New laws close gap in California on deepfake child pornography
Edgar Alejandro wanted to sing mĆŗsica romĆ”ntica blended with jazz. His professional mariachi parents had notes
Edgar Alejandro knows the challenges of the music industry thanks to his mariachi parents. He's finding his way by blending mariachi, jazz and bossa nova.
latimes.com
Who is the Stranger? 'The Rings of Power' Season 2 finale has a major reveal
The Season 2 finale of āThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powerā has confirmed what many fans suspected all along about the Stranger.
latimes.com
A divorced couple cohabitated during the pandemic ā and fell back in love
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Yes on Proposition 32. Californiaās minimum wage needs a boost
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latimes.com
Lakers newsletter: Max Christie heads list of young Lakers to watch in the preseason
With Lakers training camp underway, there are a few younger players who are going to be worth watching this preseason.
latimes.com
Becky Hammon likens Liberty to 2014 champion Spurs
Becky Hammon attempted to dissect what went wrong ā and has kept going wrong ā for her Aces, and that brought her to a Liberty comparison.
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Summerās over. What was the real meaning of āBratā?
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Megalopolis, explained as best we can
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis. | Courtesy of Lionsgate One mortgaged winery, $136 million budget, several allegations of non-consensual kissing, and a crossdressing Shia LaBeouf later, Megalopolis is finally here ā and it appears to be a āmega-flopolis.āĀ The film, a perplexing, oversaturated modern riff on the waning days of the Roman Republic ā if Rome were New York City by way of Baz Luhrmann and Felliniās Satyricon ā made an astoundingly low $4 million over its opening weekend. Though that might speak primarily to the public appetite for a CGI-laden Shakespearean drama without the benefit of Shakespeare, itās a number likely assisted by the confusion and division surrounding the film. Even for the notably demanding director Francis Ford Coppola, known for intense sets that lead to masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as well as critically acclaimed flops like The Conversation and his musical One From the Heart, Megalopolis has been accompanied by an unusual degree of chaos and controversy. As Coppola has recounted many times, heās been trying to make Megalopolis for decades, and ultimately wound up financing it by borrowing against his own fortune ā a costly risk that may now never pay off.Ā Yet after all of that hoopla, even the filmās arrival in theaters may not satisfactorily answer the basic question: What even is Megalopolis, anyway? Hereās an attempt to answer that question ā though as with all things related to this film, opinions may vary considerably about Megalopolis, what itās aiming for, and what, if anything, it achieves. Megalopolis is Ayn Randās The Fountainhead with a dash of Inception and a huge helping of theatre camp Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as a futuristic architect named Cesar Catilina. Giancarlo Esposito plays his rival, Cicero, the mayor of New Rome. Ciceroās daughter Julia (Game of Thronesās Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls for Catilina, waffles between the two (even after Catalina tells the socialite to āgo back to the cluuuuubā). She may or may not hold the secret to mastering the āmegalon,ā a golden glowy element that looks like gold foil but is, weāre told, made of space-time itself. Using megalon, Catilina wants to build a version of New Rome that he dubs an immortal school-city. His vision ultimately turns out to be just a slightly more sci-fi version of the High Line, but itās apparently enough to usher in the utopia of his dreams. (It also helps that heās motivated by the memory of his late wife, whose death he may have hastened with his obsessiveness, a la Inception, despite an official ruling of death by suicide.) Also like Christopher Nolanās Inception, architecture seems to be a metaphor for movie-making ā Catilina as a tortured, misunderstood artist who decides to name his son Francis.Ā Ā Though this basic plot feels swiped from Ayn Randās The Fountainhead, in execution the story is full of oddities ā Driver can stop time, except when he canāt? ā and curiosities; at many showings, a live performer interacts with the screen, lip-syncing along with an off-screen figure. Though the all-star cast is huge, many of the characters seem to have very little to do with the plot. They seem to primarily be window-dressing or an excuse for Coppola to cast many members of his own family, ranging from nephew Jason Schwartzman to several young grandchildren. Like Kevin Costnerās Horizon, another $100 million auteur box office failure, Megalopolis features an odd mix of deliberately elevated language and literary allusions: Driver makes his entrance reciting two-thirds of Hamletās soliloquy, apparently purely for drama. Julia and her father battle-slash-communicate using Marcus Aurelius quotes.Ā The story, such as it is, unfolds against a surprisingly lackluster CGI city whose skylines and blurred edges arenāt quite enough to convey the soaring futuristic vision Coppola clearly had in mind. By contrast, the crowded ensemble scenes and orgiastic, wild, decadent party life of the streets (embodied by a woozy Aubrey Plaza sleeping her way to the top) feel so Felliniesque itās hard to take it as anything but pastiche. Overall, the concept might have worked much better as an anime ā itās less like a fully coherent narrative and more like a fun project for theater kids and their friends who recently got into computer animation.Ā The making of Megalopolis was as over-the-top as the film itself 2024 brought an onslaught of weird Megalopolis news in the long build-up to the film itself. First, in May, there was a deep-dive Guardian investigation into the production. Timed to coincide with the filmās debut at Cannes, where it was debuting without a distributor, the piece depicted a troubled set.Ā Numerous anonymous crew members belittled Coppolaās directorial sensibilities and claimed to be baffled by his inability to work well with CGI; at one point, Coppola reportedly told a crew member, āHow can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I donāt even know what Megalopolis looks like?ā This specific CGI-induced crisis is the kind of thing that many filmmakers angst over (Christopher Nolan again comes to mind), so it isnāt as though the Guardian report alone was enough to cast doubt on the film. However, the report also contained allegations that he behaved inappropriately toward many women on set by making the rounds of the topless women in one elaborate scene and reportedly trying to kiss them. These are allegations Coppola has partially denied, admitting that he kissed the women but denying there was anything untoward ā as he was directing, he reportedly announced to the set that āif I come up to you and kiss you, just know itās solely for my pleasure.ā Itās unclear how that statement clarified anything for the actors on set; it doesnāt exactly create the image of a trouble-free production helmed by a focused, clear-sighted director. According to the Guardian, the now-85-year-oldĀ auteur would also allegedly smoke weed in his trailer before emerging to announce a brand-new scene to shoot.Ā Shortly after the Guardian story came the filmās polarized reception at Cannes. Though its director received a wild ovation from an enthusiastic audience made up of many people who were directly involved in the movie (another Horizon parallel), this was countered by critics who called the film, generously, āabsolute madnessā and āa totally bonkers experiment,ā or, less generously, āa head-wrecking abominationā consisting of ā138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isnāt there.āĀ Yikes. Finally, in July, we got the trailer, which immediately drew criticism for using quotes from critics about Coppolaās previous works, not about Megalopolis. While audiences were still debating whether this was some sort of intentional meta-commentary, the trailer was quickly recalled by Lionsgate, which apologized sincerely to Coppola for what was apparently a genuine mistake.