Preview: Berkshire Hathaway's operating earnings totaled $6.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, a release read Saturday.

Preview: Lucid plans to build just 10,000 to 14,000 vehicles in 2023, despite factory capacity to build more.

Preview: The veteran activist’s recent letter to the retailer’s board sets the table for a battle.

Preview: Movie theaters aren't going away, but they are changing. Operators are investing in better technology as well as premium concessions.

Preview: Price growth will likely stay higher this year, and the Federal Reserve is poised to continue to hike interest rates.

Preview: Warner Bros. Discovery sued Paramount on Friday over the streaming rights for cartoon comedy "South Park" on HBO Max.

Preview: Elon Musk is facing a pile of lawsuits over non-payment to vendors at Twitter.

Preview: Bitcoin continues to perplex investors with various narratives but for the Black community, storing and securing wealth is the most important one.

Preview: Lanny Smith launched Actively Black in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 murder, when he felt big companies' statements on racism and social justice rang hollow.

Preview: Travelers can save hundreds of dollars if they book outside of peak travel days like holidays.

Preview: It was "Rail Force One" -- the overnight train that took US President Biden on a diplomatic odyssey from Przemyśl Główny in Poland to Kyiv for his historic visit to Ukraine, just before the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of the country.

Preview: • Zelensky urges top GOP lawmakers to consider new weapons wish list • Opinion: Finland wants to join NATO. But it may have to ditch an old friend to do so

Preview: The US Treasury Department on Friday took "one of its most significant sanctions actions to date" to crack down on those aiding Moscow's war against Ukraine, targeting Russia's metals and mining sector, its financial institutions, its military supply chain and individuals and companies worldwide that are helping Moscow avoid existing sanctions.

Preview: In a clip from an interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin discusses Russia's war with Ukraine, the role of the United States, and his predictions.

Preview: As some outspoken Republican lawmakers threaten to block future aid to Ukraine, a small group of House GOP members that traveled to the country this week vowed to consider a list of key weapons and other crucial necessities during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.

Preview: When it comes to friendships between nations, not much comes between Sweden and my home country of Finland.

Preview: • Police identify body of missing British mother Nicola Bulley • Alex Murdaugh testifies: The key moments from his two days on the stand

Preview: • Opinion: Ron DeSantis abandons former First Amendment defense • DeSantis gets 7-figure checks from top GOP donors as he soft launches 2024 campaign

Preview: The sailor who spent weeks lost at sea in January, surviving largely off of ketchup, could have a new, state-of-the-art boat coming to him.

Preview: In hindsight, Nikki Ruston said, she should have recognized the red flags.

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: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: Threat to Invade Another Country... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: Threat to Invade Another Country... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: Putin transformation of society in overdrive... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Threat to Invade Another Country... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Threat to Invade Another Country... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... (Top headline, 5th story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Threat to Invade Another Country... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end? (Top headline, 6th story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Threat to Invade Another Country... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard...

Preview: Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard... (Top headline, 7th story, link) Related stories: Russia floats pushing back Poland's borders... Threat to Invade Another Country... Putin transformation of society in overdrive... Biden Shock-and-Awe Failing to Stop... NATO's Biggest Members Float Defense Pact With Kyiv... Win, lose, stalemate or shock: How might war end?

Preview: ZELENSKY TO MEET XI (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: BRACES FOR ESCALATION MORE DRONES

Preview: BRACES FOR ESCALATION (Main headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: ZELENSKY TO MEET XI MORE DRONES

Preview: MORE DRONES (Main headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: ZELENSKY TO MEET XI BRACES FOR ESCALATION Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: A coast-to-coast storm continued to impact California and the Great Lakes region on Saturday, with power outages reported for hundreds of thousands of customers.

Preview: Police in Austin, Texas, told Fox News Digital that the city's already slim police force is set lose at least 40 more officers in response to the city's handling of a new contract.

Preview: From Alex Murdaugh's emotional testimony on the witness stand to a bomb threat, these are the highlights of the South Carolina lawyer's double murder trial.

Preview: The former Georgia police officer charged with the murder of a missing teenage girl filed a false police report to cover his alleged crime, officials said.

Preview: The Paw Paw Volunteer Fire Department in Michigan is mourning the loss of Lt. Ethan Quillen, 28, who died after a downed power line struck him while responding to a call.

Preview: A California sheriff said on Friday he believes drugs and guns motivated the January 16 shooting that killed six people, including a 10-month-old baby.

Preview: A Care Flight aircraft carrying five people crashed in Stagecoach, Nevada, Lyon County Sheriff's Office deputies said. RESMA Health confirmed the crash.

Preview: Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced the state will be resuming executions following the completion of a "top-to-bottom" internal review of the state's death penalty procedures.

Preview: Frank Rodriguez, a former drug addict and dealer, tours Philadelphia's open-air drug market and details the ins and outs of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug.

Preview: San Antonio police said two dogs involved in a deadly attack on an elderly couple and a third dog from the property will be euthanized. Their owner has been arrested.

Preview: California Storm Brings Blizzard Conditions and Flash Flood Warnings  The New York Times California blizzard warnings: Storm closes roads, brings snow, rain  USA TODAY Winter storm slams the West Coast, prompting rare blizzard warnings in Southern California  CNN Mount Baldy is seeing its 'worst winter' in years for rescues  SFGATE As L.A. faces 1st blizzard in 34 years, advocates race to get people off the streets  CBC.ca View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Care Flight airplane crashes in Lyon County  KOLO Care Flight medical aircraft crash in Stagecoach, Nevada leaves 5 dead: report  Fox News 5 dead, including patient and medical personnel, in Care Flight plane crash  ABC News Wife & brother of plane crash victim Glenmarkus Walker share his legacy  KARK 5 dead after Care Flight plane crash, including a patient and the pilot  CBS News View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: War in Ukraine Deepens Divide Among Major Economies at G20 Gathering  The New York Times G20 fails to reach consensus on Russia-Ukraine war -sources  Reuters.com G-20 meeting in India ends without consensus on Ukraine war  The Associated Press - en Español One Year of War Hangs Over Meeting of World's Top Finance Chiefs  Bloomberg G20 Fails To Reach Consensus On Russia-Ukraine War, Sources Say  Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Trump visits East Palestine, but Biden says the White House is engaged  NPR Texas and Michigan officials say they didn't know water, soil from Ohio train wreck would be transported into their jurisdictions  CNN ‘We all knew it was going to happen’: Railroad workers and unions say years of cost-cutting and safety pushback created the Ohio train disaster  Fortune Some parents concerned as children return to school in wake of train derailment  The Columbus Dispatch The Editorial Board: Dangerous derailment in Ohio, apparent fire in rail car here raise urgent questions  Buffalo News View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Joe Biden says he does not think China will send weapons to Russia  Financial Times 'Not rational' for China to negotiate outcome of Ukraine war -Biden  Reuters.com Biden tells ABC's Muir 'we would respond' if China sends weapons to Russia  ABC News Biden Does Not Anticipate China Giving Russia Major Weapons Aid  Bloomberg Biden doesn’t expect China to arm Russia, but promises sanctions if it does  South China Morning Post View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Ordinary citizens in Kherson formed a spy network to fight against Russia  NPR Ukraine, one year on: The city of Kherson, victorious but battered • FRANCE 24 English  FRANCE 24 English Despite dashed hopes, some in Ukrainian city Kherson refuse to leave  ThePrint Ukraine's Citizen Spies Helped Oust Russian Troops : Consider This from NPR  NPR Reporters - Ukraine's shadow soldiers: Meeting resistance fighters in Kherson region  FRANCE 24 English View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Revealed: the US is averaging one chemical accident every two days  The Guardian US East Palestine air pollutants raise health concerns, researchers say  The Washington Post Residents near Ohio derailment diagnosed with bronchitis due to chemicals  NBC News Lawrence County leaders frustrated over lack of communication after train derailment  WKBN.com Hubbard, Liberty Township officials meet to discuss safety plans in case of derailment  WFMJ View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Sanders supporters took over the Nevada Democratic Party. It's not going well.  POLITICO Dueling endorsements emerge in Democratic Party leadership race  Las Vegas Review-Journal View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: 55 percent of Jackson County still without power after ice storm  MLive.com DTE Energy power outage restoration times in SE Michigan: Here's what we know  WDIV ClickOnDetroit Consumers Energy: Ice storm brought down more than 8000 power lines  13 ON YOUR SIDE Half a million customers still without power in Michigan as temperatures plunge  NBC News How residents without power are dealing with the cold  WXYZ 7 Action News Detroit View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: 12 states sue FDA to make abortion pill more accessible  The Washington Post 12 States Sue F.D.A., Seeking Removal of Special Restrictions on Abortion Pill  The New York Times Abortion pill: Democratic attorneys general sue to loosen restrictions  NPR Texas federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, known for his antiabortion views, could block abortion pills  The Washington Post Mifepristone: 12 US states sue to expand access to abortion pill  BBC View Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Vice President Harris early Wednesday dismissed the frequent jeers and boos among Republican lawmakers during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address as “theatrics,” arguing President Biden’s record of bipartisanship speaks for itself. "I think there’s a bit of what happens in that room, sadly that it’s about theatrics, but when you talk about the...

Preview: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Wednesday dismissed a question on whether he was trying to quell a number of outbursts from members of his caucus during President Biden's State of the Union Address. "Apparently the White House Comms team is delighted at the reaction because it looked like Joe Biden was standing out to...

Preview: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) suggested that Republicans who heckled President Biden during the State of the Union Address Tuesday evening are unfit to serve in Congress.  “President Biden delivered a compelling speech outlining a vision to make life better for everyday Americans” Jeffries tweeted following the speech.  "And his dignity presented a stark...

Preview: Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said it was a “questionable” decision for Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to attend the State of the Union address on Tuesday night but added that he was particularly taken aback by the disgraced freshman lawmaker’s decision to sit on the aisle. “Certainly, the fact that he showed up to the State...

Preview: Pervez Musharraf, one-time military dictator of Pakistan, was buried on Feb. 7 in the port city of Karachi after dying in exile in the United Arab Emirates on Feb. 5. A headline in the Wall Street Journal described him as a “key U.S. ally.” Well, up to a point, to borrow the disbelieving jargon of...

Preview: The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal is arguing President Biden is benefiting from Republican struggles on messaging and governance, despite his sagging poll numbers. The Journal, in an editorial published early Wednesday, noted Biden devoted much of his State of the Union address Tuesday evening touting what he says is a long list...

Preview: Republicans are willing to work within the president's roadmap, the country will be better off because of it.

Preview: More than seven in 10 viewers of President Biden’s State of the Union address had at least a somewhat positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN flash poll. The poll found 72 percent of watchers had a positive view of the speech, with 34 percent saying it was very positive. It reported that...

Preview: Alexandra Dondeville says she was a freshman majoring in psychology and liberal arts when an alleged incident with Cookie in her biology classroom changed her college life.

Preview: It’s State of the Union time, so wrongheaded expectations and misleading renderings of history require correction once again. One colleague inaccurately opined on television that “historically presidents get a little bump [from the address] … and then it flattens out.” Another commentator wrongly asserted that presidents are “aways helped” by these speeches. You...

Preview: “This is like a Macaulay Culkin movie or something," late-night host Jimmy Kimmel told the "Daisy Jones & The Six" star of the soccer World Cup tale.

Preview: Jackman is set to play Logan/Wolverine for the 10th time in the upcoming 2024 film "Deadpool 3."

Preview: J. Michael Luttig spelled out how the former vice president was playing a dangerous game refusing to testify in the Justice Department probe into Jan. 6.

Preview: "Everyone deserves a Ray in their life," said Karsen Liotta, who accepted the star on behalf of her late father.

Preview: The extremist Republican's pistol-packing servers and dishes such as the "Six Shooter" are being replaced by Mexican food at the Rifle, Colorado, venue.

Preview: Malik Monk scored a career-high 45 points as Sacramento outlasted Los Angeles 176-175 in a double overtime game on Friday.

Preview: A powerful winter storm lashing the West Coast state is still threatening floods, blizzards and avalanches Saturday.

Preview: Ramon Escobar is suspected of killing Juan Villanueva at North Kern State Prison in Delano

Preview: Lawyers have asked a federal judge to give them more time to serve Rittenhouse with a civil lawsuit because they think he's avoiding them on purpose.

Preview: The former vice president said the GOP will have "better choices" than his former boss for 2024, and he revealed when he may throw his own hat into the ring.

Preview: Norfolk Southern has lost more than $6 billion in market capitalization since the Feb. 3 train derailment.

