the end, we all have to live in this world and in this environment, which I think a lot of us understandably are not enjoying. Sean Illing As you point out, the labor movement in the 19th century basically arrived at two big regulatory responses: a ban on child labor and limitations on total hours worked. Any ideas on the equivalent regulations today? Chris Hayes I think that’s an interesting place to start. First of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention is just an area that we need to explore. There’s a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media. [But] as a general principle, the idea that companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14-year-olds is just obviously true.  And this goes hand in hand, but before we even get to regulation, we just need non-commercial spaces for connection, just the way that we have non-commercial public spaces. I can meet you in Prospect Park. We can walk on the street. We don’t just exist in a mall. All of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying to buy and sell your attention. The regulatory question is a deep one. First of all, there’s constitutional issues because of speech. But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating attention, like, An app just can’t take more than an hour of your attention today — I don’t know. Maybe we pass the law and do that. That seems crazy at some level, but is it? I just think we need to be thinking about regulating attention. Part of that is breaking up the big tech firms, which are too big. But more specifically, this does feel like a place for governments to do something. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Preview: When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The grief wasn’t helping either. “I was just like, there’s no way I can do this,” the 31-year-old from Los Angeles says. Around the same time, he’d begun using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, tinkering with the technology to create grocery lists and budgeting tools. What if it could help him with the obituary? King fed ChatGPT some details about his grandmother — she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids — and asked it to write an obituary.  “I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,” King says. “It didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.” The result provided the scaffolding for one of life’s most personal pieces of writing. King tweaked the language, added more details, and revised the obituary with the help of his mother. Ultimately, King felt ChatGPT helped him commemorate his grandmother with language that adequately expressed his emotions. “I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,” King, who works in video production for a luxury handbag company, says. “It didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.” Generative AI has drastically changed the manner in which people communicate — and perceive communication. Early on, its uses proved relatively benign: Predictive text in iMessages and Gmail offered suggestions on word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase basis. But after the technological advances heralded by ChatGPT’s public release in late 2022, the applications of the technology exploded. Users found AI helpful when writing emails and recommendation letters, and even to spruce up responses on dating apps, as the number of chatbots available for experimentation also proliferated. But there was also backlash: If a piece of writing appears insincere or stilted, receivers are quick to claim the author used AI.  Now, the AI chatbot content creep has gotten increasingly personal, with some leveraging it to craft wedding vows, condolences, breakup texts, thank-you notes, and, yes, obituaries. As people apply AI to considerably more heartfelt and genuine forms of communication, they run the risk of offending — or appearing grossly insincere — if they are found out. Still, users say, AI isn’t meant to manufacture sentimentality, but to provide a template onto which they can map their emotions.  A gut check As anyone who’s been asked to give a speech or console a friend can attest, crafting the perfect message is notoriously difficult, especially if you’re a first-timer. Because these communications are so personal and meant to evoke a specific response, the pressure’s on to nail the tone. There’s a thin line between an effective note of support and one that makes the recipient feel worse. AI tools, then, are particularly attractive in helping nervous scribes avoid a social blunder, offering a gut check to those who know how they feel but can’t quite express it. “It’s a great way to sanity check yourself about your own intuition,” says David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University. “If you wanted to write an apology letter for some transgression, you can write that apology letter and then give it to ChatGPT or Claude and be like, ‘I’m going for a warm and compassionate tone here. Am I right with this, or did I write this well?’ And it could actually say, ‘It reads a little cold to me. If I were you, I’d probably change a few words here,’ and it will just make things better.” Generative AI platforms, of course, have not lived nor experienced emotions, but instead learn about them through scraping massive amounts of literature, psychological research, and other personal writing, Markowitz says. “This process is analogous to learning about a culture without experiencing it,” he says, “through the observation of behavioral patterns rather than direct experience.” So while the tech doesn’t understand feelings, per se, it can compare what you’ve written to what it’s learned about how people typically express their sentiments.  Katie Hoffman, a 34-year-old marketer living in Philadelphia, sought ChatGPT’s counsel on more than one occasion when broaching particularly sensitive conversations. In one instance, she used it to draft a text to a friend to tell her she wouldn’t be attending her wedding. Another time, Hoffman and her sister prompted the chatbot to provide a diplomatic response to a friend who backed out of Hoffman’s bachelorette party at the last minute but wanted her money back. “How do we say this without sounding like a jerk, but without making her feel bad?” Hoffman says. “It would be able to give us the message that we crafted from there.” Rather than overthink, over-explain, and send a disjointed message with too many details, Hoffman found ChatGPT’s scripts more objective and precise than anything she could’ve written on her own. She always workshopped and personalized the texts before sending them, she says, and her friends were none the wiser.  “I know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out,” Torres says. “I don’t want it to sound silly. I don’t want it to sound like I’m not grateful.” Ironically, the worse a chatbot performs and the more editing required, the more ownership the author takes over the message, says Mor Naaman, an information science professor at Cornell University. If you’re not tweaking its output all that much, the less you feel like you really penned the message. “There might be implications for that as well: You’re feeling like a phony, you’re feeling like you cheated,” Naaman says.  But that hasn’t stopped many people from trying out chatbots for sentimental communications. Grappling with a bout of writer’s block, 26-year-old Gianna Torres used ChatGPT to outsource writing graduation party thank-you notes. “I know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out,” the Philadelphia-based occupational therapist says. “I don’t want it to sound silly. I don’t want it to sound like I’m not grateful.” She prompted it to generate a heartfelt message expressing her thanks for commemorating the milestone. On the first try, ChatGPT spit out a beautiful, albeit long, letter, so she asked for a shorter version which she wrote verbatim into each card. “People are like, ‘ChatGPT has no emotions,’” Torres says, “which is true, but the way it wrote the message, I feel it.” Torres’s friends and family initially had no inkling she had help writing the notes — that is, until her cousin saw a TikTok Torres posted about the workaround. Her cousin was surprised. Torres told her cousin the fact that she had help didn’t negate how she felt; she just needed a little nudge.  An unwelcome reception  While you may believe in your ability to spot AI-crafted language, the average person is pretty bad at parsing whether a message was written by a chatbot. If you feed ChatGPT enough personal information, it can generate a convincing text, even more so if that text includes, or has been edited to include, statements using the words “I,” “me,” “myself,” or “my.” These words are one of the biggest markers of sincerity in language, according to Markowitz. “They help to indicate some sort of psychological closeness that people feel towards the thing they’re talking about,” he says.  But if the recipient suspects the author outsourced their sincerity to AI, they don’t take it well. “As soon as you suspect that some content is written by AI,” Naaman says, “you find [the writer] less trustworthy. You think the communication is less successful.” You can see this clearly in the backlash last summer to Google over its Olympics ad for its AI platform, Gemini: Audiences were appalled that a father would turn to AI to help his daughter pen a fan letter to an Olympic athlete. As the technology continues to proliferate, audiences are increasingly skeptical of content that may seem off or too manufactured.  If you aren’t wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt? The negative reaction to outsourcing writing that people find inherently emotional may stem from an overall skepticism toward the technology, as well as what its use means for sincerity, says Malte Jung, an information science associate professor at Cornell University who studied the effects of AI in communication. “People still hold a more negative perception of technology and AI and they might attribute that negative perception to the person using it,” he says. (Over half of Americans consider AI a concern rather than an exciting innovation, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center Survey.)  Jung says that people might think of AI-generated communications as “less genuine, authentic, or sincere.” If you aren’t wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt?  When King, who used ChatGPT to write his grandmother’s obituary, relayed how he’d used AI in a reply on X, the response was overwhelmingly negative. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. The blowback prompted him to come clean to his mother, who assured him the obituary was “beautiful.” “It really did make me second-think myself a little bit,” King says. “Something that I never even thought was a bad thing, so many people tried to turn into a crazy, evil thing.” When deliberating the ethics of AI communications, intentions do matter — to a certain extent. Who hasn’t wracked their brain for the perfect mix of language and emotion? The desire to be warm and authentic and genuine could be enough to produce an effective message. “The key question is the effort people put in, the sincerity of what they want to write,” Jung says. “That might be independent from how it is perceived. You used ChatGPT, then no matter if you’re sincere in what you put in, people might still see you negatively.” Generative AI is becoming so ubiquitous, however, that some may not care at all.  Chris Harihar, a 39-year-old who works in public relations in New York City, had a specific childhood anecdote he wanted to include in his speech at his sister’s wedding but couldn’t quite weave it in. So he asked ChatGPT for some help. He uploaded his speech in its current form, told it the story he was aiming to incorporate, and asked it to connect the story to lifelong partnership. “It was able to give me these threads that I hadn’t thought of before where it made total sense,” Harihar says. Harihar was an early adopter of AI and uses platforms like Claude and ChatGPT frequently in his personal and professional life, so his family wasn’t surprised when he told them he used AI to perfect the speech.  Harihar even uses AI tools to answer his 4-year-old daughter’s perplexing, ultra-specific questions that are characteristic of kids. Recently, Harihar’s daughter wondered why people have different skin tones and he prompted ChatGPT to offer a kid-friendly explanation. The bot provided a diplomatic and age-appropriate breakdown of melanin. Harihar was impressed — he probably wouldn’t have thought to break it down that way, he says. Rather than feel like he lost out on a parenting moment by outsourcing help, Harihar sees the technology as another resource. “From a parenting perspective, sometimes you’re just trying to survive the day,” he says. “Having one of these tools available to you to help make explanations that you otherwise might struggle with for whatever reason are helpful.”

