South Carolina executes man days after witness admits to lying on stand

Submit your questions for Jennifer Rubin’s mail bag newsletter and live chat.

Whether it’s next week, next month, Christmas or April, you’re always going to hold your breath when Chytil takes a hit up high.

It is thought that some of the diamonds may have come from the necklace linked to a scandal that led to Marie Antoinette's death, Sotheby's said.

With paranormal investigations on the rise, due in part to the popularity of ghost-hunting tours, do-it-yourself ghost-hunting kits are in demand at libraries.

As an accessibility driver at New York City’s JFK airport, Melissa Jackson spends all day cheerily ushering other people toward the kinds of dream vacations she’ll never experience herself. The protagonist of Hulu’s How to Die Alone is terrified of flying—and even if she wasn’t, Mel can’t imagine scraping together enough money to travel. She has no savings, no real friends, and no romantic prospects. Naturally, she’s also afraid of falling in love.The new series, which Natasha Rothwell created and stars in, joins shows such as Insecure, Atlanta, Girls, and Broad City in capturing the ennui of a Millennial protagonist who feels stuck in place. But unlike those comedies about feckless 20-somethings, which premiered in the 2010s, How to Die Alone focuses on the arrested adolescence of a Millennial who’s now in her mid-30s, and still not doing much better. (Though Rothwell, who was born in 1980, is technically a young Gen Xer, she plays a 35-year-old on the show.) And as much as Mel might be to blame for aimlessly slogging through adulthood, How to Die Alone also depicts the hurdles that many of us in the new “lost generation” still face as we approach middle age.By now, the sociopolitical troubles plaguing Millennials are well documented: As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote in 2021, the “pandemic recession has led not-so-young adults to put off having kids, buying a house, getting married, or investing in a car—yet again.” And in the time since, many either are still playing catch-up or find themselves trapped in a precarious version of the American dream, all while watching the richest people in the country profit from those with limited economic mobility. Mel’s life is undeniably affected by these phenomena, and by the interpersonal trends that have sprung up alongside the economic challenges: Whereas her closest work friend is a rich kid who has a job only to satisfy a trust-fund requirement, she struggles just to afford astronomical living expenses. For her 35th birthday, the best thing Mel can splurge on is a dresser from a European home-goods store that’s meant to stand in for IKEA, a brand that’s come to symbolize Millennial domesticity—even as the products tend to crumble under repeated use, a metaphor in and of itself.Millennial-focused series have long nodded to the instability faced by a generation of perma-renters: Early in Insecure, for example, a dilapidated couch symbolized the decay in one couple’s relationship, and even after the sofa was replaced, the damage was done. Rothwell, who was the first writer hired on Insecure, rose to fame for playing Kelli, the character most removed from the dysfunction of the main cast. Kelli reliably served as a refreshing contrast to Issa, Insecure’s bumbling protagonist, in part because she seemed to have it together. Issa’s journey followed a common path, taking her closer to self-assurance as she crossed into her 30s, but Kelli—a fun-loving, outspoken accountant—seemed like she was already there from the start.Mel is a far cry from that confident tax professional. At the start of How to Die Alone, she sounds more like Atlanta’s fretful Princeton dropout, Earn, or one of the anxious miscreants on Girls—despite being several years older than all of those characters. Part of what fuels Mel’s insecurity is the persistent feeling that major milestones are passing her by as she ages, that she should have already figured things out by now—a sentiment that seems to be shared by many other Millennials. At one point, she negatively compares herself to the pop singer Lizzo, whose feel-good anthems captured a certain kind of Instagram-quotable girlboss optimism that became popular in the late Obama era. To Mel, Lizzo’s success at 35 is just another reminder that some people her age have managed to live out the promise of such idealistic visions.For all her worrying that being 35 makes her too old to achieve some goals, Mel also doesn’t feel like enough of an adult to climb the professional ranks. That, too, is now a common sentiment—and the show’s attention to it marks an interesting pivot from the career dilemmas reflected in previous generations’ pop-culture 30-somethings: Take Frasier Crane, the Kelsey Grammer character who was already an established psychiatrist when he first appeared as a guest on Cheers in 1984. Frasier certainly had career crises, mostly driven by his romantic failures. But as a Harvard-educated Boomer, he never seriously questioned whether he was capable of practicing medicine.[Read: “Gen Z” only exists in your head]And it wasn’t just white Ivy League alums who claimed success for themselves as they entered their 30s: In the pilot of Girlfriends, which premiered in 2000, Gen Xer Joan Clayton (Tracee Ellis Ross) was a 29-year-old attorney who not only excelled at her work but also lied about being younger to make the wins seem even more impressive. It’s clear which side of the sellout-DIYer binary she saw herself on, but in today’s economic conditions, most rungs on the corporate ladder simply have fewer benefits to offer. Working long hours at a law firm is no guarantee of affording a mortgage, much less in the historic Central Los Angeles, where Joan was a proud homeowner.How to Die Alone wrestles with what it even means to try when opportunities for career advancement come few and far between—and how Mel’s professional woes color her relationships with her family, her closest friend, and the ex she regrets leaving. Mel wasn’t born into wealth, but her mother and older brother seem comfortably middle-class, and they’re baffled by Mel resigning herself to a life of five-figure debt. Their frustrations with her don’t come solely from a place of judgment—like most families, they just can’t afford to cover Mel’s expenses indefinitely. Whatever grace they may have extended to her in the past seems to have expired as she edged further into her 30s, a decade when a woman floundering in her love life seems to draw as much condescension as one struggling with work does. The message is clear: Mel needs to get serious—now.Without spoiling too much, there’s an unlikely shift in their dynamic late in the season—but not because Mel gets a fancy new job. Thankfully, How to Die Alone doesn’t present a management-training program as her ticket to happiness, or even to self-actualization. Instead, the series spends considerable time exploring the unexpected sources of support around Mel, and nudging her to invest in the people who have always seen more in her. Although Mel still finds herself landing in some trouble later on, it’s clear that she’ll benefit from having let those people get closer—even if it means they’re witnessing her messiness up close. The chaos might not be fully resolved, but she finally grows up when she accepts that there’s no virtue in navigating it on her own.