Ā All of this led up to the resounding question of what sort of a ride we were in for. Even after the filmās release, thatās still not entirely clear ā but itās definitely anything but boring. What does it all mean?! Coppola has claimed that Megalopolis is an exploration of and a warning about an America on the brink of fascism, but the film, despite its clunky Roman metaphors and heavy-handed satire of the modern media, obfuscates that message in plenty of ways. For starters, Coppola seems to think ā and Megalopolis repeatedly seems to imply, however inadvertently ā that the greatest risk of fascism comes from the politically correct, insurgent left, rather than from oppressive systems. The film instead seems to view a wealthy upper class as a potentially benevolent force, and Coppola has stated that he deliberately cast ācanceledā actors (like LaBeouf) in order to avoid the appearance of being āwoke.ā LaBeouf plays an opportunistic figure who takes up populist causes for his own manipulative ends, all while intermittently wearing a dress and a rat-tail and cozying up to power; itās all equal parts boorish and incoherent.Ā Then thereās Cesar Catilina himself, the nephew of a powerful billionaire (Jon Voigt), who despite nominally claiming to work for the people, pursues power and his vision for the masses with pure Randian entitlement. Despite, or more likely because, of his being named Cesar, the film ultimately endorses his righteousness without any self-reflection. The film ends with Catilina winning his battle with the mayor to usher in the city he wants to build ā but his former enemy stands by his side, grandfather to his only son, and the family portrait is accompanied by an overtly creepy chant of schoolchildren pledging to build an America dedicated to education and opportunity. Politically, the message is fully muddled. Beyond that flimsy moral, itās unclear where Megalopolisās primary claim to genius rests. Lots and lots of movies have been made about a lone hero lost in a dystopian New York. (The Michael Keaton subgenre alone!) The idea that what the city really needs is a new, futuristic architectural vision isnāt new, either;Ā itās the central theme of Fritz Langās silent masterpiece Metropolis, as well as the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The 1927 silent classic East Side, West Side finds the main character, just as in Megalopolis, monologuing to his starstruck girlfriend about erecting immortal skyscrapers.Ā Unlike East Side, West Side, however, Megalopolis wasnāt filmed on location in New York, but rather in Atlanta, where Coppola was apparently so dissatisfied with the accommodations that he bought and renovated an entire motel to house his family during filming. The filmās opening weekend box office might barely cover the cost of that purchase. This contradiction is one of many that makes Megalopolis feel, for all the money and time and clear passion that went into it, like a rough draft of a film that needed several more revisions to find a coherent thesis. Despite a number of head-turning ideas and moments of sheer theatricality, the film gives way more often than not to bloat and incoherence. Is it an interesting sort of incoherence? Well, yes, if you enjoy seeing movies ironically, as many people do.Ā Still, amid all the scandal and CGI, thereās a real sense of sadness here. This may well be Coppolaās last film, so watching it for the lulz probably isnāt what most movie buffs had on their 2024 agenda.Ā
vox.com
Buccaneers vs. Falcons Week 5 predictions: NFL āTNFā picks, odds, best bets
Baker Mayfield and the Buccaneers (3-1) look to extend their lead in the NFC South when they head to Atlanta on Thursday night for a divisional bout with the Falcons (2-2).Ā
nypost.com
Cause of Maui wildfire that killed 102 revealed
County of Maui and ATF officials held a press conference after releasing the origin and cause report of the deadly Maui wildfire that happened last year.
foxnews.com
VP debate ratings show how many people watched the Walz-Vance showdown
An estimated 43.15 million viewers tuned in to the CBS News vice presidential debate.
cbsnews.com
For a sports fan in New York, thereās no better time of year
The New York sports scene is booming, and no matter who your team is, there is no better time to tune in to it all.
nypost.com
American visiting elderly mom in Lebanon among those killed in airstrikes: family
Kamel Ahmad Jawad died when a missile blasted his hometown of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon as he was "trying to save innocent lives" and comfort others on Tuesday, according to his daughter, NadineĀ Jawad.
nypost.com
Wisconsin poll shows Harris leading Trump by 4, former president ahead on key issues
Former President Trump is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four points in Wisconsin, according to a new poll.
foxnews.com
The Right-Wing Plan to Make Everyone an Informant
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
theatlantic.com
Neglect, decay and broken glass: How a Maryland school lost its football field
A long-awaited renovation led to DuValās home field being covered with topsoil that contained rocks and broken glass.
washingtonpost.com
The Sports Report: Dodgers strive to keep their competitive edge while awaiting NLDS
Facing a third straight postseason that will begin with a five days off, the Dodgers changed up some things ahead of their Saturday opener.
latimes.com
Nitrous, one of the oldest mind-altering drugs, is back
English tourists dancing after taking laughing gas at a Paris dentist, 1820. The sweet, odorless gas technically called nitrous oxide has many names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even āthe atmosphere of heaven.ā Nitrous itself has just as many common uses as it does names. Doctors use it as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into brief and largely pain-free dissociative euphorias before having a tooth pulled or dislocated finger yanked straight. Inhaling nitrous gives a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers.Ā Ā The gas is both legal and widely available. It comes in small pressurized canisters intended for kitchen use; large tanks for heavier applications, like medicine or car engines; or even as the gas that shoots out of whipped cream canisters when thereās no cream left (hence: āwhippetsā).Ā Thanks to being both accessible and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for decades, from Grateful Dead concerts in the ā60s to raves in the ā90s. Lockdowns during the Covid pandemic seem to have set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. Today, āPeople on Nitrous Gasā has its own TikTok discovery tab, with videos racking up millions of views. Celebrities are putting the risks of abuse on display, from Kanye West and SZA, to Steve-O of the stunt show Jackass fame. The Mormon mothers and social media influencers of āMomTok,ā whose faith shuns any drug use, recently said that part of the draw of all the Botox theyāve gotten is getting the nitrous first. āItās a party,ā one said. Inhaling nitrous is considered relatively safe for people who donāt use it often and donāt take too much. But there are definitely risks, and more so in recreational contexts. As recreational use rises, particularly among teenagers, those risks are gaining more attention.Ā The primary one is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without intervention, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage. Thereās currently no consensus as to whether nitrous should be labeled an addictive substance. While it doesnāt seem to build the same physical dependency as opioids, it does still carry the risk of habit formation in some cases. And while nitrous doesnāt have a known fatal dose, deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that can happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, where statistics on nitrous are more detailed, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.) But while the rise in using recreational nitrous for its brief highs is prompting new concerns, the drug is actually one of the oldest stories in the Western history of mind-altering substance use.Ā Through the centuries of up-and-down nitrous use across the US and UK, you find a rich, at times hilarious, trail left by this so-called atmosphere of heaven. Theaters across the US in the early 1800s filled with members of the public, watching volunteers inhale nitrous on stage and provide a delirious form of entertainment for the crowds. Traveling caravans brought nitrous shows on the road. Poets celebrated a new form of pleasure, while philosophers tried nitrous in Harvard laboratories, frantically scribbling down rushes of insight.Ā The history of nitrous use is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the mind. More specifically, about the value āĀ or rejection āĀ of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today, as the gradual return of legal access to psychedelics is sparking renewed conversation around the potential benefits, and harms, of mind-altering drugs, seeing the many different iterations of nitrous use across history can help us think more expansively about what, if anything, the strange experiences of nitrous mean and what the future of recreational nitrous might look like. āA new pleasure for which language has no nameā In late 18th-century industrial Britain, the air was foul. Coal smoke and the odor of feces were abundant. Respiratory diseases were rampant, like tuberculosis, which had come to be known as āthe robber of youth.