Putin Tries to Recruit More Soldiers, Encourage Bigger Families

Life is not just a deluge of bad news. Every day, all sorts of wonderful things are happening. People fall in love. New vaccines are getting closer to saving the roughly 500,000 children who die from malaria each year. And for those of us interested in the science of meditation, which promises a deeper understanding of human psychology and the upper bounds of subjective well-being, the field is entering an incredibly exciting new era. Research from the early 1990s helped establish the therapeutic potential of mindfulness, while more recent years have seen the investigation of the actual mechanisms that connect meditation to various health benefits. Now, as I’ve previously written, meditation science is going even further, exploring much larger questions that can go well beyond the simple promises of mindfulness-based stress relief.  According to neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet — who runs a bridge project between Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital called the Meditation Research Program — today’s new wave of research is characterized by probing the mechanisms that underlie advanced meditation.  This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. This includes a variety of techniques that don’t so much relax the mind as transform it. Advanced practices lead to “states and stages of meditation that unfold with time and mastery,” but can uncover insights that are relevant for consciousness in general, Sacchet told me.  And this isn’t just for Buddhist monks. In addition to shedding light on one of humanity’s most stubbornly puzzling mysteries, deeper insights into the workings of consciousness could help us think more expansively about mental health, and how to cultivate it. The expanding field is leading cognitive scientists to study a dizzying array of strangely powerful meditative states, from absorptions into rapturous beams of pleasure like the jhānas to temporarily switching consciousness off through a self-induced kind of drug-free general anesthesia known as “cessation.”  But the field still suffers from heavy reliance on data that shows a wealth of correlations, while falling short of demonstrating real causation. Neuroimaging studies that use tools like EEG and fMRI scan a meditator’s brain at a single point in time and give us associations between meditation and the brain’s structure or function.   So far, though, they can’t actually tell us what meditation really does to the brain, or the changes it causes. Maybe people who are drawn to meditation are predisposed to certain patterns of brain activity, and our heap of correlations tells us more about those willing to meditate than anything actually caused by meditation. Sacchet explained that the neuroscience of meditation has been almost entirely informed by studies that are stuck on the correlation question. That’s why he’s so excited about a new strategy: the possibility of combining meditation research with non-invasive brain stimulation, or “neuromodulation” techniques, which use electrical currents and magnetic fields to fiddle with brain activity in ways that can help isolate the changes that meditation actually causes. In late August, Sacchet co-authored a review that looked across all the recent research combining neuromodulation with meditation, trying to organize the field and get a sense of where things stand. It’s still early days, but initial signs are promising, and next steps are emerging.  The science of electrically zapping and magnetically pulsing meditating brains In the land of non-invasive brain stimulation, there are two giants: transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and transcranial electrical stimulation (tES).  During TMS, a power source pulses electrical currents through loops of copper wire, creating a magnetic field along the coil.  Hold the coil right above someone’s head, and the field passes through the scalp like a ghost phasing through a wall. The process either increases or decreases targeted brain activity depending on where you’re aiming the coil, how frequently electrical pulses are being delivered, and the field’s intensity. TMS has been in use for years in the treatment of psychiatric disorders like severe depression. Meanwhile, tES is a family of techniques that alter brain activity by sending weak electrical currents through electrodes placed on the scalp. There’s a lot of research on neuromodulation techniques in general, with TMS dating back to 1985, and tES before that. There’s less that looks directly at their combination with meditation. And there’s even fewer studies that focus only on healthy participants, which was an inclusion criteria for Sacchet’s review. That’s worth dwelling on for a second. Much of the existing research on both meditation and neuromodulation positions them as potential treatments for recognized illnesses, like depression. But a deeper understanding of how advanced meditation and neuromodulation affect well-being could have implications for everyone, not just people currently categorized as mentally ill.  Overall, only six studies met all the criteria for inclusion in Sacchet’s review. Across them, neuromodulation was generally found to enhance outcomes when compared with control groups. Combining tES and mindfulness meditation, for example, improved working memory.  In another study, a single round of tES paired with mindfully walking on a treadmill temporarily reduced anxiety. Another TMS study of 32 participants found that engaging in “self-compassion” practices while receiving TMS pulses to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increased self-compassion compared to controls doing the practice without TMS. Obviously, six studies don’t make a field. But the early experiments are proving a positive safety profile, and more general insights and hypotheses are beginning to emerge. Why is it that pulsing magnetic fields or zapping particular brain networks seems to amplify meditation’s effects? One idea offered in the review is the neural efficiency hypothesis. If two brains both solve the same puzzle, but one shows less activity in the process, that brain could be considered more efficient, solving the same task with less energy expended. And more efficiency could support higher intelligence.  In the case of brain stimulation plus meditation, it’s like running a marathon while benefiting from a tailwind. Being pushed along in the direction you’re already heading can help you progress faster while expending less energy.  The next generation of modulated meditation research Both fields — neuromodulation and meditation science — are still growing rapidly. As each develops new insights, they can inform new ways of more effectively combining the fields. For example, a growing heap of studies is establishing that a collection of brain regions known as the default-mode network (DMN) is critical to meditative experiences (psychedelic ones, too). The DMN is associated with self-referential thinking — autobiographical memories, mind wandering, or daydreaming about yourself. Given all the Buddhist talk of the self as some sort of illusion, you might not be surprised to learn that meditation is often linked to a reduction of activity in parts of the DMN. The mind becomes less self-centric. But neuromodulation research has yet to really take up the study of what happens when you use external means to help along the quieting of the DMN during meditation, creating a very conspicuous next step for the field. That research is already underway. Meditation teacher Shinzen Young and neuroscientist Jay Sanguinetti work together at the University of Arizona’s Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) lab. Not only are they cooking up studies there that target the DMN of meditators, they’re also working on a new generation of neuromodulation technology — transcranial focused ultrasound, or tFUS. Instead of magnetic fields or electrical currents, tFUS uses very high-frequency sound waves, which offer a roughly tenfold increase over TMS and tES in their precision for targeting specific areas in the brain. In a pilot study published earlier this year, a group of researchers including Sanguinetti and Young showed they could successfully reduce activity in the DMN by shooting tFUS at one of its major hubs, the posterior cingulate cortex. Though participants weren’t meditating during the process, they did report increases in mindfulness and modest reductions in their sense of self.  Now, they’re crowdfunding for what would be the first experiment to combine tFUS with a meditation retreat. If ultrasound continues on its present trajectory, it’s going to make a really exciting addition to the neuromodulation arsenal. In addition to using these techniques to amplify meditation’s effects, neuroscientists will benefit from a greater ability to carry out what are known as perturbational procedures. That means basically being able to safely, non-invasively turn activity in specific parts of the brain up and down, just to see what happens.  To date, neuroimaging studies have helped build correlations between meditation practices and changes to the brain’s structure and function. More targeted neuromodulation studies, however, will help to actually decipher causality. “This field has a lot of promise,” said Sacchet, but there’s “a lot of work to be done to do it right.”