Preview: Karla Sofía Gascon at an Emilia Pérez photocall on November 28, 2024 in Madrid, Spain. | Borja B. Hojas/WireImage Since its arrival on Netflix in December, the Spanish-language French film Emilia Pérez has been a nesting doll of controversies. The musical, directed by Jacques Audiard, has been slammed by critics and on social media for its regressive portrayal of trans identity. The film has also been critiqued for its “Eurocentric” depiction of Mexico — even inspiring a viral spoof film made by Mexican filmmakers, called Johanne Sacreblu — and Audiard himself has made dismissive if not offensive comments about Mexico and the Spanish language. Meanwhile, earlier this week, the movie’s Oscar lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, was most notable for being at war with “Brazilian Twitter” for comments she made about her Best Actress rival Fernanda Torres’s social media team. Despite all this, Emilia Pérez is up for 13 Oscar nominations and is predicted to pick up at least one for Zoe Saldaña in the Best Supporting Actress category. Gascón’s Oscar hopes are likely done, however, following a series of offensive, resurfaced tweets in what might be one of the most surprising scandals in Oscars history.  On Wednesday, after Gascón was already in the news for her comments about Torres, X users began circulating years-old tweets from the Spanish actress using derogatory language aimed at marginalized communities. The tweets, from as recent as 2021, include disturbing remarks about George Floyd, Islam, and even the nonwhite winners of the 2021 Oscars ceremony. Other tweets find her casually using anti-gay and other hateful language.  The Oscars aren’t unfamiliar with controversy. However, the mounting issues corroding the Emilia Pérez Oscar campaign are pretty extraordinary — and even make the controversy surrounding 2019 Best Picture Green Book look quaint in comparison. Likewise, it’s an ironic but extremely familiar trajectory for a movie that has been bolstered by the Hollywood establishment for its diversity and “progressive” themes.  What did Gascón’s tweets say?  On Thursday, journalist Sarah Hagi posted a thread with screenshots of more than a dozen tweets from Gascón (in her native Spanish) disparaging Islam and immigrants from the Arabic countries. In one tweet posted on July 2, 2016, and translated by Vox editor Izzie Ramirez, she says, “Islam is becoming an infection for humanity that needs to be cured urgently.” In another tweet from September 2, 2020, Gascón, who is from Spain, posted a photo of a Muslim family, including a woman wearing a burka, in a restaurant, mocking the role of women in Islam. In the tweet, she sarcastically decried the wearing of burkhas and what she perceives as the lack of respect for women in Islam, capping it off with a phrase that translates to “the deepest revulsion of humanity.” In other posts, she points out the rising number of Muslims in Spain, lamenting that schools will start to teach Arabic instead of English. She blames Islam for several terrorist attacks. There are also multiple tweets where she a European slur referring to Muslims or people with dark skin. it’s so insane that karla sofía gascón still has these tweets up. straight up have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD. there are more than a dozen… pic.twitter.com/1rcNzkJXuo — sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) January 30, 2025 Users then began circulating a startling now-deleted thread she apparently posted on June 8, 2020, about Floyd, whose death by a police officer ignited worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. In the first post, a user with Gascón’s name says, “Let me see if I understand, a guy tried to pass off a counterfeit bill after taking meth, an idiot cop arrives, and goes too far in arresting him and kills him, ruining the lives of his family and friends, and then then guy with the bill turns into a heroic marytr.” In another statement in the thread, the user refers to Floyd as a “drug addict and a hustler.”  The X account also exposed other unsavory comments, like a joke about China and Covid-19, and casual use of hateful language. A post about the 2021 Oscars ceremonies, read, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M [feminist strike],” referring to an International Women’s Day march, which takes place on March 8. Users also found a bizarre post where she refers to paparazzi photos of Miley Cyrus cozying up with a woman as “lesbian perversion.” This post might be seen as particularly baffling, as Gascón is herself a trans woman who is married to another woman.  Gascón’s X account has since been deleted, although screenshots of her comments still abound online. On Friday, she also gave a terse apology to Variety: “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt. As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well, and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life, I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.” She had previously sent a more defiant exclusive statement to the Hollywood Reporter, explaining why she deleted her account. In that statement, she called the backlash a “campaign of hate and misinformation,” while implying that the opinions she stated have changed:  “As part of this society, I have expressed my disagreement or agreement with all the related issues that have touched me and of which I have had an opinion, often erroneous, which has changed throughout my own experience. I have always used my social media as a diary, reflections or notes, to later create stories or characters, not as something that would be scrutinized down to the last of its 140 characters, since sometimes I, myself, am not even aware of having written something negative.” Oscars campaigns are usually messy, but not this messy For decades, the sabotaged Oscars campaign has been a fascinating — and typically amusing — phenomenon of awards season. Outside of Gascón’s antics, this year alone has seen several other controversies threaten the chances of certain Oscar hopefuls. Last week, the editor of 10-time Oscar nominee The Brutalist, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that he utilized AI to perfect Adrien Brody’s Hungarian speech in a brief part of the film. This led to questions about whether Brody’s performance, which has already earned him a Golden Globe, should be re-evaluated.  Meanwhile, in the midst of Gascón’s controversy, social media users found an article that her rival Torres had written slamming Amber Heard during her 2023 defamation trial against her ex-husband Johnny Depp, as well as a resurfaced video of Torres appearing in blackface in comedy sketch on a Brazilian TV show, for which she apologized earlier this week.   Other times, these flubbed campaigns have often emerged from aggressive PR measures, from the Bette Davis infamous write-in campaign to the supposed “overkill” of Diana Ross’s Best Actress campaign ads for Lady Sings the Blues to Melissa Leo’s self-funded “Consider…” plea — although she ultimately went on to receive her Oscar. This sort of zealous campaign was famously codified by former film producer Harvey Weinstein. Before Gascón’s scandal, the mantle for the most controversial recent Best Actress nominee belonged to Andrea Riseborough, who caused a huge kerfuffle when she received a surprising nod in 2023 for the small Sundance film To Leslie, due to sudden endorsements by celebrities and a dubious email sent to voters. The last-minute but shockingly efficient campaign ultimately didn’t go against the Academy’s lobbying rules, but it did put a mark on the actress leading up to the awards show.  In general, though, it’s much more rare that a contender’s Oscars chances have been tainted if not completely shattered due to hate speech — the most recent example being Lars von Trier’s antisemitic comments during a press conference for his 2011 film Melancholia. Still, Gascón’s controversy presents a more complex and head-scratching case, given that Gascón is the first openly trans acting nominee. Despite how groundbreaking her nomination is on paper, her hateful comments on social media blot out any perception that her nomination is a win for progress. Her controversial comments also present a legitimate conundrum for the ceremony. Folks are already wondering how she’ll be included in the Best Actress presentation. The Academy recently announced that it would be bringing back the “Fab 5” format, where previous acting winners give a heartfelt introduction to each of the nominees. There’s also always the possibility for more vocal backlash and even boycotts from the groups she targeted.  Overall, Gascón’s remarks have only continued to illuminate the shallowness of Emilia Pérez as a project and a “progressive” pick for the Academy. Following her scandal, folks have openly questioned why a European woman was cast in the role of a Mexican character, and recirculated comments about Audiard professing his own ignorance about Mexico. They’ve also affected any remaining amount of goodwill that the movie had going for it, including a powerful statement Gascón made at the Golden Globes earlier in January, when the film won Best Picture — Musical or Comedy.  “The light always wins over darkness,” she said. “You can put us in jail, you can beat us up, but you can never take away our soul or our resistance or our identity. I want to say to you, raise your voice and say that I won, I am who I am, not who you want [me to be].” Who knew that, a few weeks later, it’d be recycled for an apology?

