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It's getting harder for insurance companies to balance their risks as average temperatures rise. It’s one the bitterest messages you can get: A sterile form letter telling you that you’re getting dumped. And when it’s from your insurance company, it’s clear that it’s not them — it’s you. Even if you’ve always picked up the check, never made a claim, and kept your home in order, they think you’ve become too much trouble to handle.  There might be some cold comfort in knowing you’re not alone: The US is bursting at the seams with insurance relationship drama.  In California, thousands of residents this year have already received notices that their insurers don’t want them as customers. Major companies like State Farm and Allstate have stopped signing new policies in California, while others have left the state entirely.  Progressive Insurance dropped 100,000 homeowners in Florida from their rolls in April. Legislators in Louisiana voted to make it easier for insurance companies to drop their customers, even as companies there have already cut off tens of thousands.   And if you still have a policy, it’s getting more expensive. Across the United States, home insurance rates rose an average of almost 20 percent between 2021 and 2023. Without this insurance, homeowners are on the hook for losses when a hurricane bears down or a wildfire tears through. And if they’re still paying off the house, the lender could foreclose on the property if coverage lapses.  That’s making a lot of people pack up and leave. In Florida, one in three residents dropped by their insurer have moved or are planning to move, according to data released last month by Redfin.  The core of all this discontent is that insurers are struggling to stay afloat because the risks they have to protect against are mounting, driven in part by climate change. As average temperatures rise and disasters reach greater extremes, the magnitude of losses mounts, rendering parts of the US uninsurable. “We can’t stabilize insurance markets without dramatically reducing our climate risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, who studies insurance as the associate vice president for economics and policy analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund.  There are ways to navigate through these rough patches, but getting through an insurance breakup is a bit different from, you know, a normal breakup. Here’s what you need to know.  What you can do if you’re not in good hands or your good neighbor isn’t there One option, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) guide to home insurance cancellations: Ask your insurer to reconsider. You don’t even have to hold up a boombox outside your insurance agent’s office — just call and ask why you were dropped and whether there’s anything you can do to make them reconsider, like installing fire alarms or upgrading fixtures.  For the most part — federal flood insurance being the main exception — insurance companies are regulated at the state level, and state insurance commissioners establish what their policies must cover and limit how much they can charge customers.  But insurers are for-profit businesses, and if they pay out more than they make, can’t increase premiums to cover the difference, or reduce their coverage, then they have few options besides pushing their highest-risk customers off of their rolls.  If your insurance company won’t take you back, you can shop around for alternatives. Many states have also set up public companies to provide coverage. They’re intended to be insurers of last resort, offering much more expensive policies that cover less. But in states like Florida, they’ve become the biggest property insurer, and even they’re struggling to stay solvent.    If you’re in a state where even some of the second-rate prospects are disappearing, there are also some emerging alternatives to the traditional model. One is parametric insurance, which can quickly disburse money to people hit by a specific predefined disaster like a wildfire or a wind storm.   Unlike traditional indemnity insurance policies that pay out with the scale of a loss, parametric insurance pays a fixed amount regardless of the damages. You don’t submit receipts and an adjuster doesn’t come to look at your roof; instead, a homeowner can claim a fixed amount of money based on objective data around the disaster. The upside is a quick payment that you can use as you see fit right after a bout of severe weather. The downside is that disaster damages can easily exceed the fixed payouts, so you’re on the hook for what’s left — which is why parametric policies don’t fulfill mortgage insurance requirements. If you don’t get an insurance policy that satisfies your bank, the lender might take one out and make you pay for it. This is called forced-place insurance. It protects the bank’s stake in the mortgage, not your investment, and it’s usually more expensive than a policy that you could get on your own. The unavoidable result with all of these measures is that you’ll end up paying more to protect your home and often get less. It’s the bleak reality of the current insurance landscape: If you can’t afford it, you’re on your own.  Solving insurance drama requires solving the underlying problems The core issue with the US insurance crisis here is not with insurers or customers per se but the fact that, due to a number of factors, losses are mounting and overall risks are increasing.  “When you have more storms, more fires, more of any of those things that cause insurance companies to pay out, that increases the cost,” according to a CFPB spokesperson. “But on top of that, there’s also the effect of inflation and the fact that if you have a house, if it’s destroyed today, it’s more expensive to rebuild than it was five years ago.” More people are moving to cities that are vulnerable to coastal flooding or regions prone to wildfires, so when the water rises and the flames creep closer, more property is in harm’s way. The value of many of these properties is growing too, creating a recipe for surging insured losses. The insurance industry’s struggles are an unmistakable symptom of a warming planet, but the effects go far beyond whether you can afford a home to whether a place is livable at all. And while they may not experience the biggest financial losses, impoverished and historically marginalized communities stand to suffer the most enduring scars of a disaster.  “You can’t financially engineer your way out of very high risk levels; you have to just reduce the risk,” Kousky said.  That’s not something an individual can do on their own. Reducing climate risk demands global efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gasses as well as large-scale work to adapt to the shifts already underway. It requires actions on the part of governments and the largest companies in the world.  For an individual shopping for a home, the CFPB says it’s time to add climate risk to the list of factors influencing your decision on where to buy alongside school districts, recessed lighting, and granite countertops. Pay attention to flood zones and wildfire hazard maps.  It’s not a guarantee, but it might be the best way to reduce the chances that an insurance company will break your heart.