“It’s really, really hard — if it’s your life — to see your life up on screen," Ryan Murphy said.

Hollywood celebrities, including "Star Wars" star Mark Hamill, director J.J. Abrams and SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher sign a letter urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign AI safety bill SB 1047.

While FanGraphs puts the Mets’ October opportunity at 76.2 percent, their chances seem even better than that.

Now with Week 3 in the books, The Post takes a look at some of the biggest winners and losers around the NFL. 

Was there competition or camaraderie between the fashionistas?

John Nacion/Getty ImagesPrince Harry may have gone public with his drug taking in his best-selling memoir, but his U.S. visa application will remain private, a judge has decided.U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols on Monday knocked back a lawsuit from the Heritage Foundation trying to force the government to release the exiled royal’s application to check if there was any mention of drug use.The conservative think tank—notoriously behind the infamous Project 2025 blueprint for right-wing governing—questioned whether Harry was properly vetted after “widespread and continuous” media coverage of his professed use of illegal substances.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Even in a time where there are far more second- and third-place finishers who qualify for playoff berths, first place still says something.

The conservative think tank argued the public had an interest in how the Department of Homeland Security handled Harry’s application given his past drug use.

The rosters are vastly different and the stakes are higher — because it seems likely one of these teams will miss the playoffs.

Joshua Freyermuth, 39, is accused of approaching the boy and his dog outside the home in Alliance, south-east of Akron, on Sunday and trying to lure him away, cops said.

What’s making our luxury list this week? Toteme’s second NYC outpost, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal share a stage, and Madonna’s guitars hit the auction block.   

The Dodgers, who have a three-game lead over the Padres in the NL West, will host San Diego for three games starting today

Real America’s VoiceJD Vance heaped praise on his running mate Donald Trump on Monday for continuing to play golf despite an alleged threat to his life.Speaking at an event in North Carolina, the Ohio senator hailed Trump as “a person who’s more worried about missing a birdie putt than he is about an assassin’s attempt on his own life.” That, Vance said, is “the definition of courage under fire, and Donald Trump has it in spades.”One man, Ryan Routh, was arrested aftet an apparent attempt to kill the presidential nominee as he played the course at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. Vance’s comments also came as it was revealed a second man, Warren Jones Crazybull, allegedly made repeated death threats against the former president via phone calls to security staff at Mar-a-Lago.Read more at The Daily Beast.

X Games gold medallist Tom Pages combined motocross and paragliding to produce a spectacular stunt dubbed the world's first ride and fly in the French Alps.

UCLA's game against No. 8 Oregon at the Rose Bowl will start at 8 p.m., the latest start time for the Bruins on the West Coast since 1990.

The Mets have already clinched tiebreakers over the Diamondbacks and Padres and are coming off a homestand in which they won six of seven.

Sophie Cunningham and her family have a running joke about her sultry tunnel fits.

A lone bull on the lam that was one of eight that escaped from a rodeo in a Massachusetts mall parking lot has been caught

A federal jury in Texas on Monday rejected voter intimidation allegations against all but one of a group of former President Donald Trump supporters who surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus.

Israel and Hezbollah continued to launch barrages of rockets and missiles Tuesday after at least 560 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

So with a potential wild card spot on the line, here’s a look at how the Mets and the Braves match up before their battle at Truist Park.

A pilot was killed, and another person was injured Sunday afternoon in a mid-air collision near Los Angeles, California, police said. 

Federal law enforcement officials called the case one of the largest counterfeit pill busts ever in New England.

The Los Angeles Kickers won multiple U.S. Open Cup titles in the 1950s and '60s. Players on those teams will be honored before Wednesday's final.

Education wasn't a topic when Trump and Harris debated, but it's a major concern. Parents and students are looking for policies that will help turn education around.

"In order to prevent more people from dying, we have to be honest about what we’re up against," writes Ryan Hampton.

The young and talented Orioles have fallen from neck-and-neck AL East contenders alongside the Yankees to also-rans with a second-half mini-collapse.

New rules on real-estate agent commissions require buyers to read the fine print carefully.