Preview: President Donald Trump shakes hands with Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 5, 2019. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Fearless journalism needs your support now more than ever. Become a Vox Member today. On Friday afternoon, a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to halt a simply enormous amount of domestic federal spending. Chief Judge John McConnell Jr., who issued the order, is the second federal judge to do so. McConnell’s order is significant not only because it puts a second court order between the Trump White House and its proposed spending cuts, but because of who McConnell cites to justify his decision: Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Republican appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump in his first term. That citation suggests Trump’s effort may be on its way to being declared unconstitutional before the Supreme Court, once this legal challenge reaches the justices. Shortly after taking office this month, Trump issued a series of executive orders seeking to reduce or end spending on a variety of issues, from foreign aid, to diversity programs, to what Trump calls “gender ideology extremism.” On Tuesday, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo purporting to implement these executive orders, which seemed to call for an absolutely sweeping pause on government funding.  According to the OMB memo, which was rescinded on Wednesday following a bipartisan political backlash, federal agencies were required to pause “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders.” Though this memo is no longer in effect, the executive orders it sought to enforce still are. The theory that the president can simply cut off federal spending that has been appropriated by Congress is known as “impoundment,” and has long been considered unconstitutional by judges and legal scholars across the political spectrum.  Still, the current Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican supermajority. And all six of those Republicans ruled over the summer that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits using the powers of the presidency. So it’s not entirely clear whether these Republican justices will follow the consensus view. McConnell’s order, however, quotes from a 2013 opinion by then-federal appellate Judge Kavanaugh, which rejects the idea of impoundment and even cites a 1969 Department of Justice memo written by future Chief Justice William Rehnquist that reads: “It is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.” According to Kavanaugh’s opinion, “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress.  Meanwhile, another member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, Chief Justice John Roberts, expressed similar views when he was a lawyer working in the Reagan White House. In a 1985 memo, Roberts wrote that it is “clear” that the president cannot impound funds in “normal situations.” Roberts added that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.” It is, of course, possible that Roberts or Kavanaugh have changed their views on this topic. It is also possible that they will ignore their own beliefs about the law because they want to help out a Republican president. But, assuming that both justices hew to their past views, it suggests that there are at least five votes on the Supreme Court against Trump’s impoundment efforts should this case reach the highest court: Roberts, Kavanaugh, and the three Democratic justices. And, with five Supreme Court votes, Trump’s impoundment plans would be declared unconstitutional.