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After months of struggle with little movement, the war in Ukraine may be nearing a crucial point. The fight has not been going well for Ukraine. With American aid stalled, tired fighters on the front lines faced ammunition shortages just as Russia brought new sources of recruits and weapons online.But although painfully delayed, military support from the United States is on its way. The aid package passed in April is the first since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives more than a year ago, but it’s also the largest yet. Now the question is: Will it make a difference in time?The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins host Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic to discuss the state of the war and how the fight extends well beyond the battlefield itself.According to Applebaum, the psychological toll Ukraine faced from the aid holdup is only the beginning. Russia may not be able to occupy Ukraine’s cities, but it can wage a kind of psychological warfare to make them unlivable.She also describes an information war Russia has brought much closer to home for Americans. Her June cover story in The Atlantic chronicles the “new propaganda war” that Russia, China, and other illiberal states are waging on the democratic world, and how that war can shape the fate of Ukraine.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode: News clip: Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine, including a major offensive near Ukraine’s second-largest city. News clip: President Zelensky has warned that Russia’s latest push in Ukraine’s northeast could be the first wave of a wider offensive. News clip: Congress approved $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine in April. The approval came after months of dire warnings from Ukraine that its troops are running out of weapons and losing ground to Russian fighters. Hanna Rosin: The news out of Ukraine has recently turned bleak. Russia broke through critical lines in the north, and the Ukrainian side seems depleted of manpower and weapons. Now, a major part of what changed the dynamic was the halt in U.S. aid. The aid was stalled since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, although a month ago they passed the first aid bill in over a year, which may or may not be too late to turn things around.Now, I know that there is a connection between what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine and U.S. politics. But I did not truly grasp how deep that connection was and how it could affect not just the upcoming election but all of American culture, until I talked to staff writer Anne Applebaum. Anne is the first person I always want to talk to in these moments when major shifts are under way, because she can read between the lines.I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week: how Russia has brought its war much closer to home than Americans may realize.Anne has a new book coming out this summer called Autocracy, Inc. And in it, she’s been putting together the pieces: how the war in Ukraine is not just a fight for ground but a fight for psychological territory—in Russia, in the U.S. election, and pretty much all over the world.[Music]Rosin: So things have shifted on the battlefield in Ukraine. I know that much. Can you explain exactly what happened?Anne Applebaum: So, in essence, there are two different stories. There’s a story about the front line in northern and eastern Ukraine. And there we see what’s now a full-scale, very large Russian offensive.Rosin: All of a sudden? Like it just—all of a sudden?Applebaum: It’s been pushing for a while, but there was a relaunched attack in recent days and weeks against the city of Kharkiv, which is in the far north—quite near the Russian border, sort of northeast Ukraine—as well as in the east, in the sort of Donetsk region.The Russians moved tens of thousands of troops into the area, supposedly 50,000 east of Kharkiv, and redoubled their attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. That seems to have been a plan, and it seems to have been timed to happen now.Rosin: And why was it suddenly successful? Like, I feel like it’s been stalled and stalled and stalled for almost a year.Applebaum: The Ukrainians have been running out of ammunition for a long time, and during the six months in which we weren’t helping them and the European ammunition was also still on its way, the Ukrainians were holding ground but were losing weapons and equipment. And during that same period, the Russians regathered their forces. And in the last few days, they decided to push forward, as I said, in those two places.Rosin: And did anything change on the Russian side, like new strategy, new something?Applebaum: A couple things changed on the Russian side—one was the recruitment of more soldiers. They now pay people a lot of money to be in the army. And in very poor parts of Russia, they will now go and fight. Also, there’s a kind of constant, back-and-forth electronic warfare, drone warfare. The Russians got better at using drones and better at blocking Ukrainian drones and equipment.That’s one of these things where they do one thing and then the Ukrainians learn another thing. So there’s a kind of constant spiral, and that’s changing all the time. But they did recover from an earlier phase in the war when the Ukrainians could beat them using high tech a lot more easily.I should say there’s another piece of the war, however. The second piece of the story is that the Ukrainians are now using long-range weapons—some European, some American, some stuff they’ve been given recently—to hit targets in Crimea and also in Russia itself. They hit an airfield. They’ve been hitting gas and oil storage facilities, production facilities.And they’ve supposedly taken out perhaps as much as 10 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity. They’ve hit major military targets in Crimea. And so this is their new form of innovation—is to block Russian efforts from farther back. It’s almost like a separate war from the war on the front line.Rosin: I see. So the traditional battlefield that we report on and have been tracking and monitoring looks bleak, but there’s other things happening elsewhere. Okay. That’s good to know.A last battlefield question: What’s the importance of the cities, the particular cities and places where Russia has made incursions?Applebaum: So the attack on Kharkiv, which is sort of Ukraine’s second city—it was actually, at one point in history, it was the capital of Ukraine. It’s a major cultural and industrial center.The fact that the Russians are now so focused on it—focused on taking out their power stations, taking out their infrastructure, seemingly in order to force people out, to make people leave Kharkiv—is a pretty major shift in the war. They weren’t attacking Kharkiv earlier in the war.Rosin: Tactically or psychologically? Because it’s such an important city.Applebaum: I think it’s probably psychological. The idea is to make it unlivable. And my guess is that that’s really the Russian strategy for all of Ukraine, is to make it unlivable. They can’t capture it. I mean, capturing Kharkiv would be a kind of six-month Stalingrad-like urban battle. That would be my guess.And they probably don’t want to do that. So what they probably want to do instead is force everyone to leave. If there’s no electricity and there’s no water and the center is bombed out and you can’t live there, then that’s a different kind of victory.Rosin: Okay. I understand the strategy so much better. You mentioned U.S. aid. Everybody talks about U.S. aid. I feel like you, for months, have been warning: U.S. aid is critical. Please pass an aid bill. Looking back on this year, how critical is or has U.S. aid been to this shift in momentum?Applebaum: So U.S. aid and the argument in the U.S. over the aid were hugely important—both for real reasons, in that, you know, the U.S. aid provides ammunition and bullets and guns on the ground, and for psychological reasons.Because what the Russians are trying to do is to exhaust Ukraine, to convince people that Ukraine can’t win, to convince Ukrainians that they have no allies, and thereby to get them to stop fighting. And so the Russians are hoping to win through a psychological game as much as a military game.Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so it’s not just literal weapons—and I mean, it’s also literal weapons.Applebaum: It’s also literal weapons, but it’s not only the literal weapons.Rosin: It’s: You are friendless and alone.Applebaum: You’re friendless and alone, and your major supplier, which is the United States, or your big friend in Washington, isn’t going to help you anymore. And, you know, this had some impact on Ukrainians.I mean, there’s a certain scratchiness that Ukrainians now have about the U.S. You know, We relied on them. And then, you know, U.S. domestic politics undermined that. You know, remember Biden went there and, you know—first U.S. president to visit a war zone in a place where the U.S. didn’t even have troops on the ground—and promised them he would stand by them. And then he didn’t. And, okay, it wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t him alone. But nevertheless, that was experienced by a lot of people as a kind of betrayal.That was very psychologically damaging. It meant that there were soldiers on the front line who didn’t have anything to shoot back with.Rosin: So when you say “scratchiness,” that’s what you mean? Just a mistrust?Applebaum: Mistrust. Doubt. The sense of being part of a big, friendly alliance is chipped away quite a bit. I mean, it has to be said that during this time, there have been a bunch of new European projects to give them aid.There was the so-called Czech ammunition initiative. The Czechs are major producers of ammunition and weapons and have been for many decades. And there are a number of big European projects that are just getting off the ground to make new weapons, to make ammunition and so on. So other things have been happening, but the U.S. aid was expected to carry Ukraine over for six months, and it wasn’t there.Rosin: Right. So, U.S. aid was literally important, and it was meant as a bridge. So it’s like there is no more bridge.Applebaum: Yes. Yes. I mean, it’s fixed now, in other words, so the aid is coming. It’s hard for me to tell from outside how fast it’s coming. It seems some things got there right away. These long-range weapons got there right away. Other things seem to be taking longer.So that’s hard for me to tell, but there was some damage that was done by the delay. So, both psychological damage and damage in terms of lost territory and lost ability to fight.Rosin: Can we look at this from the U.S. side for a minute, since there is about to be an election? Do you just look at it as standard deadlock, or do you see some isolationism rising up in a more powerful way than it had before? How do you read the long delay from the American side?Applebaum: So I don’t think isolationism is the right word to use. I think what we were seeing was something different, which was a concerted effort to block aid that was coming from Donald Trump and people around Trump and was supported by people inside the Republican Party who are actually pro-Russian.So I don’t think it’s just that they want America to withdraw and live in splendid isolation. I think there is a piece of the Republican Party that actively supports Russia. There are members of Congress who repeat Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and of the Senate, and who actively spread Russian propaganda on social media. Those people aren’t isolationists. I mean, there’s something a little bit more than that happening.Rosin: Okay. So that sounds conspiratorial to the uninitiated. So, prove yourself!Applebaum: So to unpack—I mean, so first of all: Don’t listen to me. Listen to the various Senate and House leaders who have also said this. So, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Tom Tillis, who’s a Republican Senator—they’re all people who have said on the record, on TV, in the last few weeks and months, have talked about their colleagues repeating Russian propaganda.There’s one specific story. For example, there’s a story that circulated on social media a few months ago that said that President Zelensky of Ukraine had purchased two yachts, and there were pictures of the yachts that came in some kind of post.Obviously, President Zelensky has not purchased any yachts. Kiev is landlocked. What does he need the yachts for anyway? It was a completely made-up story that nevertheless was passed around the sort of MAGA-Russian echo chamber, which are more or less the same thing.That story: During the debate about Ukraine aid, Senator Tillis said he heard his colleagues in the Senate—Republican colleagues in the Senate—cite that story and say, for example, We shouldn’t give Ukraine aid, because Zelensky will just spend it on his yachts.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Applebaum: So that is a direct example of a false story that comes from the swamp of the internet, that is being passed around, and that is then repeated by a member of the United States Senate as a reason why we shouldn’t help Ukraine.You couldn’t get a more pure example of how fever dreams created in some troll’s brain or on somebody’s phone then become a part of the conversation in Congress.And there’s another set of arguments that are coming from Donald Trump’s camp, and Trump himself says some of it in public. He says he wants to do a deal with Russia. And there have been little leaks about what that deal might look like. And perhaps the deal includes some kind of negotiation over the border. Perhaps the deal includes some new U.S. relationship with Russia. Perhaps the deal includes some kind of deal to do with fuel prices, oil prices.There’s clearly an interest in the Trump camp to have some kind of alliance with Russia. And some people also in the Trump orbit talk about breaking up Russia and China: We need a relationship with Russia in order to oppose China, which is one of these things that sounds great until you remember how much Russia and China have in common and that the reasons why they’re in alliance have nothing to do with us.But that’s a separate topic. But there are enough people in that world who are looking for reasons why we should be allied with Russia and not with Ukraine that it’s not some kind of coincidence.Rosin: I see. Okay. So what I’m taking from that is it’s not a totally coherent plan or motivation. There’s a little bit of pro-Russia business interests. There’s a little bit of Trump magic. There’s a whole bunch of interests, but somehow the result is that there’s a repeating of propaganda.Applebaum: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, and 99 percent of it is visible to the naked eye.I’m just quoting you things that people have said. And it’s simply a desire by a part of the Republican party to have a different role in the world. Like, we don’t want to be the country that aids struggling democracies. We want to be the country that does deals. We’re going to do a deal with Russia. We’ll do a deal with whoever we can do deals with.The idea is that the United States isn’t a leader of NATO. The United States isn’t the leader of the democratic world. Instead, the United States is one power among many who does transactional deals with whoever it deems to be in its interest at that moment.And that was Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. He was restrained in it. He was prevented from doing everything that he wanted to do. He wanted to drop out of NATO, but he was talked out of it by John Bolton and others. But that’s not a new phenomenon. That’s the way a part of the party is going.Rosin: And interestingly, that faction did not win. There was U.S. aid—U.S. aid was delivered. How critical do you think the new infusion of aid is or will be?Applebaum: So the new infusion of aid is critical. Again, I’m not on the ground, and I can’t tell you what exactly has got there and what exactly it will be doing. But, psychologically, it means the Ukrainians know more stuff is coming. So they’re not being shot at on the front lines with no help arriving.So they have: Something is coming. It’s on the way. That’s very important. And then also some of the new weapons we’ve already seen in effect. So the hits on Crimea and on some of the other places on the front lines seem to be effective because of some of the new U.S. weapons.[Music]Rosin: All right. So that’s the situation in Ukraine. When we come back: Russian propaganda—how surprisingly effective it’s been, and how it’s taken root far from Moscow, both in the United States and elsewhere, and what that means for the future of democracy everywhere.