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Joe Biden’s presidency is ending sooner than he hoped, but he can still cement his legacy by accomplishing something no other president has: the commutation of every federal death sentence.In 2020, Biden ran partly on abolishing the federal death penalty. His campaign website promised that he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example,” adding that death-row prisoners “should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole.” The Democratic Party platform that year also provided for the abolition of the death penalty, and shortly after Biden’s inauguration, a White House spokesperson confirmed that the president was indeed opposed to capital punishment.But the actual practice of his administration has been mixed. In July 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on executions. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Garland wrote in a memo. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.” Asked for comment on Garland’s announcement, a Biden spokesperson said, “As the president has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions.”[Read: Can America kill its prisoners kindly?]Biden’s administration has not carried out any federal executions, but neither has he instructed Garland to stop pursuing new death sentences, or to stop defending ongoing capital cases. Biden’s Department of Justice has continued pursuing death sentences for mass murderers and terrorists, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Dylann Roof, the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter. And Biden has declined to advocate for legislation that would eliminate the federal death penalty. Opponents of the death penalty have criticized Biden for failing to honor his campaign promises concerning capital punishment.So far, Biden has approached federal executions in the same way Barack Obama did: leaving the architecture for carrying out capital sentences in place but benevolently neglecting to use it. Donald Trump’s example, however, demonstrates how easy it is to resume executions even after a long gap. From 2003 to 2020, the federal government did not carry out executions. Then the Trump administration put to death 13 prisoners in a few months. Garland’s defense of current federal death sentences and pursuit of new ones has laid the groundwork for adding new prisoners to federal death row.Perhaps Biden is hoping to leave abolition up to his successor. But that, too, would be a mistake. His successor could well be Trump, and his vice president is unlikely to act boldly in this area, as she isn’t reliably opposed to capital punishment. In 2004, when Kamala Harris refused as San Francisco district attorney to seek a death sentence for the murderer of a police officer, Democratic politicians skewered her decision publicly. Then-Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as well as then–Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown all called for the death penalty. The experience was apparently formative for Harris, who reportedly became much more politically cautious as a result. Since then, Harris’s position on the death penalty has shifted several times. Right now, Harris won’t clarify whether she intends to authorize her DOJ to seek death sentences or advance current ones, and the 2024 Democratic platform has been stripped of references to capital punishment. I doubt Harris intends to resume federal executions, but neither does she seem primed to commute every sentence on death row, or to advocate vigorously for abolition.So the opportunity is in Biden’s hands. If he really does abhor capital punishment as he has claimed, then he has several avenues through which to act with the last of his executive power. He could instruct his DOJ to withdraw its pending notice of intent to seek capital punishment in the 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooting case; rescind a Trump-era letter saying the FDA has no right to regulate the distribution of lethal drugs; and commute the death sentences of the roughly 40 prisoners on federal death row. The president no longer has to worry about the political ramifications of decisive work on capital punishment, and therefore has the freedom to act on his values and save dozens of lives. He ought to take this opportunity to keep his campaign promises, and to honor the dignity of human life.

