Trump’s Bodega Visit Should Scare the Heck Out of Democrats

The Colorado Rockies set a record for trailing in each of their first 29 games of the season as they lost in 10 innings to the Miami Marlins on Tuesday.

Black students continue standing on the front lines of protests against police brutality and racism.

Keith Davidson told the hush money trial he always believed that Trump was behind secret payments to Stormy Daniels.

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Construction of President Biden’s floating Gaza pier is nearly complete as some critics raise concerns over security and the growing cost of the now $320 million project.

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Bob Strong/ReutersNovelist Paul Auster has died at the age of 77 due to complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed.A New Jersey native who ultimately made Brooklyn his home, Auster wrote 34 books throughout his career, including the New York Trilogy, which began with City of Glass, the 1985 novel that wound up being Auster’s breakthrough (after it was first rejected by 17 publishers, according to The New York Times).Highly regarded as a leading figure in literary postmodernism, Auster was influenced by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and like Beckett, he lived for a time in Paris, where he translated French literature.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Over the past few weeks, pro-Palestinian protests have taken place at several different college campuses across the U.S.

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It finished a whirlwind run on quarterbacks in the 2024 NFL Draft — half of the first 12 picks at the position — and some felt Denver reached for the 24-year-old Nix.

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A Los Angeles Metro light rail train and a University of Southern California shuttle bus collided in downtown Los Angeles, injuring dozens of people.

The New Jersey-born writer was known for a string of acclaimed works including "The New York Trilogy" and "The Book of Illusions".