Preview: Reparations task force will recommend California schools adopt African-American studies. "You can’t fix what you won’t look at," one task-force member says.

Preview: My monthly review of stock market valuation indicators

Preview: Some major retailers give shoppers the opportunity to support charities, either directly or indirectly.

Preview: The taxes you pay on dividends, interest and capital gains could be dragging down your overall investment performance.

Preview: You might be tempted to cash out, especially if you have a small balance, but research shows the way to go is to stay invested.

Preview: Have a question about your own retirement savings? Email us at HelpMeRetire@marketwatch.com

Preview: At the end of January, the success rate for people seeking jobs in tech was just 55%, according to ZipRecruiter.

Preview: ‘Our daughter had good benefits because she worked for the city government. Unfortunately, she had not changed the beneficiary on her accounts.’

Preview: 'After we were dating for three months, he offered to take me on a trip to the Caribbean. I was just about to turn 40, and I work as a public-school teacher.'

Preview: J. Michael Luttig has been trying to convince Mike Pence that he can’t get out of testifying in special counsel Jack Smith’s probe.

Preview: Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, during which time Vladimir Putin has learned the hard way: before taking your country to war, you better do your homework.

Preview: Marjorie-Taylor Greene has been rattling on about a “national divorce.” Her idea to keep entertainment workers from moving to Georgia may be the craziest part.

Preview: We knew about Republican Rep. George Santos' many lies to voters and journalists. We didn't know about his apparent lies to a judge, too.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris spoke this morning ahead of a major decision expected any moment now out of Texas, where one Trump-appointed judge will rule on whether to ban the abortion pill, mifepristone, nationwide, in every state no matter red or blue, and upending the lives of millions of women. Joy Reid and her panel discuss.

Preview: John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined Sonia Sotomayor’s 5-4 ruling for a death row prisoner. It has nothing to do with worrying about defendants’ rights.

Preview: Kevin McCarthy said he gave Tucker Carlson exclusive access to Jan. 6 security footage because he "promised." But to whom did he make this “promise”?

Preview: Biden's trip to Ukraine highlights the U.S.'s lack of support for Palestinians facing rising deadly violence in the occupied territories at the hands of Israel.

Preview: On the debt ceiling, some Republicans are pointing a gun at the economy, seeking a ransom. Other Republicans have already decided to pull the trigger.

Preview: Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the Fulton County special grand jury, is making some people nervous with her media tour. But she seems to have kept her oath.

Preview: The 5.2 magnitude earthquake Saturday morning hammered central Turkey, just days after another quake near the Syrian border.  It struck near the cities of Aksaray and Emirgazi.

Preview: "Honestly, as fat and crazy as I look in it, I enjoyed the way I look in it," the "Watcher" actress told Page Six in an exclusive interview.

Preview: Join the club.

Preview: Biden made the remarks Friday afternoon while departing the White House for his vacation home in Wilmington.

Preview: "I was still in disbelief and asked them to send a picture — and of course it’s Tallulah," Lisa Gregory recalled.

Preview: The BetMGM bonus code NPBONUS allows new customers to get a great bonus for the North Carolina Tar Heels hosting the Virginia Cavaliers on Saturday.

Preview: This year, the new MLS season comes from a new streaming service.

Preview: From shut-downs to near-misses, the FAA is experiencing a period of extreme challenges marked by limited resources and unstable leadership.

Preview: Determination and professionalism finally earned Jacque Vaughn the Nets head coaching job, and now he is instilling those same qualities in his revamped roster.

Preview: A Pennsylvania man impersonated his dead dad for five years in order to steal more than $200,000 in NY state pension and Social Security payments, authorities said.

Preview: Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make some of the country’s best-known products.

Preview: Llegan al país en cifras récord y acaban en labores peligrosas que violan las leyes de trabajo infantil, incluso en fábricas donde se hacen algunos de los productos más conocidos del país.

Preview: Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen urged her counterparts at a summit in India to condemn Russia’s actions, and she defended the cost of supplying aid to Kyiv.

Preview: As tech companies cut costs and move to remote work, their left-behind office furniture has become part of a booming trade.

Preview: In Nigeria’s presidential election on Saturday, voters are desperate to elect a leader who can unleash their youthful country’s potential and chart a new course after years of dashed hopes.

Preview: The presidential election scheduled for Saturday in Africa’s most populous country is completely unpredictable. An unexpected third candidate with a huge youth following may upend decades of traditional politics.

Preview: A cold storm has created winter wonderlands in unusual California spots that almost never see snow.

Preview: Snow, high winds and intense rain hit parts of the state Friday. Los Angeles was under a flash flood warning early Saturday, and blizzards were expected in nearby mountains.

Preview: The intense cross-examination of Mr. Murdaugh, who is charged with killing his wife and son, came as he concluded his testimony in his own defense.

Preview: Lawyers have poured into East Palestine, Ohio, since the derailment that led to a burn-off of toxic chemicals, filing more than a dozen lawsuits so far on behalf of local residents.

Preview: Read a new murder mystery about grief, epigenetics, and surfing.

Preview: Is it right?

Preview: I was in searing pain from an old sports injury. Running helped!

Preview: Just what the GOP needs to rebound: Further conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Preview: Slate Money talks new home sales, employment for people with disabilities, and SBF.

Preview: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did the Section 230 homework, the others not so much.

Preview: And is deploying her mother’s business savvy or just enjoying being a kid?

Preview: Tim Sommer signed Hootie & the Blowfish as “children of R.E.M.”—then they went multiplatinum.

Preview: Maybe a deadly beast hopped up on nose candy is exactly what the climate movement needs.

Preview: I'm not prepared to take on a dependent.

Preview: Some of the proposals pose real threats to free inquiry

Preview: The raw milk restoration is underway.

Preview: 2/25/1841: Justice Phillip Barbour dies.

Preview: A new entrant in the anti-neoliberalism genre fails to land any blows.

Preview: Kagan: "Kavanaugh, J. (recognizing that the argument may be forfeited, but opining on it anyway)."

Preview: Attempts to reclassify ISPs as common carriers are unsupported by law.

Preview: From today's decision by Judge Robert Pitman in Fund Texas Choice v. Paxton (W.D. Tex.): [T]he Court will grant [Texas AG Ken] Paxton's motion to dismiss and grant the preliminary injunction in part. Specifically, the Court finds that while Paxton has enforcement authority under H.B. 1280, the statute does not regulate abortions that take place…

Preview: The Court’s decisions in Gonzalez and subsequent cases could lead to impossible, incompatible consequences.

Preview: Boisterous school children, suspicious mispronunciations, and convicted misdemeanant Don Blankenship.

Preview: Police have not yet determined whether the suspect was armed at the time of the shooting.

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Preview: If the last remaining arms treaty between the Russia and the U.S. falls, there won't be limits on their nuclear forces for the first time since the 1970s.

Preview: Snow and rain will continue pummeling California on Saturday before the system moves on to Oklahoma and Texas.

Preview: A lasting consequence of Russia's war on Ukraine: The coerced and forced deportation of potentially tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Preview: Airlines are expanding as summer approaches. Here's a round up of the latest announcements from United, Frontier, Avelo and Air Canada.

Preview: Ben Stiller is standing by his controversial comedy "Tropic Thunder."

Preview: A winter storm was bringing blizzard conditions, heavy rains and mudslides throughout Southern California.

Preview: Austin Butler in Elvis, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Sigourney Weaver in Avatar: The Way of Water. All four movies were massive hits, and all are nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture. | Warner Bros./Paramount Pictures/A24/20th Century Studios So why doesn’t it feel like it? In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Bowen Yang hosts a cheesy game show called “The Big Hollywood Quiz.” Tonight’s contestants are a film professor (Pedro Pascal), an entertainment writer (Ego Nwodim), and a Hollywood history podcaster (Chloe Fineman). The contestants start out well, answering questions about 1950’s All About Eve and the 1983 final episode of M.A.S.H., the most-watched TV finale ever aired. Then they get to the 2020s. “This film, written and directed by Sarah Polley, has been nominated for Best Picture this year,” Yang announces. He’s greeted by the contestants’ visible befuddlement. “I’ll give you a hint,” he continues. “It has an all-female cast, featuring Oscar winner Frances McDormand.” After some misses, the contestants ask for a hint. “It’s Women Talking,” Yang replies. “Be more specific,” Pascal says, confusion in his eyes. The crew doesn’t fare any better with a question about Andrea Riseborough’s controversial Best Actress nomination for her work in To Leslie, which Yang tells them they really should watch “because so far, it’s made $27,300.” When Fineman notes that’s not much for opening weekend, Yang deadpans, “It’s been out for four months.” At this point, everyone is frustrated. “Where did all the big, popular movies go?” Pascal plaintively asks. “Oh, they’re still here,” Yang replies. “They’re just in your phone, and you can watch them on the toilet!” It’s an extremely funny sketch, thanks to impeccable comic timing, but if it’s meant to skewer the Oscars, it’s a tad disingenuous for 2023. This year’s slate of Best Picture nominees is in fact unusually populist. And while populist and popular aren’t synonymous, these nominees include a bunch of films that were both. If you add all their box office grosses together — just domestic, not counting what they’re taking in abroad — they grossed over $1.5 billion by the end of 2022, the biggest haul in over a decade. Top Gun: Maverick alone counts for nearly half of that, mostly because it came out way back in May 2022 and stayed in theaters through the end of the year. But Tom Cruise wasn’t pulling all the weight here. In the two weeks between its release and the end of the year, Avatar: The Way of Water made a whopping $400 million domestically, while Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis made $150 million at home, despite only staying in theaters for a few months. And then there’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, the little indie that could, which pulled in an astounding $68 million domestically on a small budget, mostly thanks to the phenomenal power of word of mouth. It’s true that the other six films nominated in the category — The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking, Triangle of Sadness, Tar, The Fabelmans, and All Quiet on the Western Front — fit more into the “critically acclaimed art house film” category, with far lower grosses at the box office (which, even in the streaming age, is still the only reliable metric we really have to measure popularity). But even then, their popular cred is striking. One is a personal project directed by arguably the most famous director in Hollywood, father of the populist blockbuster Steven Spielberg. Three others star some of the biggest actors in the business, like Colin Farrell, Frances McDormand, and Cate Blanchett. Triangle of Sadness won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and has a medium-sized role for Woody Harrelson, whose career isn’t exactly esoteric. And All Quiet on the Western Front is an adaptation of a classic novel that was previously adapted into one of the earliest Oscar winners — the first to win both Best Director and “Outstanding Production,” the 1930 equivalent of Best Picture. These movies may not be big moneymakers — they’re not exactly “popular” — but they’re far from obscure. These movies may not be big moneymakers — they’re not exactly “popular” — but they’re far from obscure So why is the big joke that nobody knows any Oscar movies anymore? There are a lot of ways to explain it: It’s true that compared to, say, 2003 — where the nominees included The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Hours, Gangs of New York, The Pianist, and Chicago, the lowest grossing of which made eight times what Women Talking has so far — the trend in Oscar nominees has been toward smaller, more obscure films. (Had you heard of last year’s winner, CODA, before the nominations came out? If your answer is “yes,” you’re probably a film critic.) But it could be that the trend toward obscurity is more of a lengthy blip than a rule. I’ve also had conversations in which people swear up and down that none of the Oscar nominees have been watchable in their major metropolitan hometown (they certainly have, and they’re almost all streaming as well) — an explanation for why the list seems so obscure to them. Surely, the feeling goes, if I haven’t heard of the movie, then it has to be obscure. This is an interesting problem for me, a film critic, to think about. I watch more movies in a year than some people watch in a lifetime, and hear about hundreds more. The situation is different for most ordinary folks. In the SNL sketch, Yang asks Pascal to “name three movies from the past five years.” Stunned by the challenge, Pascal ventures, “Oh, wow. Three? Okay.” He contemplates, and comes up with Top Gun. Then he tries another: “The Hangover?” “That was 20 years ago,” Yang says. “The Night ... Man,” Pascal says. “Sounds like you’re just saying words. Come on, all you need is one,” Yang coaxes. “Can’t you just name one more movie?” “Nope,” Pascal says, resigned. “That’s right!” Yang crows, jubilantly. “Nope! You won the speed round!” I laughed at the sketch and then thought about it, because while it’s exaggerated, it’s not off-base. Everyone knows Jurassic Park and Independence Day and The Dark Knight, but even I have to Google to remember what movies came out last year. You could explain that away with some hand-waving about the pandemic, and by noting that there is just so much more stuff than there used to be; it’s harder to keep track. But that doesn’t quite explain the time-space compression sensation, the fact that if I say Mamma Mia! or Wendy and Lucy came out 15 years ago, it feels like chronology itself has warped. The abundance of options and possibilities tend to strip the context and intentionality away from the viewing experience The answer, I think, is in Yang’s quip about the movies being “in your phone.” Not so much the smallness, or the watching on the toilet, but the context collapse that happens when it feels like every movie or TV show from every time and place is all being delivered in exactly the same format at exactly the same time. The abundance of options and possibilities tend to strip the context and intentionality away from the viewing experience; you didn’t have to talk to your friends about what movie you wanted to see, buy a ticket, and create an experience out of it. Now it all just flows toward you, content in an endless stream. But it can be hard to focus on any single thing in that deluge, and that raises another issue. Back in my day (takes drag on cigarette), to find out what movies were out, we had to … look for that information. In the brief period before social media took over the world, you had to call a phone number or look up movie showtimes in some rudimentary search engine or, before that, your local newspaper. To even know what newly released movie you wanted to see, you depended on the half-dozen trailers that ran before your feature presentation, or on TV commercials during your Thursday evening must-see TV time, or you actually picked up the paper and read some reviews. The closest experience to today’s streaming releases we had were to decide you wanted to “see a movie” that night, and then either drive to Blockbuster and browse the shelves, or trundle on down to the mall and buy a ticket for what was about to start. In other words, there was some proactivity involved — even if you were being sort of passive about it. Today, though, we’ve come to believe that if we haven’t heard about something, then it doesn’t exist. “Nobody is talking about this!” we proclaim on Twitter, forgetting that our feeds are built around what algorithm creators think we want to see and, by implication, what they can market to us. The same thing happens with films, and no wonder; sometimes it seems like Netflix is trying to hide its new releases. But what I suspect is that we’ve become so accustomed to passively finding out what’s going on because it’s pushed at us by our algorithms — flooded with a context-free neverending firehose of memes and news headlines and rants and thoughtful critiques and spam and, yes, ads for movies — that we’ve lost the art of what we once called “looking it up.” (It doesn’t help that the trailers are mostly bad.) It’s okay if you haven’t seen most of the Oscar nominees, or even heard of them. In 2023, that probably means you live a normal, well-balanced life, one full of going outside to toss around a softball and maybe, I don’t know, reading books and whatever normal people do. But if you find yourself wondering why you can’t name three movies that came out in the past five years, remember, it’s not just the movies’ fault — and it’s a fixable problem, with a little effort.