In an underground parking lot beneath an ordinary building in an ordinary Ukrainian city, dozens of what appear to be small, windowless fishing boats are lined up in rows. The noise of machinery echoes from a separate room, where men are working with metal and wires. They didn’t look up when I walked in one recent morning, and no wonder: This is a sea-drone factory, these are among the best engineers in Ukraine, and they are busy producing the unmanned vessels that have altered the trajectory of the war. Packed with explosives and guided by the world’s most sophisticated remote-navigation technology, these new weapons might even change the way that all naval wars are fought in the future.Certainly, the sea drones are evolving very quickly. A year ago, I visited the small workshop that was then producing the first Ukrainian models. One of the chief engineers described what was at the time the drones’ first major success: a strike that took out a Russian frigate, damaged a submarine, and hit some other boats as well.Since then, the sea drones, sometimes alone and sometimes in combined attacks with flying drones or missiles, have sunk or damaged more than two dozen warships. This is possibly the most successful example of asymmetric warfare in history. The Ukrainian drones cost perhaps $220,000 apiece; many of the Russian ships are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The military impact is enormous. To avoid Ukrainian strikes, Russian ships have mostly left their former headquarters, in the occupied Crimean port of Sevastopol, and moved farther east. They no longer patrol the Ukrainian coast. They can’t stop Ukrainian cargo ships from carrying grain and other goods to world markets, and Ukrainian trade is returning to prewar levels. This can’t be said often enough: Ukraine, a country without much of a navy, defeated Russia’s Black Sea fleet.Nor is Ukraine’s talent for asymmetric warfare confined to water. During a recent trip, I visited another basement, where another team of Ukrainians was working to change the course of the war—and, again, maybe the course of all subsequent wars as well. (I was allowed to tour these operations on the condition that I not identify their locations or the people working at them.) This particular facility had no machines, no engines, and no warheads, just a room lined with screens. The men and women sitting at the screens were dressed like civilians, but in fact they were soldiers, members of a special army unit created to deploy experimental communications technology in combination with experimental drones. Both are being developed by Ukrainians, for Ukraine.[Read: The ‘Gray Zone’ comes to Russia]This particular team, with links to many parts of the front lines, has been part of both offensive and defensive operations, and even medical evacuations. According to one of the commanders, this unit alone has conducted 2,400 combat missions and destroyed more than 1,000 targets, including tanks, armored personnel vehicles, trucks, and electronic-warfare systems since its creation several months ago. Like the sea-drone factory, the team in the basement is operating on a completely different scale from the frontline drone units whose work I also encountered last year, on several trips around Ukraine. In 2023, I met small groups of men building drones in garages, using what looked like sticks and glue. By contrast, this new unit is able to see images of most of the front line all at once, revise tools and tactics as new situations develop, and even design new drones to fit the army’s changing needs.More important, another commander told me, the team works “at the horizontal level,” meaning that members coordinate directly with other groups on the ground rather than operating via the army’s chain of command: “Three years of experience tells us that, 100 percent, we will be much more efficient when we are doing it on our own—coordinating with other guys that have assets, motivation, understanding of the processes.” Horizontal is a word that describes many successful Ukrainian projects, both military and civilian. Also, grassroots. In other words, Ukrainians do better when they organize themselves; they do worse when they try to move in lockstep under a single leader. Some argue that this makes them more resilient. Or, as another member of the team put it, Russia will never be able to destroy Ukraine’s decision-making center, “because the center doesn’t make all the decisions.” Members of Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade assemble a Poseidon reconnaissance drone in Sumy province, near the Russian border, in August. (Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty) I recognize that this account of the war effort differs dramatically from other, grimmer stories now coming out of Ukraine. In recent weeks, Russian glide bombs and artillery have slowly begun to destroy the city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub that has been part of Ukraine’s defensive line in Donetsk for a decade. Regular waves of Russian air strikes continue to hit Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. The repeated attacks on civilians are not an accident; they are a tactic. Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to deprive Ukrainians of heat and light, to demoralize the people as well as the government, and perhaps to provoke a new refugee exodus that will disrupt European politics.Russia remains the larger and richer country. The Kremlin has more ammunition, more tanks, and a greater willingness to dispose of its citizens. The Russian president is willing to tolerate high human losses, as well as equipment losses, of a kind that almost no other nation could accept. And yet, the Ukrainians still believe they can win—if only their American and European allies will let them.Two and a half years into the conflict, the idea that we haven’t let Ukraine win may sound strange. Since the beginning of the war, after all, we have been supporting Ukraine with weapons and other aid. Recently, President Joe Biden reiterated his support for Ukraine at the United Nations. “The good news is that Putin’s war has failed in his core aim,” he said. But, he added, “the world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let a nation be destroyed? We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away.” Hoping to rally more Americans to his side, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spent much of last week in the United States. He visited an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania. He met with former President Donald Trump, and with Vice President Kamala Harris.Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien: How defense experts got Ukraine wrongZelensky also presented a victory plan that asked, among other things, for Ukraine to have the right to use American and European long-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia. This kind of request is now familiar. In each stage of the war, the Ukrainians and their allies have waged public campaigns to get new weapons—tanks, F-16s, long-range missiles—that they need to maintain a technological edge. Each time, these requests were eventually granted, although sometimes too late to make a difference.Each time, officials in the U.S., Germany, and other Western powers argued that this or that weapon risked crossing some kind of red line. The same argument is being made once again, and it sounds hollow. Because at this point, the red lines are entirely in our heads; every one of them has been breached. Using drones, Ukraine already hits targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries, oil and gas export facilities, even air bases. In the past few weeks, Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit at least three large ammunition depots, one of which was said to have just received a large consignment from North Korea; when attacked, the depot exploded dramatically, producing an eerie mushroom cloud. In a development that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the war, Ukraine has, since early August, even occupied a chunk of Russian territory. Ukrainian troops invaded Kursk province, took control of several towns and villages, set up defenses, repelled Russian troops, and have yet to leave.But in truth, the imaginary red lines, the slow provision of weapons, and the rules about what can and can’t be hit are not the real problem. On its own, a White House decision to allow the Ukrainians to strike targets in Russia with American or even European missiles will not change the course of the war. The deeper limitation is our lack of imagination. Since this war began, we haven’t been able to imagine that the Ukrainians might defeat Russia, and so we haven’t tried to help those who are trying to do exactly that. We aren’t identifying, funding, and empowering the young Ukrainian engineers who are inventing new forms of asymmetric warfare. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians tell me, many allied armies aren’t in regular contact with the people carrying out cutting-edge military experiments in Ukraine. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, says that the Ukrainians have spare capacity in their own drone factories, and could produce more themselves if they just had the money. Meanwhile, $300 billion worth of frozen Russian reserves are still sitting in European clearinghouses, untouched, waiting for a political decision to use that money to win the war. Biden is right to tout the success of the coalition of democracies created to aid Ukraine, but why not let that coalition start defending Ukraine against incoming missiles, as friends of Israel have just done in the Middle East? Why isn’t the coalition focused on enforcing targeted sanctions against the Russian defense industry? Worse—much worse—is that, instead of focusing on victory, Americans and Europeans continue to dream of a magic “negotiated solution” that remains far away. Many, many people, some in good faith and some in bad faith, continue to call for an exchange of “land for peace.” Last week, Trump attacked Zelensky for supposedly refusing to negotiate, and the ex-president continues to make unfounded promises to end the war “in 24 hours.” But the obstacle to negotiations is not Zelensky. He probably could be induced to trade at least some land for peace, as long as Ukraine received authentic security guarantees—preferably, though not necessarily, in the form of NATO membership—to protect the rest of the country’s territory, and as long as Ukraine could be put on a path to complete integration with Europe. Even a smaller Ukraine would still need to be a viable country, to attract investment and ensure refugees’ return. Right now, the actual obstacle is Putin. Indeed, none of these advocates for “peace,” whether they come from the Quincy Institute, the Trump campaign, the Council on Foreign Relations, or even within the U.S. government, can explain how they will persuade Russia to accept such a deal. It is the Russians who have to be persuaded to stop fighting. It is the Russians who do not want to end the war. Portraits of Russian service members killed during the invasion of Ukraine are projected onto the State Council building in Simferopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea, in April. The letter Z is a symbol of the Russian invasion. (AFP / Getty) Look, again, at the situation on the ground. Even now, two and a half years into a war that was supposed to be over in a few days, the Kremlin still seeks to gain more territory. Despite the ongoing Ukrainian occupation of Kursk province, the Russian army is still sending thousands of men to die in the battle for Donetsk province. The Russian army also seems unbothered by losing equipment. In the long battle for Vulhedar, a now-empty town in eastern Ukraine with a prewar population of 14,000, the Russians have sacrificed about 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and pieces of artillery —nearly 6 percent of all the vehicles destroyed during the entire war.Russia has not changed its rhetoric either. On state television, pundits still call for the dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine. Putin continues to call for the “denazification of Ukraine,” by which he means the removal of Ukraine’s language, culture, and identity—as well as “demilitarization, and neutral status,” by which he means a Ukraine that has no army and cannot resist conquest. Nor do Russian economic decisions indicate a desire for peace. The Russian president now plans to spend 40 percent of the national budget on arms production, sacrificing living standards, health care, pensions, broader prosperity, and maybe the stability of the economy itself. The state is still paying larger and larger bonuses to anyone willing to sign up to fight. Labor shortages are rampant, both because the army is eating up eligible men and because so many others have left the country to avoid conscription.Negotiations can begin only when this rhetoric changes, when the defense machine grinds to a halt, when the attempts to conquer yet another village are abandoned. This war will end, in other words, only when the Russians run out of resources—and their resources are not infinite—or when they finally understand that Ukraine’s alliances are real, that Ukraine will not surrender, and that Russia cannot win. Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia. At that point, there can be a cease-fire, a discussion of new borders, negotiations about other things—such as the fate of the more than 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped and deported by the Russians, an orchestrated act of cruelty.We have not yet reached that stage. The Russians are still waiting for the U.S. to get tired, to stop defending Ukraine, and maybe to elect Trump so that they can dictate terms and make Ukraine into a colony again. They are hoping that the “Ukraine fatigue” they promote and the false arguments about Ukrainian corruption (“Zelensky’s yachts”) that they pay American influencers to repeat will eventually overwhelm America’s strategic and political self-interest. Which, of course, might be the case.But if it is, we are in for a nasty surprise. Should Ukraine finally lose this war, the costs—military, economic, political—for the U.S. and its allies will not go down. On the contrary, they are likely to increase, and not only in Europe. Since 2022, the military and defense-industry links among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have strengthened. Iran has delivered drones and missiles to Russia. Russia, in turn, may be providing anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, Iranian proxies who could use them against American and European commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. According to a recent Reuters report, the Russians are now constructing a major drone factory in China. The Chinese stand to benefit, that is, from the huge technological gains that the Russians have made, in many cases by imitating the Ukrainians in drone warfare and other systems, even if Americans aren’t paying close attention.[Read: Confessions of a Russian propagandist ]A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbors. I doubt very much that Germany and France, let alone Poland, are prepared for the consequences of a truly failed Ukraine, for a collapse of the Ukrainian state, for lawlessness or Russian-Mafia rule at the European Union’s eastern doorstep, as well as for the violence and crime that would result.The means to prevent that kind of international catastrophe are right in front of us, in the form of Ukraine’s drone factories, the underground sea-drone laboratory, the tools now being designed to enable the Ukrainian army to beat a larger opponent—and also in the form of our own industrial capacity. The democratic world remains wealthier and more dynamic than the autocratic world. To stay that way, Ukraine and its Western allies have to persuade Russia to stop fighting. We have to win this war.