I felt tremendous shame,” Ta-Nehisi Coates confessed in November at a pro-Palestinian event called “But We Must Speak.” His shame, he told a rapt crowd near Columbia University, had arisen during a recent trip to Israel, his first. Long deceived by “all of the articles I’ve read,” he had assumed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was exceedingly complex, that “you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a Ph.D., to really understand what’s happening.” But when he was guided from Jerusalem to Hebron on a tour organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature, he found that the situation was far from complicated.He had confronted, he said, Israel’s “Jim Crow regime,” its “segregationist order,” enforced by the “biggest guns I’d ever seen in my life.” And given that he had been “reared on the fight against Jim Crow, against white supremacy,” he felt mortified by his years of blindness to the brutal simplicity of the Palestinian plight. “How,” he asked, “could I not know?”A year later, he is publishing The Message, a book of four essays; the first, serving as an introduction, is presented as an imaginary lecture to his writing students at Howard University. Addressing them as “comrades,” he pronounces that his mandate and theirs, as writers, is “doing their part to save the world.” Then come three essays built around racially or ethnically charged travel. The last and by far the longest piece is devoted to his single transformative visit to Israel. It is the book’s main reason for being, and it is a condemnation of the “elevation of complexity over justice,” which is “parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.” Coates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane.Yet an undercurrent of shame, in multiple forms, lies beneath his conviction: shame, partly, over having internalized the worldview of oppressors. Though quieter than other themes, it is a propulsive force—and it helps to explain, in the Israel essay, a stunning omission, a moral abdication.Coates opens his culminating essay on the tenth and final day of his Israel trip, at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial, where the first thing he sees is “not an exhibit but a row of twenty-odd soldiers in brown fatigues, carrying guns the size of small children.” He stares “longer than I should have. There was something incongruous about so many guns being so flagrantly wielded in so solemn a place. I knew that they were there to protect this site from those who would wish Hitler’s work more complete. But by then, I knew that that was not all the soldiers of this country were protecting.”As Coates moves through the Holocaust displays, he reels with raw feeling. But to absorb the rest of the essay, to reread and reread it, is to sense that his rendering of his experience inside Yad Vashem is strategic as well as sincere, a means of inoculating himself against charges of insensitivity or worse as he becomes purely polemical and takes up, without any complication, the Palestinian anti-colonial narrative. The row of soldiers at Yad Vashem is, in Coates’s mind, safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state, an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust,” by Israel’s self-congratulatory creation story of rising from victimization to strength and self-determination in “a God-given home.”Traveling in the West Bank, he observes that Palestinians collect rainwater in cisterns while Jewish country clubs fill their swimming pools with bountiful state-supplied water. In a Jewish settlement outside Hebron, he walks into a park named in honor of Meir Kahane, a Zionist extremist whose disciple, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994, slaughtered 29 Muslims worshiping at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, an ancient site venerated by both Muslims and Jews. Coates discusses the West Bank roads that Palestinians are forbidden to drive on, the checkpoints they’re subjected to, the state-perpetrated or state-permitted violence that stalks them constantly, the mass displacements that saturate their history. The list of injustices is long—and it is harrowing, though nearly every detail Coates offers may be familiar to anyone who has studied the conflict reasonably well. Jolting, too, if unsurprising in historical context, are the quotations Coates marshals to demonstrate that leading Zionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries thought and wrote in ruthlessly colonialist and racist terms.[Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism]Beneath the essay’s unremitting argument runs a set of powerful and convergent emotional forces, among them the shame and guilt Coates declared nearly a year ago and reiterates in The Message. Yet his sense of culpability is at once more precise and more sprawling than “How could I not know?” It involves a crime that he accuses himself of committing in the pages of this magazine—and which, he announced at the November event, he would be “making amends for until the day they put me in the ground.”In his 2014 Atlantic article calling on the United States to pay reparations for the ongoing effects of slavery and state-sponsored discrimination, Coates turned to the history of the young Jewish state and the reparations it received from Germany as an example of how beneficial such payments can be. He now vehemently repudiates that part of the article for its obliviousness to the oppression wrapped up in Israel’s birth and existence. “My words here,” he writes in the book’s Israel essay, are a personal “bid for reparation.”Within the failure Coates sees in the magazine article that launched him toward fame lie strata not only of guilt but also, it seems, of searing anger. Thinking back to when he wrote it, he remembers himself as a journalist all too willing to tread tactically and tactfully at the “hallowed and lauded” and white-led publication that gave him a platform, and all too ready to conform to what he believes is the governing Israel-friendly outlook of the mostly white media world. For Coates, it is a world infused by white supremacy and by a mindset that, even if only half-consciously, views Israel as an outpost of Western white hegemony. He recalls his feelings as a racial outsider advancing a marginalized argument about the need for U.S. reparations: “You are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories.” The story of Israel provided the perfect exemplar, a way to couch an outsider’s argument in an insider’s language. Now, he writes, he knows better about what Israel represents, but back then he was insecure, unquestioning, accepting. “I felt my deep ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders and, with that, a deep shame.”Though Coates’s Israel essay dominates the book, the other pieces are essential to fully understanding his motivations, as well as his willful blind spots, while he is there. The book’s second essay, about a trip to Dakar, Senegal, painfully evokes an acute