Preview: Francesca, left, is the star of Perfect Match. Here, it seems that a twist on Perfect Match has surprised her! | Netflix Ceaseless watcher, gaze upon this wretched thing. Humiliation has always been at least a small part of reality television dating shows. Whether it’s the tear-stained rejection confessional on The Bachelor, Love Island’s public vote selecting the couple Britain likes the least, or Millionaire Matchmaker’s Patti Stanger berating a sugar baby into submission, the gist is always the same: The risk of on-camera embarrassment is worth the one-of-a-kind love one may find on these shows (or at least the love of being on camera). In the last two weeks, I’ve discovered a sinister show in which utter human debasement is the sole point. This sadomasochistic program not only fools the contestants it treats like lowly worms into believing that flawless compatibility with another human exists and can be quantified, but makes those sick little piggies grovel every night for the chance to stay on for more humiliation. Welcome to Netflix’s Perfect Match. To be fair, I should have seen this coming: This is Netflix. The streaming platform gave us Love Is Blind, a series where people who have never seen each other and only spoken through an adjoining wall fall in love and get married within a couple of months. Its premise is allegedly about finding true love and how looks don’t matter, but over the course of its three seasons, it has maniacally warped into something close to the Stanford Prison Experiment. The streamer is also home to Too Hot to Handle, a show that tricks extremely attractive, extremely horny people into believing they’re on a regular reality dating show. What these possible sex addicts are really in for is a show where they can win a cash prize if they can last the entire show without boning anyone on the show. If they do have sex, the cash prize is reduced little by little based on the audacity of the sexual act. Impurity will cost you! Contestants from both those shows and other Netflix offerings like The Circle (a deeply obnoxious competitive reality series about social media where people yell commands at a screen), The Circle: France (I’m assuming it is also deeply obnoxious, but includes French people), The Mole, Selling Tampa, and Sexy Beasts all appear on Perfect Match, which is somehow crueler than any Netflix show that isn’t Squid Game. The series appears to be Netflix’s foray into ABC’s vaunted Bachelor-Bachelorette universe where contestants from both those shows participate in the extracurricular spinoff Bachelor in Paradise. On Perfect Match, Netflix has assembled a rotating roster — five men and five women — of its reality television personalities and plunged them into what appears to be a gorgeous Airbnb in Panama. Netflix Kariselle, left, has a name that didn’t click for me until one of her castmates said it out loud. Those who watch multiple Netflix shows will be rewarded by knowing the deep lore of these cast members and their personalities — like a woman named “Kariselle” from Sexy Beasts, whose carnival ride of a name didn’t unlock for me until it was said out loud. There’s also Shayne, an alum of Love is Blind who may or may not have been emotionally abusive to the woman he was supposed to marry on the show. Shayne is unnerving because you cannot tell when this toothy man is joking, especially when he threatens a fellow contestant by saying he will run that guy’s dreams into the ground. I hope that is a joke. My personal favorite is Francesca, a Too Hot to Handle alum who treats the game like Survivor and has had the kind of plastic surgery that makes it look like her mother was a Kardashian and her father was an Instagram filter. Shayne, Kariselle, Francesca, and the other men and women pair off as heterosexual couples based on how attracted they are to each other. Then the next day, they take part in some kind of competition (these convoluted contests vary from physical challenges to kissing to quizzes and everything in between) where the winning couple gets to bring in two men or two women to the house. That decision deliberately creates an imbalance where there are either five men and seven women or vice versa. Whichever gender has the smaller number gets to choose their partner for the night, which almost always results in two contestants being left out in the cold (although later in the season, a same-sex couple materializes). When I say cold, I mean it literally and figuratively. It appears to be cold at night in Panama, and these pairing ceremonies take place outdoors. Women on the show rarely wear pants. Men on the show rarely wear shirts. None of these Netflix stars brought warm knitwear to Central America. The “pairing” ceremony takes place over drinks and the course of the night, throughout the various outdoor areas of the palatial Airbnb. To match with someone and thus stay on the show, one has to be invited to a room by a person whose gender is doing the choosing that night (e.g. girls pick guys when there are fewer girls). The innuendo is, of course, sexual as each couple will be sharing not just a room but a bed. As couples pair off, they leave the remaining, unchosen people downstairs. At the end of the night, the two people not invited to bedrooms must leave together, like the lingering guests at a party when the host has gone to bed. They exit through the front door, while everyone else has put up “do not disturb” on their bedroom doors. In the short term, winners get to stay another day and cozy up to their match, but it’s unclear what anyone wins at the end of the competition other than being deemed compatible. Host Nick Lachey says they’ll be deemed a “perfect match” but does not specify if there’s money or some kind of vacation as a reward. Uncertainty is part of Netflix reality television charm. Since many of the streaming platform’s shows are the first of their kind, the contestants tend to fill in how the game is played, the way that, in the first season of The Circle, the players decided it was about teamwork. (Spoiler: It wasn’t, but it worked.) Perfect Match is filled with Netflix vets, and the contestants have determined among themselves that someone “here for the right reasons” should win. That said, the “right reasons” seems to be more or less arbitrary and largely dependent on if Francesca and her friends like someone. Netflix The Bachelor has roses. Perfect Match has “do not disturb” signs. While no one outright says it, the looming humiliation of having to leave the house with your fellow loser at the end of a drunken night has to be a motivating factor for staying on the show. The circumstances were created to trigger and maximize desperation. Existing couples reassure each other that they really like each other, not just because one person in the relationship held the power the previous night. Someone in a pairing who doesn’t necessarily like their partner might put on a charm offensive not because of genuine interest but because they know one else will invite them to a room. The two newbies who get picked to enter the villa have to work speedily to convince anyone to let them stay. After all, they did not fly all that way to Panama to get barely any screen time on a Netflix show. During one brutal pairing-off ceremony, Dom, Francesca’s longstanding match, watches as Francesca cozies up to a new man. He cries to the camera lamenting the connection they or he had. He weeps because she’s chosen another muscled himbo, one who she says is more appetizing to her sexually than the man crying is. The whimpering man at one point tells the cameraman that he told Francesca he loves her. This man has felt a full lifetime of emotion for Francesca, it seems, in just 72 or so hours. The next morning, Francesca and her new match talk about how they don’t have foot fetishes but they like feet. Then the Hunger Games-like cycle repeats itself as two more people enter the house, the power shifts, from women to men, and two more people leave alone together. And on and on. Despite extensive Googling, the show has an opacity that I cannot penetrate: It’s still unclear what the winning couple actually gets. What’s in store for them? Cash? Another trip to a sandy beach? His and hers matching sets? It doesn’t matter. The humiliation is the point.

Preview: The EPA has ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup of its train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images It’s the beginning of a years-long effort to clean up and track the effects of chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. Many residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have warily returned to their homes after a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled more than 100,000 gallons of dangerous chemicals into the air and water earlier this month. The towering smoke cloud from the burning vinyl chloride has drifted away, and the track has been cleared. Trains are now running again through the town. But the 4,700 residents of East Palestine say they still smell chemical residue in the air, see an oily sheen in the water, and are suffering from headaches and nausea. Concern is mounting about the long-term effects of the disaster. It’s also become a political football. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine this week and apologized for not speaking about the derailment sooner. Former President Donald Trump also visited the town and criticized President Joe Biden for going to Ukraine this week instead of Ohio. (Trump himself has faced criticism for rolling back train safety rules.) Other government officials are trying to assure residents that much of the risk has faded. This week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan both visited East Palestine and drank tap water in a resident’s home. Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg apologized to residents of East Palestine, Ohio, for not responding sooner to the train derailment. “You don’t know who to trust. That’s a big part of it — the uncertainty. You don’t know if you’re going to have to move,” one resident, Carolyn Brown, told ABC News. “We need to feel that we’re safe.” But “safe” may be more than anyone can promise. “‘Safe’ is one of those four-letter words in a [disaster] response you just don’t use,” said Stan Meiburg, executive director of the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability at Wake Forest University and a former career EPA official who worked on toxic waste cleanup. “What people consider ‘safe’ is highly variable ... plus, EPA just can’t answer that question.” Instead, agencies like the EPA try to measure what they can and extrapolate from past research. They compare the concentrations of pollutants they measure to limits established by health departments, which don’t always reflect the dangers an individual will face. Children, for example, breathe in more air proportionate to their body size and thus are more vulnerable to airborne toxic chemicals. And scientists aren’t clear how the health effects of the specific toxic chemical brew that shrouded East Palestine will play out over time. Authorities nevertheless told residents they could return home. In doing so, the people of East Palestine may face low levels of exposure to some of the dangerous chemicals from the derailment, with uncertain health effects. So now begins a years-long effort to track the effects of the leaked chemicals, to mitigate their harms, to analyze why the train derailed, and to prevent the next spill. While this is uncharted territory for health and environment agencies, experts say there are some best practices to better understand the disaster and to protect residents. But they require continued attention and resources long after media coverage fades and political wrangling stops. The next steps in the response to the East Palestine chemical spill Of the 38 cars that derailed on February 3, 11 were known to hold hazardous chemicals, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. These included chemicals like vinyl chloride, a flammable carcinogenic gas, and butyl acrylate, a toxic flammable liquid. Some leaked, some were vented, and some burned, further complicating the picture. “Each of the chemicals that leaked are respiratory irritants, and some of their breakdown products are also irritants,” said Marilyn Howarth, an environmental toxicologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in an email. “This is part of what is unclear: How much of each was experienced by each person and for how long?” Occupational health researchers have found that workers who are regularly exposed to chemicals like vinyl chloride have higher rates of liver cancer. It’s a signal that can take 20 years or more to emerge, Howarth said. However, these workers were exposed to higher doses and in enclosed spaces, unlike the residents of East Palestine. It’s not clear how exposures from the train derailment will play out, but the long latency of vinyl chloride’s worst effects means that it’s critical to track its concentrations in the community for years to come. Michael Swensen/Getty Images More than 40,000 fish died after chemicals spilled into waterways during a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month. Meanwhile, residues from burning vinyl chloride, like dioxin, and other leaked chemicals, like butyl acrylate, can haunt water supplies for years and spread through watersheds and underground aquifers that provide drinking water. “The aquifer may remain contaminated for years, even a decade, despite best clean-up efforts in the short and long term,” Abinash Agrawal, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wright State University, said in an email. “This may not be a threat to breathable air quality, but definitely toxic in drinking water as it can migrate and move/travel in a groundwater plume of contamination to the pumping wells nearby up to several thousand feet.” So state and federal environmental agencies will also need to check water and soil samples regularly for contamination for years. Parts of East Palestine and the surrounding region will also have to be decontaminated, cleaned up, and remediated. The water used to extinguish the train fire is now toxic, and 2 million gallons of it are being sent to Texas, where it will be injected underground for disposal. The contaminated soil around the train tracks is being excavated and sent to a toxic waste disposal site in Michigan. The community may also have to look for a new drinking water source, Agrawal said. The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation of the root causes of the train wreck. Federal regulators will have to consider whether to impose new safety regulations on the rail industry. The residents of East Palestine will also have to keep tabs on their health. Philip Landrigan, director of the public health program at Boston College, studied 20,000 first responders and rescue workers in New York City after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He said one of the key lessons learned from that study was that in addition to figuring out exactly what was in the dust that people were breathing in, it was also important to conduct regular health assessments to catch problems that emerged over time. “A program has to be put in place to get baseline health evaluations of people in the town, even people that appear to be okay, and follow them up periodically over the next decade or more,” Landrigan said. Norfolk Southern will have to pay All these measures, however, will cost a lot of money. “You can’t expect the people who were the victims of this catastrophe to pay for that themselves,” Landrigan said. To that end, the EPA has ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup of the train derailment and the response. If they fall short, the rail operator could face a fine of $70,000 per day according to EPA administrator Regan. “Norfolk Southern will pay for the mess that they created and the trauma that they inflicted on this community,” he said during a press conference this week. But that doesn’t account for the ongoing health needs of East Palestine, and the total medical bill could be massive. A number of residents are now looking to sue the railroad company. Norfolk Southern has also committed $5.6 million in financial assistance and support to the town. Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images East Palestine, Ohio, residents gathered at a town hall meeting to voice their concerns after a train derailed and spilled chemicals earlier this month. One of the biggest challenges, however, will be rebuilding trust between the community and the government. A half-dozen federal offices along with local authorities are playing roles in the disaster response, which is making it difficult for some residents to figure out who should be held accountable. And agencies like the EPA are struggling to communicate how to interpret their measurements of chemical exposures and how residents should respond to their findings. Things like quantifying the toxic chemicals in the air, soil, and water and determining that they’re below reference levels don’t address the anxiety that the people of East Palestine may feel. “One thing that I hope we will see the agency doing is recognizing that assurances to people are not just giving them numbers but rather helping them have access to resources that will help them discuss their feeling about the matter,” said Meiburg. “This has been a traumatizing event for the community,” he added. “To think about this as a ‘one and done’ experience is probably a mistake.”