āĀ The deadly air inspired the founding of the Pneumatic Institution in 1799, a medical facility in Bristol intended to study whether gasses could be used as medicines, too. It was there that the first experiments with nitrous began in earnest. The chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, but dismissed it as toxic. Humphry Davy, a young lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution, had a hunch that Priestleyās discovery had been confused with a chemically similar but highly irritating compound: nitric oxide.Ā In April, Davy repeated Priestleyās experiment, and wrote to a friend afterward that he had āmade a discovery which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,ā prefiguring the role of replication in science today. Nitrous oxide, when purely synthesized, was perfectly breathable. Davy then set out to breathe as much as he possibly could. He sealed himself inside a box that was designed to boost the inhalation of gasses. He sat for over an hour while a steady flow of nitrous oxide filled the chamber. When he stepped out, he grabbed a giant silk air-bag full of more nitrous and huffed that too, just for good measure. Then, his mind peeled away from his body, and he ālost touch with all external things,ā entering a strange, revelatory world of flashing insights.Ā That summer, Davy invited dozens of curious writers, physicians, and philosophers to visit the Pneumatic Institute in the late evenings after normal operations had ceased. They all huffed nitrous, experimenting with entirely new regions of the mind. According to historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, nitrous gave Western scientists one of the first chemical means of reliably accessing mystical states of consciousness. Against the banality of our ordinary experience, nitrous delivered a shocking contrast, a state of mind full of unfamiliar pleasures that often carried a sense of insight into the nature of the cosmos. The poet Robert Southey, after his first hit of nitrous, wrote to his brother that āDavy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.ā Within a year, however, most who had come to try nitrous lost interest. Its pleasures were new and exciting, but rarely stuck with users once they returned to sobriety after a few minutes. Others who tried the gas just ended up with an upset stomach and the giggles. Davy, who would go on to become president of the Royal Society, stayed with his experiments, eventually producing a hefty book on the chemistry and philosophy of nitrous. He predicted that since nitrous temporarily extinguished pain, it could be useful during surgeries. No form of anesthesia existed yet, so surgeries were very painful, and very dangerous. But the idea failed to gain momentum. Instead, nitrous became something else: entertainment. How nitrous became entertainment, and then medicine Though the early enthusiasm for nitrous fizzled, it was easy enough to produce that, as word got out, chemists learned they could make it in their home laboratories. This turned nitrous into something of a party fixture.Ā Ā Ā āMaybe it will become the custom for us to inhale laughing gas at the end of a dinner party, instead of drinking champagne,ā a young German chemist speculated in 1826, after participating in a garden party where guests enjoyed nitrous under the afternoon sun.Ā Public nitrous shows began taking place as early as an 1814 lecture series in Philadelphia. First, a doctor gave a discourse on the effects of nitrous to the assembled crowd. Then, a series of young men volunteered to inhale balloons of nitrous onstage, putting on a raucous spectacle. While Davy and his friends had been interested in the mental side of what being on nitrous felt like, these public shows put a spotlight on the uninhibited bodies that the chemical set loose. After inhaling the gas, volunteers would clumsily dance, fight, sing, or even strike up the occasional fencing match. Sometimes, the first row of a theater was kept empty to protect onlookers from the mayhem. āOn stage, the subjective experience was incidental,ā writes Jay. āThe moment of return to waking consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for confused hilarity.āĀ Soon, nitrous shows were taken on the road, carried by traveling carnivals to new, hooting crowds each night. Volunteers were charged around 25 cents per huff, bringing in good profit for those whoād invested in the necessary gas tanks, tubes, and breathing bags. One traveling nitrous show, put on by Samuel Colt (who would go on to invent the pioneering Colt firearm), dosed roughly 20,000 volunteers from Canada to Maryland.Ā It was during a show in 1844 that the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, felt no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled. Wells first tried on himself, inhaling nitrous and having another dentist pull his own wisdom tooth. It was a great success: Wells felt no pain, and proclaimed āa new era in tooth pulling.ā He successfully performed the procedure on a few of his patients, before convincing a surgeon at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital to let Wells administer the gas during an operation, doubling as a demonstration for a strictly medical audience. It didnāt go well. Nervous in front of a scrupulous crowd, Wells pulled away the nitrous balloon a little too quickly. During the operation, the patient appeared to groan in pain (though it was later deemed an involuntary and unconscious response). Onlookers nevertheless booed Wells out of the theater, and the embarrassment pushed him into a depression that culminated in suicide. But the demonstration inspired Wellsās former partner to try a similar procedure, only with a different substance: a solvent called ether.Ā After a few successful experiments using ether as an anesthetic, another demonstration was arranged in the same theater where Wellsās had failed. This time, ether was successfully administered as a pain-vanquishing anesthetic, prompting one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the century, as well as a revisitation of Wellsās work with nitrous. The hospital theater was renamed āThe Ether Dome,ā while anesthetic use of both ether and nitrous began to spread across the country. The next 150 years of nitrous The rise of anesthetics like nitrous in medicine was accompanied by a decline in their useĀ as recreational drugs.Ā Physicians began to think of nitrous-induced revelations as gibberish, closer to delirium than real insight. Too much interest in their short-lived pleasures, doctors began to write, could pose a public health risk. Recreational anesthetics like nitrous would ādelight the animal sensations, while they destroy the moral sentiments; they introduce their victims to a foolās paradise; they mock them with joys which end in sorrows.ā Jay describes the mid-1800s arc of nitrous as a āshift away from subjectivity,ā prefiguring the same trajectory across a variety of disciplines, including psychology. Through the middle of the 19th century, nitrous settled into dentistry while falling out of philosophy, with at least one major exception that ultimately proved the rule: the eccentric American philosopher Benjamin Blood.Ā In 1860, during what he expected to be a very normal visit to the dentist, he awoke from a routine dose of nitrous with the vague sense that heād glimpsed the essence of all philosophy, the āsecret or problem of the world,ā as he later wrote.Ā Blood asked dentists and doctors why their gas had given him a spiritual epiphany. He learned two things. First, that ānearly every hospital and dentist office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anesthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life.ā Across the country, patients returning from anesthesia had been asking their doctors something to the effect of, āWhat does it all mean, or amount to?āĀ Second, the doctors and the dentists couldnāt care less. Blood received smiles and shrugs, but no explanations. So he spent 14 years reviving the tradition of nitrous self-experimentation, eventually publishing a pamphlet: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. It didnāt get particularly famous, but it did catch the attention of Harvard philosopher William James. Inspired by Bloodās curious writings, James followed Humphry Davyās old protocol, heating a beaker of ammonium nitrate in the Harvard chemistry laboratory, capturing the escaping gas, and inhaling deeply with pen and paper in hand. His subsequent experience of āintense metaphysical illuminationā informed the rest of his lifeās work, where he would go on to become known, today, as the father of American psychology.