Dear Abby: I’m a pastor and I believe our pets will join us in heaven

Alexandra's live chat with readers starts at 11 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Submit your questions now.

More than 1,000 people have been reported unaccounted for in Buncombe County in North Carolina, as rescue efforts continue in the area following Hurricane Helene. The county, home to Asheville, already has 30 of the Tar Heel State’s 36 confirmed deaths — a terrible toll expected to soon rise, according to Gov. Roy Cooper.

This u? The inflammation chatter is everywhere, and it’s coming for your legumes.  I first heard it from a friend recovering from surgery, who blamed her unusual post-op incision site irritation on foods TikTok had (incorrectly) informed her were inflammatory, like lentils. Antibiotics ultimately fixed her pain — turns out the incision was infected. Who knows what happened to the nutrition hearsay that lodged in her mind? Plenty of good science shows that lentils, beans, and other legumes actually have anti-inflammatory effects, but fad diets like Whole 30 demonized them years ago. Those rumors are back, along with many others, as influencers exhort people to avoid all kinds of foods with the ultimate goal of banishing inflammation from the body. That’s not something anyone would want if they understood inflammation’s complexities, says Shilpa Ravella, a Hawaii-based gastroenterologist whose book A Silent Fire explores the subject in detail. But it’s typical of the binary approach popular on social media, “where it’s either all good or all bad.”  In reality, inflammation is a double-edged sword: It’s an ancient weapon that has enabled human bodies to fight off pathogens, poisons, and traumas for millennia, but it’s also a biological process that can damage and debilitate. It’s the subject not only of thousands of TikToks, but reams of scientific research.  Here’s how inflammation can help us and hurt us, and what you need to know about reducing the risk it might pose to you. Is there such a thing as good inflammation? Inflammation involves the immune system, but not all immune system activity is inflammation, says David Hafler, a neurologist and immunobiologist at Yale who specializes in the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis.  In inflammatory states, the immune system has been switched into attack mode, which on a microscopic level means a variety of specialized cells are fighting what they perceive as invaders. They often do this either by attacking their adversaries directly or by releasing toxic chemicals that create intolerable conditions for them. Many experts split inflammation into two varieties, acute and chronic. Acute inflammation is the kind that happens in the hours and days after an injury or infection. It’s rarely quiet, says Ravella: “Blood flow is increasing, fluid and protein are leaking out of the vessels,” and as a result, people experience symptoms like swelling, redness, fever, and pain either all over or at the site of a specific injury or infection. “You can feel this,” she says, “and you know that kind of inflammation is helping to heal the wound.” When it’s short-lived — typically on the order of days to weeks — this type of inflammation is beneficial to us. Without it, we wouldn’t heal wounds or fight off infections. When acute inflammation is suppressed by an immunocompromising condition or medication, people are at higher risk of getting seriously ill due to small injuries or ordinary cough-and-cold viral infections.   In other words, there is such a thing as too little inflammatory activity, says Ravella: “We don’t want to go down to zero.” What makes inflammation bad? Unlike fast-moving acute inflammation, chronic inflammation — which typically lasts from months to years — is associated with collateral damage that limits both the quality and length of life. Some of the most prominent examples of chronic inflammation are autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system turns against the body — conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis), and lupus. These diseases are initially easy to confuse with acute, infection-related inflammation because they include so many of the same symptoms. While these symptoms don’t cause harm to our bodies when they’re directed at an invader, they can hurt us when they’re directed at our own tissues.  However, chronic inflammation can also be physically silent, causing few observable symptoms for years until it culminates in disease states. A lot of cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases, and cancers overlap with this kind of systemic chronic inflammation. Because chronic inflammation is harder to detect on routine lab tests than acute inflammation is, it’s harder to diagnose and intervene.  What causes chronic inflammation, and what does chronic inflammation cause?  While experts for years thought chronic inflammation was merely a consequence of these illnesses, there’s now mounting evidence that in some cases, inflammation itself can actually lead to disease.  The paradigm shift in the science started around 2017, says Ravella, with a clinical trial showing that in heart attack patients who had abnormally high blood levels of an inflammation-associated protein, taking an anti-inflammatory drug lowered the risk of a second heart attack by 15 percent.   “The data for causation is stronger for some conditions — like heart disease and cancer — than for others,” says Ravella. For conditions like obesity, neurodegenerative disease (like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases), and some psychiatric diseases (like depression), disentangling cause from effect is more challenging.  David Furman, a Stanford immunologist who uses genomics data to study links between aging, the immune system, and cardiovascular health, says chronic inflammation is more common in people with chronic pain, older people, and those with obesity. One effect of having the immune system always set to simmer is a “boy who cried wolf” situation: It’s so used to being saturated with inflammatory proteins that “when the real threat comes in, cells don’t respond,” he says. One effect of having the immune system always set to simmer is a “boy who cried wolf” situation That might explain why people in these groups were at such a vastly increased risk of death due to Covid-19 infection early in the pandemic, and why they are at higher risk for other diseases. Scientists are exploring other triggers in the world around us that could cause chronic inflammation, including poisons in our air; disruptions to our circadian rhythm and other stressors; problems with our food and water; and changes to the microbes that colonize our guts. Researchers call this range of inputs the “exposome.” It’s something we don’t have much control over — “You’re fighting a ghost,” says Furman — and yet a deep bench of research links many of these exposures to inflammatory pathways. Why is there so much confusing information about inflammation out there? In general, it’s hard to link any single exposure to a common outcome in humans because scientists cannot ethically control a person’s environment like they can with a lab rat. That makes it hard to do the kind of randomized, controlled human trials that many health experts favor. Researchers still have a lot of open questions about when inflammation is a cause, an effect, or something incidental to a disease or set of symptoms. And where there are gaps in science, people can make money and gain attention by exploiting the public’s understanding. TikTok is a showcase for many inflammation myths and scaremongering, much of it peddled by influencers who earn a living from your engagement or in some cases, are actively trying to sell you something. “Listing of a bunch of random symptoms to try to sell you a program or a product is unprofessional and predatory, if it’s even coming from a professional,” says dietitian Abbey Sharp in a TikTok debunking the “hidden signs your body is inflamed” genre.  Echoing expert advice about avoiding health misinformation, Sharp suggests consumers should be suspicious of vague, oversimplified, context-free statements about the causes and fixes of inflammation, especially ones from people who make money off your attention. @abbeyskitchen If you experience these dangerous symptoms and signs of INFLAMMATION- do this RIGHT NOW!! #brainfogtips #inflammation #antiinflammatory #bloatingtips #moodswings ♬ original sound – Abbey Sharp Additionally, be aware that foods are not necessarily inflammatory just because they make you gassy (hello again, legumes!), cause some people allergic reactions (think: soy), or aren’t tolerated by people with certain conditions. Gluten, for example, causes inflammation for people with celiac disease but is fine for most others.   Okay, so what can I do to reduce chronic inflammation?  There are ways to reduce your risk for the kind of chronic inflammation that may cause health problems. One of the main recommendations Hafler makes to his multiple sclerosis patients is to avoid processed foods; that nutritional habit, and many others linked to lower markers of inflammation, can also benefit people with risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but also those without specific health conditions.  The inflammation-fighting diets actual experts recommend all have something in common: “We have an anti-inflammatory nutrient, perhaps our most anti-inflammatory nutrient,” says Ravella, “and that nutrient is fiber.” She recommends going well beyond the Food and Drug Administration’s recommended daily allowances of fiber — especially soluble fiber, which nourishes microbes in the gut whose work may help lower inflammation elsewhere in the body. Be aware that foods are not necessarily inflammatory just because they make you gassy (hello again, legumes!) Beans — yes, beans! — and grains are excellent sources of soluble fiber. Leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables also contain compounds that protect against inflammation, as do nuts, seeds, fatty fish like salmon and mackerel, and a whole variety of berries. Fermentation is also a powerful way to boost foods’ anti-inflammatory properties. That’s in part because the process yields good bacteria and fungi that, when eaten raw, fortify the gut microbiome. Even in fermented foods that are cooked — like sourdough bread — the microscopic architecture changes in ways that may have anti-inflammatory effects.  Hafler recommends minimizing fat and salt in your diet, and all the experts I spoke to recommended avoiding processed foods, especially those that contain compounds and ingredients uncommon in home kitchens. The methods used in home kitchens are a lot less likely to cause inflammation than the ones used in industrial food production, which makes cooking from scratch really important, says Furman.  That even goes for treats like ice cream, he says: The surfactants and emulsifiers that produce the smooth texture in many mass-produced ice creams temporarily alter the gut’s microbiome and reduce the intestine’s protective layer, which can contribute to inflammation in ways the raw ingredients of a homemade version wouldn’t.  Spending time in nature and with other humans and animals may also reduce inflammation, in part by diversifying the microbiome, but potentially through other mechanisms. Exercise, including strength training, is also key — “Muscle is a secretory organ with anti-inflammatory properties,” says Furman — and weight control can lower risk by reducing fat cells’ secretion of pro-inflammatory substances. Ultimately, most evidence-based recommendations for an anti-inflammatory lifestyle overlap significantly with what experts have long suggested is a healthy lifestyle. We can always do more — eat ever more pesticide-free food, breathe ever-cleaner air. But “we can’t go back to being cavemen,” Furman says. It’s really up to us how far we go.   