Preview: Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual state of the nation address at the Gostiny Dvor conference centre in central Moscow on February 21, 2023. | Ramil Sitdikov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images Vladimir Putin is suspending New START amid Ukraine war tensions. The last standing nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States is in deep danger. Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week that Russia was “suspending” its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which limits the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons for each country. Putin made the announcement in a speech marking the first year of his war in Ukraine, and he effectively tied his decision to the conflict, saying Washington wants “to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities.” Putin’s decision is a distressing signal not just for New START but for global arms control and nonproliferation more broadly. Russia and the United States have the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenals, and a pact like New START should serve as a safeguard during moments of tension, rather than a tool in a geopolitical standoff. New START specifically caps the number of long-range missiles each country can deploy to 1,550 and allows for a maximum of 700 long-range missiles and bombers. It all sounds very technical, but strategic nuclear arms are “the big intercontinental systems that are essentially an existential threat — not only to the United States and to the Russian Federation, but to the global community, to humanity as a whole,” said Rose Gottemoeller, who served as the chief negotiator in the Obama administration for the New START Treaty and is now the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University. Russia has said it is going to continue to follow the limits set out by New START — in other words, according to Moscow, it’s not going to amass more warheads. But beyond the nuke limits, New START has formal mechanisms for data-sharing and verification — including inspections — which give both the US and Russia transparency into what the other was doing, and brought stability and predictability to the nuclear relationship. The Biden administration renewed the pact with Russia in 2021, but the agreement is set to expire in 2026 unless a new deal can be negotiated. The prospects for a new deal were already pretty grim, even before the Ukraine war poisoned US-Russia relations even further. Russia had been gumming up the pact even before Putin’s announcement this week. Inspections were paused during the pandemic, but Russia has continued to block them, most recently claiming that US sanctions are preventing Russian officials from conducting checks. (The US State Department says that’s not true.) Russia also bailed on technical talks, linking that to the US’s weapons support for Ukraine. Russia’s so-called suspension isn’t actually a legal possibility under the treaty — but, then again, this isn’t exactly a good faith effort. Instead, Putin is trying to use New START as a bargaining chip in the Ukraine war. It’s another way for him “to impose costs or risks on the United States and the West, basically, saying: ‘We know you value this arms control treaty, but if you continue supporting Ukraine the way you are, you can say goodbye to that treaty’ — or he’s at least kind of hinting at the possibility that that could happen down the road,” said Nicholas Miller, nonproliferation expert and associate professor of government at Dartmouth University. Putin has also used nuclear threats during the Ukraine war. The suspension of New START follows that playbook — an attempt to raise fears in the West about what Russia might do — in an effort to force the US and its partners to back off their support for Ukraine. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Russia’s decision “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible,” but made it clear that the US wants to engage with Russia on arms control at any time, “irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship.” In the past, Washington and Moscow have tried to separate talks on strategic nuclear arms from other issues, even if the rest of the relationship was a mess. That seems much less of a possibility now, which is trouble for the US-Russia relationship — and the entire world. What happens if New START stops? New START is the last of the bilateral arms control pacts between Washington and Moscow, as the rest of the architecture built from the Cold War onward unravels. New START was negotiated in the early years of the Obama administration, and officially went into force in February 2011. The treaty was set to expire in February 2021, but President Joe Biden and Putin agreed to extend it for five years, until February 2026, its current termination date. Now, Putin has put the existing New START in jeopardy. The prospects of a follow-on treaty, however, were already pretty precarious even before the Ukraine war and Putin’s New START decision. “The pathway that we’re on is no different, but the slope is steeper,” said Amy Woolf, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former specialist on nuclear weapons at the Congressional Research Service. The arms control agenda between Washington and Moscow has been stalled for some time; Russia and the US want different things. Also, any new New START would need to be ratified by the US Senate with a two-thirds majority, and good luck with that in the current US political environment. “We’ve known for 10 years that our lists are very different, and we’ve been unable to reach any agreement on what should be on the table,” said Woolf. “If you think that Ukraine caused the problem, all Ukraine did was highlight the fact that there was already a problem.” Both the US and Moscow had been chipping away at the arms control regime in recent years. The Trump administration withdrew from a few arms control agreements, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed for unarmed reconnaissance flights. The US had valid claims of Russian noncompliance, but both ended and left a vacuum behind. Some experts worry that this is Putin’s current modus operandi around New START: don’t comply, trample on the treaty, and force the US to withdraw, allowing Putin to blame Washington for tearing up the agreement. So far, the United States’ tack has been to say they’re disappointed in Moscow but still open to finding a way out of this jam. Exactly what that means for the treaty going forward is unclear, but the most immediate risk is that both sides get a lot less clarity about what the other is doing with their nuclear arsenal. And we’ll know if that concern materializes pretty soon: The treaty calls for a biannual data exchange, and the next one is due March 1. But even beyond that, New START provides both sides updates about what the other is doing — for example, if someone’s conducting a test or the US moves a missile out of a silo for repairs, it has to notify Russia about it. “Over time, that gives the Russians a great 24/7 view of the status and US Strategic Force posture,” Gottemoeller said. “That’s important for their security, it’s important for their stability; they understand exactly what’s going on in the US strategic nuclear arsenal.” The same is true for the United States, of course. Once those updates don’t happen, the US and Russia will likely have to use other means to verify nuke limits. That is time-consuming, probably not as accurate (although both sides are allowed to use “national technical means” — like satellites — to verify information, and neither party is supposed to interfere with those), and also much more expensive. New START is “cost-saving,” said Jessica Rogers, impact fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. “You can use those resources for other things, or for other defense purposes.” Without that information, the pressure could grow on both sides to build up the nuclear arsenals. “Confidence in what’s going on in the Russian force will degrade. The voices arguing for an expansion of the US force because of what Russia is doing and what China’s doing will grow louder. And Russia will see what we’re doing and their voices to expand will grow louder,” said Woolf. “It’s a cascading effect over time — it’s not a concern that next week will pop out with an extra 1,000 warheads. That’s not going to happen.” Experts caution that an immediate buildup by Russia is probably not the immediate threat. That takes time and money, and Russia has a lot going on. Again, at least for now, Putin has said that Russia will not increase its strategic nuclear arsenal beyond the current New START limits. But even if an arms race isn’t an urgent worry, the potential for an arms free-for-all exists — not just between the US and Russia, but also China and other nuclear powers. Putin’s weakening of New START starts this process, and the treaty expiring might accelerate it. “If 2026 rolls around and there’s no replacement, then there is a possibility that each country could substantially upload more nuclear weapons,” said Shannon Bugos, senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association. A grim moment for global arms control, in a series of tough moments A renewed and unrestrained arms race is not an inevitable conclusion, but as the arms control regime erodes, the greater the risk becomes over time. And if that happens now, it is not a reprise of the Cold War, with two superpowers, Russia and the United States, locked in competition. It is a much more multipolar world. Iran is inching closer to enriching weapons-grade uranium (something facilitated by the US throwing out the Iran Nuclear Deal). Even US allies like South Korea are more publicly debating getting nuclear weapons, worried about the threat from North Korea’s program. But most critically, China, another superpower, is also in the mix. Beijing’s strategic nuclear arsenal is still far below either the US or Russia’s, but it is likely trying to build closer to their levels over the next decades — strategic nuclear arms levels currently fenced in by New START. If Russia and the US throw off the remaining restraints, it removes some of the incentive for China (who has been reluctant to engage bilaterally or multilaterally on arms control), or anyone else, to follow suit. And once countries start down an arms-race path, it is hard to get off the ride. Trust is broken, and getting any agreement on arms control is much harder if tensions among parties are high. Once you invest in building up a nuclear arsenal, it’s not easy to shift, and it’s not cheap to dismantle nuclear warheads, either. And even if you’re a country that thinks some 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons is enough for your defense, sitting out an arms race with an adversary is a pretty hard sell when it comes to domestic politics. Again, this is not happening at this moment, but chipping away at pacts like New START make that all the more possible. And often it takes a near-catastrophe — say, a Cuban missile crisis — for countries to acknowledge it’s in their national security to do arms control. If anything, the Ukraine war should prove the need for Russia and the US to sit down on strategic arms, no matter what else. After all, that’s the point of these kinds of arms control treaties: They are supposed to provide guardrails when geopolitics are at a fever pitch because they help maintain a level of mutual trust and transparency that protects against miscalculation. They restrain powers when the impulse would be the opposite. Which is also what’s so dangerous about Putin’s New START tactics. He is explicitly linking it to the US’s support for Ukraine in the war, which as Rogers pointed out, imperils not just arms control but international law more broadly. Putin isn’t the only president who’s used treaties as a form of politics, but it adds to a troubling norm. By wielding New START as a cudgel, Putin is trying to escalate the nuclear risk, and get the US and the West to climb down from their Ukraine support. That ultimately makes the conflict more dangerous, adding uncertainty and even more mistrust — this time around weapons of mass destruction.