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Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2024. | Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Federal Reserve will give an announcement on interest rates during its May meeting Wednesday. Even borrowing money is more expensive these days — and the Federal Reserve might decide to keep it that way for a while. All eyes are on the Fed’s May meeting today, where Fed chair Jerome Powell will make an announcement about interest rates. Though analysts do not expect the Fed to cut rates just yet, some had projected a cut might be coming soon. That now appears increasingly unlikely. Instead, his remarks are expected to shed light on how much longer the US economy will have to endure high interest rates, which are squeezing everyone from prospective home buyers to people who have racked up credit card debt. High interest rates have helped cool a too-hot economy, significantly bringing down inflation to 3.5 percent from its 9.1 percent peak in June 2022. But it’s still well above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, and inflation has increased slightly in the last few months, which means we might not see a rate cut anytime soon. “The ‘last mile’ ... to the Fed’s target range was expected to be more difficult than what came before it,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Even with that expectation, however, inflation data in the first three months of 2024 has been surprisingly high.” Why inflation has remained high A few factors are driving stubborn inflation. Housing costs have been the biggest contributor by far. Inflation in rent and homeowners’ cost of living in their own homes has moderated somewhat but by less than expected, Colyar said. Auto insurance and repair costs have also risen sharply even though car prices have fallen. And health care costs have also picked up. Nicole Narea/Vox But this isn’t necessarily a “strong indication that inflation will remain similarly high for the rest of 2024,” Preston Caldwell, chief US economist at Morningstar, said in a note to investors Friday. The US economy has so far staved off a recession, growing at a slower but still solid pace in the first quarter of 2024 in part because Americans are continuing to spend a lot. The job market also remains strong, with the US blowing past projections to add 303,000 jobs in March. That hasn’t given the Fed much urgency to cut rates anytime soon. “It’s not an economy in obvious need of the pick-me-up that a rate cut would deliver,” Colyar said. Strong consumer spending, though, isn’t expected to last as Americans deplete any savings they accrued in the pandemic and rack up more household debt. That will likely cause US economic growth to slow in the coming year, which “should be sufficient to cool off remaining excess inflation,” Caldwell told Vox. When will the Fed cut interest rates? After the Fed’s December meeting, financial analysts were expecting six interest rate cuts in 2024, beginning in June. But given that inflation has remained high and the economy is still going strong, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Caldwell said he’s now expecting three cuts this year starting in September. Other top economists at UBS, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have also pushed back their projections for a rate cut. For example, Bank of America is projecting only a single rate cut in December. Some Fed officials also have not ruled out the possibility of another rate hike, which would be the first since last July. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman recently said she would support a rate hike “should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.” But Caldwell said that still seems a far-off possibility. “The mere fact that they’re delaying rate cuts already has a contractionary effect on the economy,” he said. Colyar said he will be watching Powell’s remarks to discern “how spooked they have been by the hotter-than-expected inflation data in the first quarter” and to what extent he attributes the stickiness of inflation to a few industries, rather than an indication of current overall cost pressures. What continued higher interest rates might mean for the economy Recent economic data has already dampened earlier enthusiasm in the stock market about an imminent interest rate cut. Powell’s remarks might have a similar depressive effect, depending on how pessimistic he is about the Fed winning its battle against inflation in the near term. “The first effect is psychological,” Colyar said. “Persistently high borrowing costs are painful and will eventually break something.” It’s already slowing down the real estate market significantly. Mortgage rates have surpassed 7 percent, and that’s keeping prospective home buyers and sellers on the bench. People who secured lower interest rates just a few years ago don’t want to sell and would have to secure a higher-rate mortgage for their new lodging, so there are fewer homes on the market, keeping prices higher than many buyers can afford. Americans’ total credit card debt also hit a record $1.13 trillion earlier this year, and repaying that in a high interest rate environment is bound to hurt their wallets. At the same time, the US economy has proved resilient even in a high interest rate environment. The Fed doesn’t need to step in just yet given steady job growth and economic growth, as well as strong consumer spending. “However, I would argue that the time to start loosening policy is before things are flashing red,” Colyar said. “Waiting too long because shelter prices are slow in moderating I think is an unnecessary risk.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Scouted/The Daily Beast/Murad.Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission.While a consistent topical skincare routine is essential for maintaining healthy skin, there are many other elements that contribute to the health of our skin, from diet to environment and even lifestyle factors like stress and anxiety. Murad’s new supplement is formulated to help combat the impact of stress on our skin health. Recent studies have found that stress can increase your ‘biological age’ internally and even make you look up to three years older than you actually are—not to mention the associated increased risk of cardiovascular issues and mood disorders. This research is precisely what led Murad to formulate its latest supplement, Stress Less, which contains a blend of clinical-grade adaptogens, including ashwagandha and L-theanine, along with skin-boosting ingredients like hyaluronic acid.“Murad’s Stress Less Supplement was formulated with a focus on addressing everyday stress, knowing how much it can affect the core of our well-being. This is something Dr. Murad has long been aware of and continues to study,” Emily Philen, Senior Manager of R&D Scientific Affairs at Murad, tells The Daily Beast. The goal was to create a stomach-friendly, easy-to-swallow supplement that helps the body manage responses to stress with a little boost of skin-enhancing ingredients.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in America’s retreat from democracy—the failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford’s high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.Despite this—and numerous death threats—Cheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasn’t alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.) President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona) Yet when the foundation’s executive committee received Cheney’s nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundation’s executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundation’s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committee’s decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: “At the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.”Giving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be “prudent.” Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America—the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump’s team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]I see Whitney’s legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasn’t been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. What’s more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to then–Vice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, “We face a very different political environment today than in 2004.” He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasn’t afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying “MAGA Republicans.” Daniels said he had spent 10 years “ducking” such questions. He allowed that he would “make no objection” to Biden’s statement, but continued: “I think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.” This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundation’s executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixon’s actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney—someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.Researchers led me into a small microscope room. One of them turned off the lights, and another handed me a pair of tweezers that had been dipped in a solution of glutamate—one of the most important neurotransmitters in our brains and, research has recently found, one that boosts plants’ signals too. “Be sure to cross the midrib,” Jessica Cisneros Fernandez, then a molecular biologist on Gilroy’s team, told me. She pointed to the thick vein running down the middle of a tiny leaf. This vein is the plant’s information superhighway. Injure the vein, and the pulse will move all over the plant in a wave. I pinched hard.On a screen attached to the microscope, I watched the plant light up, its veins blazing like a neon sign. As the green glow moved from the wound site outward in a fluorescent ripple, I was reminded of the branching pattern of human nerves. The plant was becoming aware, in its own way, of my touch.But what exactly does it mean for a plant to be aware ? Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention. Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them.Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent. Plants have been found to show sensitivity to sound, store information to be accessed later, and communicate among their kind—and even, in a sense, with particular animals. We determine intelligence in ourselves and certain other species through inference—by observing how an organism behaves, not by looking for a psychological sign. If plants can do things that we consider indications of intelligence in animals, this camp of botanists argues, then why shouldn’t we use the language of intelligence to describe them too?[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]It’s a daring question, currently being debated in labs and academic journals. Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist’s career. And plenty of botanists still think that applying concepts such as consciousness to plants does a disservice to their essential plantness. Yet even many of these scientists are awed by what we are learning about plants’ capabilities.A single book nearly snuffed out the field of plant-behavior research for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, was as popular as it was irresponsible; though it included real science, it also featured wildly unscientific projection. One chapter suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. Another suggested that a plant could respond to malevolent thoughts.Many scientists tried to reproduce the most tantalizing “research” presented in The Secret Life of Plants, to no avail. According to several researchers I spoke with, this caused the twin gatekeepers of science-funding boards and peer-review boards to become skittish about plant-behavior studies. Proposals with so much as a whiff of inquiry into the subject were turned down. Pioneers in the field changed course or left the sciences altogether.A decade after the book’s publication, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, reopened questions of plant communication. Rhoades had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.[Read: A glowing petunia could radicalize your view of plants]Still, the idea that a plant would defend itself in this way was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades presented his hypothesis at conferences, but mainstream scientific journals were reluctant to take the risk of publishing something so outlandish. The discovery ended up buried in an obscure volume, and Rhoades was ridiculed by peers in journals and at conferences.But Rhoades’s communication experiments, and others that came immediately after, helped establish new lines of inquiry. We now know that plants’ chemical signals are decipherable not just by other plants but in some cases by insects. Still, four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany.One key problem is that there is no agreed-upon definition of communication, not even in animals. Does a signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver? Much as consciousness and intelligence have no settled definition, communication slip-slides between the realms of philosophy and science, finding secure footing in neither. Intention poses the hardest of problems, because it cannot be directly determined.[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]The likely impossibility of establishing intentionality in plants, though, is no deterrent to Simon Gilroy’s sense of wonder at their liveliness. In the ’80s, Gilroy, who is British, studied at Edinburgh University under Anthony Trewavas, a renowned plant physiologist. Since then, Trewavas has begun using provocative language to talk about plants, aligning himself with a group of botanists and biologists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, and publishing papers and a book laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness. Gilroy himself is more circumspect, unwilling to talk about either of those things, but he still works with Trewavas. Recently, the two have been developing a theory of agency for plants.Gilroy is quick to remind me that he is talking strictly about biological agency, not implying intention in a thoughts-and-feelings sense. But there’s no question that plants are engaged in the active pursuit of their own goals and, in the process, shape the very environment they find themselves rooted in. That, for him, is proof of plants’ agency. Still, the proof is found through inferring the meaning behind plants’ actions rather than understanding their mechanics.“When you get down to the machinery that allows those calculations to occur, we don’t have the luxury of going, Ah, it’s neurons in the brain,” Gilroy told me. His work is beginning to allow us to watch the information processing happen, “but at the moment, we don’t know how it works.”That is the essential question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli? How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?A few years back, Gilroy and his colleague Masatsugu Toyota thought they’d have a go at those questions, which led them to the experiment I participated in at the lab. Their work has shown that those glowing-green signals move much faster than would be expected from simple diffusion. They move at the speed of some electrical signals, which they may be. Or, as new research suggests, they may be surprisingly fast chemical signals.Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localized response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found “nervous system–like signaling” in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organisms separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, Llinás and Miguel Tomé say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?“What do you mean, the flower remembers?” I ask.It’s 2019, and I’m walking through the Berlin Botanic Garden with Tilo Henning, a plant researcher. Henning shakes his head and laughs. He doesn’t know. No one does. But yes, he says, he and his colleague Maximilian Weigend, the director of a botanical garden in Bonn, have observed the ability of Nasa poissoniana—a plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andes—to store and recall information.The pair noticed that the multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were raising their stamen, or fertilizing organs, shortly before a pollinator arrived, as if they could predict the future. The researchers set up an experiment and found that the plant in fact seemed to be learning from experience. These flowers, Henning and Weigend found, could “remember” the time intervals between bee visits, and anticipate the time their next pollinator was likely to arrive. If the interval between bee visits changed, the plant might actually adjust the timing of its stamen display to line up with the new schedule.In a 2019 paper, Henning and Weigend call Nasa poissoniana’s behavior “intelligent,” the word still appearing in quotation marks. I want to know what Henning really thinks. Are plants intelligent? Does he see the flower’s apparent ability to remember as a hallmark of consciousness? Or does he think of the plant as an unconscious robot with a preprogrammed suite of responses?Henning shakes off my question the first two times I ask it. But the third time, he stops walking and turns to answer. The dissenting papers, he says, are all focused on the lack of brains—no brains, they claim, means no intelligence.“Plants don’t have these structures, obviously,” Henning says. “But look at what they do. I mean, they take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions. And they perform. They take everything into account, and they transform it into a reaction. And this, to me, is the basic definition of intelligence. That’s not just automatism. There might be some automatic things, like going toward light. But this is not the case here. It’s not automatic.”Where Nasa poissoniana’s “memories” could possibly be stored is still a mystery. “Maybe we are just not able to see these structures,” Henning tells me. “Maybe they are so spread all over the body of the plant that there isn’t a single structure. Maybe that’s their trick. Maybe it’s the whole organism.”It’s humbling to remember that plants are a kingdom of life entirely their own, the product of riotous evolutionary innovation that took a turn away from our branch of life when we were both barely motile, single-celled creatures floating in the prehistoric ocean. We couldn’t be more biologically different. And yet plants’ patterns and rhythms have resonances with ours—just look at the information moving through Gilroy’s glowing specimens.Mysteries abide, of course. We are far from understanding the extent of “memory” in plants. We have a few clues and fewer answers, and so many more experiments still to try.This article was adapted from Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence.’”