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MSNBCMSNBC host Joe Scarborough said on Wednesday’s Morning Joe that one of JD Vance’s answers during his debate against Tim Walz explains exactly why he’s not supporting the Republican ticket in this election.Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, was speaking about a moment toward the end of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate in which Walz asked Vance point blank whether or not he believed his running mate, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 election. Apparently unwilling to contradict Trump’s false claims about that election being stolen, Vance ducked the question to say he’s “focused on the future.”Scarborough praised aspects of Vance’s debate performance, but said that particular answer was crucial.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Win McNamee/Getty ImagesDonald Trump has come up with yet another excuse to skip a proposed second debate with Kamala Harris, claiming she only wants to debate him again because his running mate bested hers in Tuesday’s face-off between the candidates for vice president.“Lyin’ Kamala just put out a request for another Debate because they lost so badly tonight - Again, it’s like the fighter who lost, gets up and says, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’’’ he wrote on Truth Social after Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz finished their debate. “I beat Biden, I then beat her, and I’m not looking to do it again, too far down the line.”For weeks, Harris has been goading Trump to agree to a second debate, after most registered voters said she was the clear winner in their lone match-up in September. On Sunday, she told a crowd of about 7,500 people in Las Vegas that Trump’s refusal to debate her was proof he was “ready to fold.” But she didn’t call for another presidential debate on Tuesday night.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Brandon Blackwood is a purveyor of Black luxury who has revolutionized the fashion world with his bold, unapologetic designs famously worn by icons from ­Beyoncé to Megan Thee Stallion. In 2020, at the height of one of the most transformative movements in recent history, one tote took over all of our feeds with a straightforward…