Preview: Diapers, food, rent — around the world, prices are rising. So, what can we do about it?  Inflation is inescapable. At the grocery store and the gas station, in almost every country in the world, people are paying more — way more — for everything than they did just a couple of years ago. Diapers in the US, food in Ghana, and home prices in India. What caused all this inflation? In the US, the Federal Reserve expects inflation to be about 2 percent a year. Right now, that’s true for some goods like clothing, prescription drugs, and education; they’re only slightly above that 2 percent mark. For other goods like used cars and trucks, gasoline, internet service, and phone plans, prices are actually lower than this time last year. But let’s look at the cost of diapers. Between 2018 and 2022, the overall cost of diapers increased by 22 percent. Rent, airfare, dairy products, and baked goods all went up significantly, too. In this video, we explore three competing explanations for why prices are rising, as well as different policy options for bringing them down. Read more on some of the sources and ideas for the video above: America’s monopoly problem, in one chart Inflation: No evidence of a wage-price spiral “Prices, Profits, and Power: An Analysis of 2021 Firm-Level Markups” Inflation & Corporate Power Explained: Supply Disruptions & Corporate Power. The Groundwork Collaborative You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

Preview: New York Representative-elect George Santos speaks during the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 19. | David Becker/Washington Post via Getty Images The Republican representative who allegedly made up his life story, explained. The biography of newly elected Congress member George Santos seemed quite impressive. The 34-year-old son of immigrants had graduated from Baruch College, a public college in New York, before going on to work at firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Santos eventually became a successful financier who started an animal rescue charity. The problem is that biography was apparently a lie, and now he might be facing not only political consequences but legal consequences for his wholesale inventions. As revealed in the New York Times on December 19, it wasn’t just that Santos exaggerated his résumé — he had allegedly invented it out of whole cloth. The Times found that he apparently did not graduate from Baruch College, he did not work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, there were no records of him being a successful financier, nor were there of him registering his animal rescue charity. The Times also found that he had been charged with check fraud in Brazil. Further, a number of outlets have found no evidence of Santos’s repeated claims to be Jewish, to have Jewish heritage, or to be descended from refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Santos even described himself at one point as a “proud American Jew” in a campaign position paper. In a media tour with friendly outlets on December 26, Santos admitted to putting “a little bit of fluff” on his résumé. In other words, he conceded that he never graduated from college, never worked for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, and wasn’t Jewish (though he claimed to be “Jew-ish”). Santos brushed off lying about basic biographical information as embellishment, and he pushed back on the Times’s reporting about his criminal charge in Brazil. “I am not a criminal,” he told the New York Post. The story has sparked one of the more bizarre political scandals in American history. Members of Congress have committed murder in office. In fact, a member of Congress has even killed another member of Congress. Even in the present day, we’ve seen every scandal under the sun, from Anthony Weiner tweeting a lewd picture of himself, to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous Facebook post about Jewish space lasers. But it’s hard to think of a precedent for a scandal like this as Santos faces calls for his resignation from fellow Republicans and investigations into potential criminal misconduct. Who is George Santos? There are some things we know about Santos. The openly gay son of Brazilian immigrants, he was elected in November to an open congressional seat that includes a thin slice of Queens and much of the North Shore of Long Island in Nassau County. Santos defeated Democrat Robert Zimmerman by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. This represented a major swing from 2020 when Biden had won the district by the same margin. That year, Santos ran against incumbent Tom Suozzi in a similar district and lost handily by a margin of 56 percent to 43.5 percent. Santos is also an ardent Trump supporter — so much so that he was at Trump’s Ellipse rally on January 6, 2021, and has repeatedly falsely claimed that the former president won the 2020 election. Also, for all his alleged lying about his résumé, it is clear that one company Santos worked at, Harbor City Capital, has been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of being a Ponzi scheme. As for Santos’s other employment, he did spend a stint as a Portuguese language customer service agent for DISH Network a decade ago. Santos has also been accused of setting up a GoFundMe that raised $3,000 to pay for lifesaving surgery for the dying service dog of a disabled homeless veteran and then pocketing the money. He responded on Twitter by claiming “the reports that I would let a dog die is shocking & insane.” Santos added, “Over the past 24hr I have received pictures of dogs I helped rescue throughout the years along with supportive messages.” Politico has reported that this alleged scam is being investigated by federal law enforcement. Questions have been raised about whether he had misappropriated other funds that he had raised on behalf of animal welfare. He was charged with theft in Pennsylvania in 2017 in connection to writing bad checks to Amish dog breeders. The charges were eventually dismissed after Santos convinced law enforcement in the state that his checkbook was stolen. The New York congressman also falsely claimed in a 2017 Seattle court hearing for a convicted fraudster that he worked for Goldman Sachs. Santos made that statement, according to Politico, at a bail hearing for Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, who was eventually convicted of fraud for skimming card information from ATMs. The two men had previously shared an apartment in Florida. Santos has also pushed back against the claim that he dressed in drag while living in Brazil. A drag performer who goes by the name Eula Rochard told multiple outlets that Santos used to perform in drag under the name “Kitara Ravache.” Santos initially mounted an aggressive denial on Twitter. “The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” said the embattled New York Republican. “The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results.” Eventually, he conceded to reporters at LaGuardia Airport that he did dress in drag but that he was simply having “fun at a festival.” What don’t we know? We don’t know a lot. This ranges from basic facts about Santos’s biography to details about his dealings with the Brazilian criminal justice system, and everything in between, including where he actually lives. But most importantly, we don’t know where Santos’s money comes from. The representative loaned his own campaign $700,000 during the 2022 cycle and claimed an income of $750,000. He also listed millions of dollars in assets including an apartment in Rio De Janeiro worth up to $1 million and a seven-figure savings account. It’s a major shift in fortune for someone who was evicted twice, in 2015 and 2017, for failing to pay rent and had been taken to court for not paying debts. Even in 2020, he reported income in only one category — compensation in excess of $5,000 paid by one source — with no other assets. Santos initially provided no information on his finances on his media tour, except to concede that he owned no property. He had previously claimed on Twitter to be a landlord who owned 13 properties. The representative eventually claimed in an interview with Semafor that his newfound wealth came from “capital introduction” where he helped broker deals for the wealthy. Santos used a yacht sale as an example of how he earned a living: “If you’re looking at a $20 million yacht, my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000.” What happens now? Santos is already being investigated by federal and local prosecutors while the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James has been “looking into some of the issues that have come out.” Further, a complaint has been filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center alleging Santos illegally hid the source of the money he loaned his campaign through a straw donor scheme and other alleged violations, including whether he used campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. The Washington Post reported in late January that the Justice Department has asked the FEC to hold off any enforcement actions so that it can pursue a criminal investigation. Although Santos had originally accepted an assignment from House GOP leadership to sit on the science and small business committees, he announced on January 31 in a meeting of Republican lawmakers that he would step aside from those positions. The announcement came only a day after a closed-door meeting with McCarthy. Dan Goldman, a fellow representative from New York and a former prosecutor, has suggested that Santos face criminal investigation for conspiracy to defraud the United States as well as filing false statements to the FEC. In a December interview with Vox, Goldman shied away from weighing in on whether Santos should be denied his seat in Congress. “I think the bigger question is not whether I think George Santos should be a member of Congress. The bigger question is whether Kevin McCarthy and the Republican leadership think that George Santos should be a member of Congress.” A number of Santos’s fellow Republicans have called on him to resign as well. The Nassau County Republican Party, long considered the most powerful county party in New York, called on Santos to step down as have other New York Republicans, including Reps. Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler, Nick Langworthy, and Brandon Williams. Joe Cairo, the chair of the Nassau County GOP, told reporters, “George Santos’ campaign last year was a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication” while demanding his resignation. Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), one of only two Jewish Republicans in the House and a longtime Trump White House aide, called on Santos to resign in mid-January, and cited the New York Republican’s lies about his family ties to the Holocaust in doing so. The result has left Santos in a state of limbo with no committee assignments and a constant pack of reporters following him around the Capitol. But, as McCarthy acknowledged to reporters, if the Ethics Committee finds that Santos broke the law, the New York Republican should be ousted from Congress. Further, there is new grist for the Ethics Committee with a prospective staffer accusing the New York Congress member in early February of sexual harassment. However, as of now, McCarthy needs Santos almost as much as Santos needs McCarthy. McCarthy only became speaker by the skin of his teeth on the 15th ballot. With a narrow majority — and the likelihood of frequent member absences now that the House has gotten rid of proxy voting — McCarthy needs every vote he can get. Further, because Santos represents one of the most Democratic seats in Congress held by a Republican, forcing him to resign under any circumstance is risky. It would be a difficult seat for a Republican to hold in a special election and a loss would further imperil an already slim GOP majority. In the meantime, it’s a matter of waiting for the next shoe to drop. As unsustainable as the current status quo might seem, the only impetus right now for Santos to resign would be a sense of shame, and it seems unlikely that he carries that burden. Update, February 24, 1:40 pm ET: This story was originally published on December 21, 2022, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with news of past connections to legal cases in Seattle and Pennsylvania.