Ā Meanwhile, innovations in the delivery mechanisms for laughing gas were starting to ramp up its use in dentistry. George Poe, cousin of the poet Edgar Allen Poe, figured out how to manufacture nitrous in liquid form. This allowed for packaging and distributing it in easy-to-use canisters. By 1883, he was supplying 5,000 dentists with canned nitrous oxide across the country.Ā Ā Ā Once nitrous came in a convenient package, people began finding all sorts of new uses for it. In 1914, American rocketeer Robert Goddard filed a patent suggesting it could work as a rocket propellant, where itās still used today.Ā But the innovation that brought nitrous back into style as a contemporary recreational drug was a little more mundane: whipped cream canisters. It turned out that dispensing cream out of a nitrous gas cylinder delivers the perfectly fluffy whipped cream we can so easily buy in grocery stores today. These whipped cream canisters are also where the name āwhippetsā comes from, and how weāve landed in the awkward situation of rising nitrous use among teenagers. Nitrous, today and tomorrow In the neighboring arena of psychedelic drugs, many advocates are pushing for wider accessibility to these mind-altering substances. With nitrous, that accessibility is already here, and now, attracting strong criticism. The UK recently reinstated a shade of prohibition, making possession of nitrous oxide for āunlawful useā illegal. You can still use it to dispense whipped cream and other culinary delights, but if youāre just interested in a giggly high, or even seeing whether it might reveal, as Blood thought, the worldās philosophical secret, thatās unlawful. But prohibition inevitably pushes drug use underground, where itās guaranteed to be riskier and less well-informed than legal, regulated, and educated use. And with a substance like nitrous that has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, thereās an opportunity to work on promoting more responsible forms of use through public education (such as awareness that the gas impairs the bodyās ability to take in oxygen, so doing whippets in a tight, closed space is probably not as safe as in a backyard).Ā Since nitrous-related substance abuse is such a small problem relative to opioids and alcohol, it hasnāt received all that much study. The past few years of data, however, have prompted a new conversation around whether nitrous should be considered addictive. It doesnāt seem to form a physical dependence, like opioids, and has no physical symptoms of withdrawal. But it does seem capable of forming a more psychological form of dependence (dissociative pleasure basically on tap does obviously pose some habit-forming risk), prompting concerns around how exactly to label it. Either way, ensuring support and harm reduction is available to those who need it may prove to be a challenge. But if we canāt figure out how to handle recreational use with nitrous, itās difficult to imagine how weād do it in a world where LSD and psilocybin mushrooms become widely available, too.Ā More broadly, though, set against the long history of different approaches and interpretations of nitrous, our current situation isnāt all that new. Todayās social media spectacles of nitrous use are just digitized versions of the same nitrous shows from the 1800s. Back then, some people believed that wild behaviors while on nitrous revealed āthe volatility of the democratic masses.ā What might it say about our own cultural moment that recreational nitrous use is returning as a sort of performative delirium?Ā As far as the philosophy of nitrous goes, I imagine curious experimenters today are working with different substances, like extended DMT. Maybe someone like Benjamin Blood will come along and make the case that we still have much to learn from nitrous. Maybe dentists will begin to read up on metaphysics and begin engaging with their woozy patients rather than dismissing their experiences.Ā Or, maybe nothing much will happen with nitrous. The social media hype will die down as new drugs take its place, and it will sink back into relative obscurity, propelling rockets and numbing minor surgeries, inspiring the occasional dorm-room conversation about God and the nature of pleasure. At the very least, as its long history shows, nitrous will always remain capable of giving us a great story.
vox.com
The factors Jets need to consider before a potential Davante Adams trade
This is the point where, if this were any feel-good movie, the Jets would make a grand gesture and reunite the pair that never shouldāve broken up.
nypost.com
Iran warns of 'decisive response' if Israel crosses 'red lines'
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned this week at the Asia Cooperation Dialogue summit that Israel cannot act with "impunity" and "crossing [Iran's] red lines" will be met with a "decisive response."
foxnews.com
Trump-Backed MAGA Senate Candidate Hits Drag Queens During Bizarre Cannibalistic Rant
WAVY TV 10/YouTubeRetired Navy Captain Hung Cao, the Trump-backed Republican running against Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, went on a bizarre and disturbing rant Wednesday, blaming a drag queen for low military recruitment numbers and saying the U.S. military needs people āwho are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds.āDuring a televised debate, moderator and WRIC anchor Deanna Allbrittin asked Cao to explain a tweet where he claimed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practicesāwhich he alleged were a āgrowing obsessionā of the Biden administrationāwere to blame for eight-decade low military recruitment numbers.āWhen youāre using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy thatās not the people we want,ā replied Cao. āWhat we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.āRead more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Shooting near luxury Mexico resort leaves 1 dead, suspects flee on jet skis
A Mexican national was shot and killed Wednesday near a ritzy resort in Cancun before two suspects fled on jet skis, according to a local report.
foxnews.com
Three Mile Island owner seeks taxpayer backing for Microsoft AI deal
The Department of Energy is weighing a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for plan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant with Microsoft as its sole customer.
washingtonpost.com
Hurricane Kirk strengthens in the Atlantic, expected to grow rapidly
Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Leslie formed in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and could strengthen into a hurricane by the weekend, forecasters said.
cbsnews.com
Connecticut man accused of punching pregnant woman in carjacking attempt at Dunkinā Donuts drive-thru
William Rodriguez, 28, faces multiple charges and is being held on a $250,000 bond.
nypost.com
Will Justyn Martin start at quarterback for UCLA? Five things to watch vs. Penn State
Five things to watch when UCLA football takes on No. 7 Penn State on Saturday at 9 a.m. PDT.
latimes.com
This is who gets the blame for the port strike. Hint: It's not labor or management
The strike on 36 US ports halts more than half of US container traffic and cripples exports. But it's not really a labor/management dispute. Blame the insane cost of living.
foxnews.com
Gabriel LaBelle keeps portraying the greats. Could he be one?
How did Gabriel LaBelle, star of āSaturday Night,ā nail Lorne Michaels? With work, charisma and ādad energy.ā
washingtonpost.com
Elite colleges shocked to discover students 'don't know how' to read hooks: 'My jaw dropped'
Elite college educators described being shocked at finding students in their classes unprepared to read full books in a piece from The Atlantic Tuesday.
foxnews.com
Here's the speech Biden should have given to a troubled United Nations
During his speech to the United Nations, President Biden should have said the U.N. has lost its way, and it will need to be seriously reimagined if it is to remain relevant.
foxnews.com
Work Advice: How honest should a reference be for a laid-off employee?
Objectively ranking co-workers makes sense when theyāre all vying for the same prize. But for one candidate seeking your endorsement, a little subjective hype may be in order.
washingtonpost.com
Black women say dating apps like Hinge are biased. Now some are testing it.
Are dating apps biased? After an experiment went viral on TikTok, Black women are changing their racial data on dating apps like Hinge to find better matches.