[Music]Rosin: So where we are now: There’s this critical moment in the war, and then there are all these shifting, underlying alliances that we saw come out in the debate over aid. And a lot of them have to do with shifting propaganda and messaging, which is really interesting. How is Vladimir Putin messaging this moment? Like, what’s he saying?Applebaum: So, Putin’s messaging—what Putin himself says—is of no significance. Russian messaging and Russian propaganda comes through a lot of different channels.So it comes through proxies. It comes through some Russian ambassadors. There’s of course Russian TV. There’s RT. And some of it is laundered through—it’s called information laundering—it’s laundered through other kinds of publications that have links to Russia that you can’t see.So there will be newspapers or websites in Africa or Latin America, which look on the surface like they don’t have anything to do with Russia but, in fact, they have links to Russia.Rosin: This is why we have you, Anne Applebaum, to draw these lines.Applebaum: I mean, I’m actually very interested in how it works in Africa, which I think is more interesting than how it works in the U.S., but that’s a separate story. But, you know, some of it, as we know, comes through trolls on social media. Twitter is now pretty much awash in different kinds of Russian trolls.It’s hard to say if they’re really Russians or they’re just people who like Russia or they’re being paid.Rosin: Who knows.Applebaum: Who knows. But there’s a lot of it. So a lot of the attempts that social media companies made a few years ago to control some of this stuff, some of them don’t work as well anymore, especially on Twitter, but not only.So the messages come in different ways. And I should also say that the other new factor is that the messages are sometimes amplified by other autocracies. So in addition to Russian messaging, you now have Chinese messaging, some of which echoes Russian messaging. You have Iranian messaging—same thing. Venezuelan messaging—same thing.Rosin: What do you mean, “Same thing”? Like, same message about the Ukraine war?Applebaum: Same messages about the Ukraine war.Rosin: What’s the message?Applebaum: The message is: The Ukrainians are Nazis. The Ukrainians can’t win. The war is America’s fault. This is a NATO war against Russia that was provoked by NATO.There’s another strand alongside it that also says, you know, Ukraine is decaying and chaotic and catastrophic. The United States is also decaying and divided and catastrophic. These are all losing powers, and you shouldn’t support them.I’m being very, very over general, but there is now a kind of authoritarian set of narratives, which more or less are all about that, and they’re now repeated by lots of different actors in different countries. I mean, there are some specific things about Ukraine.In a cover story I wrote for The Atlantic, I describe a story that was very important at the very beginning of the war: the so-called biolabs conspiracy theory, which was an idea that the U.S. is building biological weapons in laboratories in Ukraine, and that somehow that’s a reason for the war. This was completely fake. It was debunked multiple times, including at the UN.Nevertheless, it was repeated by Russian sources. It was repeated by Chinese sources. It went out—China has a huge media network in Africa. That whole story went out on that network. You could find it all over, you know, Ecuador and Chile and so on.And that was a story that was so prevalent at the beginning of the war that something like 30 percent of Americans saw it and may well have believed it. And, certainly, a lot of Africans and Latin Americans also saw it and may well have believed it.Rosin: You’re speaking, and I’m feeling utterly defeated. I mean, that’s the truth. I feel utterly defeated by these washes and washes and washes of information coming from all corners that are going to snag in some people’s minds and sort of corrode them. Like, that’s the image I had as you were talking.So in a moment like this, all that is the groundwork. What you just described is the groundwork that’s been going on since the Ukraine war began.Applebaum: It’s been going on for a decade.I mean, it has to be said, the Ukrainians are also good at messaging, and they have resisted that pretty well. And they were very good at it in the first year of the war. The majority of Americans still support Ukraine. And the majority of Europeans still support Ukraine. So it’s not as if the Russians are winning everywhere all the time. It’s just that it turned out they had affected a key part of the Republican Party, which, actually, by the way, took me by surprise.When the aid didn’t pass early last autumn, I was initially surprised.Rosin: Surprised that this broader message was seeping up into—Applebaum: It was the broader message and the degree to which Trump didn’t want it passed and was blocking it, and that therefore—first it was Kevin McCarthy, later Mike Johnson—were also willing to block it. That was not something I expected.Rosin: Because you, in your mind, are used to like: Okay, there’s some isolationist strain. But the idea that the argument itself has taken on all kinds of force, motivation—Applebaum: The idea that they had that much power at the top of the Republican Party. Because many senior Republicans, the leaders of all the important committees in the House, are all people who have been to Ukraine, who have been very pro-Ukraine, who understand the significance of Ukraine and the war in the world and were willing to help. And so none of the congressional leadership were buying any of this Russian propaganda. But then it turned out that it still mattered. Because of Donald Trump.Rosin: I’m trying to wrap my head around this global propaganda war that you’re describing. I’m used to thinking of propaganda, I guess, in an old-fashioned way, which is something that happens over there in countries that are autocracies, and the autocrats impose it on their beleaguered citizens, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Like, it’s something I anthropologically witnessed.Applebaum: That’s very 20th century. That’s the 20th-century idea. So in the 20th century, when you think of what was Soviet propaganda, it was posters with tractor drivers, and they had square jaws, and they were digging lots of wheat, and there would be overproduction in the steel industry and so on—Rosin: And we might buy them in a campy way—Applebaum: We might buy them in a campy way. I’m sure I own some. So that was 20th-century Soviet propaganda, which ultimately failed because it was so easy to compare that with reality. So even when I first went to the Soviet Union in the ’80s, people could see that wasn’t true. That was the major flaw of that form of propaganda.What happens now, led by the Russians, and this has been true for a decade—modern Russian propaganda, and now other autocracies echo it, is not focused so much on promoting the greatness of Russia. Sometimes there’s a bit of that. Mostly, it’s focused on the degeneracy and decline of democracy. So the idea is to make sure that Russians don’t imagine there’s something better anywhere else.Rosin: Because they wouldn’t know. Like, you can tell that Russian propaganda about Russia is a lie because you’re actually waiting on a bread line. So you know that it’s not as good as the posters are showing, but you don’t necessarily know.Applebaum: But you haven’t been to Sweden or the United Kingdom or wherever. And a lot of it was—the implication of it was—now I’m just paraphrasing, but it was: Okay, not everything in Russia is perfect. And, okay, we may have some corruption, and we have some oligarchs. But look over there at the hideous decline of, you know, England and France and Germany and America. You wouldn’t want to be like that.And the purpose of this is that the main opponents of Putin and Putinism were people—and over the last two decades, have been people—who used the language of democracy and transparency and anti-corruption.Rosin: And freedom.Applebaum: And freedom.Rosin: Yeah.Applebaum: And that kind of language was also aligned with an idea that there were better societies—like, you know, in Europe and North America—and Russia could be like them.And