“How will we do it when it’s never been done? “How will we find a way, where there isn’t one?” So sings the great Shaina Taub as Alice Paul in her masterful Broadway musical Suffs, a decade-long labor of love that tells the story of the tenacious women on the front lines of the suffragist…

A movie star is someone you can’t take your eyes off of. Their beauty and presence pull you in right away, but it’s the sense of mystery behind their eyes that keeps you there. That’s Adria Arjona. When she shows up, it’s like, holy sh-t. She’s sweet and confident, but there’s a depth to her…

Payal Kapadia is nothing short of a trailblazer. Her 2024 film, All We Imagine as Light, made history this year as the first from India to win Cannes’ Grand Prix. The movie is a master class of emotions—deeply reflective, philosophical, and meditative in its approach. There is a powerful believability to how she portrays the human…

When I think about Alice Oseman, a frame from their Heartstopper comic pops into my head. In it, Nick Nelson wraps a blanket around Charlie Spring’s shoulders and says, simply, “There.” To me, that’s Alice’s work in a nutshell. Her books—and Heartstopper’s pitch-perfect adaptation to a Netflix series—are earnest, heartfelt, and tender. They sit with…

Ashley Park vibrates with energy and warmth like a downed power line on a beautiful summer night. Spending time with Ashley is a cross between Paris Fashion Week, one of those dancing inflatables outside a car wash, and a TikTok compilation of “funniest jump scares.” I first met Ashley when she auditioned for the role…

Mayor Eric Adams' troubles have ensnared many of his key lieutenants — several of whom have either left or been forced to resign as Hizzoner's legal troubles mount.

The World Health Organization says there have been increasing reports of deadly outbreaks among mammals caused by influenza viruses, including H5N1.

It couldn't be further from a Bad Romance.