Israel has killed many of Hezbollah's senior leaders with devastating strikes in Lebanon, but neither side appears ready to step back from the brink.

"Damn, what now? Should we talk about how I got the mayor indicted?" Carpenter quipped during a break in her Madison Square Garden concert Sunday night.

Federal prosecutors alleged last week Adams pressured the fire department to open a new 36-story Turkish consular building in September 2021 in exchange for free travel.

The vice-presidential showdown on Oct. 1 is expected to be the last debate before the November election.

The deal would provide a loan to Dish parent EchoStar Communications and also prompt the departure of AT&T from its ownership of DirecTV.

Haitians, tampons, cat ladies.

Not all ghosting in dating is created equal, writes Myisha Battle.

There’s a strange new star in the sky, so bright that you can see it by day. It brings with it unseasonably hot weather and bizarre phenomena that defy scientific explanation. To some, the star is an astronomical marvel; to others, it’s a portent of doom. This is the premise of The Shooting Star, a comic book starring the plucky young Belgian journalist Tintin, published in 1942. It’s also, more recently, the premise of a series of novels by the celebrated Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. The third book in the series, The Third Realm, arrives this month.I once read a parody of Tintin in which he kept overhearing conversations and finding little scraps of paper—crumbs!—and the joke was that they weren’t clues to anything, just meaningless ephemera. It’s funny because nothing is ever random in Tintin’s world; it’s entirely organized around him, and supersaturated with meaning. At first blush, the world of The Third Realm looks more like the parody world: a jumble of unconnected incidents and coincidences. All noise, no signal. Just like reality! But the truth is more complicated than that, and more interesting. It turns out that meaning, like a stubborn ghost, isn’t so easy to get rid of.Meaningless ephemera are, of course, Knausgaard’s stock in trade. He’s best known as the author of the six-volume autofictional epic My Struggle, a frame-breaking, obsessively detailed, radically confessional account of his own life that has become a landmark in contemporary literature. Knausgaard’s new series is, on its face, a much more conventional affair. It began—in case you’re just tuning in—in 2020 with The Morning Star, which tells the stories of nine fictional Norwegians as they go about their lives under the enigmatic gaze of the eponymous star. Is it a comet? A supernova? A UFO? An optical illusion? Nobody knows. Book two, The Wolves of Eternity, is about a young undertaker who finds out he has a secret half sister in Russia. Its connection to book one is mostly thematic, though that mystery star does appear at the end.As if to make up for the digression, The Third Realm (the title can also translate as The Third Reich—very on-brand for Knausgaard) is almost too closely tied to The Morning Star. It features most of the same characters and a lot of the same incidents; the major difference is that Knausgaard is telling them largely from new points of view. For example: In The Morning Star, we met Arne, a handsome but rather dull academic who’s trying to keep his family together while his wife, an artist named Tove, wrestles with delusions. The Third Realm puts us instead in Tove’s head, a blast furnace of creative fury and intrusive hallucinations that compete with her family for her attention. “Hell isn’t the psychosis,” Tove says. “Hell is leaving the psychosis. Hell on earth is what that is.”After six volumes of My Struggle, an uncharitable reader (like me) might have suspected Knausgaard of being a one-POV pony, but the people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona. In addition to Tove, we get Gaute (a schoolteacher), Kathrine (a pastor married to, and bored of, Gaute), Line (an H&M sales clerk), Helge (an architect), Jarle (a neurologist), Geir (a policeman and philanderer), Ramsvik (a semiconscious stroke victim), and Syvert (the undertaker from book two with the secret half sister). My Struggle has become Their Struggle. We follow them through their days, watching as they text, drive, make small talk, contemplate infidelity, have lunch, brush their teeth, smoke, think about death, drink dismaying quantities of alcohol, and pull it together for the kids. The H&M worker dates a musician. The architect goes to work. The neurologist consults on a case. Some of them meet each other; some of them don’t. They all look up at the star—“It was pale,” Helge thinks, “like the sun’s ill sister.”Knausgaard’s writerly self-discipline is formidable. Most novelists freely pump the gas and the brakes, zipping through the boring bits to get to the good ones, but his pacing is remorselessly steady, the metronome locked at 60, one second per second. He transcribes every trivial exchange in real time. He doesn’t show off; modernists such as Joyce and Woolf trafficked in mundane details too (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”), but they used them as raw material for wild stylistic experiments. The heat of Knausgaard’s prose never exceeds room temperature. Why should it? The world isn’t here to entertain you. Neither is he.I know how this sounds. And it is a lot—The Third Realm, at 512 pages, is the shortest book in the series. There’s definitely some conventional plot in there: Is Kathrine cheating on Gaute? Could Helge have saved the victim of that car crash he witnessed as a child? What should Jarle title his monograph on neuroscience (it’s not a Knausgaard novel without an embedded monograph)? Still, I’ll own that some of the suspense for me was the meta-suspense of whether I would crack under the strain of paying attention.[From the November 2018 issue: How writing My Struggle undid Knausgaard]But Knausgaard is playing a subtly different game here than he was in My Struggle. Mixed in with the everyday dross are a few sparkly flecks of strangeness, curious anomalies that might be clues to a larger mystery. Murders, for instance: Just as the star appears, three members of a death-metal band have been found dead in the woods, and not just dead but skinned. Also, unnatural herds of crabs roam the land, and a brain-dead patient who’s about to have his organs harvested suddenly revives on the operating table. If this were a Tintin comic, these things would eventually lead us to a Moroccan opium-smuggling operation. In The Third Realm, they don’t—but it’s weirder than that. They’re not connected, but they’re not not connected either. As readers, we’re all conspiracy theorists, searching for patterns, trying to put together a bigger picture. But Knausgaard keeps refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any larger mystery or meaning behind the oddities, the result being that you start hallucinating connections to fill in the gaps. Soon you’re seeing them all over the place. Everything in The Third Realm exists in a kind of Schrödingerian superposition, clue and not-clue at the same time.The characters experience their own stories this way. They’re always looking at the star and projecting their fervent but totally unsubstantiated theories onto it. “People wanted excitement,” scoffs Jarle, who fancies himself a man of science. “They wanted mysteries, they wanted the unknown.” Everybody in The Third Realm is obsessed with coincidences and what they might or might not signify. One of Gaute’s students mutters in her sleep, and it sounds like she’s saying the words heavenly star, except that the words are in Hindi, a language the student doesn’t speak. “Could it be coincidence?” Gaute asks himself. “It had to be, there was no other explanation.” Syvert, the undertaker, finds his business drying up because there have been no deaths since the mystery star appeared. “It was coincidence, of course. But how many coincidences did it take for something to no longer be coincidence?” Is it noise, or signal? And if it’s signal, what is it signaling?The effect is maddening but enthralling. It’s like you’re trapped in an endless line at the DMV, but at the same time you’re inside a police procedural that is in turn stuck inside a horror movie. The entire book seems to flip back and forth, like an optical illusion, from literary novel to genre thriller and back again. The world is drab and pedestrian, but always just behind it trembles some apocalypse or ecstatic revelation that could break through at any moment! Or not! Either way, you can’t stop reading. Early on in the book, there’s a title drop: When [Line’s metalhead boyfriend] spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit. I’m not sure exactly what he means—Line isn’t quite sure either—but if the Holy Spirit is something transcendent and omnipresent but also diffuse and really hard to explain, he might be onto something. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that The Third Realm does not tidy up all its tangled threads, but hope springs eternal. Knausgaard has already published book four in Norway, Nattskolen (“The Night School”), with one or two more expected after that.You can see why this kind of writing would be a logical next step for Knausgaard, after the strenuous naturalism of My Struggle and the mostly autobiographical Seasons Quartet that followed it. He’s always had something of a mystical streak, but without the consolation of any conventional religious faith, so it’s no wonder that after so many pages spent wandering in the desert of the real, he’s started seeing oases, or mirages, or possibly both at once. It’s a concession, maybe, that there are realms of human experience better served by something other than orthodox realism, and also by genres other than literary fiction—thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, horror. Knausgaard’s characters like to think of themselves as dwelling in respectable reality, but they’re constantly besieged by the fantastical; it seethes at the corners of their vision, as madness, dream, memory, love, drunkenness, jealousy, neurological disaster (at least three people in The Third Realm have strokes), or holy ecstasy. Like plucky journalists, they suspect the world of harboring some hidden meaning, something wonderful and terrible, and they won’t rest until they find out what it is.