Preview: First lady Jill Biden, President Joe Biden, President-elect Donald Trump and Melania Trump stand together ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, at the White House on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump and JD Vance were officially sworn in as the 47th president and vice president of the United States on Monday, January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Their inauguration looked different from previous years, in part because it was held inside the Capitol Rotunda, instead of outside the US Capitol, as a polar vortex threatened much of the nation with below freezing temperatures. Trump has issued hundreds of executive orders soon after he was inaugurated for his second presidency, including laying the groundwork for a civil service purge and establishing a framework through which he intends to carry out mass deportations. He also provided sweeping pardons for the hundreds of so-called hostages convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Follow here for the latest news, analysis, and explainers about Inauguration Day and Trump’s first days in office.  Brett Kavanaugh has very bad news for Donald Trump Trump’s immigration policy is already terrifying America’s kids Why big tech turned right The astonishing conflict of interest haunting RFK Jr.’s health secretary nomination How Trump is laying the groundwork for another travel ban Inside Trump’s purge at the agency that saves millions of lives Trump and Musk’s plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained Trump is already acting like a king The thin evidence behind Trump’s new ban on trans service members Why Trump pardoned the creator of “the Amazon of drugs” The one big question looming over Trump’s power grabs This obscure budget procedure could be Trump’s biggest weapon Researchers are terrified of Trump’s freeze on science. The rest of us should be, too. Trump rescinded a half-century of environmental rules. Here’s what that could mean. How Greenland feels about Trump, explained by a Greenlander Mass deportations aren’t here — yet Trump’s attack on EVs is just theater — so far A federal judge already blocked Trump’s single most unconstitutional action Trump’s crypto grift is a warning Trump’s January 6 pardons were democratically legitimate — and dangerous Candidate Trump was an abortion moderate. What will President Trump be? Trump’s sweeping new order tries to dismantle DEI in government — and the private sector Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders are both right about immigration How Trump will hide his anti-democratic politics in plain sight What Trump’s executive orders tell us about the future of immigration What did Trump just do to the environment? 6 things we learned from Day 1 about how Trump will govern Why Wall Street found Trump’s first day reassuring Is Donald Trump’s agenda actually popular? The Trump executive orders that threaten democracy Trump’s real inaugural address started when the teleprompter stopped Covering a second Trump presidency Why Trump’s second inauguration isn’t like the first The law is clear on birthright citizenship. Can Trump end it anyway? The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. 6 factors to watch in the incoming Trump administration Trump’s “shock and awe” approach to executive orders, explained

Preview: The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff. Today is a tough one: I want to focus on the Trump administration’s freeze of foreign aid, an issue that is a matter of life-and-death for vulnerable people around the world. What’s the latest? People around the world are feeling the effects of Trump’s Day 1 decision to freeze all foreign aid. The New York Times has a series of painful examples: displaced Sudanese people losing access to soup kitchens, Thai war refugees getting turned away from hospitals, Ukrainian civilians losing access to firewood. Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this week ordered “lifesaving” aid to be temporarily exempted from the freeze, but ProPublica reported on Friday that that in at least some cases, that hasn’t happened. The Times reporting also suggests the pause — plus uncertainty over what aid is “lifesaving” — has led to some essential funding falling through the cracks. There’s no way to sugarcoat this: Foreign aid saves lives, and freezing it will cost them. Is this funding freeze normal? Absolutely not. Foreign aid fluctuates between administrations, and the law gives them leeway in how it gets distributed. Sometimes individual programs will be stalled for review. But a wholesale freeze is unprecedented.  How much money are we talking about? Last year, USAID, the State Department’s foreign aid agency, dispersed $43.8 billion — or about 0.7 percent of the federal budget. What comes next? Politico reported that the State Department has been given about three months to evaluate the foreign aid and then for Rubio to make a recommendation to Trump on which programs should be kept or discontinued. But Rubio on Friday signaled a deep skepticism, saying: “The US government is not a charity.” Killing the funding, however, would require Trump to stop spending that Congress approved — a move likely banned by a 1974 law. Trump’s team argues that law is unconstitutional, and so the fate of any canceled aid would likely fall to the courts. And with that, it’s time to log off … It can feel uncaring or insensitive to deliver news with this gravitas and then pivot to joy. However, I believe that taking care of ourselves mentally — including by consuming hopeful news — is a part of being good citizens. To that end, here’s a story featuring two things I deeply enjoy: polar bears, and potential scientific breakthroughs. Take good care this weekend. I’ll see you back here on Monday.