washingtonpost.com
TNF BETTING promos: 6 sign-up offers & welcome bonuses for Buccaneers-Falcons on Thursday Night Football
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nypost.com
Fanatics Sportsbook Promo grants $100 daily for 10 days starting with āThursday Night Footballā or any event
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nypost.com
Geno Smithās Seahawks reclamation a blueprint for Daniel Jonesā potential post-Giants career
Sometimes getting out and moving on is best for all concerned. The Giants are not there yet with Daniel Jones
nypost.com
Health Care Is on the Ballot Again
In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the lawās provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trumpāwho sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in officeāshould be viewed as the programās savior.Vanceās evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trumpās attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vanceās equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.The political paradox of Vanceās policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOPās ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 āthe Trumpcare conundrum.āāGoing back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,ā Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.Vice President Kamala Harrisās campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACAās coverage. Support for the ACAāin particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditionsāmay be one of Harrisās best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trumpās argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vanceās strangest answer?]The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACAādespite polling that shows the actās broad popularity. During Trumpās first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.āIn 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,ā Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown Universityās Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.Today, however, āwe are in a very, very different place,ā she said. āI would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stableā condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.Despite Vanceās portrayal of Trump as the programās savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trumpās term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (āsilverā) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.āThe biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,ā Levitt said. āThe enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.āNeera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. āA way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,ā Tanden said. āNo one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.āConservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA show that it has failed in its initial ambition to ābend the curveā of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.The ACA āhas covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,ā Cannon told me. āDonāt tell me itās a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sectorāāthe growth in total national health-care spending.Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACAās effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the lawās two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACAās Medicaid expansion.Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that āwe added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.ā[David Frum: The Vance warning]The ACAās record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the lawās provisions that encouraged risk-sharingāby, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACAās protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.āA young American doesnāt have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,ā Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. āA 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.ā Although āwe want to make sure everybody is covered,ā Vance claimed, āthe best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.āSupporters of this vision, such as Catoās Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.āIf you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,ā Cannon told me. āYou need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.āSupporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetownās Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACAās risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACAās risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.Vanceās most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would āallow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.ā Butāas many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last nightāthat notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possibleāwhich, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.āThe far right,ā Tanden told me, āhas always believed people should pay their own way, and they donāt like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they donāt become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.āTo date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.
theatlantic.com
The Truth About Immigration and the American Worker
Donald Trump and his allies on the populist right believe they have a compelling argument for why the GOP is the true blue-collar party: Immigration is killing the American worker, and only Trump will put a stop to it. āKamala Harrisās border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers and also union members,ā Trump declared at a recent rally. At other times, he has referred to immigration as āall-out economic warfareā on the working class. Itās a message that the former president repeats in one form or another at just about every one of his public appearances.The argument carries a certain commonsense logic: Immigration means more workers competing for jobs, which translates to lower wages and employment rates for the native-born. During Tuesday nightās vice-presidential debate, Republican Senator J. D. Vance said that his bossās proposal to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would ābe really good for our workers, who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good dayās work.āMainstream Democrats used to vigorously dispute the notion that immigration hurt native-born workers. No longer. Today, the two major parties are jockeying to convince voters that they are the ones who will truly secure the border. To the extent that liberals still defend immigration, they often do so by arguing that deporting migrants would reduce the labor supply and send prices soaring againāan argument that implicitly accepts the premise that immigrants do in fact depress wages.This is a tragedy. The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off. In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking. The economics of immigration is not one of them.Econ 101 tells us that when the supply of a good, like labor, increases, then the price of that good falls. This is the lens through which economists viewed immigration for much of the 20th century: great for corporations (cheap labor) and consumers (lower prices) but bad for native-born workers. Then a study came along that shattered the consensus.In 1980, Fidel Castro briefly lifted Cubaās ban on emigration, leading 125,000 people, most of whom lacked a high-school education, to travel from Mariel Bay to Miami in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. In a few months, Miamiās workforce expanded by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands because of immigration in a typical year, creating the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. The economist David Card later realized that if he compared Miami with cities that did not experience the boatlift, he could isolate the effect that immigration had on native-born earning power. If immigrants really did depress wages, then surely the effect would be visible in Miami in the 1980s.Instead, in a paper published in 1990, Card found that the boatlift had virtually no effect on either the wages or employment prospects of native-born workers in Miami, including those who lacked a college degree. Economists have since used similar natural experiments to study the effect of immigration in countries including Israel and Denmark, arriving at the same conclusion that Card did. (These studies mostly focus on low-skill immigration; high-skill immigration has long been viewed almost universally as economically beneficial.)[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]The simple Econ 101 story turned out to have a blind spot: Immigrants arenāt just workers who compete for jobs; they are also consumers who buy things. They therefore increase not only the supply of labor, which reduces wages, but also the demand for it, which raises them. In the end, the two forces appear to cancel each other out. (The same logic explains why commentators who suggest that immigration is a helpful inflation-fighting tool are probably wrong. I have made a version of this mistake myself.)Inevitably, not everyone accepted the new consensus. In a paper first circulated in 2015, the Harvard economist George Borjas reanalyzed Cardās data and concluded that even though average wages were indeed unaffected, the wages for natives who lacked a high-school degreeāand thus competed most directly with the Marielitosāhad fallen as a result of the boatlift. Borjasās study seemed to back up restrictionist policy with empirical data, and for that reason became a pillar of anti-immigration discourse. In 2017, for example, Stephen Miller cited it when pressed by a New York Times reporter for evidence that immigration hurts American workers.But Borjasās debunking of Card, such as it was, has itself been debunked. The data underlying his argument turned out to be extremely suspect. Borjas had excluded women, Hispanic people, and workers who werenāt āprime ageā from his analysis, arguing that the remaining group represented the workers most vulnerable to immigrant competition. As the economist Michael Clemens has pointed out, Borjas ended up with an absurdly tiny sample of just 17 workers a year, making it impossible to distinguish a legitimate finding from pure statistical noise. Another study looking at the same data, but for all native-born workers without a high-school degree, found no negative impact on wages. Subsequent natural experiment studies have yielded similar conclusions. āEconomic models have long predicted that low-skill immigration would hurt the wages of low-skill workers,ā Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, told me. āBut that turns out not to be true when we actually look at what happens in the real world.