Vladimir Putin would like you to know that he plays hockey. Before he invaded Ukraine, Russia’s 71-year-old president regularly competed in public exhibitions with professional athletes (whose job was clearly to let him score). He insists that the war hasn’t kept him from playing privately, even though it’s required subbing out athletes for bodyguards.Putin would also like Alina Kabaeva to know that he plays hockey. A former gymnast, Kabaeva has been rumored to be Putin’s romantic partner for more than a decade; their relationship is an open secret in Russia. But according to a recent investigation published by the Dossier Center, a Russian opposition media group, the couple take extra precautions when Putin invites her to his rink: She watches him play from a separate box, out of sight of Putin’s staff, hidden behind smoked glass.Putin will broadcast anything from his personal life that burnishes his image as a strongman. (Hockey is one of many athletic exploits that he brags about.) But he zealously guards everything else, even if it means concealing a woman in a box.The report from the Dossier Center, which is financed by the exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, describes in detail the sheltered lives of Putin, Kabaeva, and their purported kids, whose existence Putin has long denied. Even the children he’s willing to acknowledge publicly—the two daughters he had with his ex-wife—live under assumed names. But in recent years, journalists and activists have obtained unprecedented access to Putin’s inner circle, a massive failure on the part of his security services.[Read: That time I was a Russian propagandist]The private lives of Russian and Soviet leaders have almost always spilled into public view, becoming subjects of study for historians or grist for national mockery. But they can usually keep their secrets at least until they leave office. Putin hasn’t been so lucky.Kabaeva was once known as Russia’s “Golden Girl.” Walk around Moscow and you’ll still find posters celebrating her 2004 Olympic gold medal. But now, at age 41, she lives almost entirely in Putin’s shadow, reportedly residing in his palace in the freezing northern town of Valdai. A pop song named after her includes the line, “she is dancing there, behind a little invisible door.” It’s the same door that hides nearly everyone in Putin’s orbit.“Kabaeva must have thought she would become a queen, but turned out a prisoner,” Nina Khrushcheva, an international-affairs professor at the New School, in New York, told me. “This is the Kremlin’s tragedy.”The author of the Dossier Center report, Ilya Rozhdestvensky, described to me the “surreal” schemes that Putin has in place to protect his personal life. Guests have to quarantine before seeing him or his family, sometimes for weeks, and his children are moved around the palace grounds only by car. “But at the same time,” Rozhdestvensky said, “there are many signs of security negligence: People can sneak into the residence with cellphones.” He told me that he and his team managed to corroborate some of their reporting with photos of Putin’s sons that had been posted on social media by his own employees and guests.The president’s obsession with privacy might be explained in part by how much Russians now know about the personal life of his favorite dictator, Joseph Stalin. Entire movies and documentaries have been made about Stalin’s ill-fated wife, Nadezhda. One night at dinner, Stalin was flirting with another woman by rolling bread into little balls and throwing them into her cleavage. When Nadezhda noticed, he rolled a ball of tobacco and threw it at her face. The next morning, she was found dead in her bed with gunshot wounds. The official cause of death was suicide.As with Stalin, many artists have portrayed Putin in their work. But they’ve largely avoided the president’s personal life. Erika Sheffer, who wrote a play called Vladimir that premiered this month in New York, told me that Putin struck her as “not particularly complicated—petty, self-interested, determined to retain power and amass money.” Her play depicts several major political events during Putin’s tenure while steering clear of his private life. “Great drama requires complexity and contradiction. It requires humanity, and I don’t see that in him.”Mikhail Gorbachev was the rare case of a Soviet leader whose private life endeared him to the public. In Moscow in 2021, at one of the final rehearsals of a play about him and his wife, Raisa, he was in the audience to hear the standing ovation. Raisa Gorbacheva was the Kremlin’s only truly public first lady. Many Russians loved her—a fact Putin seems not to have grasped. “Putin thinks that Gorbachev’s beautiful, strong, and active wife, Raisa, was hated by ordinary people,” Maria Morina, a Russian filmmaker, told me. “He does not want Kabaeva to be the focus of gossip.”That fear isn’t completely unfounded. Gossip about Kabaeva erupted in 2008, when a recently opened newspaper, the Moscow Correspondent, published an article asserting that Putin was preparing to marry her at a royal palace in St. Petersburg. Putin denied the report, denouncing its authors and their “erotic fantasies.” The paper closed soon after, a signal to Russia’s journalists that Putin’s personal life was off-limits.[Gal Beckerman: Five tiny pieces of paper]But secrets kept coming out. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison earlier this year, founded an online outlet that has reported on real estate that Putin seems to have purchased for Kabaeva’s family. Three years ago, Navalny released a video investigation into Putin’s purported Black Sea estate, which has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube. Last year, his team published a report that included records of Putin’s and Kabaeva’s matching itineraries. Journalists at independent Russian outlets such as Dossier, Project Media, Meduza, The Insider, and others have continued to probe the relationship. Some found a private railroad that Kabaeva reportedly uses to travel to and from Putin’s palace in Valdai.Exactly how many children the couple have is unclear. Some say two, others three. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Kabaeva gave birth to one of them in Switzerland in 2015. According to Dossier, that child was a boy named Ivan, now 9 years old. He likes playing chess online, Rozhdestvensky told me, which suggests that he may have access to the outside world. Wi-Fi could be a mixed blessing for Ivan. The internet is a big place. It includes the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his father’s arrest. It also includes allegations that his father has stolen Ukrainian children.Rozhdestvensky called his investigation “Succession,” after the television series about children fighting over their father’s empire. I asked Timur Olevsky, the editor of The Insider, what that fight might look like among Putin’s multiple sets of children. “Russia will probably suffer from decades of conflicts, like the War of Roses,” he told me, only half-kidding. “For now, Putin’s kids will continue to live as recluses in a golden cage.”