Preview: Students and families attend a presentation on immigration enforcement at a school in Washington, DC, on January 10, 2025. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election last November, kids around the country have been scared about what his promise of mass deportations might mean for them and their classmates. “They come up and say, ‘What’s going to happen, teacher?’” Elma Alvarez, an instructional specialist at an elementary school in Tucson, Arizona, told me. Now the fear in classrooms has ratcheted up to a new level, thanks to a directive issued last week allowing immigration agents to arrest people at schools and other “sensitive areas” that they’ve avoided in the past. Anxiety ramped up even further last Friday after federal agents who showed up at a Chicago elementary school were initially mistaken for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  They were actually Secret Service agents, but the episode has parents in the city feeling frightened, with one mom, who has legal status but whose children do not, telling the Washington Post over the weekend that she didn’t want her son going back to school until things had calmed down.  The incident “reflects the fear and anxiety that is present in our city right now,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said in a letter to parents. That fear and anxiety have been echoed around the country, with parents and students afraid to leave their homes, and educators worried about how the threat of ICE raids could affect a generation of kids already reeling from school shootings, the Covid-19 pandemic, wildfires, and other disasters.  “They’ve already been through so much,” Alvarez said. “School is a place where everybody, every single person that steps on campus, should feel safe.” The fear of ICE in classrooms Since at least 2011 — including during the first Trump administration — ICE policy has been to avoid making immigration arrests in or around schools, churches, hospitals, and other locations deemed “sensitive,” in order to avoid scaring people away from basic services. But last Tuesday, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security reversed that policy, with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “this action empowers the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens — including murders and rapists — who have illegally come into our country.” The Trump administration has said it will target violent criminals in its immigration enforcement actions — and not, presumably, schoolchildren. Moreover, all children in the US have a legal right to a public education regardless of immigration status, as Axios notes, and schools generally do not keep track of whether students are in the country legally. Some school districts, such as Chicago and New York, have said they will not allow ICE agents into schools without a warrant signed by a judge. Getting such a warrant can be an “involved process” and “we did not see a lot of that in the first Trump term,” said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K–12 education research at the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.  Even if ICE agents do enter a school, there is a legal argument that arresting children there violates their right to an education, some experts say. However, the Trump administration has already taken actions many believe to be unconstitutional, such as attempting to end birthright citizenship, and the sense that the country is entering uncharted territory is fueling panic in many immigrant communities. “There’s just a generalized sense of fear and confusion” about the new administration’s policies, said Abigail L’Esperance, co-director of the immigration program at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, California. “It’s a lot of wait and see, but with an undercurrent of terror.” The fear is the most acute among families in which one or more members are undocumented — 6.3 million households, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly 70 percent of those families are “mixed status,” meaning at least one member is a US citizen or legal resident. But the prospect of federal agents entering a classroom and taking students can be terrifying for any child, regardless of immigration status. Decades ago, border patrol agents came to Alvarez’s sister’s classroom and took two of her classmates away, Alvarez told me.  “My sister was in first grade. She’s almost 50 now, and she remembers that day so clearly,” Alvarez said. “She still remembers her whole class just breaking out in tears.” “That’s what’s going to happen to our children, our students,” if ICE does enter classrooms, Alvarez said. Kids are scared of losing their parents Beyond fear of ICE raids at school, kids are facing another worry too: that when they get home at the end of the day, their parents won’t be there anymore. “The children are saying to their mothers, ‘I don’t want you to be deported, I don’t want to be separated from you,’” said Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice: Communities for Quality Education, a nonprofit that serves primarily Latino and Indigenous parents in Los Angeles. Aleman herself was deported in 1970 along with her mother, while her father stayed behind in the US, she told me. “Here we are, 55 years later, still dealing with family separation,” she said. “The trauma is real and it never goes away.” Research has found that children separated from families under the first Trump administration experienced profound harms, including PTSD; in 2021, a group of pediatricians wrote that family separation “constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that rises to the level of torture.” The anxiety that someone in their family could be deported is already affecting children at school. It’s hard for them to focus on subjects like math and reading “when all they’re thinking about is what is happening to Mom and Dad,” Alvarez said. “They’re just on survival mode right now.” Other kids are scared to even leave the house. Carolina Avila, a social worker for the East Bay Community Law Center who works with students who came to the US as unaccompanied minors, says many of her clients “have expressed an intense fear of really going anywhere, not just school.” Some parents, too, “don’t feel safe congregating, they don’t feel safe leaving their home,” Aleman said. Some are afraid to drive or walk their kids to school.  That fear comes at a time when school districts are trying to battle chronic absenteeism and get kids back in school after the disruption of the pandemic. It’s also a time when kids around the country have to endure active shooter drills and hear about children their age losing their lives to gun violence. “Our kids are already traumatized thinking some crazy person is going to come in and shoot them,” Alvarez said. For the kids in Aleman’s community in Los Angeles, fear of ICE arrives on the heels of devastating wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and at least eight schools. While the fires are a natural disaster, ICE raids are “a disaster of human proportions,” Aleman said. “It’s being caused on a human being by another human being.”  How schools are supporting kids As the next weeks and months unfold, schools and districts can help kids by publicly affirming their right to an education and setting clear policies around when and how ICE agents can enter schools, experts say. Families may also need help creating alternate care plans in case a child’s parents are detained, said Avila, the social worker, who works with the Children’s Holistic Immigration Representation Project, a program serving unaccompanied minors in California. Outside of schools, ordinary people can also support students and families who are feeling fear right now, Alvarez said: “Call your local legislative representative, let them know that you don’t think this is right.” “These kids are loving kids,” she said. “They’re intelligent. They care about their community. They love their families. They’re not here to hurt anyone. They’re here to be a child.” What I’m reading Extreme weather disrupted school for at least 242 million kids around the world last year, according to a new UNICEF report. Heat waves were the most common reason children had to miss school. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under Trump has rescinded Biden-era guidance warning schools that banning books could violate civil rights laws. “Because this is a question of parental and community judgment, not civil rights, OCR has no role in these matters,” the office said in a release. Being “good at the internet” means something very different to kids than it meant to their millennial parents. My little kid and I are reading Oge Mora’s Saturday, a sweet story about a special day that goes off the rails, and how a mother and daughter salvage it together.  From my inbox A reader pushed back in response to my story last week on kids and food dyes, writing, “My 14-year-old daughter has ADHD. She and I can both tell with high reliability if she has eaten something containing FD&C red 40 fifteen minutes earlier.” He added: “As you say, ‘Cutting out dyes won’t make all kids better-behaved, because not every child is sensitive to dye in the first place.’ But it will help, and moving in the right direction is something we should all strive for.” To share your thoughts, recommendations, or ideas for stories I should cover, get in touch with me at anna.north@vox.com. Update, January 31, 4:15 pm ET: This piece was originally published on January 30 and was updated to include Carolina Avila’s affiliation with the East Bay Community Law Center.