āOn paper, immigrants and natives without a high-school education might look like easily substitutable workers. In reality, they arenāt. Take the restaurant industry. New immigrants may disproportionately get hired as fry cooks, which, in turn, depresses wages for native-born fry cooks. But by lowering costs and generating lots of new demand, those same immigrants enable more restaurants to open that need not just fry cooks but also servers and hosts and bartenders. Native-born workers have an edge at getting those jobs, because, unlike new immigrants, they have the English skills and tacit cultural knowledge required to perform them.This dynamic helps explain why many efforts to deport immigrants have hurt native-born workers. From 2008 to 2014, the Department of Homeland Security deported about half a million undocumented immigrants through its āSecure Communitiesā program. Because the initiative was rolled out in different counties at different times, researchers were able to compare how workers fared in places where mass deportation was under way against outcomes for those in as-yet unaffected places. They found that for every 100 migrant workers who were deported, nine fewer jobs existed for natives; native workersā wages also fell slightly. Other studies of immigration crackdowns throughout American history have reached similar conclusions. When a community loses immigrant workers, the result isnāt higher-paid natives; itās fewer child-care services provided, fewer meals prepared, and fewer homes built.Low-skill immigration does have some economic costs. Most studies find that the income of other immigrants takes a hit when a new wave of migrants arrives. Low-skill immigration also tends to slightly exacerbate inequality because it increases demand for college-educated professionals such as doctors, managers, and lawyers, resulting in even larger wage gains for that group. But these complications donāt mean that immigration is crushing the American working class.Hold on, immigrationās critics say: Natural experiments can only tell you so much. You must instead look at the broad sweep of American history. As the liberal New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has pointed out, the decades in which American workers experienced their fastest income gainsāthe 1940s, ā50s, and ā60sāoccurred when immigration was near historic lows; since the ā70s, immigration has surged while wages for the median worker have stagnated. āThe trajectory of American history tells a very clear story,ā Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me. āHigh levels of immigration are correlated with poor outcomes for workers.āThe problem with relying on history is that correlations also only tell you so much. Some readers will recall that quite a few things have changed since the 1970s; most relevant for our purposes, these include the loosening of trade policy, the weakening of labor unions, and the enormous rise in corporate concentration. All of these trends have been more persuasively linked to the declining fortunes of the working class. Without some evidence of causation, the co-incidence of stagnating wages and rising immigration really does look like just that: a coincidence.[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]Two data points are instructive here. First, the parts of the country that have received the largest numbers of immigrants in recent decadesāTexas, Florida, the D.C.-to-Boston corridorāare those that have experienced the least wage stagnation. Second, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has experienced both a huge surge in illegal immigration and perhaps the most significant reduction of wage inequality since the 1940s. That doesnāt mean high levels of immigration caused the spike in wages at the bottom. But thatās exactly the point: Historical trends donāt necessarily imply neat causal relationships.The other problem is that you can just as easily make the circumstantial case that the natural-experiment literature underestimates the economic benefits of immigration. The aforementioned Denmark study tracked every single individual across the country (something that isnāt possible in the U.S. because of data constraints) over a 20-year period and found that low-skill natives who were most exposed to immigration responded by pursuing higher levels of education and moving to higher-paying occupations. Ultimately they achieved higher earnings than their peers who werenāt exposed to immigration. A study in the U.S. found that immigrants were 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business, and that the rate of entrepreneurship was just as high for immigrants from low-income countries as those from high-income countries. āImmigrants to the U.S. create so many successful businesses that they ultimately appear to create more jobs as founders than they fill as workers,ā Benjamin F. Jones, one of the authors, wrote in The Atlantic last year. Immigrants, he noted, are inherently risk-takers. āWe should not be surprised that they are exceptionally entrepreneurial once they arrive.āI admit to being partial to this view for personal reasons. My grandfather came to the U.S. in the 1960s as an undocumented immigrant from Lebanon, having never finished high school and speaking very little English. Within a few months, he landed a job as a car mechanic at a local gas station, leaving for work each morning before his kids woke up and returning after they were asleep at night. An economic study might find that he helped depress the wages of native-born mechanics, which might have been balanced out by his spending in other areas. What it probably wouldnāt capture is what happened next: He opened up his own station, and then another, and then another, employing dozens of mostly native-born mechanics, attendants, and cashiers. Along the way, he became a darling of his community, bringing a little bit of Arab hospitality to a mostly white suburb of New Jersey. His life was its own kind of natural experiment.The appeal of restricting immigration has, to put it lightly, never been primarily about economics. Surveys of public opinion generally find that peopleās feelings about immigration are driven less by material concerns than they are by cultural anxieties about crime, social norms, and national identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment is much higher among older Americans (many of whom are retired) living in rural areas that contain few immigrants than it is among working-age Americans in immigrant-heavy cities such as New York and Los Angeles.Even if conservative policy wonks sincerely believe that limiting immigration would help the American worker, the guy at the top of the Republican ticket clearly has other things on his mind. In his debate against Kamala Harris, Trump, who has accused immigrants of āpoisoning the blood of our country,ā mentioned the supposed economic impact of migration exactly once. He spent much more time portraying undocumented immigrants as a marauding horde of psychopathic murderers āpouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.ā At one now-infamous moment, he even claimed that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In Trumpās hands, the economic case against immigration is a fig leaf that barely obscures a much larger and more nakedly bigoted body of work.[Gilad Edelman: Donald Trumpās theory of everything]The example of Springfield is a revealing one. In the past few years, thousands of Haitian immigrantsāoverwhelmingly with legal statusāhave settled in the town of 58,000. This has led to some problems. Housing prices rose quickly. The health-care and education systems have come under stress. And relations between longtime residents and the new arrivals have at times been contentious, especially after a traffic accident caused by a Haitian immigrant last year resulted in the death of an 11-year-old boy.But after decades of dwindling population and shrinking job opportunities, Springfield has also experienced a jolt of economic energy. The immigrants have helped auto factories stay in operation, filled shortages at distribution centers, and enabled new restaurants and small businesses to open. Wage growth in the city took off during the migration wave and stayed above 6 percent for two years, though it has since slowed down. And the flip side of strain on the housing, education, and health-care systems is that there are now more jobs available for construction workers, teachers, and nurses to meet that increased demand. āWhat the companies tell us is that they are very good workers,ā Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in a recent interview, referring to the Haitian immigrants. āTheyāre very happy to have them there, and frankly, thatās helped the economy.āFor DeWine and other public officials, this is a trade that is well worth making: Immigrants might cause some social tensions, but overall they make the place better off. Others, of course, disagree. According to Gallup, 2024 is the first year in nearly two decades that a majority of the public wants less immigration to the U.S. In the past year alone, the desire to reduce the amount of immigration has jumped by 10 points for Democrats and 15 points for Republicans. No matter who wins in November, we will likely see more restrictive immigration policy in years to come. If that is the will of the voters, so be it. Just donāt expect it to do anything to help the working class.
theatlantic.com
Europe Shrugs Off Russiaās Latest Nuclear Threats
The saber rattling from Russia has come hard and fast in recent days, but European leaders barely seemed to flinch.
time.com
What History Can Teach Us About Constipation and the Gut
Weāve historically been obsessed with constipation. Itās shaped how we think about the gut, writes Elsa Richardson.
time.com
Everything You Need to Know About Voting in the 2024 Election
Who can register to vote? How do I vote early?