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.Don’t want to miss a single column?Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox. Dear Therapist,Seven years ago, when I was a college freshman, I was sexually assaulted. This experience deeply traumatized me beyond what I could cope with at the time. I did not want to press charges or involve authorities, because I’d had a bad experience telling someone in power about a prior sexual assault. I eventually processed what happened through a lot of therapy and some medication.I moved across the country and thought I’d never see the person who assaulted me again. But recently I moved back to where we both went to college. When a friend invited me to join a Spanish-practice group, I noticed that the meetup link said “organized by” and then it said his name. At the time, I assumed it was a different person because the name is common.I showed up, and although the guy looked like my rapist, I still wasn’t sure it was him. I had mostly forgotten the details of that encounter years ago. After the meeting, I looked him up online to see if the details matched. I also asked my friend to send me his Facebook profile, which I couldn’t open: “content unavailable.” If it wasn’t him, why would I be blocked? It was him.I immediately told another friend I’d made at the group about what had happened. That friend was stunned. Now I don’t know how to proceed—do I expose him to the group? Does he deserve to have a leadership role if he’s a rapist? Has he changed?Dear Reader,I’m very sorry that you were assaulted, and I’m glad you were able to process this trauma with the support of a therapist and medication. Sexual assault leaves many survivors with numerous psychological wounds, and although each person’s experience will be different, some common effects include anxiety, a sense of helplessness, depression, sleep disturbances, low self-esteem, withdrawal from social situations, flashbacks, amnesia (such as forgetting details of the encounter), difficulty concentrating, and a hesitance to trust in relationships. These effects can last for years if untreated, but even if treated, they can be triggered anew by something in the present—the scent of a particular cologne while walking through a department store, a song playing at a party, or, most obviously, running into the assaulter in person, as you did.To figure out what to do, let’s consider how you feel, because clarifying your feelings will help you understand why you might take a certain action and whether doing so will contribute to your well-being.[Read: The bad science behind campus response to sexual assault]Let’s say, for example, that seeing this person again made you angry. Anger is a common reaction to a boundary violation (in this case, the assault itself) or a gross injustice (his “getting away” with the crime by becoming a well-liked leader of this group). If that’s your primary emotion, I imagine there’s a part of you that wishes to punish him by telling people what he did, which might lead to him being shamed and socially ostracized.Although dealing with anger by hurting someone who hurt you is a natural impulse, the question is, if he were to be socially shunned by your disclosure, would that help you heal? Would you feel some relief because justice of sorts was served? Empowered because you were no longer silent? If so, that’s important information. But another possibility is that you could feel good in the moment for hurting him in some way—given how significantly he hurt you—but not feel any less angry, or experience any real sense of relief, in the long run. In that case, this might not be the action to take.What I’m getting at is that whatever you decide to do should be viewed through the lens of this question: What outcome will be best for you going forward? And the corollary: What didn’t you get back then that might be helpful for your emotional well-being now?As you reflect on these questions, let’s explore some other emotions besides anger that seeing him might have evoked. Did you feel afraid? If so, will you feel safer by choosing not to go to this group and finding another one like it? Will outing him to the group decrease your anxiety because doing so might protect both you and others he encounters from future harm? Here you’ll have to weigh your intent to warn others of this person’s potential to be a repeat offender with the fallout of his reaction. Will your anxiety increase if he denies what you tell others he did, sues you for defamation (if, say, there’s no “proof” of the rape), or decides to get retribution by ruining your reputation in this city you’ve just moved to? How will you feel if some people in the group continue to embrace him or doubt your credibility? These questions present another opportunity to anticipate the consequences of the various actions you’re considering and determine which would best support your well-being.[Read: Abuser and survivor, face to face]Given that he’s in the same city, you might also fear running into him again in another setting. In that case, you can reflect on how you would feel about talking with an attorney about the pros and cons of getting a restraining order, reporting him to the police, or filing charges. You say that telling someone in power about a prior sexual assault was a bad experience (I imagine it made you feel helpless and unheard), but given the therapy you’ve done since this assault, you might feel that doing so would be worth that risk now—or you might not. Sit with any anxiety you experience to determine what will make you feel calmer, safer, and more at peace.Another feeling to explore in the aftermath of seeing him is that of isolation. Some people experience a profound sense of loneliness after a sexual assault. They hide what happened to them out of shame or confusion (“Did I somehow have a role in causing this?”), minimize the assault (“It wasn’t really that bad, so people might dismiss me if I tell them”), or avoid social situations because of depression or the worry that something similar might happen again, which isolates survivors further. Some people imagine that nobody will understand the impact the assault has had on them, or that friends will view them differently, so they try to go through their days as if everything is fine—then feel isolated from all the pretending. When the rape occurred in college, I don’t know whom you told besides your therapist, but it sounds like telling this new friend in the group felt validating. If you’ve felt isolated in your experience, sharing it with others you trust now could make you feel less alone as you take in this unexpected encounter with your rapist. You don’t say whether the friend who invited you to the group knows what happened in college, but perhaps confiding in her will also help you feel supported in whatever choices you make about how you handle this situation within the group.Lastly, you asked if your rapist has changed, and I wonder again how the answer will affect you. If he has, do you hope that he will show remorse and offer a genuine, meaningful apology that would aid in your healing? In this case, you might gather some supportive friends for both emotional and physical safety to help you approach him. But if you do approach him and he can’t acknowledge what he did and how he hurt you, how will you feel after learning that perhaps he hasn’t changed at all? (While you don’t know whether he recognized you at the meeting—just as you weren’t sure it was him—if he did recognize you, I’m not hearing that he’s made any attempt to make amends.) With some self-reflection, you’ll be able to determine whether approaching him will give you a sense of agency (something stolen during a sexual assault) even if he denies what he did—or whether the question of who he is now doesn’t feel relevant to your well-being.The beauty of taking a rigorous “feelings inventory” is that it offers the ultimate freedom that no one can take from you—the ability to choose for yourself what feels good to you. By being thoughtful about your emotional needs and anticipating which actions might get you closer to meeting them, you’re creating a way of being in the world that will help you figure out not only how to handle this upsetting situation but, just as important, how to show up in future relationships with a newfound sense of self-awareness and the confidence to act on it.Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Truck carriers offload and load cargo containers from countries including China, Japan, and Panama at the Port of Long Beach, California, on March 22, 2018.These are exactly the kind of imports that Trump, Biden, and Harris’s tariffs could hit. | Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images The signature policy proposal of Donald Trump’s third campaign for the presidency is a tariff: a tax of 60 percent imposed on all imports from China and 10 percent on imports from any other country. Not only does he want this tax hike, which would raise about $291 billion or 1 percent of GDP when fully implemented, but he says he’ll do it unilaterally. “I don’t need Congress, but they’ll approve it,” Trump declared at a September 23 rally. “I’ll have the right to impose them myself if they don’t.” This is a rather enormous policy change for a president to undertake unilaterally, and one of dubious legality. For comparison, the hike Trump is considering is over twice as large as the tax increases used to fund Obamacare. (And make no mistake — tariffs are tax increases.) Experts like former World Trade Organization (WTO) deputy director-general Alan Wm. Wolff have argued that no law passed by Congress gives the president the power to levy across-the-board tariffs along the lines Trump proposes. Even so, Congress has given the executive branch a remarkable amount of flexibility to set tariffs. This is a mistake. Members of Congress, whether or not they support Trump’s tariff plans, should be able to agree on this much: As the Constitution lays out in the taxing clause, it’s Congress’s job to set taxing and spending policy for the United States. It’s been that way for the US’s whole history, it’s the traditional role of legislatures in all democratic countries, and putting this power instead in the president’s hands cuts the people’s representatives out of the process of determining how they are taxed — a concept that goes back to before the American Revolution. While Congress has in the past given up its power to tax in the case of trade to the president and the cabinet, it should reverse that trend. One way to do so is to pass a bill like Sen. Rand Paul’s No Taxation Without Representation Act to ensure that any changes in tariffs are subject to a congressional vote before taking effect. The president’s tariff powers, explained The presidential power to impose tariffs does not originate from a simple bill or program; rather, it slowly accreted over time, with a particular expansion over the past decade as the Trump administration rediscovered authorities in old laws that enabled it to wage a trade war with China and protect the steel industry. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, for instance, gives the president the right to levy tariffs upon the secretary of commerce’s recommendation without asking Congress. This was the authority Trump used to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum back in 2018, tariffs which Biden recently expanded slightly. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives a similar power to impose tariffs based on unfair trade practices by foreign nations on the advice of the Office of the US Trade Representative. Trump used this power to impose sweeping tariffs against China. Biden has made liberal use of this power, too, expanding tariffs on steel, batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles from China. Finally, there’s Section 201 of that same 1974 law, which allows tariffs against imports that “seriously injured or threatened … serious injury” to domestic companies. Trump and Biden have used this to justify tariffs on washing machines and solar cells from most countries. Even if Trump couldn’t implement a full 10 percent tariff on all imports with his executive powers — because the previous authorities apply only to specific industries or specific countries — he could make a lot of progress toward that goal. His 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, for instance, may very well be possible because it’s narrowly targeted at one nation. He and Biden have proven that the president can, without Congress, raise taxes on imports very significantly. I happen to think most of both Trump and Biden’s tariffs were wrongheaded and that Trump’s plan for more sweeping tariffs amounts to a significant tax increase on the poor and middle class that would hurt US exports, invite retaliation from other countries, harm America’s international reputation, and fail to create any jobs for people who need them. (Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked the Trump tariff plan as a “sales tax” but hasn’t disavowed Biden’s tariff policies.) That said, you don’t have to agree with me on the merits of the tariffs to agree with a narrower point about the process: This shouldn’t be the president’s decision. Congress is the branch of government invested with the power to tax and spend, and these trade laws have narrowed its power to the benefit of the executive in a way that is difficult to justify. The Social Security Administration is not allowed to set Social Security taxes, nor is the Department of Health and Human Services allowed to set Medicare taxes, but the Department of Commerce and the Office of the US Trade Representative are explicitly authorized to recommend tariffs that take effect upon the president’s approval. Why is trade the exception? One possible rationale might be that tariffs are a tool of foreign policy, which is traditionally an area where the executive has more autonomy. But even in that context, the tariff powers are extraordinary. Congressional authority is necessary to approve treaties and declare war; the War Powers Resolution means that armed conflict short of declared war needs congressional approval, too, as does funding conflict. Allowing a tariff increase without any congressional vote at all is a much greater deferral of authority. There are more specific, partisan reasons why Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about the presidential tariff power. For the past half-century, the GOP has been mostly a free-market, anti-tax party, which should naturally lead to skepticism of taxes and especially of unilateral presidential powers to levy taxes. As outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it recently, “I’m not a fan of tariffs. They raise the prices for American consumers. I’m more of a free-trade kind of Republican that remembers how many jobs are created by the exports that we engage in.” The large number of Republicans still holding to that worldview should support curbing the presidential power to levy tariffs. Democrats, even those sympathetic to tariffs and skeptical of free trade, should be wary of consigning a whole area of policymaking to Trump’s whims should he win the election. He demonstrated in his first term that he was very willing to use the tariff powers, more willing than any recent president, and his second term should, if anything, see him use them more promiscuously.  Presidential authority on tariffs also opens the door to corruption. Importers are allowed to petition the Commerce Department for specific waivers from tariffs, an allowance corporations unsurprisingly use to extract special favors. Apple, for instance, got exemptions from anti-China tariffs for iPhones and Apple Watches.  Given what we know about Donald Trump and his clientelist, favor-trading mode of politics, is that really a kind of power he should have? Is it a power Democrats will trust him to use in a non-corrupt manner? Or should Congress have the ability to curtail tariffs and limit opportunities for abuse? Congress needs to act sooner rather than later Some presidential powers, like the power to pardon political allies or immunity from prosecution, stem from the Constitution or the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it. But the tariff powers stem from statutes passed by Congress, and they can be rescinded by further acts of Congress. There were some proposals during the Trump years to require congressional approval for section 232 tariffs, most notably the Trade Authority Act introduced to the Senate by Mark Warner (D-VA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). That bill has been kept alive in the most recent Congress by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Don Beyer (D-VA). But Gallagher has since resigned from Congress, and Toomey retired in 2022.  More to the point, section 232 is only one of the sources of authority the president can use for tariffs. Sections 201 and 301 of the 1974 Trade Act would remain and could be used to raise taxes unilaterally. The Supreme Court could, in theory, strike down tariffs that overstep congressionally delegated authority, but historically, the courts have deferred to the executive on trade. The only bill I know of that would tackle the full suite of laws authorizing presidential tariffs is the No Taxation Without Representation Act from Rand Paul. As Paul put it in a statement upon introducing the bill: “Unchecked executive actions enacting tariffs tax our citizens, threaten our economy, raise prices for everyday goods, and erode the system of checks and balances that our founders so carefully crafted.” I find myself agreeing with Paul on very few issues, but he’s dead right on this one: Taxation is a congressional authority, and that should apply to tariffs as much as anything else. “To me it’s sensible policy,” Wolff, the former WTO executive and veteran US trade negotiator, told me. He might add carve-outs to give the executive flexibility in emergency cases (like when another nation levies a tariff against us first, or as part of a sanctions regime against a state like Russia or Iran), but broadly, the principle that Congress should authorize tax increases makes sense. We’re essentially out of time for Congress to act before its preelection October recess, and action may be harder in November and December when we know who the next president will be, and their copartisans may be less willing to support actions to constrain their powers. But the battle will only get harder once a new president takes office and starts proposing tariffs.  The time to act is this year, before that happens and while Congress has an opportunity to reassert its taxing power. The alternative could mean hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tax increases issued unilaterally by the president, with Congress unable to stop it.