Preview: Paul Rudd in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, a movie in which multiple people are mean to Paul Rudd. | Marvel With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it feels like another whiff for a once-unstoppable studio. There are a lot of things that are hard to believe in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It proposes the idea that entire alien galaxies exist in between the atoms that make up our world, filled with tiny, extremely powerful beings. The movie also, not for nothing, asks you to believe that anti-vaccine rally attendant Evangeline Lilly runs a foundation that uses science to better the planet. Plus, it imagines a reality in which multiple people are extremely mean to Paul Rudd. But the most difficult thing to fathom, especially for fans, is that Marvel created a lackluster superhero movie. While one’s personal feelings toward Marvel largely hinge on how much one likes superhero movies, the general consensus is that Marvel — over the past 15 years — has figured out the formula on how to create a competent, if not extremely thrilling, superhero movie. While Quantumania hauled in $120 million domestically on opening weekend, the biggest for any Ant-Man movie, it received the worst aggregated review score in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The poor ratings aren’t exactly what Marvel wants to see, given that Quantumania kicks off Phase 5 in the MCU, a new chapter of the studio’s storytelling design that will focus on the multiverse and the villain known as Kang (Jonathan Majors). While Quantumania’s final box office haul is yet to be determined, Marvel hasn’t had a breakaway hit in a minute. With the exception of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home (a collaboration with Sony), no Marvel movie released in 2022 has surpassed $1 billion worldwide, a feat Marvel was achieving regularly in 2018 and 2019, the years leading up to Avengers: Endgame. Quantumania’s poor critical scores remain an outlier, but the studio’s recent crop of movies haven’t seen the same acclaim previous films achieved. For the first time in a long time, and going by Marvel’s own lofty standards, the entertainment juggernaut seems to be in a bit of a rut. Quantumania was supposed to be a new chapter for Marvel The Marvel hangover feels so urgent and immediate in large part because Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is one of the studio’s weakest movies. The visual creativity — the shrinking and enlarging of things — seen in the previous Ant-Man films was largely absent. Characters were underwritten, like Kang’s explanation-free desire to eliminate universes and Cassie’s (Kathryn Newton) relentless negging of her superhero dad. Lilly’s Wasp was barely noticeable in a movie that’s supposedly about her character, a choice that might have to do with the actress’s promotion of anti-vax propaganda during the pandemic. And perhaps the most egregious fault is that Quantumania itself felt like a mishmash of previous Marvel movies — from the way the Quantum Realm was depicted as an alien world (Guardians of the Galaxy) to featuring a kid genius caught up in a problem much bigger than they bargained for (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever or Spider-Man: No Way Home) to the theme of parents not telling their children about a big evil (literally all of The Thor movies, the first Black Panther, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). The overall effect was a movie that didn’t have the spirit of the previous Ant-Man movies and also wasn’t breaking any new ground. It truly felt like Marvel was phoning it in, making a movie just to tease its next few movies. It’s one thing to be bad while trying to do something ambitious. Quantumania awfulness feels more egregious because it stems from a lack of ambition. Coupled with the tepid critical reception to Thor: Love and Thunder (64 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (74 percent), and the similarly disappointing Eternals (47 percent), Marvel’s batting average has taken a hit. Marvel Kathryn Newton and Paul Rudd in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Newton plays Cassie Lang, Scott Lang’s daughter, who is a total jerk. If you zoom out a bit, you start to realize that Marvel’s previous success only amplifies its recent flops. From after 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron until 2019’s Endgame, no Marvel movie dipped below a 79 percent aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes. Marvel was clinically efficient at creating enjoyable superhero movies. They were fun. They had that signature Marvel voice. Black Panther, the best movie of the bunch, was nominated for Best Picture. Even if some of those movies weren’t blazingly unique, they managed to check all the boxes of what people want in a superhero flick. And having an endpoint like Endgame — which was hyped up as the conclusion of a decade of Marvel cinema — helped pull in focus and streamlined the storytelling of its preceding movies. Endgame’s finality also helped the box office haul, as people wanted and needed to see the movies leading up to the big finale. Movies like Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel soared past the $1 billion worldwide benchmark. Now, without an Endgame-like movie on the horizon — understandable because it took a decade to create that phenomenon — Marvel looks much more vulnerable than it did a few years ago. The Multiverse is really complicated and ... a bit of a slog The MCU is now hyperfocused on the concept of the multiverse: the idea that there are many timelines running parallel to the main timeline of the MCU, with different versions of the heroes (see: the Spider-Men in No Way Home) and villains we know. The villain known as Kang and his variants present the biggest threat to this series of alternate realities. Endgame started the entire thing. In that film, we learned that if the heroes could shrink themselves (Ant-Man’s specialty) and enter the Quantum Realm, where time functions more slowly, they could time-travel into the past, obtain Infinity Stones, and defeat big bad Thanos. The Avengers then had to return their Infinity Stones to the respective timelines to keep them alive. After Endgame, Marvel expanded on the ripple effect of the Avengers’ tinkering with the multiverse. Marvel. Jonathan Majors as Kang. Kang wants to destroy parallel universes but doesn’t really explain what he’s gonna rule if he destroys all of them? It’s weird! Loki, the Disney+ television series spinoff, centered on a variant of the Thor villain who uncovers an entire agency tasked with eliminating stray timelines. No Way Home sees Doctor Strange scramble this all up, introducing Spider-Man and villain variants to the main MCU timeline, thanks to a spell gone awry. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduced America Chavez, a character whose superpower allows her to travel throughout the multiverse. Now Quantumania has established that Kang and his variants present an existential threat because of their power to eliminate entire universes. As a concept, all of these parallel universes and all these variants are harder to grasp than Thanos, the all-powerful bad guy who wanted to decimate the universe’s population. And at times, Marvel hasn’t done the best job of guiding the audience through this complicated proposition. Casual fans might find themselves confused, especially since Multiverse of Madness and Quantumania rely heavily on the audience retaining deep knowledge of the television series Loki and Wandavision. Yet, despite the assurance that all these television shows and movies are connected, the studio hasn’t actually defined the order in which all these interactions with the multiverse take place. Nor has it distinctly shown us the continuity theory it posited: that tinkering with the multiverse in the first place has a ripple effect, perhaps an immense one, on the future. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that for such a tantalizing concept of unlimited, infinite potential, Marvel has only scratched the surface. While No Way Home executed the idea in the clearest way with its multiple Spider-Men (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) —cleverly wielding nostalgia for those previous movies to really illustrate the idea of heroes having alternate, disparate lives that matter — that’s only one successful offering so far. In Multiverse of Madness, a movie that promises both multiverse and madness, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) are just lazily jumping back and forth between two of the infinite worlds at their disposal, always played by the same actors, and having little to say about their lives. Similarly, Quantumania shows off a Quantum Realm that felt like any other planet in a Star Wars universe. Supposedly, this is a vast and limitless world beneath our own, but in the end it just felt well, small. And Kang, who is supposed to be this mythical, universe-skipping foe, just seems to have the usual Marvel villain fare of laser beams with a nifty suit. Marvel has sold the multiverse as a theory of endless possibility, yet it hasn’t shown the cinematic imagination to fully capture its gravity. We’re missing the heart and soul of the MCU The biggest thing missing in Marvel movies is quite obvious: the star power and chemistry of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, and Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America. The two, along with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, were the core that Marvel built its entire universe around. Even though other characters were introduced, like Ant-Man, Falcon, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel kept the story revolving around those three characters and made them the heart and soul of the MCU. Downey’s and Evans’s contracts were up with Endgame, which saw Stark sacrificing himself to save the world and Rogers retiring from superhero duty. And despite Marvel having more heroes than ever, no one has filled those shoes. The most obvious successor was the late Chadwick Boseman who played T’Challa, the Black Panther. Boseman, playing the king of the hyper-advanced African country Wakanda, was going to be the next face of Marvel before his death in 2020. He brought a dignity to the role and was integral in making Black Panther the most critically acclaimed Marvel movie to date. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which was released in 2022, reflected the grief of losing and saying goodbye to the star. Marvel Evangeline Lilly (L) has about five lines and frowns about three times in a movie where she plays one of the titular characters. Next in line would probably be Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. No Way Home, which grossed over $1.9 billion worldwide, is the most successful Marvel superhero movie since Endgame by a big margin. But it’s difficult to see Marvel making Holland their crown jewel without sole custody of the webslinger, especially since Sony has increasingly teased that Holland’s Spider-Man would be the center of his own Sony-driven cinematic universe (which would ostensibly include Tom Hardy’s Venom and Jared Leto’s Morbius). When it comes to the Marvel superheroes, none have really set themselves apart in a crowded field. Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange is snarky and biting like Stark but was upstaged by Olsen’s Maximoff in his own movie (in which she was killed off). Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord is the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but Pratt himself has been plagued by a likability issue, which culminated in him being named the “Worst Chris” in Hollywood. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, a.k.a. Carol Danvers, suffered from a solo movie that didn’t do the hero justice — Danvers spends most of the movie dealing with alien amnesia. Larson has also had to deal with flak from a number of toxic, sexist fans. That said, it’s also difficult to stick out of the crowd when Marvel is constantly pumping out movies establishing new heroes like Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi and the alien beings known as the Eternals, alongside TV projects introducing other heroes like Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac). Even Sam Wilson’s (Anthony Mackie) new title as Captain America was given via television series, easily lost in the jumble if one weren’t paying attention. It was easy to make Downey and Evans stars when they had the space to tell their stories. It’s much more difficult for actors, even extremely talented ones, to shine when there are several Marvel movies and television series each year, with the studio telling fans they’re all important. I guess you could make the argument that the MCU doesn’t need singular heroes to shine, but at the moment, what Marvel has feels rudderless. That said, it’s relevant to remember that Marvel’s flop era is completely relative. Any studio would be happy to make 31 movies over 15 years with each one making hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. But Marvel isn’t just any studio, and it set its own bar with the overwhelming success of that 2015-2019 run. The floppy feeling is that the MCU, in the four years since 2019 (which of course includes a worldwide pandemic that altered our moviegoing habits), doesn’t have the same kind of magic it once did. Marvel seems to recognize this as much as anyone. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly this month, Marvel president Kevin Feige said that the studio plans to slow down the production of its Disney+ shows and space out its films. It’s unclear if more space and time would be given to film teams and then result in better movies, but it may alleviate the feeling of glut or superhero fatigue that some fans could be feeling. At the same time, it also makes the MCU more accessible to casual fans who aren’t tuning in to every television show and seeing every movie. The move could also allow Marvel to pinpoint its more charismatic stars and figure out how to get the best out of them, as it once did with Downey and Evans. There might be some kind of panic setting in for Marvel fans at the idea of slowing things down and possibly cutting future projects because it seems like there’ll be less of the stuff they love. But it’s important to remember that Marvel became what it is today by taking a big chance and giving audiences something they’ve never seen before. It feels as good a time as any to do that again.

Preview: Pay increases for hospital executives have dwarfed the growth in compensation for clinical staff like doctors and nurses. | Luiz C. Ribeiro/NY Daily News via Getty Images Some hospital CEOs quadrupled their salaries in a few years while nurses’ pay largely stayed stagnant. Hospital executives are seeing their compensation increase at even faster rates than previously calculated, according to new research out of North Carolina, even as many of them continue to fall short in providing charity care to their most marginalized patients. The pay disparity between hospitals’ administrative staff and clinical staff is exploding: Some of the individual hospital CEOs covered in the study saw their salaries increase by more than 700 percent in just a few years, while doctors and nurses got a fraction of that salary increase, 15 to 20 percent, across an entire decade. Compensation for health system CEOs and other executives has been the subject of much press scrutiny. Activists and lawmakers have called for hospitals to take the money they are paying their leadership and spend it on patient care. Nurses unions in labor standoffs used it to justify their decision to strike (or threaten to strike) unless their hospitals acted to increase compensation for clinical staff and otherwise improve their working conditions. There isn’t enough money to be gained from cutting executive pay to ameliorate all American health care problems. But the disconnect between the soaring pay of hospital leaders and the plight of nurses and patients is a symptom of a dysfunctional health system that too often prioritizes moneymaking — even for systems technically classified as nonprofits — over patient care. That’s especially true since many hospitals use aggressive tactics to extract payments from low-income patients and fail to deliver the community benefit that justifies their nonprofit status. “Existing evidence suggests that hospital CEO pay is not meaningfully tied to quality of care or patient safety,” the authors of this new study, commissioned by North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell and peer-reviewed by academics at Rice University and Johns Hopkins, wrote. “Instead, experts have warned that too many hospital CEOs and top tier executives are financially incentivized to cut costs and boost revenue in ways that threaten patient safety and hurt affordability.” The researchers reviewed executive compensation from nine of the state’s largest hospital systems from 2010 to 2021, using tax filings and other public data to paint a broad if still incomplete picture. Two publicly owned hospitals were not required to fully disclose what they pay their leadership, which left researchers to rely on press reports and other data sources. But if anything, they point out, that means they are only underestimating the executives’ pay. The study’s most notable finding was that previous attempts to assess the growth of hospital leaders’ pay appear to actually underestimate how quickly compensation for these executives is increasing. One prior study, which measured CEO pay from 2005 to 2015, found CEO salaries rose nationally by 93 percent over that period — meaning they almost doubled over a decade. The North Carolina researchers used a smaller but more detailed data set that let them track personnel turnover at those positions, a “missing link” in previous research “that inadvertently concealed an explosion in hospital CEO pay,” as they put it. As it turns out, most individual hospital CEOs in North Carolina actually doubled their salary within just five years, half the time previously indicated. Here’s how to understand the unique methodological trick the researchers applied to uncover this trend. Previous studies would generally look at the salary of a CEO at a given hospital one year, then look at the CEO salary at the same hospital a little later — say, 10 years later — and compare the two, even if a different person who started at a different salary became CEO during that time. Say the prior CEO had made $2 million in 2010 and then left and a new CEO was hired. By 2021, the new CEO was also making $2 million. It would appear, at first glance, as if executive pay had been essentially unchanged over that period. But that method of evaluating the data could in theory mask an enormous increase in compensation for the new CEO. Let’s say, hypothetically, that the new CEO was hired in 2015, making $1 million, By 2019, they were making $2 million, doubling their salary in five years, a trend you can only detect when tracking the compensation for individual hospital leaders, as the North Carolina researchers did. The researchers discovered this kind of scenario playing out in the real world. At Duke Health, for example, CEO Eugene Washington was making $1.2 million less in 2021 than his predecessor had been in 2010. But what those topline numbers do not reveal is Washington had doubled his compensation from his initial starting salary within four years. Some of the other examples were even more egregious: Atrium Health CEO Gene Woods more than quadrupled his salary in six years, and Mission Health CEO Ronald Paulus saw his paycheck grow by more than 700 percent in less than a decade. Those pay increases for hospital leadership dwarfed the average growth nationwide in compensation for clinical staff like doctors and nurses. Family physician wages increased by 23 percent from 2010 to 2019; registered nurses saw their pay rise by just 15 percent over the same period. According to the North Carolina researchers, the state’s nine largest nonprofit hospital systems paid 11 current or former CEOs a total of $38.7 million in 2019. That is equivalent to the salaries of 572 registered nurses, who were making about $68,000 on average in North Carolina that same year. At the same time that hospital executives saw their salaries skyrocket, many of their facilities failed to provide the “community benefit” that is supposed to justify their nonprofit status. Patients who should have received charity care at North Carolina hospitals have instead been billed at least $150 million for medical services in recent years. In 2020, the state’s nonprofit health systems enjoyed $1.8 billion in tax breaks — but only one of them provided enough charity care to offset that tax exemption. Taken together, the study paints a picture of hospital executives enriching themselves at the expense of vulnerable patients and overworked staff. The authors urged lawmakers to require transparency from all hospitals on executive compensation and stricter enforcement of the community benefit requirements that nonprofit facilities are supposed to abide by. Those would be steps toward a more equitable health system, they wrote, than the one described in their report.