sense of internalized inferiority: “The weight of my first trip to Africa—the many years it took me to actually go—is directly tied to … men like Josiah Nott, a nineteenth-century anthropologist, epidemiologist, and student of civilization. Nott was also a slaveholder” who called his anthropological specialty “Niggerology.” He deemed himself “the big gun of the profession,” a profession that, according to Coates, “had but one aim—assembling all the knowledge Nott could summon to prove we were inferior and thus fit for enslavement.”Coates’s candor is riveting. The long legacy of such racist anthropology made him reluctant to visit Africa. When he finally did, he found himself looking through a white-supremacist lens. In one of the best passages in the book, he recounts taking a taxi from the airport into Dakar on a beachside road. “All along that beach I saw what looked like the abandoned remnants of an outdoor training gym,” he writes, “and in the blur of our passing I saw yellow paint peeling from the machines to reveal the rusting metal beneath. I assumed that these pieces were the remains of some public works project gone wrong, and the sight of this ostensible failure immediately became a sign of our collective dysfunction, of the ‘Negro race’s’ irredeemably savage state. And hearing that voice in my mind, I came to a terrible realization.” It is that despite the Afrocentric lessons he learned from his parents, and despite the Afrocentric name they gave him, “I was still afraid that the Niggerologists were right about us.”Dakar starts to liberate him from this predatory fear. He buys “the most beautiful fabric I’d ever seen.” He is transfixed by the physical beauty of the people, which leaves him “amazed—too amazed, I think,” betraying “a deep insecurity, a shock that the deepest and blackest part of us is really beautiful.” But the liberation is fleeting. One night at dinner with a Senegalese writer and his wife, he hears about the widespread practice of skin-bleaching in Senegal. “The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here”—among “my lost siblings”—“was chilling.”The next morning, he takes a short ferry ride to the Gorée Island memorial, with its Door of No Return, long believed to be a point of embarkation for the Middle Passage. He is keenly aware that the importance of this place in the slave trade is likely more myth than history, that probably very few enslaved people passed through this port, that the idea of its being “any kind of origin point for Black America” is “imagined and dreamed up to fill an emptiness of a people told that they come from nothing and thus have done nothing and thus are nothing.”Despite the feelings of flimsiness and futility that surround the memorial, Gorée moves Coates to tears. Then, in a deft pivot, the memorial stirs thoughts of his father reading a book about a failed slave revolt in Guyana that ended with rebel leaders “collaborating with the very people who enslaved them.” The book leaves his father lamenting, “‘I don’t think we are ever going to get back to Africa.’ My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles.”[Read: Letter to my son]Sadly, such layered introspection is rare across Coates’s travels. Too often, his method isn’t nearly as subtle or searching, and this, combined with a reflexive self-involvement, tends to rob The Message of truly resonant insight in both Senegal and Israel.On the last night of Coates’s brief Dakar trip, the Senegalese writer and his wife assemble a group for him to meet over tea. “They were my kind of people—activists against the corruption of the state, writers delving into rising homophobia. But they were something more. We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West.” Yet his writing bears no evidence that he engaged with anyone in the room. He seems to have solicited no one’s thoughts about anything that had plagued him during his visit. He doesn’t seem interested in their perspectives. Instead, the essay takes a bizarre turn in its final paragraph. Coates describes, among the guests, a young woman, a local university student, who is writing a dissertation about his work. He highlights her “look of amazement” at being in the presence of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Rather than seeking out and including the ideas of any of his fellow guests, he chooses to end by remarking on the potency and reach of his own words.In Israel, the seal Coates creates around his own mind becomes impermeable. He refuses to countenance conversations with Jews who don’t share his opinions and don’t denounce their nation. He has “the right” to “shove bullshit,” he asserts, “out of the frame.” (In contrast to the depths of reflection inspired by the Gorée memorial, Yad Vashem becomes, in the book’s last pages, a monstrosity, because it was built not far from the site of a massacre of Palestinians during the warfare leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence.) Meanwhile, every Palestinian he spends time with is accompanied by an air of utter innocence. Early in the book, Coates praises writing that illuminates “common humanity,” but in his Israel essay, this ideal gives way to a strict dichotomy between perpetrators and victims.The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?Coates races right past such points. Although many of his sentences have a measured cadence, there’s something manic about his approach. He seems driven by what’s most animated in his own head and heart: the shame and persistent pain and insidious inferiority inflicted by “the long shadow of slavery.”With all of this at play internally, Coates goes beyond allying himself with the Palestinian cause. He identifies entirely with it. He and the Palestinians share the suffering of “conquered peoples.” It is almost as if he feels that through his embattled attachment and identification, he can free his own psyche from “the long shadow.” And this personal urgency may elucidate Coates’s staggering omission. His essay, in a book published near the one-year mark of Hamas’s October 7 attack, contains nothing about that day and nothing about the war since. Not a sentence, not a word. The word Hamas does not even appear.Why leave this out? Wouldn’t Coates have wanted to argue that Israel’s bombing campaign has amounted to genocide or ethnic cleansing? Wouldn’t he have wished to conclude his case in this way? Probably, but in doing so he would have been compelled to at least note Hamas’s murders, rapes, dismemberments, and kidnappings of civilians, even if only in the swiftest summary, and this would have marred the purity of the essay.Purity of argument is Coates’s desire; complexity, his self-declared enemy. In this, in his refusal to wrestle with conflicting realities, the essay feels desperate. It feels devoid of the layers and depths of the most profound moral writing, devoid of the universalist goal, the exploration of “common humanity” that Coates has extolled. Complexity, not purity, is the essence of the moral and the humane.