The Duke of Sussex’s latest venture -- a documentary on the equestrian sport he had been playing since he was a child -- is called “POLO” and is set for a December release.

Therese Mascardo was done with the daily grind of life in Los Angeles. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was seeing around 40 clients a week and spending hours in the car commuting.  “There’s a pressure that you feel as an American, and in LA, I certainly felt like I needed to work as much as possible, either to make my rent or buy Whole Foods, and so my quality of life really suffered there,” Mascardo, 42,  said.  So Mascardo made a radical change in search of an easier lifestyle. She kept seeing Portugal on lists of great places to live as a “digital nomad,” a fairly recent term for a person who can work remotely from various locations rather than a fixed location. Since 2007, the European country offered would-be nomads a visa that allowed them to live there so long as they were earning money while working for a company from a non-EU nation.  Mascardo fit the bill.  She decided to move to Lisbon in 2018. At first, Mascardo said, it was hard to stop being a “workaholic.” She continued seeing more than 35 clients a week remotely but eventually pared down to around 25 clients per week, a move she could make because Lisbon is so affordable.  She gave up the car, too. “Most of my friends live within a 15-minute walk of my house, or I can take an Uber that costs 10 euros to the other side of town, a maximum of 30 minutes by car,” she said.  And Portugal felt peaceful, too. Mascardo and other digital nomads we spoke with in Portugal cited the prevalence of gun violence in the United States as one factor for leaving.  “It’s crazy to live in a place where every day I don’t wake up and read about a mass shooting,” Mascardo said. “That whole part of my brain that was experiencing trauma in the USA isn’t dealing with that anymore.”  The pandemic turned work in America upside down: Lots of companies went fully remote, which meant knowledge workers in particular had more freedom than ever before to choose where to live without changing jobs, just as Mascardo did. Four years later, however, many companies have called workers back into the office at least some of the time, some for the whole workweek.  Which means some workers are living the digital nomad dream while others are back to long commutes and $15 desk salads. We wanted to know what these two extremes reveal about how we think about work and how we balance work and life, so a team from Vox’s Today, Explained podcast went to Portugal. We also visited an American city where the five-day, in-office workweek never went away: Miami. We’ll get to Miami tomorrow, but today, we’re exploring how Portugal turned itself into a haven for remote workers and saw mixed results. How Portugal drew nomads and breathed life into its cities Thousands of digital nomads from all over the world have moved to Portugal, many after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though nomads by their nature are hard to track, some estimates show there are about 16,000 living in Lisbon alone, the bulk from the US.  In 2022, a few years after Mascardo arrived, Portugal began offering a new type of visa as an incentive for digital nomads. The D8 visa allows non-EU/EEA citizens with remote jobs to live and work in the country for up to one year, with a path to permanent residency.  Even before that, Portugal was an attractive place for digital nomads to hang out. After the Great Recession obliterated economic growth in the country, the government set up a generous tax structure and relatively easy visa requirements for certain kinds of foreigners (a.k.a. those with money). The idea was to attract not just people with cash to spend but entrepreneurs and knowledge workers to juice a torpid economy.  It worked, said Luís Carvalho, a professor of economics at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. Just look at his own city.  “Twenty years ago, the city was declining very fast. You saw a lot of criminality. Buildings were falling apart,”  said Carvalho. One of the oldest city centers in Europe, Porto was usually known for Port wine, not laptop warriors. When foreign workers started showing up, so did a new energy. New skills, higher incomes, entrepreneurialism. Tourism, too.  The urge to travel and visit a new country is baked into digital nomadism, so it’s not surprising that coworking and coliving spaces have popped up there. We accidentally stayed in one in Porto, where we stumbled on a place called Outsite Muoco that looked like a regular hotel. It’s actually a chain of rooms and apartments with locations all over the world catering to longer-term stays and “using the remote work revolution to define a new way of life.” The property in Porto had several coworking spaces, sleek Scandinavian design, and even a library to listen to vinyl records.  We met 25-year-old Gia Lee in the vinyl library while a British punk band played a concert in the basement. She never pictured herself jet-setting around the world while working, but Lee graduated from college right into the pandemic and the worst job market since the Great Recession. “There were no jobs at all in 2020. I was planning to go into a normal ad agency and corporate trajectory but Covid threw a wrench into the situation, and we kind of had to adapt and figure out how to do our own thing,” Lee said. That meant bouncing right into fully remote work. Lee and two friends founded a marketing agency called NinetyEight that provides brands with insights into the minds of Gen Z. It just made sense to Lee to continue keeping the company fully remote because it’s less expensive and provides more freedom to move around.  Portugal also experienced the downside to attracting well-off workers The pandemic gave lots of laptop workers like Lee tons of time to consider their living situations and jump the pond, but all this self-actualization had some negative effects for the Portuguese.  Foreign workers, often flush with cash, drove up housing costs. Carvalho and a team estimate an 8.5 percent increase in prices due to foreign workers. That’s been infuriating to a lot of Portuguese people, who are now facing some of the highest housing costs and the lowest median income in Western Europe. Tourism hasn’t helped either. There’s now a movement to get short-term rentals banned in Lisbon.  Mascardo has picked up on a change of sentiment from locals. “Prices have skyrocketed for housing because people show up with their American budgets and just throw their money around, and inflation doesn’t help,” she said.   New hopeful digital nomads are showing up in Portugal every day; more than 2,500 visas were already issued this year.   Carvalho hopes the Portuguese government can find a way to achieve balance. He says it’s important to attract entrepreneurs into the country and that a lot of new skills and technology came to Portugal precisely because of the visa and tax incentives introduced to digital nomads. But policymakers have to consider the impact on Portuguese society as a whole before native citizens of the country are priced out of their own housing market.  “I think you cannot have a decent city without economic growth and without people coming in with skills and talent. So I see policymakers very much as cooks who are trying to combine different ingredients, but the recipe is not there. So sometimes you have to create the recipe yourself.”

Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

At least 91 people across several states were killed. Officials warned that rebuilding from the widespread loss of homes and property would be lengthy and difficult.

The Revolution band members, Lisa and Wendy, have revamped Prince's childhood home for fans.

Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesAn irate, bumbling former president Donald Trump posted an indignant broadside Sunday asserting that Vice President Kamala Harris should be impeached, prosecuted, or both over U.S. immigration policy.But his withering attack made reference to data released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is being “misinterpreted.”The oft-misleading, oft-misinformed Republican nominee for president, taking to his Truth Social site, also blamed the “Fake News Media” for supposedly not covering the issue, which isn’t true.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Only four solidly red states have legalized marijuana. With Trump’s support, Florida may soon be the fifth.

MSNBC's Jen Psaki suggested Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff reshaped masculinity by openly supporting his wife Vice President Kamala Harris during the election.