Preview: Rats doing very rat things: swarming a bag of trash near a dumpster in New York City. | Robert Mecea/Associated Press If we are, as some city officials have said, in a war with rats, we are clearly losing. We’ve been losing for years. Although cities have ramped up their use of poisons and traps, the number of rats in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto has increased in recent years, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. The researchers analyzed rat complaints and inspection reports for 16 cities that had consistent, long-term data available. More than two-thirds of those cities saw a significant increase in rat sightings. Washington, DC, had the largest increase in sightings over roughly the last decade, according to the study, which is the most comprehensive assessment of city rats to date. “We are on our heels and being pushed backward,” Jonathan Richardson, the study’s lead author and an ecologist at the University of Richmond, said about the fight against rat infestations. There’s more bad news: The study found a strong link between an increase in rats and rising temperatures, a consequence of climate change. Cities that warmed more quickly had larger increases in rat sightings, the research found. This is in part because, with warmer winters, rats can spend more time eating and reproducing and less time hunkering down underground. Scientists project that urban areas will warm by between 3.4 and nearly 7.9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, depending on how much oil and gas we burn. Cities tend to be hotter than rural areas — because concrete and other human infrastructure absorb and re-emit more heat than vegetation — and warm faster. That means that not only are current rat control methods failing, but the problem is likely to get much worse. It’s a good thing, then, that there’s an obvious solution. And better yet, it’s simple. The cities where rat sightings are growing the fastest While rats are easily the most common urban mammal, cities don’t actually know how many of them there are. They don’t run a census for rats like they do for, say, squirrels. So to figure out how their populations are changing, researchers rely instead on proxies, such as 311 complaints — when disgruntled tenants or parkgoers or diners report an infestation to city officials. Those complaints have been shown to correlate with the abundance of rats, though they’re imperfect approximations. Plenty of factors, beyond the sheer number of rats, influence whether or not someone complains, including their relationship with their landlord and trust in the city government. The new study relies on those public complaints, though it also uses inspection reports, which are created by city officials who inspect a property for rats, either following a complaint or as part of a proactive sweep. The authors identified 16 cities, most of which are in the US, that reported this data consistently for at least seven years. The figure below shows how rat sightings in those cities have changed. Cities with red bars show an increase in rat sightings; longer bars show greater increases. Blue bars, in contrast, indicate rat sightings have decreased. The takeaway is that DC, San Francisco, Toronto, and New York City have seen a surge in sightings over the last several years, whereas rat sightings in New Orleans and Tokyo have dropped. The researchers also explored what might be driving those trends, and ultimately linked rat sightings with temperature, the degree of urbanization (i.e., a lack of green space), and human population density. None of this is particularly surprising. When it’s cold, rats and other small mammals burrow underground to stay warm. “This is called vertical migration,” said Michael Parsons, an urban ecologist and rat expert. “They just keep going deeper and deeper the colder it gets. As that’s occurring, they’re not mating.” They’re not eating as much, either, said Parsons, founder of the consulting firm Centre for Urban Ecological Solutions. Food doesn’t smell as much when temperatures drop, making it harder for rats — who rely on their nose for foraging — to find their next meal. (As a cute but also gross aside, rats apparently smell each other’s breath to determine what foods they like.) Taken together, this means that as cities warm, rats have more time to eat and mate, and they can more easily locate food. This could help explain why New Orleans didn’t see an increase in rats, Parsons said. The city already has a warm, subtropical climate, so additional warming may provide less of a benefit for its rats. Too much heat could eventually become a problem, Richardson said, but rodents seem to be less limited by heat than by cold.  “For millennia — for decades, centuries in New York City — we’ve relied some on winter cold snaps to support population controls,” said Kathleen Corradi, NYC’s director of rodent mitigation, also known as the rat czar. “We continuously have warmer winters. We know the impact that has on these populations.” Meanwhile, cities with less green space (meaning more buildings and more urbanization) and higher densities of people saw larger increases in rats, the study found. That’s likely because human infrastructure, such as homes and restaurants, are a more constant source of food, compared to big parks. This is concerning because urban land and human populations living in cities are expected to grow in the coming years. Basically, the future is shaping up to be a lot rattier. Why are humans so bad at controlling rats? More rats, in short, is not great. These animals can carry dozens of pathogens and parasites, such as the bugs that cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a severe lung disease, and, you know, bubonic plague. There’s also a growing body of research that links rat infestations to mental illnesses including depression and psychological trauma. A recent study in Chicago found that people who saw rats in their homes daily or almost daily were five times more likely to report serious symptoms of depression. And poor neighborhoods tend to face the brunt of these problems because they often harbor more rats. This is to say: There are some very important reasons to reduce rat populations. Yet despite decades of anti-rat efforts costing hundreds of millions of dollars, infestations in many big cities are only getting worse. In some cases, much worse. Why haven’t we — humans, with human-sized brains and human technology — done a better job at controlling these animals? Part of the problem, experts told Vox, is that for much of the last century, cities have relied on rodenticides and baited traps to eradicate rats. This approach just doesn’t work. “It’s fairly clear that widespread application of rodenticide does not curb rat populations,” said Jason Munshi-South, an ecologist and rat expert at Drexel University. “What it does is kill rats on a local level, so it feels like you’re doing something. But you’re up against the brutal math of rodent reproduction.” A well-fed mother rat can have 10 or more babies in a litter, and have several litters a year. Plus, poison doesn’t reach every rat, and some have learned to avoid it. What poison does do is cause gnarly deaths for rats — often leading to prolonged internal bleeding — and it kills other wildlife, too. When scientists collect dead birds of prey, they find rodenticide in most of them. “Dying from rodenticide like an anticoagulant is a terrible way to die,” Munshi-South said. Exterminators continue to rely heavily on poison and baits in part because it’s easy, Richardson said. “They’re just doing what they have the capacity to do in a practical, short time frame,” he said. The status quo is also benefitting the extermination industry. “Exterminators don’t get paid to remove rodents entirely,” Parsons said. “They get paid to control rodents so that they’re always needed. I’m not at all cynical. This is just the way it works.” Here’s what actually works There’s only one way to actually get rid of rats: Get trash off the street. That’s literally it. “It’s not rocket science,” Richardson said. “We know what we have to do.” Controlling rats requires putting trash in sturdy bins with tops that rats can’t easily chew threw, and not in bags on the curb. It requires that people don’t litter. It requires cleaning up. Again, not complicated. Trying to tweak enormous, citywide systems and behavior norms, however, is a challenge. Cities or building owners may have to buy new bins and maintain them. Trash collectors may need to tweak their operations and use new trucks. Residents may need to be educated on proper disposal. Parking spots may need to be removed to make space for large waste bins. Multiple city agencies may need to get involved, including health, sanitation, and housing departments. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Munshi-South said. But this approach clearly works. New York, arguably the most famous ratty city (with its very own rat celebrities), recently required that most city trash be placed in containers with secure lids, not in plastic bags on the street. Progress! And preliminary data suggests these changes may have already put a dent in rat complaints, Richardson said. Under Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, so-called containerization is “the hallmark” of the city’s battle with rats, Corradi told Vox. “We’re so optimistic and excited to see that rollout and its impact on rats, because food source is what has allowed rats to thrive for so long in New York City and other urban centers,” she said. Tokyo’s decline in rat sightings likely also has to do with containing food waste. The city’s culture puts a lot of value on sanitation, Richardson said. Restaurants and other businesses get shamed if people spot rats nearby, he said, and the growth of social media has made shaming easier. Japan has also deployed other anti-rat approaches including infusing garbage bags with the smell of herbs. There’s a similar story in New Orleans, which saw an even steeper decline in sightings: The city has put a lot of work into educating residents and government agencies about behaviors that support rats, such as leaving out trash and debris, Richardson said. Ultimately, Corradi said, what makes fixing rat infestations so hard is that “rat issues are human issues.” It’s human behavior that allows rats to thrive in the first place.  Put another way, the rats aren’t to blame, Parsons said. “Rats would still be in northern Mongolia hanging out in their burrows if it weren’t for these food crumbs that were dropped all the way across the continents,“ he said. “It’s just so much easier for us to kill another species and bludgeon it to death — in some cases, torture it — than it is for us to just pick up after ourselves.” Rats are affectionate, Parsons said. They laugh. They’re empathetic, in some cases, giving up chocolate to save a drowning companion. “There’s just enough [research] out there that we need to stop being barbaric in our approach to animals,” he said. “They deserve to have basic welfare.”