time.com
The Supreme Court will decide if Oklahoma must execute a man it doesnāt want to kill
Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip. | Oklahoma Department of Corrections In 2004, Richard Glossip was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Since then, the case against him has completely fallen apart. The state of Oklahoma, which is currently holding Glossip on death row, commissioned two investigations looking into Glossipās 20-year-old conviction. The first, conducted by the law firm Reed Smith on behalf of a committee of state lawmakers, determined that a long series of errors, destroyed evidence, and police failures āfundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.ā A second investigation, commissioned by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, and led by a former district attorney, determined that āGlossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.ā And yet Glossip remains on death row, despite the fact that Drummond has become his unlikely advocate. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court, Drummond argues that āby suppressing important evidence about the Stateās indispensable witness and then knowingly eliciting false testimony on the same subject,ā prosecutors violated the Constitution when they tried and convicted Glossip. Drummond went to the Supreme Court because Oklahomaās own institutions resisted his pleas to retry Glossip. The stateās highest criminal court denied the request to toss out Glossipās conviction, claiming, among other things, that a crucial new piece of evidence ādoes not create a reasonable probability that the result of the proceeding would have been differentā had Glossipās lawyers been aware of it at his trial. The stateās parole board, meanwhile, split 2-2 on whether to grant relief to Glossip ā with one member recused because his wife was the lead prosecutor against Glossip. Without a majority vote from the parole board, the state governor may not pardon Glossip or commute his sentence (although the governor can delay the execution for 60 days). Though the two state investigations into Glossipās conviction were broad, and uncovered a long list of questionable actions by police and prosecutors, the specific legal issues now before the Supreme Court are narrow. Specifically, both Glossip and Drummond identify two possible constitutional violations arising out of a single document that was recently disclosed to Glossipās lawyers.Ā Four words in that document, which the state shared with Glossipās lawyers in January 2023, suggest that prosecutors kept a key piece of information from Glossip: an essential witness against the former motel manager was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness. Had Glossipās legal team known of this information at trial, they could have used it to undermine that witnessās credibility and to undercut the stateās entire murder case against Glossip. No matter how the Supreme Court rules, Glossip most likely will not get off scot free. The state maintains that the new evidence does not prove that Glossip is actually innocent, and it reserves the right to retry him. Indeed, the Supreme Court wonāt even consider all of the exculpatory evidence listed in the Reed Smith report ā instead focusing on the one newly revealed document which suggests that prosecutors violated the Constitution. And it is far from clear that this document will be enough to persuade this Supreme Court, which has a history of arguing that state convictions should remain final even if they are later revealed to be unreliable, to grant Glossip a new trial. The flimsy case against Glossip, explained In 1997, Justin Sneed, a maintenance worker at a motel owned by Barry Van Treese, killed Van Treese with a baseball bat. At the time of this crime, Glossip was the manager at the same motel. Though Glossip was not present when Van Treese was killed, he was convicted of murder in 2004 on the theory that he hired Sneed to kill Van Treese. Sneedās testimony against him was the only direct evidence connecting him to the murder. The state now describes Sneed as an āindispensable witness.ā Itās worth noting that regardless of whether Glossip hired Sneed to kill their boss, he is not entirely innocent. According to his own attorneys, he āspoke to police voluntarily on the day of the murder and again after he was detained the next day, admitting that he took actions after Van Treese was killed that helped Sneed after the fact.ā Initially, the state charged Glossip as an accessory-after-the-fact for helping to cover up the murder and clean up the murder scene. But that charge was later upgraded to murder after police caught up with and interviewed Sneed. There are several reasons to doubt this upgraded charge, however, and even to suspect that Sneed was intentionally railroaded by police into implicating Glossip in the murder itself. The Reed Smith investigation, for example, found that āSneed implicated Glossip as masterminding Mr. Van Treeseās killing, but only after being led there by [the lead detectiveās] inappropriate interrogation tactics.ā That investigation found that detectives mentioned Glossipās name six times during the first 20 minutes of his interrogation of Sneed, and āmentioned nobody else before Sneed confessed and pointed the finger at Glossip.ā Sneed implicated Glossip, according to the Reed Smith report, āonly after [lead] Detective [Robert] Bemo interjected his views that Sneed did not act alone, that Sneed could help himself, that Glossip was arrested, and that Glossip was blaming Sneed for the murder.ā The report also found other significant flaws in the police investigation. Among other things, police collected a surveillance tape from a gas station near the motel, which could have revealed information about Sneed and Glossipās movements the night of the murder, but the tape appears to have been lost. Police never searched the motel rooms where Sneed and Glossip lived, nor did they search the motel office. They also did not interview potentially important witnesses, including āindividuals who Sneed was staying with immediately after the murder.āĀ And, on top of all of this and other failures listed in the report, the state ādestroyed a box of evidence containing 10 itemsā before Glossipās 2004 trial even took place, and did so at the request of the Oklahoma County District Attorneyās office. This evidence included ākey physical evidence from the crime scene that could have been tested for the first time, such as Mr. Van Treeseās wallet which was never checked for fingerprints.ā In any event, these failures by police and prosecutors are not before the Supreme Court. The specific constitutional violation alleged by Glossip and Drummond arises out of a single page of handwritten notes by prosecutor Connie Smothermon, which wasnāt disclosed to Glossipās lawyers until January 2023. Those notes include two somewhat cryptic references, one indicating that Sneed may have been on the drug lithium, which is used to treat bipolar disorder, and other referencing a āDr. Trumpet.ā The significance of these notes, however, quickly became clear to both Glossipās lawyers and the state. As the state explains in its brief, at the time that Sneed was incarcerated at the Oklahoma County jail, that ājail had just one working psychiatrist in 1997 when Sneed was held there: Dr. Larry Trombka.ā Both Glossip and the state agree that Smothermonās note about āDr. Trumpetā must have been a reference to Dr. Trombka, who would have been āthe only possible treating psychiatrist and the only medical professional at the jail qualified to prescribe lithium.ā Sneedās medical records, moreover, which the state had previously withheld from Glossipās lawyers, āconfirm a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with a treatment of lithium at the county jail.ā The state, in other words, withheld evidence that its key witness had a serious and untreated mental health disorder at the time of the murder. Worse, Dr. Trombka later said that Sneedās mental illness could have caused him to experience a āmanic episodeā that may have led him āto be more paranoid or potentially violent,ā and that Sneedās condition was āexacerbated by illicit drug use, such as methamphetamine.ā Thus, the undisclosed evidence didnāt simply undercut the credibility of the stateās key witness, it suggested that Sneed may have had another motive for committing the murder. Rather than murdering Van Treese at Glossipās urging, as the state claimed, Sneed may have done so because he was in the middle of a serious mental health episode. Whatās the actual legal issue before the Supreme Court? Both Glossip and the state allege that this failure to reveal Sneedās connection to Dr. Trombka violates the Supreme Courtās decisions in Brady v. Maryland (1963) and Napue v. Illinois (1959). Brady held that prosecutors must turn over evidence that is āfavorable to an accusedā if that evidence āis material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.ā So Glossip and Drummond now argue that prosecutors had an obligation to reveal that the killer, a key witness against Glossip, was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness. Napue, meanwhile, held that āa conviction obtained through use of false evidence, known to be such by representatives of the State, must fall under the Fourteenth Amendment.ā This rule applies even āwhen the State, although not soliciting false evidence, allows it to go uncorrected when it appears.ā The reason Napue applies to Glossipās case is that, during Glossipās 2004 trial, Sneed testified he was given lithium in the county jail, but he suggested that he was prescribed it by accident and that he ānever seen no psychiatrist or anything.ā Smothermonās notes suggest that she knew Sneed was not telling the truth when he testified heād never seen a psychiatrist, but that she failed to correct this false statement as required by Napue. So is that enough to overturn Glossipās conviction? Well, it was enough to convince Oklahomaās top law enforcement officer that Glossipās conviction cannot be sustained. Certainly, many judges would agree Glossipās rights under Brady and Napue were violated here. But, to win this case, Glossip must convince at least five members of this Supreme Court to rule in his favor. And this Court has a history of condemning men to die despite significant evidence that they are innocent. Consider, for example, the Barry Jones case. Jones was convicted of murdering his girlfriendās 4-year-old daughter and sentenced to die in 1995. But Jones received constitutionally inadequate representation, so the jury never heard evidence indicating that Jones is innocent. Among other things, medical experts determined that the injuries that killed his alleged victim could not have been inflicted during the time when Jones and the girl were together. Armed with this evidence, two federal courts determined that Jones must be given a new trial. But all six of the Republican justices reversed that decision, holding that federal courts may not even consider this evidence. They reasoned it is more important to preserve āthe Stateās significant interest in repose for concluded litigationā ā that is, once a trial is complete, it is more important to preserve its outcome than to determine if the outcome is correct. (After the Supreme Court ruled, Jones was freed from death row because Arizonaās attorney general negotiated a deal where Jones pled guilty to second-degree murder and was resentenced to the time heād already served.) When both parties to a Supreme Court case agree that the court below botched a case, the Court typically appoints a third attorney to defend the lower courtās judgment. That happened in the Glossip case. The court-appointed lawyers tasked with defending Glossipās conviction essentially argue the additional information revealed by Smothermonās notes is too trivial to matter. ā[T]he notes would have at most altered the juryās perception of Sneed from a troubled murderer who took lithium,ā they write, āto a troubled murderer who took lithium from a psychiatrist.ā Of course, the real question in the Glossip case is what evidence Glossipās lawyers could have presented to his jury if theyād known Sneed was treated by a psychiatrist and obtained Sneedās medical records. But this case will not turn on whether a reasonable judge would find that prosecutors violated Brady and Napue when they withheld this information.Ā Instead, it will turn on whether the same six judges responsible for the Barry Jones decision are willing to give Glossip a new trial.
vox.com
Your iPhone is probably a satellite phone. Hereās how it could save your life.