remember that many Russians in the ’90s did hope that their country would become a democracy and believed well into the 2000s that it was still a possibility and were used to the idea that these countries are our friends.And so what Putin has set out to do is to poison that idea—so poison the idea that there’s anything better—and to poison the idea of the ideas, poison the language: democracy, freedom, transparency, rule of law, anti-corruption. All those things have to be shown to be false.And this has been done in various ways. So there’s a version of this inside Russia, and there’s a version abroad. But inside Russia, it’s been part of an anti-LGBT campaign. You know, The Western world is degenerate. Putin has said it himself: There are many different kinds of genders. Who even knows what happens over there anymore. An implication of degeneracy. Here we still have some kind of clean, more traditional way of life.Rosin: Men and women.Applebaum: Exactly. And that was mostly originally designed for the Russian audience. But it also had a certain echo and an appeal to a far-right audience in the United States and in Europe.You know, the Russians do it because they want to weaken the United States. They want the U.S. to leave Europe. They want, you know, American decline to accelerate. And Americans do it because they want to take over the government and replace it with a different kind of government.And so many of the people who will repeat Russian propaganda have been repeating some of those same ideas also for decades.I mean, this story goes back probably 20 years, so this is nothing especially new, but it became much more turbocharged in 2014 during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.Rosin: It sounds like what you’re saying is: We are vulnerable. I mean, it seems like their propaganda war is winning, the autocrats. Like, I feel like the Americans are duped in this scenario.Applebaum: I mean, first of all, it’s not clear yet that they’re winning.I mean, again, a majority of Americans support Ukraine, and a majority of Americans support the idea that the U.S. should be a democracy. So, we’re not finished yet. It’s a very delicate thing.I mean, are we being manipulated and duped by foreigners? Or is it elements in our own society that are seeking to manipulate us and dupe us?In other words, the farthest thing I want to do is say that somehow the Russians are intervening in our politics and changing it. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think we have a very important element of U.S. politics that believes the same things and uses the same tactics and is very happy to be amplified by the Russians for its own ends.So usually what happens is that Russian propaganda doesn’t invent things that are new. So, for example, in France, the Russians did not invent Marine Le Pen, who’s the French far-right leader. She’s been part of French politics for decades. They just amplify her. In her case, they gave her some money.In Spain, there’s a Catalan separatist movement, which has also been supported by the Russians in different ways. Did they invent that? No. It was already there. It’s been part of Spanish politics for decades.What they do is they take an existing fault line or an existing division, and then they help it get worse. So whether that’s through, you know, social media campaigns, in some cases through money, in some cases through helping particular individuals, they seek to amplify.Rosin: So it’s almost like there’s this coalescing global division and on one side a sort of autocracy and nostalgia.Applebaum: Except that it’s—Rosin: And the other side is what, like, freedom and democracy?Applebaum: Except that it’s more complicated because there is no—it’s not the Cold War. There’s no geographic line. There’s no Berlin Wall, and good guys are on one side and bad guys are on the other.These are struggles that are taking place within each democracy and actually within each autocracy. I’m leaving out the fact that there are democrats in Russia and movements in Iran and in China, for example, that have also wanted greater freedom, greater autonomy, rule of law.A lot of it’s about transparency. You know, We want to know where the money is. How did our leaders become so rich? That’s what the Navalny movement was about, for example, in Russia.Rosin: Right, right.Applebaum: And so there is a battle going on between two worldviews, but the divisions aren’t geographical. They’re in people’s heads.Rosin: Right. Okay, so with Ukraine and this whole propaganda war in mind that you’re describing, what are the stakes for the 2024 election?Applebaum: I think the stakes for the 2024 election are really stark. Is the United States going to remain allied with other democracies? Is it going to continue on the path of the struggle against kleptocracy, which is finally beginning to gain a little bit of traction? So against money laundering and anonymous companies and so on. Is the United States going to militarily resist Russian incursions in Europe? And this is a package of things. Is the United States going to maintain its alliances with Japan and South Korea and Taiwan?Or is the United States going to become a transactional power whose friends one day might be Russia, another day might be North Korea, who no longer leads a recognizable democratic alliance, either on the ground in the world or mentally?I mean, are we still going to be seen as a country that stands for a set of ideas—as well as a country that respects language about human rights and human dignity and so on—or are we going to become a transactional power like so many others?And that’s one of the questions that’s on the ballot in November.Rosin: Well, that is very clear. Anne, thank you for helping us put all these pieces together. That was very helpful.Applebaum: Thank you.[Music]Rosin: To read more of Anne Applebaum’s work, check out her June cover story of The Atlantic, “The New Propaganda War.” And look for her upcoming book, Autocracy, Inc., this summer.This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.An old saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain runs, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Misinformation—or what some call “fake news”—is clearly a huge problem in our society, leading to a great deal of conflict. But this principle is, from my observation, also the biggest obstacle facing every young adult starting out on a new life after college graduation. Focusing on all the things you don’t know yet is easy. The greater problem is everything the world has told you about your future that simply isn’t true.Our culture’s propensity to spread misinformation is nothing new, of course; history abounds with instances of faddish nonsense that influenced conventional wisdom. Fortunately, history also abounds with people and groups dedicated to stamping out fallacious error and declaring truths about life, even when doing so has been inconvenient or costly. A prime example is the Dominican order of priests, nuns, and friars—the Mendicant Order of Preachers that was officially founded in France in 1216 by the Castilian priest Dominic de Guzmán.From their earliest days, the Dominicans have done battle with lies, folly, and ignorance, and what the Order of Preachers has taught to combat falsehood still serves today. To show what I mean, let me give three cases of patent untruths you have probably heard, the Dominican rebuttal, and the supporting evidence from modern science that can help you avoid costly errors and get a good start in the next phase of life.