Preview: As the Ukraine war enters its second year, both Ukraine and Russia still believe they can achieve their objectives on the battlefield. | Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A year into the conflict, what’s next? Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine one year ago, igniting the largest conflict in Europe in decades. In that year, tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have likely died, along with thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Millions fled: more than 8 million Ukrainians to Europe and Russia, and another 6 million displaced within Ukraine. Harder to gauge is the exodus from Russia of people who opposed the war or did not want to fight in it. The conflict has decimated Ukraine’s economy, and Russian bombing campaigns have destroyed or damaged swaths of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. This is the state of play as the Ukraine war enters year two. Both Ukraine and Russia still believe they can achieve their objectives on the battlefield, which makes it hard to see any clear pathway to a negotiated end to the conflict. But that could change, depending on how the next weeks, and months, unfold. And depending on how they do, it may raise new questions — like just how sustainable the West’s “unwavering support” is, or how much longer Russia can pursue its current strategy. Wars are unpredictable, and Ukraine has proven that again and again. Below are some of the big unknowns as the war reaches, and exceeds, the year mark. 1) Who’s winning right now — and what’s next in the war? After months of troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders, Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, from multiple fronts, bombarding cities across the country, with Kyiv, the capital, as the main target. Kyiv did not fall. Not in a matter of days, as predicted, and not a full year into the war. A creative and resilient Ukrainian resistance combined with confounding logistical and tactical missteps from the Russian military transformed the contours of the conflict. Russia refocused its efforts on the east and the south, and the war became a grinding battle in the Donbas. In the late summer and fall, Ukraine launched successful counteroffensives, retaking some 400 square miles of territory. Ukrainians pushed into the areas near Kharkiv and recaptured the key city of Lyman, in the Donetsk region. In November, Ukraine forced a Russian retreat to the other side of the Dnipro River in Kherson. The front lines have remained largely the same since, with no decisive advantage for either Russia or Ukraine right now. Russia used its partial mobilization to bring more people to the front, shoring up defensive lines that made it harder for Ukraine to keep pushing forward. Ukraine has also dug in, preparing for a possible Russian attack. A mild, muddy winter also made any major moves difficult. Here are today's control-of-terrain maps for #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats Click here to see our interactive map, updated daily: https://t.co/tXBburiWEN pic.twitter.com/B2BaERsKzn — ISW (@TheStudyofWar) February 22, 2023 Russia has tried to take Bakhmut in Donetsk for months, and while troops are advancing — taking nearby towns, like Soledar — it has been very slow and very costly. It is an attritional battle, with high casualties, especially for Russia, which has been relying on prison recruits associated with the Wagner Group as cannon fodder in combat. Russia’s continued push around Bakhmut now looks to be part of a larger Russian offensive that started a few weeks ago. Russia is attacking along multiple fronts, rather than launching one big push. It is making some incremental gains, but with limited strategic value so far. And as this offensive unfolds, hints of the Russian military’s dysfunction continue. The US estimates Russia has committed about 80 percent of its available forces to Ukraine, but Russia is struggling to make significant advances. In Vuhledar, in the southeast, Ukrainian officials estimate that Russia expended dozens of armored fighting vehicles and tanks, and suffered staggering casualties. UK Defense Secretary Benjamin Wallace said “a whole Russian brigade was effectively annihilated” there. Still, the Ukrainian military has also used lots of ammunition and firepower in fending off these advances. It is burning through thousands of rounds of ammunition daily, at a rate potentially faster than it can be replaced by Western backers. Ukraine is likely gearing up for its own counteroffensive in the spring, but it will need more munitions, along with the Western tanks and infantry fighting and armored vehicles that have been promised. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has described it as a “race against logistics” between Ukraine and Russia, and their respective backers. All of this makes it hard to see exactly how either Russia or Ukraine could dramatically shift the front lines in the next weeks or months. The attritional nature of the war is straining resources on both sides. Ukraine still has momentum from last fall, but Russia’s retreat allowed it to take up more defensible positions — for example, on the other side of the Dnipro in Kherson. That will make it that much harder for Ukraine to break through this time around. There are also questions about how new, more advanced Western weapons might influence the battlefield — and when promised support, like tanks, will get to the front lines, and what that will mean for Ukraine’s own likely counteroffensive. 2) How much more can the West give to Ukraine — and will it want to? President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv this week, almost a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion. He pledged the US’s “unwavering support,” and announced more military support for Ukraine. The United States has committed billions in assistance to Ukraine; $111 billion appropriated through Congress alone. As of the end of last year, the European Union had committed as much as 52 billion euros to Ukraine. The coalition supporting Ukraine most recently pledged advanced tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, which Ukraine lobbied hard for in recent months and which some see as essential to any Ukrainian counteroffensive. The debate is now shifting to whether the West should start supplying Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been an extraordinarily effective advocate for his country. That, combined with Ukraine’s successes on the battlefields, helped overcome some of the potential hesitation in Western capitals about backing Kyiv. But there are real questions about the sustainability and longevity of this support, for two reasons: practical limitations and political will. The practical first: The West does not have unlimited stockpiles of weapons. The longer the war goes on, the harder it will be for governments to meet Ukraine’s artillery, ammunition, and air defense needs without depleting their own stores and compromising their own military readiness. Officials have been warning about this publicly and privately for months, even as Zelenskyy is pushing Ukraine’s backers to deliver more weapons, faster. Right now, Western officials are trying to find ways to balance both needs. The US and Europe are trying to ramp up production of armaments; the Pentagon is raising its production of artillery shells by 500 percent in two years. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently said that the US and its partners are trying to help train Ukrainian soldiers in different maneuver tactics on the battlefield so they can preserve more ammunition. This is all linked to the second pillar of Western support: political will. Right now, Western allies remain committed to Ukraine — a theme diplomats and leaders have continued to reiterate as the war’s year mark approaches. But the rush to ramp up weapons aid and the push to show a united front comes with a bit of subtext: Ukraine needs to show that it can keep making gains on the battlefield in the coming weeks and months. If it’s unable to dramatically change the map in its expected counteroffensive, and Ukraine and Russia stay engaged in this attritional battle, trading towns here and there while exhausting ammo, the reality of a long, drawn-out war may change the calculations in Brussels, Berlin, and Washington. “This is not an endless source of assistance. Everyone understands that in the West, and that at some point, there has to be a line drawn, where it’s no longer sustainable for us,” said Sergiy Kudelia, an associate professor of political science at Baylor University. In Washington right now, there is general bipartisan consensus around continued support to Ukraine. Some Republicans have talked about reining in some of the spending for Kyiv, and those voices might get louder with time, especially if the US economy sours or other crises eclipse Ukraine. The number of Americans who say they support keeping up weapons aid and other assistance to Ukraine is also declining, an issue that may take on even more relevance as the 2024 presidential election comes into focus. The rush to ramp up weapons aid and the push to show a united front comes with a bit of subtext: Ukraine needs to show that it can keep making gains on the battlefield in the coming weeks and months In Europe, even as leaders express solidarity with Ukraine, there have been more signals about the need to find a diplomatic solution out of the conflict. Europe has its own divisions, particularly between the more hawkish former Soviet states closer to Ukraine and Russia, and the rest of the continent. Europe’s effort to wean itself off Russian gas — and Russia’s cutoff of fuel — threatened to fracture unity this year, but the energy crisis didn’t materialize as starkly as expected thanks to a mild winter, conservation efforts, and investments in other sources of energy. But the continent is still dealing with high costs of living and is now hosting about 5 million Ukrainian refugees. The European public is largely still supportive of backing Ukraine in the war, but moods differ depending on the country. Right now, the West seems willing to give Ukraine what it needs, to let Kyiv capitalize on this particular moment. But Ukraine is unlikely to recapture all of the territory within its internationally recognized borders, and this war could start to turn into a stalemate. If that happens, it may give way to a new kind of Western solidarity: one that supports Ukraine but also begins to quietly pressure them to negotiate. “That kind of pressure will come from reversals on the battlefield, and political pain at home — whether it’s energy or inflation,” said Jim Townsend, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy. Putin is banking he can outlast the West’s commitment to Ukraine, so there’s an incentive and an imperative for the US and its partners to make any signals quietly. Few are naive about how incredibly difficult this will be, and how untrustworthy a negotiating partner Putin has proven to be. But even if the war ended tomorrow, Ukraine requires massive investments to rebuild, and likely some sort of security guarantees and continued security assistance. Russia and Ukraine will be neighbors forever, no matter what. 3) How long can Russia wage war? The Russian military has made missteps, big ones, and is suffering heavy losses of both manpower and equipment. The country has reportedly deployed the majority of mobilized troops to Ukraine, and there are real questions about how well equipped, supplied, and trained those soldiers are, especially for counteroffensive operations. But Russia started the war with a much larger arsenal and population, which will help it sustain its side of the conflict. And as Putin’s speech on the eve of the invasion anniversary again made clear, Russian leaders are preparing the Russian public for a long war. Putin illegally annexed four Ukraine regions (Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) in the fall of 2022, though Russia didn’t fully control any of those regions. A 2020 constitutional amendment makes it illegal for a Russian leader to cede any territory once it’s been declared part of Russia, which means it is going to be politically very difficult for Putin to give up the effort to take those areas, either militarily or through some sort of negotiated settlement. “Doubling down isn’t merely the choice that they made, but it’s also, increasingly, the only choice they’ve left themselves,” said Gavin Wilde, a Russia expert and senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s hard for me to discern whether that’s self-sabotage or an effort to get the West to understand — or the US in particular — how existential they’ve chosen to make this conflict, and all the escalatory implications that that entails.” Ihor Tkachov/AFP via Getty Images This aerial photograph shows a damaged church, used by Russian troops as a makeshift hospital, in the village of Mala Komyshuvakha, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, on February 22, 2023. Militarily, there are still very real questions about whether Moscow has solved any of its manpower and equipment problems. Russia is reportedly suffering a staggering number of casualties, both of its troops and of its prison recruits from the Wagner Group. The human wave attacks, beyond being terrifyingly gruesome, are unlikely a real long-term strategy. But a grinding war likely still favors Russia. Russia just doesn’t have the same type of time pressure as Ukraine to prove it can keep winning — or, at least right now, there’s no real indication that it does. Putin’s regime looks pretty stable for the moment. “We’ve seen very successful management of both elite defections — there are no visible cracks in Putin’s ruling elites — and also of societal discontent, even with mobilization. There were minor protests here and there, but by and large, it was contained,” Kudelia said. As Russia launches this new offensive, and if it continues to struggle on the battlefield — while also incurring major casualties — both elite and public opinion in Russia could splinter. This is by no means predicting some sort of unraveling of Putin’s power, but it may shape how Russia, or Putin, frames or fights this conflict. Another thing that might affect elite and public opinion: the further isolation of the Russian economy. So far, the Kremlin has also proved pretty darn resilient against Western sanctions, including on its banking sector, technology imports, and oil and gas. These penalties are hurting Russia, but they are not a fatal blow to its economy — which shrank, but not dramatically. “They are hurting, but they are not hurting to the point that could get Putin to change his calculus,” Emily Harding, deputy director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on a recent panel discussion. There are a bunch of reasons for this. The Russian state intervened in ways that helped soften the sting of sanctions. Sanctions are extensive, but many, like those on energy, are still limited in scope. The US, Europe, and other partners — about 30 total — signed on to some version of sanctions, but the rest of the world did not. Those gaps, including from major economies like China and India, have made sanctions less effective and offered Russia a financial lifeline. The US and its partners are continuing to impose additional sanctions, but this is largely tightening existing penalties and an effort to close gaps in sanctions that Russia or its friends could exploit. One area where sanctions do seem to be working is on technology imports, specifically the kind of advanced tech required for modern weapons — everything from helicopters to precision munitions. Russia has tried to get around this through sanctions evasion and repurposing chips from commercial products to replace or repair equipment. But this isn’t sustainable in the long term, and over time, Russia’s military capabilities are likely to be severely weakened. Russia may already be conserving things like precision-guided missiles. Russia is also facing other constraints. Like Ukraine, it is tearing through its stocks of ammunition and artillery. Russia has mobilized many, many soldiers, but all of those troops need to be equipped, and Russian industry also has limitations. This is why Russia is reportedly getting things like artillery from North Korea and drones from Iran (two countries also under heavy sanctions, for what it’s worth). But if China actually does step in and give military assistance to Russia, as the US has warned, that could give Moscow a boost. All of this is to say that Russia is facing real challenges militarily and economically, but none of it yet seems like the knockout punch. And, importantly, none so far seem to have shifted Putin’s calculus. 4) What has the Ukraine war taught us about conflict now? The Ukraine war is already one of the bloodiest and deadliest of this century, if not longer. The US government estimated last year that battlefield casualties for both Russia and Ukraine exceeded some 200,000. It is likely much higher than that now. Add to that the civilian casualties, which the United Nations estimates to be about 7,000 killed and nearly 12,000 injured, much of it “caused by the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, including shelling from heavy artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, missiles and air strikes.” The UN also believes these figures to be an undercount. The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine. The Ukraine war has “reminded everybody how horrible war is, and how horrible it could get — and that’s without even using nuclear weapons,” said Joseph Nye, a US foreign policy expert and university distinguished service professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. That war is brutal and horrible is not exactly a new observation, but the war in Ukraine is both a war of the future and a war of the past. Technological advances on the battlefield — tools like drones — are reshaping the war, but they’re also not transforming conflict into something never before seen. Right now, traditional instruments of war — ammunition, artillery, armored vehicles, ground troops, trenches — are anchoring this conflict. “This is a war of incremental, not dramatic, transformation. I think everyone expected perhaps a transformation, or replacement of conventional warfare with new cyber means and using AI and new technologies. What we’re actually seeing is, all of that is happening alongside conventional warfare,” said Branka Marijan, senior researcher on military and security implications of emerging technologies at Project Ploughshares. “Artillery’s still important; that’s not going to go away. If you want to hold territory, you’re still going to need to deploy troops. You’re still going to use tanks.” Militaries are learning that even as they invest in new technologies like cyber and artificial intelligence, they can’t forgo stockpiles of artillery, either. “Lesson one is really: you need to buy stockpiles for the long war,” said Cynthia Cook, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group and a senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But having the tools to fight a war, whether artillery or precision missiles, only goes so far. Before the war, Russia, on paper, had the world’s second strongest military. “Morale to organization, to training to logistics, to doctrine and strategy, those are all human things that you can’t automate your way out of, you can’t necessarily innovate your way out of,” Wilde said. And on the battlefield and off, the Ukraine war has shown the limitations on how much countries can innovate out of the brutality of war.