Preview: An estimated 20 percent of the world’s population has some form of enhanced sensitivity to environmental or emotional stimuli. The feature-length documentary, Sensory Overload, explores the needs of the neurodivergent and sensory sensitive communities, and aims to raise awareness of the need for more sensory inclusive spaces.  The film follows Lola Dada-Olley, a mother of two children on the autism spectrum; Dr. Jacob Dent, a dentist who has designed his practice with the needs of the neurodivergent and sensory sensitive communities in mind; and Burnett Grant, a young individual on the autism spectrum who advocates for more inclusive environments. Through these profiles, the film aims to shift the narrative around sensitivities from one rooted in deficiencies or shortcomings towards one of acceptance and the embrace of differences.  The film was produced as part of the Sensodyne Sensory Inclusion Initiative to raise awareness of the importance of sensory inclusivity in oral care. Learn more about that initiative here, and catch the film on Hulu beginning March 3.

Preview: Banks are hoping to sell the X debt at around 90 to 95 cents on the dollar.

Preview: The Canadian government said it would provide extraordinary financing to Canada Post to avoid insolvency at the state-owned mail service.

Preview: Amazon.com said it is open to talks with officials from the Canadian and Quebec governments about the decision to shut down operations in the country’s French-speaking province, which would lead to 1,700 people losing their jobs.

Preview: Once a stalwart supporter of Black and LGBTQ rights, the retailer joined corporate America’s retreat from DEI initiatives.

Preview: Find insight on Cnooc, YTL Power International, Ampol, and more in the latest Market Talks covering energy and utilities.

Preview: Find insight on CSX, Givaudan, Rio Tinto and more in the latest Market Talks covering basic materials.

Preview: Read about CSX, Magna International, Alaska Air and more in the latest Market Talks covering the auto and transport sector.