On a swampy afternoon this past spring, I met Mitt Romney in his soon-to-be-vacated Senate office. It was strange to see him in person again. For two years, we’d talked almost every week as I worked on a biography that would cement his reputation as a Republican apostate. Since the book’s publication last year, we’d kept in sporadic touch—mostly through texts, the senator’s preferred medium for venting about politics—but we hadn’t spoken in much depth.Some things hadn’t changed. Romney was, as ever, acutely attuned to his own mortality. “I saw an article this morning saying that they find your chances of getting Alzheimer’s are significantly increased based upon two things,” he told me as soon as we sat down. One factor was alcohol consumption; the other was stress at work. The latter had him worried. Romney is a teetotaler but has been addicted his whole life to stressful jobs. “I mean, I’ve felt high stress in my work since—” He thought about it. “Well, since I went to grad school.” He’s stepping down when his term ends in January. Retirement, he told me, would be good for his health.[Read: ]What Mitt Romney saw in the SenateAs we chatted, though, I noted a change in his countenance. In the past, his frustration—with the Senate, with the Republican Party, with politics in general—had always seemed tinged with resignation. Maybe he was miserable, but he felt obligated to stay in Washington and do his part. Now, at 77, he couldn’t wait to leave. He seemed lighter in a way, but also more restless. Mormon missionaries have a term for the feeling of distraction and homesickness that sometimes settles in as they approach the end of their service: trunky. I asked if the term applied to him now, and he smirked: “Oh yeah.” This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning. Romney had mentioned to me repeatedly, in those brief exchanges over the preceding months, that life in Congress was getting worse. He wasn’t alone in feeling this way. His planned departure was part of an unusually large wave of retirements from Congress in 2024—52 as of May—and the phenomenon had prompted much discussion about why lawmakers were rushing for the exits. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress,” Ken Buck, an outgoing Republican congressman from Colorado, told CNN. “And having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress.”When I asked Romney why his colleagues seemed so miserable, he surprised me by launching into an uninterrupted, seven-minute diatribe about everything that was wrong with Washington. He talked about growing polarization, and the radicalizing effects of the primary process, and the institutional dysfunction of the House, and the indignity of serving in Congress during a presidential-election year.To illustrate this last point, he offered an example. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers had negotiated a bill aimed at restricting illegal immigration. It had been written at the behest of Republicans, who said they would fund new Ukrainian military aid only if Congress also tackled the “crisis” at America’s southern border. Then Trump came out against the immigration bill, having reportedly decided that the crisis at the border was good for his reelection prospects, and Republicans promptly fell in line. To Romney, it was clear that the priority for most of his colleagues was “to do whatever their nominee wants”—not to solve the problems they’d been elected to solve: “If Donald Trump says, ‘Hey, kill that immigration deal,’ [they’re] gonna kill the immigration deal.”Romney told me he’d been invited to deliver a commencement speech, and he planned to illustrate the cynical nature of politics today by talking about his childhood fascination with professional wrestling. As a kid, he’d been enthralled by the theatrical rivalry between “Dick the Bruiser,” a muscle-bound former NFL player, and “Haystacks Calhoun,” a 600-pound farm boy from Texas. The two men riled up crowds by thumping their chests and talking trash about each other. “I was intrigued,” Romney told me, “until my brother, six years older, said it’s all fake. And it suddenly became less interesting.” Congress, he’d come to discover, was more or less the same. “Most of what’s going on in these buildings is just fake”—less policy making than performative animosity and posturing.I thought it sounded a little bleak for a commencement address, but Romney wasn’t soliciting feedback. Before I could say anything, he was venting about the lack of seriousness in legislative debates over the federal debt and climate change, and the plague of partisan “messaging bills” that are written to score points instead of make law. Finally, when he’d tired himself out, he slumped back in his chair. “We’ve got some real challenges,” Romney said, “and we just don’t deal with them.”“So that’s—anyway, that’s a long answer,” he said with a sigh.I joked that it seemed like he had a lot to get off his chest. He didn’t laugh.It was not lost on me that the publication of my book, Romney: A Reckoning, was a more fraught experience for Romney than it was for me. As a biographer, I’d looked at his stories about the dissolution of the GOP under Trump as a valuable contribution to the historical record. But Romney had paid a price for his candor.To the extent that there had been any doubt before, the book sealed his status as a villain in MAGA world. Conservative publications ran takedowns with headlines such as “Mitt Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Sean Hannity, a onetime cheerleader for Romney’s presidential campaign, denounced him as a “small, angry, and very bitter man.” Trump himself weighed in with a characteristically rambling post on Truth Social in which he seemed to confuse the biography for a memoir. “Mitt Romney, a total loser that only a mother could love,” the review began, “just wrote a book which is, much like him, horrible, boring, and totally predictable.”Romney was mostly amused by Trump’s reaction (“Hahaha!” he texted me at the time. “He’s such a whack job!”), but the book’s chilly reception among Republicans on Capitol Hill must have been upsetting. Some of his colleagues made known their disapproval in private. Others, including Senator J. D. Vance, lashed out in the press. “If he has a problem with me,” Vance told a reporter, “I kind of wish he just acted like a man and spoke to me directly, not whining to a reporter about it.” Romney wasn’t exactly surprised by the attacks from people he’d criticized in such withering fashion. (“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” he had told me.) Still, the hostility was unpleasant enough that, after The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book, he opted to skip the GOP caucus lunch.The Trump-era GOP’s perception of Romney as a devious traitor put him in a precarious position. The 2024 presidential election had, by that point in the spring, played out exactly as he’d predicted. Trump had easily defeated a large and feckless field of Republican challengers to clinch the party’s nomination, despite facing 88 criminal charges. And Joe Biden looked to be on a glide path to renomination, despite having some of the worst approval ratings of any modern first-term president. In the months that followed, the race would become more volatile—a disastrous debate performance by Biden; a party-wide panic and push to replace him on the ticket; the nomination of Kamala Harris; the assassination attempts on Trump. But that spring, polls showed Trump clinging to a persistent lead, and Romney was convinced that a second Trump term was imminent.Romney had made this prediction before, telling anyone who would listen in the run-up to the 2020 election that he thought Trump was going to get a second term. He’d even bet one of his sons his prized 1985 BMW that Biden would lose. But back then, he’d told me, it was a kind of psychological game he played with himself—predicting the outcome he most dreaded as a form of “inoculation.”This time felt different. Trump had repeatedly pledged to use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies if reelected. “I am your retribution,” he enjoyed telling his crowds. Romney knew that he was likely to appear on any enemies list kept by the former president, and he’d privately mused to friends that it might be time for him and his wife, Ann, to consider moving abroad. (A spokesperson for the senator told me he was not serious about this.)But when I asked Romney, in the spring, what a Trump reelection would mean for him and his family, he was careful at first. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. If Trump tried to sic the Justice Department on him, Romney told me, “the good news is I haven’t had an affair with anybody; I don’t have any classified documents; I can’t imagine something I’ve done that would justify an investigation, let alone an indictment.”What about his sons? I asked. Might they be targeted?“I mean, hopefully they’ve all crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s,” Romney replied, straining to sound casual. “But it’s hard for me to imagine that President Trump would take the time to go out and see if [he] can find something on members of my family.”“You might need to expand your imagination,” I suggested.Romney grew irritated. “Yeah, but I’ve got 25 grandkids!” he said, throwing up his hands. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.” This was clearly a problem to which he’d given serious thought, and realized there was no solution. In the weeks after January 6, he’d spent thousands of dollars a day to protect his family from red-capped vigilantes. But how do you hide a family of 40 from a president hell-bent on revenge?Recognizing that I’d hit a nerve, I said it was possible, of course, that Trump’s “retribution” rhetoric was all bluster. But Romney didn’t seem comforted.“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told me, his voice suddenly subdued. “So I would take him at his word.”Romney is the first to admit that retirement has never been his strong suit. The last time he attempted it, after losing the 2012 presidential election, the boredom nearly drove him crazy. Writing in his journal at the time, he struggled to even use the term retirement. “Terrifying word,” he wrote, “but worse reality.” Among those who know him best, the consensus is that he’ll need a post-Senate project—but what will it be?Romney told me he’s received invitations from multiple universities to teach, and was considering a campus lecture tour. He also remained fixated on finding ways to pull American politics back toward the center. He wanted to collect data on how reforming the primary system to allow ranked-choice voting and greater participation from independents might yield less extreme candidates. And he was eager to see more coordination among the various centrist nonprofits and third parties—No Labels, Forward, Unite America—that are devoted to depolarization.He conceded that there were hurdles impeding such efforts. Romney himself had been recruited by No Labels to run as an independent. Like everyone else approached by the group, Romney had turned them down. “The reality that anyone who looked at it had to confront was that you can’t win, right?” he told me. “And if you can’t win, you’re a spoiler, and you’re not quite sure who you’re going to spoil.” Sure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed content at the time to play the 2024 spoiler, but Romney didn’t exactly consider the anti-vaccine former Democrat a role model. The senator mentioned a recent New York Times article revealing that doctors had discovered a dead parasite in Kennedy’s brain in 2010. “I’m sorry, but there are certain people I will not vote for for president,” Romney told me. “People who’ve had a worm eat part of their brain should probably not be given the nuclear code.” (Kennedy dropped out over the summer and, perhaps confirming the wisdom of Romney’s litmus test, endorsed Trump.)There was, of course, one other possibility for Romney’s final act: a position in the next Biden administration. The two men have become unlikely friends in recent years. And according to one person close to the Biden campaign, senior Democrats in the president’s orbit had discussed appointing Romney to a high-profile diplomatic post in a second term, before Biden dropped out of the race. The conversations were hypothetical—ambassadorships aren’t typically doled out six months before an election—but such an offer would presumably be conditioned on an endorsement. And Romney wasn’t sure he could oblige.“Biden’s policies drive me crazy,” he told me. “And one of the reasons I think there are people like me who shrink at the idea of endorsing Biden is, does that mean I endorse his border policies? Or do I endorse giving trillions of dollars to college students to pay their debt?” He knew Trump’s authoritarianism and commitment to undermining America’s electoral system made him more dangerous than Biden. “The fact that if you want to be in the good graces of MAGA world you’ve got to say the election was stolen is extraordinary to me—but that is the test,” Romney said. Still, throwing his support behind a president whose policies he’d spent decades fighting against was a difficult thing to do. He told me he wasn’t ruling it out.In September, after Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, I asked Romney if he wanted to talk again, hoping to understand how the news might change his expectations for the election. He declined, but there are signs that his impression of the vice president, like that of many Americans, might be evolving. On the few occasions when he mentioned her in our interviews over the years, it was usually to describe the Democrats’ political bind. Romney had internalized the Washington consensus that, although Biden was clearly weak, Harris had no chance of beating Trump. But after her debate performance earlier this month, Romney seemed impressed. “Most people didn’t know her terribly well other than a few clips that were not flattering that you might see on the internet,” he told reporters. “And people saw, actually, she’s an intelligent, capable person.”As our conversation in the spring wound down, I decided to ask Romney a question I’d somehow neglected to bring up in our dozens of interviews before: What—if anything—gave him hope about the future?This question had come up repeatedly on my book tour. Invariably, after listening to me recount the sordid tales of cynicism, hypocrisy, and unbridled malice that Romney had witnessed inside Congress, someone in the audience would politely raise their hand and ask for a happy ending—and I’d draw a blank.When I put it to Romney in his office, he told me about a book he’d recently read, The Age of Acrimony. The book chronicled America from 1865 to 1915, a period in which the country was exploding with political energy, much of it destructive. Torch-carrying mobs held massive rallies that turned into riots. Political assassinations were widespread. Many people were predicting a second civil war. Then, in relatively short order, “the air went out of the balloon,” Romney told me. Presidential-election turnout rates plunged from 80 percent in 1896 (when many people were bribed for their vote) to less than 50 percent two decades later. Romney invited the author, a historian at the Smithsonian, to his office. He wanted to know what had changed. How had a nation addicted to partisan tribalism and political violence managed to break the cycle? The author told him that members of the generation that had come of age during this “age of acrimony” simply decided they didn’t want to live that way anymore.Romney thought about the young Americans who’d entered political consciousness during the Trump era. They’d watched their parents and grandparents fight endlessly with one another about politics on Facebook and fall down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. They’d seen the caliber of politicians who rose to the top in this climate, and the havoc they’d wrought on democratic institutions. And he hoped that perhaps they were ready to try something different.When Romney announced his retirement last year, he framed the decision as a move to make room for “a new generation of leaders.” At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this notion. It seemed like a savvy bit of rhetoric aimed as much at dinging the two geriatric presidential contenders at the time as it was at explaining his own thinking.But listening to him talk that day in his office, I was struck by just how much trust he was placing in younger Americans to fix Washington, if only because he’d lost confidence in the supposed adults running the town now.“I have hope in the rising generation,” Romney told me—hope “that they’re watching what’s going on, and they’re going to say, Enough.”This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning.