Preview: People standing near a Ukrainian national flag watch as dark smoke billows following an airstrike in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, on March 26, 2022. | Aleksey Filippov/AFP via Getty Images The US never had an exit strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan. Does it have one for Ukraine? The United States is good at getting involved in wars and not as good at getting out of them. A year on, the Russia-Ukraine war has no end in sight. The war is at a semi-stalemate, and both Russia and Ukraine are sticking to their demands. Ukraine has been able to defend itself against Russian aggression in large part due to the $29.8 billion worth of weapons and equipment that the US has sent so far. While the US has hit some limits, it is sending ever more advanced weaponry and provides Ukraine with intelligence to help it target Russia more effectively. Ukraine cannot continue the war without Western military and economic support. All of which raises the question of whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict is entering forever war territory. The US’s post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan turned into decades-long conflicts because the objectives kept shifting, because they were guided by ideological goals, and because they were enabled by legal authorizations that gave policymakers room to expand the wars. The situation in Ukraine is obviously different from US engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan — for one, the US does not have troops on the ground in Ukraine. But when I asked former high-ranking military officials and national security experts about the risk of protracted war in Ukraine, they told me that those other forever war factors are currently present in the US’s support for the Ukraine war. The Biden administration does not view the war as endless. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in October, “certainly we don’t want to see a forever war,” and he blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war’s continuation. But there’s a lot of time between here and forever. And in statement after statement after statement, officials describe the US’s enduring commitment to Ukraine. (Neither the White House nor the Pentagon replied to interview requests.) “This is going to be a generational conflict between the West and Russia,” says historian Michael Kimmage of Catholic University, who has researched Putin’s strategy in the war. “The further the West moves in, the more Putin is going to be motivated to keep on going,” he told me. “This is going to be the mother of all forever wars, because of the nature of the adversary.” So what can the US learn from its interventions in its Middle East forever wars? In the first year of the Iraq War, a young Gen. David Petraeus said he would repeat the mantra to himself, “Tell me how this ends.” These days, Petraeus is retired from active duty and shares on social media daily Ukraine war situation reports from the Institute for the Study of War, where he is a board member. “I think the most important question has to do with how one might see this war ending,” Petraeus wrote in an email. “Related to that is the critical question of what needs to be done to convince Vladimir Putin that the war in Ukraine is not sustainable for Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine and also on the home front in Russia.” But there are other ways of posing the question. Thomas Pickering, a former career ambassador who served in Russia and rose to be undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, says the potential for a nuclear conflict means the US does have to think about “whether it would make sense to try to terminate the war on an advantageous but not perfect basis.” “I don’t [think] Ukraine has to become a forever war or even a frozen conflict; in fact, we need to do everything that we and our allies and partners can to enable Ukraine and ensure that this does not become a forever war,” Petraeus, now a partner at the private equity firm KKR, added. Talking about how and why Ukraine is becoming a forever war, then, is a fine place to start. Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan The global war on terrorism was a sprawling and ill-defined project. After 9/11, the US was responding to an attack on its soil, but then the George W. Bush administration expanded its international campaign to target not just al-Qaeda but the concept of terrorism — one that somehow the US is still fighting today. Though President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, US troops are still in the Middle East, and many aspects of the counterterrorism wars endure. The way that Bush’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began made that possible. Congress approved a joint resolution against threats to the US homeland in 2001 that was so broad that it evolved as the threats did. That vote authorized the use of military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” connected to the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002, Congress passed another broad authorization on Iraq that two decades later is used to counter the Islamic State terrorist group. The US’s goals in Iraq, for example, ran the gamut of eliminating the risk of purported weapons of mass destruction, regime change, nation-building, countering Iranian influence, and then debilitating ISIS. US troops remain there in 2023. And when there were opportunities to end the initial invasion of Afghanistan — like when hundreds of Taliban fighters surrendered to the US — the Bush administration rejected them. Even now, 18 months after the US withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan and more than a year after the US assassinated perhaps the last known planner of the 2001 attack, the initial authorization has yet to be repealed. As Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who voted against the authorization of military force in Afghanistan in 2001, warned just days after the 9/11 attacks: “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Some of the lessons of the Bush and Obama years seem to have been put into action. Strategists now recognize that a small footprint is better than a massive US presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, and that much can be accomplished by partnering with another country’s military (instead of having “boots on the ground”). From the first 20 years of the war on terrorism, the US learned well that corruption among recipients of aid is corrosive to US interests. That commanders on the ground offer overly rosy assessments of progress in a self-deceptive process that ends up extending the war is now a truism. Throughout, the American people are somewhat willing to ignore ongoing US wars, even when US soldiers are deeply involved. Mustafa Ciftci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Ukrainian soldiers attend shooting training near the frontline in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on February 18, 2022. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images A man sweeps near a poster depicting a Ukrainian soldier that reads “Unbreakable. Unconquered. Unstoppable” in Kyiv on February 22, 2023. But perhaps what the US ought to have learned from the forever wars is the importance of practicing humility and not underestimating one’s enemies. A more difficult lesson to put into practice is the importance of incorporating dialogue and negotiations with adversaries into policy. Mara Karlin, a top civilian strategist appointed by Biden to the Pentagon, wrote a 2021 book on what the US learned from the post-9/11 wars. In The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War, she details how wars without clear ends affect the morale, preparedness, and even civilian control of the military. Karlin warns of the danger of “overreacting to threats and attacks, as the United States did in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks” and of “under-responding, as the United States has done in its persistent inability to recognize and act on the growing security threats posed by China and Russia to the U.S.-led global order over the last decade or so.” Karlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. But that a key Pentagon leader in 2021 worried more about a US underreaction to Russia than the potential for another endless war shows how committed a leading strategist in the Biden administration may be toward a long-haul fight. How Ukraine can become America’s next forever war The striking parallel between the US’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing war in Ukraine is the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. The US role in supporting Ukraine has been framed as ideological. Biden from the get-go described the conflict in terms of good versus evil, democracy against autocracy. Does the US “stand for the defense of democracy?” Biden asked again in his recent State of the Union address. “For such a defense matters to us because it keeps the peace and prevents open season for would-be aggressors to threaten our security and prosperity.” And senior State Department official Victoria Nuland wrote in testimony to Congress last month that “Ukraine’s fight is about so much more than Ukraine; it is about the world our own children and grandchildren will inherit.” The Biden administration may believe that. But rhetoric like that is also how wars continue in perpetuity. It’s how the objectives creep, the goalposts shift. Ideological struggles are not so easy to win. By some metrics, the objectives that the US set out to achieve in Ukraine have already been achieved. Christopher Chivvis, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that the US in the past year has managed to avoid a direct war with Russia, made Russia suffer a strategic defeat, and kept the NATO alliance unified. Ukraine has also maintained its sovereign independence. Continued unqualified support is “good in the sense that it puts pressure on the Russians to try to moderate their more extreme objectives,” Chivvis told me. “But it’s not likely to get the Ukrainians to think seriously about restraining their own war aims, because they see the whole set of Western nations backing them to the hilt.” Though many experts told me that it’s time to begin plotting the contours of talks between Russia and Ukraine, neither side sees value in negotiating right now. The types of military support the West is giving to Ukraine — including US and German tanks and British promises to train Ukrainian pilots on their fighter jets — acknowledge this reality and could help contribute to it, argues Chivvis. The most advanced and heavy weaponry, like the US’s Abrams tanks, likely won’t arrive till next spring. “The trend is toward more and more military support to the Ukrainians, and they have no real reason as of now to limit their own war objectives,” says Chivvis, who previously worked as a US intelligence officer in Europe. “So it’s hard to see how it ends at this point.” And yet, the longer the war goes on, the more people will die in Ukraine and Russia, and the risks for the war to spiral out of control are real. As Pickering put it, the US risks stumbling into “an endless war punctuated by nuclear use.” What happens when the war keeps going The war to defend Ukraine may be more coherent than the war on terrorism, but it also appears ill-defined in terms of goals and strategies. Analysts who might not agree on much else do agree that there isn’t enough of a debate on what outcomes the US seeks. The Biden administration, for its unprecedented mustering of allies through NATO, Europe, and elsewhere, has left some gaps unfilled. Deferring to Ukraine, as Biden’s national security leaders have consistently done in public interviews, is not a strategy. Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images Ukrainian soldiers stand in the square in front of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv on February 20, 2023, after the visit of President Biden. Less attention has been paid to how this conflict might end in a way that serves US interests in Europe and the world, according to Samuel Charap, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. And those trying to have that conversation about how to end the war, he told me, are sometimes cast as Russian sympathizers. But there is an urgency to have these difficult conversations. “We know that, for example, conflicts that last more than a year are more than likely to continue to go on for 10 years,” Charap told me. “I don’t think that we should tolerate a war that stretches on for years, because if we do, it means that we are tolerating greater risk that the war will spread,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official who now directs the McCain Institute think tank. “If we knowingly accept a war that will go on for years, then I think we are taking on a moral hazard because Ukrainians are dying every month this war goes on.” The toll on human life is unfathomable, and the long-term effects on the country will be many. Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO now at the Atlantic Council think tank, is worried about how the wartime mentality has forever changed Ukrainian institutions. “We’re going to have to help Ukraine get back to normal,” he told me. “You have the presidential administration basically running everything. You have one centralized media operation for news for the country, which is highly censored,” Volker said. “These are things that can’t go on in a normal society. So they’re going to have to decentralize. They’re going to have to open new media outlets, going to have to have political pluralism in terms of political parties and competition — all kinds of things that they are not currently grappling with.” The rebuilding of Ukraine will require massive investments, too. The country’s energy infrastructure will need to be rebuilt, and just keeping its economy afloat in the meantime may require up to $5 billion a month, the International Monetary Fund has estimated. After the hot conflict ends, the US commitment will likely continue. But an end to the conflict seems increasingly hard to find. A Defense Department leader, Celeste Wallander, was recently asked at a Washington think tank event whether the Pentagon is planning for a negotiated outcome or an outright Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. “It is difficult ahead of time to precisely predict how an armed conflict will end,” Wallander said, though she did emphasize that “it ends in Russia’s strategic failure, no question,” and that the US will support the choices made by Ukraine as to whether it would negotiate with Russia. But Wallander and her colleagues in the Biden administration have left open the question of how the US would extricate itself from this conflict. Without having a clear answer of how this ends or how the US will get out, they presuppose that Washington will be in this war for the long haul.

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Preview: HOLLYWOOD—Rushing to gather as much footage as they could piece together from what was already available on the internet, panicked producers of the film Cocaine Bear were scrambling Friday to expand four minutes of social media clips into an actual movie. “Shit, we didn’t think anyone was actually going to expect an… Read more...

Preview: Russian president Vladimir Putin has announced that he will be suspending the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States when it expires in 2026, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. What do you think? Read more...

Preview: U.S.-MEXICO BORDER—Emphasizing that the event had left citizens feeling embarrassed and exposed, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced Friday that the nation had installed a 2,000-mile-long privacy curtain after Mexico saw it naked. “Starting today, the entire U.S.-Mexico border will be… Read more...

Preview: Studies show that 100% of men are sperm donors, yet many donors aren’t familiar with all the intricacies of the process. Here are things that no one tells you about being a sperm donor. Read more...

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Preview: AUGUSTA, GA—Lamenting how painfully obvious it was in retrospect, local man Aaron Thompson told reporters Friday he was kicking himself after thinking of the perfect gun he could have used to win an argument. “God, I feel so dumb, I just stood there like an idiot when the perfect semiautomatic weapon was staring me in… Read more...

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