[Havelock Ellis: Science and mysticism]You have probably been told that college is a place you go to figure out your career plans and life ambitions—where you discover what your passion is, what you’re good at, and what the world needs specifically from you. College in particular is supposed to give you this information, in a road-to-Damascus sort of way, and you should graduate clear and confident in your goals. If that doesn’t happen, well, maybe you’ll never have a job you love or really succeed as a result.This is not true.In fact, you should not have your future all figured out. Not now, and not later. We learn this from the 13th-century Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart. He taught that we should “live without a why” (sunder warumbe in Middle High German). By this, he did not at all mean that we should be directionless or that life is meaningless. On the contrary, no one was more steadfast than Eckhart in teaching what the ultimate objective of life should be: to act in a spirit of pure love before all else, and not to let worldly aims of money, power, and prestige distract us from this objective.By all means, we should have goals in life. But they should be intentions to give us direction. They should not be attachments, so that the priority of loving others can always take precedence.This might sound heretical in our ambitious culture (in his time, Eckhart himself was periodically accused of heresy). But modern social science suggests that it is outstanding advice—and quite easy to follow. Social psychologists have long shown that people are happiest and most productive when they make progress toward ordinary goals for themselves in school, work, and life. To set goals such as getting a decent grade, graduating from college, finding a full-time job, and saving to buy a house is perfectly healthy.What is not healthy is to be attached to worldly goals in such a way that your happiness depends on them. This leads to the so-called arrival fallacy, in which you believe that bliss attends hitting your goal, a belief that almost invariably leads to frustration and disappointment.If you are at loose ends right now, and unsure about your future, that’s just fine. It means you are fit to serve the highest good as you find it on your journey. Go ahead and set a career goal, but always resolve not to let it distract you from love and service. And that way, you also stay open to finding yourself on another, better path.[Annie Lowrey: The monk who thinks the world is ending]The second big lie you may have absorbed osmotically through the culture has to do with pain and suffering. If one unofficial 1960s motto was “If it feels good, do it,” today’s might be “If it feels bad, make it stop.” Sadness and fear are commonly considered symptoms of pathology; many people have come to see ordinary unhappiness and stress as evidence that they have a disorder. Well-intentioned parents spend a huge amount of energy trying to shield their children from pain of all kinds, physical and emotional—even though good evidence suggests that some experience of adversity can build a capacity for resilience. So those who have been too thoroughly shielded can be forgiven when starting out their life journey for seeing the avoidance of suffering as a primary goal.Saint Rose of Lima had thoughts on this. She was a Dominican tertiary (a layperson who lives as a nun or monk, but outside a monastery) in 17th-century Peru, and was the first person born in the Americas to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Rose dedicated herself to serving the poorest of the poor, and suffered her own ill health and torment, dying at age 31. She was a true expert on suffering, both hers and others’. You might think she would hate and resent it, but you would be wrong. “Grace comes after tribulation,” she said, paraphrasing Jesus. “Without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace,” she elaborated. “The gifts of grace increase as the struggles increase.”Far from being a martyr to her pain, Rose was a social scientist before her time. The truth is that the people who are happiest with their lives encounter plenty of suffering too. They don’t seek it, but they also do not consider it to be some sort of sickness; nor are they afraid of it. On the contrary, they know that suffering is necessary to learn and grow. Research shows that experiences of sadness can improve memory, judgment, motivation, and goodness toward others.Similarly, fear is an essential part of the human experience because it is how we learn and develop psychological courage, which is core to our well-being. Negative or unpleasant emotions and experiences give us the resistance we need to get stronger. A strategy of evading sources of suffering is no way to live fully. Even if it were possible, it would stunt our development as human beings and lower our satisfaction with life.Obviously, suffering can reflect a behavioral or psychological maladaptation, and it may involve an actual medical problem, such as clinical depression. But suffering per se is not evidence that you are broken; it is evidence that you are a living human, experiencing a full range of emotions. If, like Rose, you accept your suffering, that challenge can be a key part of your path to success in life: You don’t have to be canonized to be sanctified.[Arthur C. Brooks: How to find your faith]Perhaps the biggest lie of all that can hold back your life’s journey in the modern world is that you should seek your own individual truth in life. Each of us has different life experiences and struggles, and this means—the contemporary conventional wisdom proposes—that truth is relative, because you have your own truth. The goal is to find that unique personal verity, embrace it, make it your identity, and not let anyone question it.On this issue, we turn to probably the greatest Dominican mind of all, Saint Thomas Aquinas. The 13th-century “Angelic Doctor,” as he became known, embraced Aristotelian philosophy, added in Muslim and Judaic ideas, and interpreted Christian thought in a way that arguably has more continuing influence today than the work of any other Catholic writer.In his Summa Theologica, he observed that perfect happiness is not possible in this life, but we can approach it if we are “busied with one thing, i.e. the contemplation of truth.” The obvious question at this point is—to quote Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea who questioned Jesus—“What is truth?” The knowledge that conforms to my lived experience? No, Aquinas teaches, only one true and divine truth exists—an ineffable mystery that we can’t fully attain on Earth. But possessing that ultimate truth is not the point; what matters for your progress toward happiness is to approach it with an open heart and an open mind.By this logic, establishing and living according to “your truth,” which is entirely relative, will not lead to your well-being. Quite the contrary. And past research seems to back this up. In 1984, the psychologist Daniel Lapsley was studying the causes of rising depression among early and late adolescents, a phenomenon that has only escalated since. He asked his young subjects to react to numerous statements such as “Everyone’s opinion is just as good as everyone else’s” and “There is no such thing as the truth.” His conclusion from their responses was clear: A belief in relative truth was a strong predictor of depression.[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]To start today on a path toward enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, consider the possibility that you don’t need to learn anything new. Instead, you may want to unlearn some false lessons that have pervaded the culture over the past few years. The first untruth is that you must know your destination; the second is that a good life is one that minimizes suffering; and the third is that you must know and live your own truth. The Dominican sages and the modern scientists together show that these are all fake news and serious impediments to a happy life.In their place, I suggest that you start your path of life by repeating each morning these three affirmations: 1. I do not know what this day will bring, but I will live it the best I can, with an attitude of love and generosity.2. I am grateful for the good I experience today, but I do not fear the bad, which is part of being alive and an opportunity for learning and growth.3. I do not possess the absolute truth, but today I will seek it with honesty, an open heart, and a spirit of adventure. Even if you prefer not to adopt this practice, let me offer the one universal cheat code that can defeat almost all of the lies you will ever encounter. This is attributed to Saint Dominic himself, the founder of the Order. “Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword,” he said, and “wear humility rather than fine clothes.”You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself—your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.This column is adapted from the commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2024, at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded by Dominican friars.