Preview: Find insight on Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s bid for Mediobanca, Travelers and more in the latest Market Talks covering financial services.

Preview: Novo Nordisk shares rose sharply after the Danish pharmaceutical giant said an experimental weight-loss shot helped patients lose 22% of their body weight in a clinical trial.

Preview: The European Commission said that the parties’ offer to sell five of International Paper’s plants in Europe fully addresses its competition concerns over the deal.

Preview: President Trump on Saturday ordered tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, making good on his threats to punish the U.S. trade partners.

Preview: George Mason University has agreed to pay $15,000 in damages and attorneys' fees to two female students who were disciplined for raising objections to stocking tampons in men's restrooms.

Preview: The Los Angeles Police Department is looking for a man they say stabbed a woman from behind before fleeing to an L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority rail station.

Preview: The Los Angeles Clippers have traded P.J. Tucker and Mo Bamba to the Utah Jazz for Patty Mills and Drew Eubanks.

Preview: At least 773 people were killed in eastern Congo's largest city of Goma and its vicinity this week amid fighting with Rwanda-backed rebels who captured the city in a major escalation of a decadelong conflict, Congolese authorities said Saturday. The rebels' advance into other areas was slowed by a weakened military that recovered some villages from them.

Preview: President Trump ordered federal agencies to jettison 10 regulations for every new one established, hearkening back to a move he made during his first stint in the White House.

Preview: A 5-year-old boy was killed and his mother was injured after the hyperbaric chamber he was in at a Troy, Michigan, medical facility exploded Friday.

Preview: Harry Kane scored twice and Bayern Munich almost squandered a four-goal lead against promoted Holsten Kiel before holding on for a 4-3 victory in the Bundesliga on Saturday.

Preview: Israel on Saturday released a total of 183 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for three Israeli hostages held in Gaza as the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas continued to gain traction after nearly two weeks.

Preview: The U.S. bombed Islamic State targets in Somalia on Saturday, President Trump said, marking the first major American operation against terrorist groups abroad since he took office on Jan. 20.

Preview: In honor of Black History Month, the Democratic Party has announced the authoritative list of its top ten black heroes. Here are the ten incredible individuals chosen by Democrats as the ultimate paragons of black history:

Preview: ROME, GA — In a brutal takedown, a local, well-known "Karen" was accused today of being a "real Margaret."

Preview: WILMINGTON, DE — President Donald Trump announced this morning that he has officially replaced the entire federal workforce with one single teenage Chick-Fil-A employee.

Preview: VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis issued an official statement today demanding that God remove the walls and gates that surround the Kingdom of Heaven.

Preview: The Colorado Supreme Court unanimously ruled that five elderly elephants don’t have legal standing to sue to leave a local zoo because they’re not human. What do you think? The post Court Rules Elephants Can’t Sue To Leave Zoo appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: ALCOBENDAS, SPAIN—Responding to backlash after the resurfacing of a 2024 film in which she appeared, Karla Sofía Gascón issued an apology Friday for her participation in the movie musical Emilia Pérez. “I understand now that I should never have made this terrible film, and for that I’m sorry,” said the Academy Award–nominated actress, who asked […] The post Karla Sofía Gascón Apologizes After ‘Emilia Pérez’ Resurfaces appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Pledging to restore racial purity to the nation’s aviation programs, President Donald Trump assured the families of American Eagle Flight 5342 victims on Friday that he was doing everything possible to resegregate flight schools. “You have my promise that I’m working around the clock to make sure our beautiful Caucasian pilots—who are just trying to […] The post Trump To Victims’ Families: ‘I’m Doing Everything Possible To Resegregate Flight Schools’ appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Despite CDC recommendations that everyone get their shot by the end of October, less than half of American adults receive flu vaccines, with many refraining due to misinformation they encounter online. The Onion breaks down common myths about immunizations and how they really affect the body. MYTH: The flu shot is free. FACT: While the […] The post Flu Vaccines: Myth Vs. Fact appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: SCOTTSDALE, AZ—Sources marveled at the single-mindedness and robotic efficiency with which area man Maxwell DiLuzio raised and lowered his pastry-laden fork Thursday, reporting that nothing could deter the 68-year-old as he forged ahead in his pursuit of numbness with a third slice of pie. “I can still hear that voice in my head telling me to […] The post Area Man Forges Ahead In Pursuit Of Numbness With Third Slice Of Pie  appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Cheese Stick Wrappers Piled On Desk Like Shed Skins Littering Cobra Pit appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Hopelessly captivated by the animal’s cheerful energy and striking appearance, the U.S. populace reportedly converged upon a D.C.-area park Tuesday where sources confirmed that all 340 million Americans were vying for the approval of a cool dog. Several reports indicated the charismatic, carefree border collie, named Scout, was first spotted dashing across Georgetown Waterfront Park, […] The post Nation Vies For   Approval Of Cool Dog appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Saying it was only by divine intervention that he was still standing, President Donald Trump stated during a press briefing Thursday that God had spared his life during last night’s midair collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger jet over the Potomac River. “Without the beautiful hand of God guiding that airplane away from […] The post Trump Claims God Spared Him In Airplane Crash appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: NEW YORK—In a desperate attempt to revive their floundering brand amid declining revenues, WeightWatchers officials announced Thursday that butter was now worth zero points. “Joining the likes of cauliflower, plain Greek yogurt, and air-popped popcorn, butter will now be a WeightWatchers ZeroPoint food, so go ahead and eat—or drink—as much as you like,” said interim […] The post Cash-Strapped WeightWatchers Announces Butter Now Zero Points appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, Rich. Our team trusted you with the privilege of proving yourself on Trivia Hell Night. But after last night’s demeaning spectacle, I doubt we can ever go back to Sharlene’s Bar without recalling the deep humiliation you brought upon us all. After tanking a Star Trek round with […] The post When We Invited You To Join Our Trivia Team, It Was With The Understanding That You Knew ‘Star Trek’ appeared first on The Onion.