A woman looks at her smart phone in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 1, 2024 in Bat Cave, North Carolina. Youāve probably seen a satellite phone in a movie. Usually theyāre depicted as black bricks that let you phone home from Mount Everest for $100 a minute. Whether youāre a mountaineer or not, the technology has gotten smaller, better, and much cheaper. In fact, you may have a satphone in your pocket right now and not even know it. An untold number of people in western North Carolina have made this realization in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which left towns and counties without power, water, and cell service. The latest generations of smartphones, however, can connect directly to satellites. That means you can send text messages and make emergency phone calls, even when thereās not a working cell tower for miles. āDue to the lack of cell service, EVERYONE in Asheville NC right now on iOS 18 has been able to get messages out and in with the Satellite messaging feature,ā Asheville resident Matt Van Swol said in a tweet. āThis is literally saving lives.ā The Apple feature indeed lets you send iMessages and SMS messages via satellite, and itās only been available for a few weeks, thanks to the latest iPhone operating system upgrade. Anyone with an iPhone 14 or newer can install the software and gain access to satellite-based messaging. The service is also currently free for the first two years after youāve activated or updated your device (Apple hasnāt said how much it will cost thereafter). To send a message via satellite, you must be outside, away from obstacles like buildings and trees. Then, you point your iPhone at the sky ā just like they do in the movies when looking for a signal. An onscreen prompt will steer you toward a satellite, and when you connect, you can send a message to anyone. It takes a while: Up to 30 seconds for the entire message to send. You can also receive messages, but only from your emergency contact and members of your Family Sharing account. Apple isnāt the only one getting on the satphone bandwagon. Google rolled out a similar service called Satellite SOS for its Pixel 9 series devices, which hit shelves in August. Itās also free for the first two years, and you have to be using the Google Messages app. These texting services are not necessarily designed to be lifelines. In fact, Apple specifically says, āMessages via satellite shouldnāt be used in emergencies.ā Thatās what its Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, which has been around since 2022, is designed to do. Google similarly offers a Satellite SOS feature. Apple also offers Roadside Assistance via satellite in case your car breaks down or crashes in a remote area. The big difference between the texting services and those SOS options is that, instead of staying in touch with family and friends, the SOS services connect you directly to emergency services, with whom you can share your location and details of your emergency. The new iMessage and SMS service, for now, amounts to a fun, free way to text your friends when you summit Mount Everest. And it obviously comes in handy if ābiblical devastationā strikes your part of the world and you want to let loved ones know youāre okay. Apple and Google did not enable these futuristic new services with a simple software update or even a new generation of phones. Enabling cellphones to connect directly to satellites ā also known as direct-to-cell technology ā has been years in the making. More access to satellite-based communication has also changed the sky. You can now see constellations of satellites flying above you, designed to solve the very difficult problem of beaming signals from your phone up to space and back down to someone elseās device. To make this possible, a growing list of companies is launching even more satellites into orbit and developing new methods of triangulating signals called beamforming. If youāre familiar with the satellite-based broadband pioneered by companies like Starlink, the way direct-to-cell satellite technology works will sound familiar. The basic idea is to create cell towers in space. That way they could receive signals from devices on Earthās service and bounce it back down to terrestrial cell towers or even specific devices, much in the same way networks of cell towers keep all our phones connected here on the ground.Ā To do this, a number of companies have launched large constellations of satellites into low Earth orbit a few hundred miles up, where they speed around the planet at tens of thousands of miles per hour. The challenge then is to find devices on the ground while the satellites are moving so quickly. Thatās where larger antennas and beamforming come in. Larger antennas help the satellites pick up more radio waves as they speed by, and beamforming allows the satellites to send signals from multiple sources that converge to create a stronger signal. (If youād like a more technical explanation of how this works, this is a good guide.) A lot of companies you probably havenāt heard of are making this possible. Apple is working with a satellite partner called Globalstar for its new services. For its new Pixel 9 lineup, Google has teamed up with Skylo, which is also working with Verizon to provide its customers with direct-to-cell capabilities. And then thereās the Elon Musk company you have probably heard of. T-Mobile has a partnership with SpaceX, which sent the first of several sets of Starlink satellites into orbit earlier this year as part of the effort. While the system has been successfully tested, itās not clear when this network will come online for T-Mobile customers. In the meantime, the Starlink satellites themselves are apparently very bright in the night sky.Ā As all of these disparate efforts to connect cellphones to stars come to fruition, we can expect a near future where youāre never without a signal. You could be deep in the Amazon rainforest texting your kids details about wildlife or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean getting updates about the playoffs. And thatās not even taking into account how many lives could be saved by offering lifelines to those in trouble.Ā Expect all of these services to cost money. But in the two or so years you have to test it for free, give the satphone experience a try. You can find details about setting up satellite messaging on an iPhone here and the Emergency SOS feature on Google Pixel 9 devices here.Ā If your phone is a few years old or not made by Apple or Google, then you donāt have these capabilities. Donāt expect to rely on these features in a disaster. For better or worse, the future of extraterrestrial communication is built on Big Techās endless upgrade cycle.
vox.com
āOne-of-a-kindā new Alzheimerās drug shows promise: āAn exciting developmentā
Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative condition that affects an estimated 7 million Americans.
nypost.com
Jennifer Aniston dispels wildest rumors written about her: āThatās a little trueā
The "Friends" alum, 55, dispelled a series of wild headlines written about her during an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"
nypost.com
Biden admin accused of burying Americans' voting concerns and more top headlines
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.
foxnews.com
Grandparents Found Hugging After Being Killed in Hurricane Helene Disaster
Laurel Lindsay/Second Baptist Church of Beech Island, S.C.A couple in South Carolina killed by a tree falling on their bedroom during Hurricane Helene was found hugging each other, according to their grandson.Marcia, 74, and Jerry Savage, 78, were lying in bed at their house in Beech Island when the tree crashed down on their bedroom, their grandson John Savage told the Associated Press. āAll you could see was ceiling and tree,ā the 22-year-old, who was in the property at the time, said. āI was just going through sheer panic at that point.āSavage told the news agency that his grandparents were found hugging each other in the bed. He said his family believe God intended for them to be taken together rather than allowing one of them to live without the other.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Kathie Lee Gifford would be āin an insane asylum without Jesusā but ācanāt stand religionā
The former āTodayā host ānever would have made itā without her faith.
nypost.com
Texas teen Natalee Cramer sex trafficked from Dallas Mavericks game details harrowing abduction,Ā transported 200 miles away from home
The teen, having left her phone behind, had made eye contact with her future abductor on the arena's concourse.
nypost.com