You’re in a crowd of tens of thousands of fellow fans. The band starts playing your favorite song. Everyone screams. You will never, ever forget this moment. Seeing a musician you adore live can be a transcendent experience. But getting to that moment has become a nightmare because getting tickets that won’t completely bankrupt you now requires weaving through an obstacle course. Tickets to a popular show dropping means pandemonium. You might get errors when you try to purchase tickets, and can spend hours waiting in a virtual line to grab any available tickets you can. Then the entire ticketing site crashes, apparently due to too many bots trying to access the site. On resale sites, tickets are already exponentially costlier than what you were prepared to pay. But you’ve been waiting years for the chance to see them up close — so you shell out the money. In 2024, that can mean hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for the best available seats. The very best tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, as of last year, were sold on resale sites for as much as $200,000 — enough to pay for a four-year private college with no financial aid. It’s no wonder music fans are disheartened and furious. But while it’s easy to blame just one party for the chaos and the cost, the reality is that there’s a complicated concoction of reasons why obtaining tickets to a major concert has gotten so dire. The fact that the biggest music promoter and ticketing service is one single, giant company that has a lot of control over how tickets are bought and sold definitely doesn’t help matters — but dealing with so much demand isn’t easy, either. Millions of fans want to attend a Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Harry Styles concert — and there are only so many shows and seats. Who should get to go?  How concerts got so pricey The fact is, concerts have steadily gotten more expensive even on the primary market — the place where someone can originally buy tickets, like Ticketmaster — before any scalper upcharge is added. According to the live music trade publication Pollstar, the average ticket price of the top 100 music tours last year was $122.84. In 2019 it was $91.86 — a rise that outpaced inflation by a good margin. Back in 2000, it was $40.74. For the top 10 grossing tours in 2023, the average price was even higher: $152.97. Though there are a number of factors involved in this price creep (including high fees, which a 2018 Government Accountability Office report says make up an average of 27 percent of the ticket’s total cost), the heart of the matter is simple: demand. People all over the world are clamoring to go to just a handful of the most popular artists’ concerts. Live Nation — the dominant player in the live events industry, which promotes and manages artists as well as owns the much-maligned ticket sales platform Ticketmaster — reported that 145 million people attended one of its shows in 2023, compared to 98 million in 2019. The momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing, with ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024 higher than they were this time last year.  Just 1,591 tickets for a Taylor Swift show were on sale to the public for a venue that could hold 13,330 people One big thing that artists and promoters could do is open up more tickets to their fans. A significant chunk of a venue’s capacity is often held back for presales that only a certain exclusive group may even get access to — VIP guests, music industry managers and agents, corporate sponsors, the media, and more. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that between 10 to 30 percent of tickets for big concerts were sold through presales rather than general sales; for major artists at huge venues, that number could rise as high as 65 percent. In 2009, an investigation by Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 found that, after presales and other holds, just 1,591 tickets for a Taylor Swift show were on sale to the public for a venue that could hold 13,330 people. In 2019, Live Nation even admitted that it kept tens of thousands of tickets for a Metallica tour from being sold at face value by putting them directly on resale sites. Pascal Courty, an economist at the University of Victoria, contends that lack of transparency is a huge issue. “It’s very rare that the public knows how many tickets are actually sold,” he tells Vox. While it’s true that there’s stratospheric demand for pop superstars, the practice of withholding so many tickets from the public — gating them behind credit cards, for example — certainly doesn’t help.  Elizabeth Alume, 27, spent several thousand dollars flying from Seattle to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to see the K-pop group BTS (she’s far from alone in traveling to see a favorite act; a Stubhub report last year revealed an 80 percent rise in 2023 of US-based customers buying tickets to international events on the platform). While the travel and tickets were onerous, she knew the clock was ticking on the band’s compulsory service in the South Korean military. But while the flights and hotels were several hundred dollars each, the main expense was buying resale tickets to see them over multiple days — $2,200 in Vegas, $1,600 in LA.  The ticket resale market — where hoarded supply meets unprecedented demand — might be the biggest issue facing fans today. How resellers beat out the fans These days, buying a ticket for a major concert takes preparation. At a minimum, you need a calendar alert with the ticketing site ready on both your phone and laptop. For the most popular shows, it might mean signing up for the sale ahead of time — like with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, which requires users to register before the sale begins with a phone number and email address. The company then “uses algorithms and unique data analysis” to separate the bots from the real people. (Proving that you’re human is no guarantee you’ll get the chance to buy tickets, though. For the hottest shows, Verified Fans are placed in a lottery, and only those who are selected receive an access code for the sale; others are shunted to a waitlist.) Ticketmaster places all these hurdles on the way to a purchase with an eye toward stopping professional resellers — the networks of scalpers who snap up tickets with the goal of reselling for a profit. The precise metrics Ticketmaster uses to check that someone isn’t a professional reseller are a secret, but there are some clues. “It seems like if you’ve seen the artists in the past, you have a better chance of being selected,” says Jason Koebler, a co-founder of the tech site 404 Media who has reported extensively on ticket scalping. “If your credit card and your registered address with Ticketmaster is near the city that you’re trying to see the show in, you have a better chance. If your Ticketmaster account is older, you have a better chance.” The problem is that determined professionals can still jump these hurdles. Today, according to Koebler, there exists an entire black market where people sell Ticketmaster accounts, including ones that have been “aged” to look more legit. Ticket brokering — what disgruntled fans often call “scalping” — is a longstanding, professionalized industry. (In Ancient Rome, scalpers would hawk tickets to the best seats in the Colosseum for gladiator fights.) They hold conventions and lobby for favorable legislation. The amateur reseller might not have the money to buy up heaps of Ticketmaster accounts, but what Koebler calls “industrial-scale” resellers certainly do. “Let’s say I want to see Taylor Swift in LA,” he explains. “As a normal fan, I enter the lottery one time with my one Ticketmaster account. Then you have a ticket broker who enters the Verified Fan lottery 20,000 times with 20,000 Ticketmaster accounts.” This same unevenness of resources and dedication is true of pretty much any method of buying hot concert tickets. A presale offered as part of a credit card’s reward program? Serious brokers won’t just have one card with such entertainment perks, as a fan might, but all of them. A presale intended for an artist’s official fan club? Trivial for scalpers to pay the membership fee and also join. There are also places online where scalpers can buy presale access codes, skipping credit card sign-ups. Ticketmaster has made attempts to tamp down on bots, but the software sophisticated resellers use continues to evolve. Scalpers invest a pretty penny into buying professional-grade tools that make them faster and allow them to buy more tickets than one sluggish human could, like subscription-based web browsers where each tab acts like a brand-new user waiting in a virtual line. They have troves of burner phones and credit cards on hand. Stopping these resellers is a constant cat-and-mouse game. While ticket resale isn’t illegal — only a few states have restrictions capping resale prices — using bots is. But enforcement against the resellers who use them has been lax. This means that, in practice, attempts to crack down on scalpers have made it a lot more cumbersome for everyone — including real fans — to buy tickets. The disastrous initial rollout of tickets to Swift’s tour last year left many fans unable to buy tickets at all. Going head-to-head against a scalper, you’re not likely to win out. “You’re competing against people whose livelihoods depend on being able to buy and sell these tickets,” says Koebler.  