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Plastic pollution has been growing exponentially, endangering the planet and human health. The UN is working on a treaty to reduce it. | M. Dylan/Europa Press via Getty Images Microplastics are everywhere: In our pantries and refrigerators, in our oceans, in the headlines. The world produces hundreds of millions of tons of plastic each year, much of which will eventually end up in landfills or the environment. It seems a month doesn’t go by without a new study affirming one of two things (or both): The tiny particles in the plastics we use every day have made their way into everything from our brains to men’s testicles. They could be contributing to the rise in cancer rates among young people that has befuddled scientists, and they may contribute to a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. The negative effects of plastic on the environment and on the health of life on Earth should worry everyone. At the same time, modern life depends on plastics, which are vital for everything from sterile single-use medical equipment to the modern transportation of goods around the globe. Durable and malleable, there are no real substitutes for plastics. So is there anything we can do about their ubiquity now? The world’s governments have agreed to give it a try. For the past couple years, the United Nations has been negotiating a plastics treaty — a binding agreement that could set firm limits on plastic production, establish commitments to reducing plastic pollution, and encourage new investments to improve our ability to recycle plastics.  The goal, in theory, is to reach an agreement by the end of the year. But there have been four negotiating sessions so far, with no final language yet agreed upon, and the last session is supposed to be held in late November, so there’s a real possibility that a deal won’t be reached. (If world leaders can’t even agree on a pandemic treaty in the immediate aftermath of a world-altering public health crisis, as the World Health Assembly failed to do this year, it would be unsurprising for them end up at an impasse over a slow-moving crisis like plastics pollution.) Scientists and advocacy groups fear that any final agreement could be a watered-down one, that objections from powerful industries will convince government leaders from wealthier countries to duck the commitments needed to reverse the plastic pollution crisis. The next few months will be pivotal as the world’s nations seek a consensus. “I am cautiously optimistic that we can come out of this with the treaty that will be meaningful and for me, that starts with reducing plastic production,” John Hocevar, director of Greenpeace’s oceans program, told me. “If we don’t start making less plastic, then we’re not going to make a dent.” The plastics crisis, explained Plastics are made of polymers, extremely long repetitive molecules that are naturally occurring in things like animal horns and rubber trees. Humanity has been making use of these materials for millennia. But the modern era of plastics began a little more than a century ago, when Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist who had migrated to the US, invented the first entirely synthetic plastic in 1907. The impressive heat resistance of plastic led to its wide adoption in the electrical equipment that was becoming more common at the time. The discovery of polymers in the 1920s and the industrial acceleration of World War II rapidly expanded humanity’s capacity to manufacture plastics.  In the second half of the 20th century, a worldwide explosion of petroleum production provided the raw materials for the mass manufacturing of plastics. Manufacturers turned to consumer applications for their products, such as clear packaging for foods, clothing, and lightweight suitcases. The types of plastics, too, have grown considerably since: Our flatscreen TVs and iPhones and smart watches all depend on the latest iterations. Read more from Vox on plastic pollution Finally, a solution to plastic pollution that’s not just recycling The massive, unregulated source of plastic pollution you’ve probably never heard of More than ever, our clothes are made of plastic. Just washing them can pollute the oceans. Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is “missing” Plastics now are no longer seen as a scientific marvel, but rather as an inextricable part of everyday life. It is cheaper to produce than other materials, leading to the proliferation of single-use plastic items, from the vital (packaging for vaccine syringes) to the frivolous (grocery bags). It’s estimated there was more plastic produced in the first decade of the 21st century than in the entirety of the 20th. In 1950, humanity produced 2 million metric tons of plastic. Today, we are churning out 430 million metric tons of plastics every year, two-thirds of which is for only short-term use and quickly ends up in a landfill. In 2009, scientists at the research group RTI International and the trade association PlasticsEurope predicted: “Any future scenario where plastics do not play an increasingly important role in human life … seems unrealistic.” Since the 1970s, some scientists and environmental advocates have warned that our plastic usage was unsustainable, harmful, and could deepen our dependence on fossil fuels. The birth of the environmental movement gave rise to concerns with plastic pollution, particularly its impacts on natural habitats, including the world’s oceans, and the dependence on petrochemicals required to produce it. You may have read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an accumulation of human waste more than twice the size of Texas, 99 percent of which is plastic. Thus far, the benefits have appeared to outweigh their environmental risks to industry and policymakers.  But more recently, we’ve been learning that the reach of plastics is much more pervasive than we previously thought. The tiny molecules that make up plastics, it turns out, can flake off and find their way into almost every part of the human body. Washing our plastic-laced clothing in hot water can ultimately lead to microplastics leaking out into the ocean, into the seafood that we eat, and back into our bodies.  It’s a feedback loop with dire consequences, based on emerging evidence: Microplastics may be associated with higher risk of dementia, heart disease, infertility, and more. And we haven’t figured out how to avoid ingesting them.  One study published earlier this year found microplastic pollution in every one of the two dozen human testicles and nearly 50 dog testicles that were sampled. Another group of researchers found that the increasing prevalence of microplastics parallels the alarming recent rise in early onset cancers. We already have research suggesting that some of the compounds in microplastics could contribute to cancer development. The disproportionately low-income communities where plastics are produced may be especially at risk. Shiv Srivastava is the policy director for Fenceline Watch, a local environmental group in Houston, where a significant share of US oil is produced. He told me that because the city lacks zoning restrictions, residential developments are built next to those industrial sites. “Our communities are negatively impacted directly from the toxic multigenerational harm of plastic production,” he said. Accidents are a common occurrence at oil refineries and other industrial plants, posing an acute risk to nearby residents, and there is also evidence of elevated cancer rates that could be linked to longer-term exposure to fossil fuel production. On the other end of the plastic life cycle, plastic waste sometimes ends up being exported to the Global South, making rich countries’ trash an often hazardous problem for poor nations.  