Former president Donald Trump speaks with Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion holding that Trump is immune from prosecution for crimes he committed using his official powers as president. It’s hard not to feel a sense of dread as the Supreme Court justices return to Washington for their new term, which, by law, begins on the first Monday in October. Most of the men and women on the Court so recently showed such astoundingly poor judgment, in a case that could lead the United States down the grim road to dictatorship, that it’s far from clear why anyone would trust them to judge a beauty contest — much less to sit on the nation’s highest Court. That case, Trump v. United States, was an infidelity. Six justices, despite swearing an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons,” ruled that Donald Trump, the leader of their political party, was allowed to use his official powers to commit crimes while in office.  They did so, moreover, just days after President Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate performance seemed to ensure that Trump would return to the White House in a walk. And those justices did not simply immunize Trump from prosecution for many of his past crimes, they provided a roadmap for how he can abuse and consolidate power if he does again become president. Among other things, Trump held that a former president may not be prosecuted for any order they give the Justice Department, including orders that are given “for an improper purpose.” The Supreme Court, in other words, said that nothing could happen to Trump if he won in November, then promptly ordered the FBI to round up all of his political opponents and have them arrested. Despite this partisan decision, these uniquely unsuited men and women remain the most powerful people in the country. The United States has no mechanism to remove a justice for recklessness, or for sheer incompetence. For the moment, at least, this upcoming term appears less busy than the previous one, which featured not only the Trump immunity decisions, but also one of the most consequential power grabs by the Supreme Court in many years. Bear in mind, however, that the character of a term can change quickly. At this time last year, the Court had not yet gotten its hands on the Trump immunity case. And, in a potentially nightmarish scenario for American democracy, these justices could be called upon to settle a presidential election this November. Still, while the current term may be less eventful than the previous one, it’s unlikely to be sleepy. The Court will weigh into the fraught issue of transgender rights in United States v. Skrmetti, the first such case to reach the justices since GOP-led states enacted a wave of anti-trans legislation after Trump left office. Vice, specifically guns and porn, also stands out on the Court’s upcoming docket. In Garland v. VanDerStok, the same Republican justices who recently voted to legalize a device that effectively converts an ordinary semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun, will decide whether to allow virtually untraceable guns to be sold without a background check. Then, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court will reconsider several key First Amendment cases that established that the government may not prevent adults from accessing sexual material online, even if the government does so to try to prevent children from seeing this material. Glossip v. Oklahoma, meanwhile, presents the odd question of whether the state of Oklahoma must execute a man that it very much does not want to kill.  Finally, there’s FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments, a meritless case brought by tobacco companies that are upset that the FDA didn’t approve their flavored nicotine vapes. The case is interesting largely because the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided to cast its lot with these companies. For now, the Fifth Circuit is a reminder that there are some things even this Supreme Court is unwilling to do. Last term, the justices reversed a Fifth Circuit decision that could have triggered a second Great Depression, as well as some unusually partisan free speech cases handed down by the Fifth. And these cases are part of a long series of Supreme Court rulings reining in the Fifth Circuit’s worst excesses. White Lion will give us a window into whether the justices will continue to do so. Given recent events, we probably can’t expect the justices to show much moderation or judgment in their upcoming decisions. But we can, at least, hope that they do not descend even further into partisanship. Trans rights return to the docket, in United States v. Skrmetti In May of 2021, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for transgender patients under the age of 18. Since then, such laws have become ubiquitous in states controlled by the Republican Party — according to the Human Rights Campaign, 26 states now have laws imposing some restrictions on health care for trans youth, although some of these laws are stricter than others. The Tennessee law at issue in United States v. Skrmetti, which the justices will likely hear this winter, is among the strictest in the country. It does not simply ban treatments that alter a transgender youth’s body to align it with the patient’s gender identity, it also bans treatments such as puberty blockers, which seek to delay permanent changes to that patient’s body until the patient is older. These laws raise difficult constitutional questions. On the one hand, the government typically has the power to regulate the practice of medicine, and to ban drugs and procedures it deems harmful. This is why, for example, states can ban heroin even if it is prescribed by a doctor. At the same time, the political context of these laws — the fact that they are all of recent vintage, are supported almost exclusively by Republican lawmakers, and are part of a broad attack on transgender rights by Republican politicians — suggests that these laws may not be motivated by a sincere desire to protect anyone from a harmful medical procedure, and are actually rooted in unconstitutional animus against transgender people. Skrmetti asks whether Tennessee’s strict ban on transgender health care violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, a provision that protects against laws motivated by such animus against a vulnerable minority group. Under this provision, the Court has long held that any law that targets a group that has experienced a “history of purposeful unequal treatment” which “frequently bears no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society,” should be viewed with extraordinary skepticism by courts. Realistically, however, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans is unlikely to rule that all anti-trans laws are constitutionally suspect, and it’s notable that neither the United States nor the ACLU, which represents parties challenging the Tennessee law, devote much of their brief to this argument. Instead, they focus primarily on an argument that two of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, embraced in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020). Bostock asked whether a federal ban on “sex” discrimination in employment prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. A majority of the Court concluded that it does, even if you assume that the word “sex” refers exclusively to a person’s sex assigned at birth, and not to their gender identity.  The Court reasoned that, if a male employee is allowed to date women, to dress in traditionally masculine clothing, or to otherwise present as a man, then a female employee must be allowed to do these same things. Otherwise, the employer is treating men differently than women, and that’s illegal sex discrimination. Similarly, both the Justice Department and the ACLU argue that Tennessee’s strict trans health ban violates Bostock because it treats patients of one sex differently than patients of the other sex. A patient assigned male at birth, for example, is allowed to be treated with testosterone if their doctor prescribes it, but a patient assigned female at birth is not. This argument, however, has not won many fans among Republican lower court judges. And the Supreme Court recently signaled that it may be moving away from Bostock. So the parties challenging this Tennessee law probably face an uphill climb in this very conservative Court. Garland v. VanDerStok, the “ghost guns” case Federal law requires gun buyers to submit to a criminal background check before they can purchase a new firearm. It also requires guns to have a serial number that allows law enforcement to track them. In Garland v. VanDerStok, however, the Court could potentially create a loophole that would make it trivially easy to evade these two laws. These federal laws apply to “any weapon … which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” It also applies to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a firearm that houses other components, such as the barrel or trigger mechanism. Thus, if someone purchases a series of gun parts to assemble at home, they should still face a background check when they buy the gun’s frame or receiver. VanDerStok involves “ghost guns,” guns that are sold dismantled, in ready-to-assemble kits. To evade the background check and serial number laws, the kit’s frame or receiver is often sold in a partially incomplete state. Some kits allow a gun buyer to build a working firearm after drilling a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others merely require the user to sand off a small plastic rail. According to the Justice Department, it is often a trifling task to complete these guns.  The right-wing Fifth Circuit held that these ghost guns were immune from the background check and serial number laws. Frames that are missing a small hole, a panel of three Trump judges concluded, are “not yet frames or receivers.” The Fifth Circuit also claimed that ghost guns do not count as a weapon that “may readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even if only a trivial amount of work would be necessary to make the gun function. It’s likely that a majority of the justices will disagree with the Fifth Circuit, although the vote in VanDerStok is likely to be quite tight. The Court has already heard this case twice on its “shadow docket” — a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices handle on an expedited basis — and a majority of the justices voted twice to apply the background check and serial number laws to ghost guns, albeit only on a temporary basis.  Still, the first of those two decisions was decided on a 5-4 vote, with Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the Court’s three Democrats. So there appears to be significant support on the Court for the idea that criminals should be allowed to buy guns without submitting to a background check. Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: Do adults have a right to look at porn? In the mid-to-late 1990s, as the internet was starting to become widely available to American consumers, Congress passed a pair of laws intended to prevent minors from accessing pornography online. Both laws were eventually blocked by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004). Reno and Ascroft established, in Reno’s words, that a law seeking to “deny minors access to potentially harmful speech” must not suppress “a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another.” That is, the First Amendment does not permit the government to cut off adults’ access to sexual material in order to prevent young people from seeing it. Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton involves a Texas law that is very similar to the ones blocked in Reno and Ashcroft. Under this law, websites that devote “more than one-third” of their content to “sexual material harmful to minors” must require their users to prove they are over 18 before they can access any of that material — such as by transmitting a copy of their photo ID to the website owner. Texas is one of eight states with similar laws — these sorts of age-gated restrictions are also in place in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. Needless to say, most people who view pornography online do not want to send a record of their identity, which might be leaked or stolen, to the pornographic website. And many of the major online porn sites have simply blocked access to their content in the states with Texas-style laws. Someone who tries to access the website Pornhub in these states, for example, will be greeted by a video of a fully clothed woman criticizing their state’s law and urging them to contact their state legislator. The Fifth Circuit, being the Fifth Circuit, nonetheless upheld the Texas law. The two Fifth Circuit judges who ruled in Texas’s favor claimed that they were not bound by Ashcroft because the Supreme Court’s decision “contains startling omissions,” meaning that the Court did not discuss a legal argument that these two lower court judges find persuasive. This is not how constitutional litigation is supposed to work. Once the Supreme Court announces a legal rule, lower court judges are not free to ignore it just because they think of a new critique of the Court’s decision. Nevertheless, both these two Fifth Circuit judges and the eight state legislatures that enacted similar bans appear to be betting that a newly constituted Supreme Court, dominated by very conservative Republicans, will overrule Reno and Ashcroft and allow states to restrict adults from seeing entirely legal sexual content. Does Oklahoma have to execute a man against its will? The tragic case of Glossip v. Oklahoma. Richard Glossip, a motel manager, was convicted of murdering the owner of that motel in 2004 and received a death sentence; he’s awaiting execution. Glossip did not actually commit the murder himself, but the prosecution’s theory was that Glossip hired Justin Sneed, a maintenance man at the motel, to kill the victim. Since then, the murder case against Glossip has fallen apart. In 2022, a committee of Oklahoma state lawmakers commissioned a law firm to investigate whether the conviction was reliable. The firm’s 343-page report is scathing, concluding that a combination of lost and destroyed evidence, a “deficient police investigation,” distortion of evidence by the prosecution, and “a cascade of errors and missed opportunities by defense attorneys” all “fundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.” A separate investigation, conducted by a former district attorney at the request of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, concluded that “Glossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.” Drummond, a Republican, is now asking the Supreme Court to toss out Glossip’s conviction and order a new trial. The reason why this unusual move is necessary is that Oklahoma’s own courts have refused to grant similar relief to Glossip, despite the weight of evidence against his conviction.  One explanation for this refusal is that Oklahoma requires someone who has already been convicted of a crime to bring most challenges to that conviction within 60 days of discovering any new evidence that undercuts the conviction. So, as new evidence has trickled out that benefits Glossip, his lawyers have been forced to submit that evidence to the courts on a piecemeal basis, and those courts have looked at new pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than seeing the cumulative picture detailed in the legislature’s and the attorney general’s investigations. The newest piece of evidence, which is now before the Supreme Court, is that prosecutors hid the fact that Sneed, a key witness against Glossip at his trial, was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness that made Sneed prone to violent outbursts and paranoia. It remains to be seen whether Glossip’s lawyers, even with Drummond as their unlikely ally, can persuade this chaotic Supreme Court to order a new trial. FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments: the flavored vape epidemic Flavored nicotine vapes are supposed to be illegal in the United States. A federal law requires the FDA to approve any “new tobacco product” sold in the US. And, while the FDA has approved some tobacco-flavored vapes, it has not approved fruit-flavored, bubblegum-flavored, or any of the other many arrays of flavored nicotine vapes that tend to appeal to young people. In practice, however, the ban on flavored vapes has not been particularly effective. Much like the proliferation of illegal weed shops in cities where marijuana is legal but is also supposed to be highly regulated, shops selling illegal flavored vapes are common in the US. Nevertheless, courts are supposed to apply the law as written, and the law governing FDA approval of nicotine vapes is pretty clear. The FDA is required to deny any application to approve a new tobacco product unless the manufacturer of that product can show “that permitting such tobacco product to be marketed would be appropriate for the protection of the public health.” FDA makes this determination by weighing the likelihood that approving a new product will lead existing smokers to quit against the likelihood that approving the new product will cause new users to become addicted to nicotine. Accordingly, the FDA has approved some tobacco-flavored vapes, on the theory that vaping is safer than smoking so it is better if existing smokers switch to vaping. But it has not approved any flavored vapes, on the theory that these products are so appealing to young users that they will cause many new people to become addicted to nicotine. Then the Fifth Circuit decided to get involved. In Wages & White Lion Investments v. FDA, the right-wing court essentially ordered the FDA to rerun its approval process for flavored vapes, claiming that the FDA illegally changed the process it used to evaluate these products midstream. It didn’t. While Judge Andy Oldham’s majority opinion in White Lion is very long, he rests his case primarily on blockquotes from FDA documents that do not say what Oldham claims that they say. Oldham, a Trump appointee and former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, has a history of reading the law in implausible ways to benefit right-wing causes, and he’s often reversed by the Supreme Court. So it’s likely that even this panel of justices will cast a skeptical eye on his White Lion opinion. But, if nothing else, White Lion is a reminder that, no matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse. If Trump wins in November, he could potentially replace several sitting justices with judges like Oldham, who make many of the justices responsible for the Trump immunity decision seem like sensible moderates eager to preserve the stability of US democracy.