Flipping concert tickets is basically a way to print money for the adroit reseller, which is why the scalping industry is a thing in the first place. Non-VIP tickets for Swift’s North American tour stops last year ranged from $49 to $449, while resale tickets for these shows sold at an average of $3,801, according to a Pitchfork analysis. Tickets to her shows were so valuable that even regular people got in on the game: Stubhub noted that the overwhelming majority of Eras Tour tickets for sale on its site last year were from new accounts — which indicated that they weren’t professional ticket brokers, but fans who decided they’d rather make a small fortune than attend. Scalpers are a big problem making the concert-going experience worse — but at the root of the chaos is unmanageable, roof-shattering demand that has warped beyond recognition what people are willing to pay for a show. Could the solution to soaring resale prices be … higher ticket prices? To deal with white-hot demand, artists can try to play more shows at the biggest venues. If that’s still not enough, artists and Ticketmaster often opt to hold a lottery where at least everyone has a fair shot at attending.  Unfortunately, “fair” lotteries for popular tickets don’t have a great track record because the profit motive is too heady. Courty, the University of Victoria economist, calls this the “fair price ticketing curse.” If you don’t want scalpers to take advantage of lotteries, there needs to be follow-through on ensuring they don’t end up grabbing a bunch of tickets. But Courty says that’s complicated. “You have to start to audit all the sales accounts, you have to look at who the buyers were, who the resellers were — and they could often be out of jurisdiction,” he says. The secret third option to pour some water on fiery demand is not exactly popular, but it is simple: Make the tickets more expensive on the primary market.  It’s easy to see why artists are reluctant to set their prices to what a ticket would sell for on, say, StubHub. Fans would rightfully complain, and many musicians do want to give all fans the chance to come to their shows. But one surefire way to deter scalpers would be to raise prices and narrow the margin that a reseller could make by flipping a ticket. (Theoretically, there’s a ceiling on what people would pay for concert tickets, and surpassing it would quench demand.) There’s a logic to doing so for artists: If a ticket sells for $100 on the resale market compared to $50 on the primary market, “the scalper’s making more than you are from your art and your labor,” notes Koebler. One surprising thing Believe it or not, economists say that one way to stabilize some of the extremely high resale prices for popular concert tickets is to raise the price at which they’re originally sold. You can attack the supply-and-demand problem from two sides: boost the supply (artists could play a bunch more shows at the biggest stadiums in the world) or tamp down demand (charge high prices that turn a lot of consumers away). Courty’s proposed solution for an actually fair concert lottery is making the experience more like booking flights. The ticket is tied to your name, and if you have to cancel, the ticket is returned to the original issuer, who then offers it to the next person in line. The problem is that, obviously, resellers would likely fight any such measure, and there’s a bigger operational cost for ticket providers and venues since they would have to confirm that the initial buyer’s identity matched the person who shows up at the venue.  As long as there isn’t legislation making scalping impossible, and there remains a huge gulf between what artists are charging and what people are willing to pay, resellers are going to be very motivated to ruin the concert ticket-buying experience. The race to snag a spot is so cutthroat that some fans advocate for a system based on merit — well, what they consider merit — rather than luck. The most devoted fans, who have streamed the most hours of someone’s music, who have bought the most albums, vinyls, and merch, should be given priority. But it’s not clear that this is more fair. Time is also a luxury, as is having the financial means to buy merch. The discourse points to the level of resentment generated by lopsided supply and demand: Who truly deserves to be front row at a Taylor Swift concert? If you have the most money to spend? The most time to dedicate? If you’re busy with work when a concert sale drops, do you just resign yourself to missing the show? Huge pop stars are already trying their best to book the highest-capacity stadiums, or adding extra shows to ease some of the demand. But for a select few, like Taylor Swift, fans’ desire to see them feels insatiable, and there’s a physical limit to the number of shows we can expect an artist to perform. “What we’re talking about is access to a human being, more or less,” says Koebler. “The space is limited. The time is limited.” 

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Tax filing in the United States should be a lot simpler.

At the end of the day, outside of a handful "culture war" issues, the core values of today's GOP are fundamentally contradictory to the family-forward values and kitchen table issues of most Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik via ReutersDonald Trump claimed his uniquely special relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin would allow him to secure the release of Evan Gershkovich, the American Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in Russia for over a year on espionage charges which his newspaper and the Biden administration vehemently deny.The GOP presumptive presidential nominee overnight wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gershkovich “will be released almost immediately after the Election, but definitely before I assume Office,” saying that his hypothetical election victory in November would ensure the journalist will be “HOME, SAFE, AND WITH HIS FAMILY.” “Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!” he added.Much like his promise to end Russia’s war in Ukraine within a day of his return to the White House, his supposed plan to free Gershkovich was not accompanied by any specifics about how it would actually happen.Read more at The Daily Beast.

House Republicans have summoned the leaders of Northwestern University and Rutgers University to testify.

The State Opening of Parliament has been scheduled on an important anniversary for the monarch.

"I think inflation is stickier than people think," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at a summit in China.

We explain the history of Biden’s immigration policy and explain what’s likely to happen next.

The former Fulton County special prosecutor said his relationship with Willis was as "American as apple pie."

Alex Rodriguez posted Hall of Fame numbers, but given his drama-filled career, the New York Yankees are yet to retire his number.

It’s far more interesting than a reference to Her.