The world is working on a plastics treaty And yet, unless something changes, global plastic production is projected to triple from current levels by 2060. By 2050, greenhouse gas output associated with plastic production, use, and disposal will account for 15 percent of all the world’s emissions. When Hocevar, Greenpeace’s oceans program director, started at the organization 20 years ago, he told me, most people did not consider plastics to be a major threat to human health. “But pretty quickly, we realize that this isn’t just an ocean problem,” Hocevar said. “It’s a climate issue. It’s a human health issue. It’s an environmental justice issue.” With the emerging evidence painting an increasingly clear picture of the danger plastics present to humanity, the United Nations Environment Assembly, made up of representatives from 193 countries, in 2022 decided to negotiate a legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution. They set a deadline for themselves: the end of 2024. The questions under consideration have been clear from the start: Should plastic production be reduced? Should certain plastics be banned or phased out? What investments can be made to reduce the plastic pollution that already exists, particularly in precious natural habitats?  But the negotiators have not reached a final decision on any of the proposal treaty sections, instead continuing to deliberate over a range of options for draft language. There have been four formal negotiating conferences so far, with informal, behind-closed-doors talks in between. The final conference is scheduled for November in Busan, South Korea. The process started with great optimism, based on contemporaneous notes taken by the Plastic Pollution Coalition, one of the large nonprofit groups involved in and closely monitoring the treaty talks. Every country, from large industrialized nations like the United States to the small island nations most directly affected by plastic dumped into the oceans, agreed on the need for such an agreement. But it quickly became clear there were sharp divisions that could prevent a substantive agreement from being reached. At that first meeting in December 2022, major manufacturing countries (like China and India) and oil producers (Saudi Arabia and Iran), which supply the raw materials for plastic production, argued the treaty should require only that each nation create their own national action plans for plastic waste — not plastic production — which would include non-binding targets for reducing pollution. On the other end of the spectrum, some more progressive developed countries, led by Norway, allied with African countries, led by Rwanda, argued for a global approach that limits plastic production and bans the use of certain compounds (like PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”). Groups like Greenpeace have been advocating for a 75 percent reduction in plastic production. The US has said it supports a goal of zero plastic pollution in the environment by 2040 — though it hasn’t yet committed to the specific plan to realize that goal. There are serious doubts over whether these two camps — known as the “high-ambition” and “low-ambition” coalitions among insiders — can find consensus before the end of the year, although everyone I spoke to expressed reserved optimism about a final deal. The US government, for its part, has tried to play dealmaker, according to people close to the process. At times the US has appeared allied with China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. But it is also trying to keep an open dialogue with advocacy groups and the more ambitious set of nations, Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told me. “The United States has been playing kind of a dealmaker. They didn’t want to get trapped in a coalition,” Spring, who held senior positions at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Obama presidency and has represented the International Science Council at the negotiations, told me. The question looming over the next several months: Is there really a deal to be made? The most important dividing line in the plastic treaty talks More than any other issue, specific limits on plastic production are the most contentious. Scientists and advocates argue they are necessary, that a successful treaty must address the full life cycle of plastics from birth to disposal. But, as the fight against climate change has affirmed again and again, overcoming the influence of the oil and gas industries is extremely difficult. Nearly 200 lobbyists from those industries attended the fourth negotiating conference in Ottawa this past May. They significantly outnumbered representatives from the scientific and Indigenous communities, making the argument that a treaty should focus on demand, rather than on supply, and on recycling. The problem, scientists and advocates say, is that recycling plastics is notoriously difficult and can lead to its own health hazards. This week, California sued ExxonMobil for allegedly lying about the effectiveness of plastic recycling. At the May meeting, the majority of the conference agreed to exclude “upstream” measures — i.e., those focused on supply and production — from any of the agreement draft language. While there is still an opportunity to insert such provisions into the final draft, it represented a setback for the environmental advocates. “It’s like trying to regulate tobacco and we know it causes cancer. But then you’re bringing in all these executives to create regulations on the deadly product. Essentially the same thing here,” Erica Cirino, author of Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis, now working at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, told me. There have been some signs of the impasse thawing. In August, a group of environmental activists attended a meeting with US government officials, in which they were told that the Biden administration would support limits to plastic production; Reuters soon reported the same, citing a source close to US negotiators.  “They don’t know how they’re gonna do the supply side, but they’re willing to say that that has to happen,” Spring said. “You can’t recycle your way out of it.” But since that development in August, there has not been a more forceful public declaration of that new position from the US government — to the discouragement of some advocates. “Right now, while we applaud what this shift could potentially mean, without meaningful details, it’s only as valuable as a piece of paper it’s written on,” Srivastava told me. “Right now, there isn’t one.” Some of the people closely monitoring the treaty talks chalk up America’s caginess to its dealmaker role, avoiding a public position to keep more resistant countries at the table. The risks of failure Beyond plastics production levels, there are still plenty of other details to work out. Should certain substances be banned or phased out? Should companies be required to disclose the chemicals in their plastics? Should countries that refuse to ratify the treaty be subjected to punitive trade measures? All of those questions are supposed to be addressed during ongoing “intersessional” negotiations that are not made public, and then at the final November conference. Some of those monitoring the process say they would not be surprised if an additional conference is scheduled to hash out a final deal, which advocates say would be preferable to a weak agreement that lacks the mechanisms to expand in the future.  Others, however, worry that the final product could only be more watered down the longer negotiations go on. As both sides look for an exit strategy, the low-ambition countries could gain more leverage to insist, for example, on nixing any firm production limits on plastics. “When you have momentum, you use the momentum. Keep going,” Spring said. “I think that the danger of extending is: Does the air go out of the balloon?” Advocates are urging policymakers to seize the moment. “Every minute that we don’t have this treaty is more time where plastic pollution is accumulating,” Srivastava continued. “It is only going to increase without mandated reduction targets worldwide. So it’s super important that it happens.”

Once the high priests of policy, economists may now be seeing lower demand. But who's taking their place?

Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDonald Trump and the Republican Party are ditching Mark Robinson, their scandal-plagued nominee in the North Carolina governor’s race.Robinson has been battling to keep his head above water after claims that he called himself a “Black Nazi” and made other offensive comments on a pornographic website.But it appears the national GOP hierarchy are prepared to let him drown. The Republican Governors Association said in a statement that they are pulling Robinson’s financial support.Read more at The Daily Beast.