The city on the border with Arizona has suffered years of violence between drug cartels fighting for control of the border crossing.

The Rams had some highlights as a team and individually, but the visitors settled for too many field goals in a 24-18 loss to the Bears at Soldier Field.

NewsmaxDonald Trump on Sunday called for “one really violent day” to address crime in America.Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, the former president falsely claimed that crime has gone “through the roof” and that the phenomenon was “largely because of migrant crime.” He then proposed a solution which sounded disturbingly similar to The Purge—the dystopian 2013 movie in which violence is legalized for a brief window as a means of addressing crime—in which law enforcement would be temporarily permitted to get “real rough.”Trump—who was convicted of 34 felony counts this year—said it wasn’t just migrants contributing to the purported crimewave; he also complained about thieves targeting New York City drug stores, causing retailers to secure their products in glass cases. “See, we have to let the police do their job, and if they have to be extraordinarily rough…” he said to applause.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Google, Meta and their Big Tech allies have stoked outrage on both sides of the aisle in a desperate scramble to derail the Kids Online Safety Act – and critics say it’s a cynical attempt to protect their profits at the expense of minors.

The Chargers were shorthanded on offense and defense and still gave the Chiefs all they could handle, but could not come through in the clutch again.

Democrats believe political newcomer Janelle Stelson, a longtime local TV anchor, may be able to unseat six-term GOP Rep. Scott Perry.

Judge Anita Josey-Herring reflects on challenges and successes during as her time as chief judge of D.C. Superior Court comes to an end.

A longshoremen’s strike will rekindle worries about shortages in stores and inflation weeks from a presidential election in which the economy has been a key issue.

Young voters still not won over by Vice President Kamala Harris should look to history to see what happens when autocrats are elected.

The bill allows alcohol to be served until 4 a.m. to dues-paying members of private suites inside Intuit Dome, the $2-billion new home of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Familiar tune for the Chargers, who are very competitive with Justin Herbert at the helm but as usual are shorthanded because of injuries and lose to Chiefs.

Upset that life is worse now than it was before 2020? You can put part of the blame on Trump's failed pandemic policies.

It's still the economy. Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be president is up to a few million undecided voters in swing states. Guess what they care about.

Negotiations between longshoremen and port operators broke down in June and the two sides have barely been speaking. The current contract expires at midnight Monday.

Pet cemeteries, spooky escape rooms, a séance aboard a 1930s luxury liner and more await you this Halloween season.

Two veteran CBS News journalists will put the vice presidential candidates to the test in New York on Tuesday.

The roots of breaking are strong on Venice Beach as the Red Bull BC One USA Championships arrive on the heels of a controversial showing at the Paris Olympics.

When the Lakers hired JJ Redick, they entered a partnership with a pioneer of basketball’s alternate realities of the internet. For him, that's in the past.

Filthy conditions, aging equipment and haphazard cleaning at the Jarratt, Va., plant may have made some of its products microbial time bombs waiting to explode.

Liberal author Fran Lebowitz urged President Biden to "dissolve" the Supreme Court before leaving office, calling it "not even a court" on "Real Time."

Climate change is exacerbating the risk of potentially dangerous mosquito-borne diseases in California — threatening to turn more of those annoying-but-harmless bites into severe illnesses, experts say.

How a scrappy podcast forged by a stand-up comedy power couple grew into a network that surpassed everyone's expectations.

The shock rocker's return has sparked outrage from abuse survivors and activists who are aghast that Manson is performing in arenas again.

When JD Vance and Tim Walz meet to debate Tuesday, families hope they talk about the child tax credit, paid family leave and child-care affordability.

Another hillside home has been defaced in L.A. This Bel-Air mansion was designed by a famed architect and occupied by a Hollywood producer and a Bin Laden.