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But Moss is Jewish, is running to represent a district with a strong Jewish community, and is a supporter of Israel. His backing of a two-state solution and disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu had traditionally been Democratic orthodoxy. However, that’s no longer the case.

In contrast, El-Sayed is a virulent critic of Israel. Earlier this summer, he told CNN: “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” And he said that if you’re “a Democrat and you believe in human rights,” the only reason one could support Israel is campaign contributions.

The candidate, who is Muslim, also said, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as the commitment I’ve got to my own kids,” but to many, his criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitic tropes. That’s particularly true after he campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has made antisemitic remarks and praised Hamas. The result has left many in Michigan’s Jewish community wary of El-Sayed and looking for outreach from him and his campaign to assuage their concerns.

“I think we both recognize it’s going to take Jeremy Moss voters and Abdul El-Sayed voters to vote for the same ticket to beat Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and MAGA extremism, and as we saw on Tuesday night’s results, there is a lot of overlap there,” Moss tells Slate. “But we’re going to sit down, and Abdul’s going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.”

As the political season turns from primaries to the general election, much has been made of the tension between centrist and progressive candidates. But some of those divides are more easily healed than others. Democratic differences over healthcare can be brushed aside by all parties involved, agreeing that their positions are superior to the GOP approach. Same with questions about policing or immigration or a host of other issues. But it remains to be seen if the divide in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be bridged when a growing number of Democrats no longer support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state—and when, at times, anti-Zionist rhetoric has spilled over into antisemitic rhetoric.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Finn Gomez/Getty Images, USA Today Network via Reuters Connect, Sarah Rice/Getty Images, and Getty Images Plus.

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The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy.

President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud.

The New York Times editorial board is tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion in the United States, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before Mr. Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but still a strong democracy. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran and Russia. Based on Mr. Trump’s statements and actions about the 2026 midterms, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — manipulating the law to stay in power— up one notch, to Level 3:

Together, Mr. Trump’s actions have left constitutional scholars and democracy experts anxious about this year’s midterm elections. They wonder if the Trump administration may use false pretenses to send federal agents to Democratic-leaning areas to intimidate people and suppress voting. Experts are also worried that after the elections, Mr. Trump may pressure legislators not to certify the winners, as he unsuccessfully tried to do after the 2020 presidential election. Even if he does not take these extreme steps, the gerrymandering campaign he has demanded has probably tilted the competition for control of the House of Representatives at least 2.5 percentage points in Republicans’ direction.

It remains unclear how far Mr. Trump will go this fall. He does often make statements that amount to little. But his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election should make clear that the threat is real. He has demonstrated that he prioritizes his own interests over the national interest. He is often willing to defy bipartisan traditions and even act illegally.

Politicians from both major parties and federal judges should be prepared to push back forcefully against any attempt he and his allies make to interfere with the 2026 elections. If the president succeeds in perverting the results, he will be emboldened to take similarly unconstitutional steps in 2028.

This editorial is our fourth version of the autocracy index, which we first published in October 2025. The updated version includes chronological lists of the antidemocratic steps Mr. Trump has taken in all 12 categories, and we plan to update them again in the months ahead.

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The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office

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For most of my adult life, I have noticed something odd. Some evenings, I can barely remember what I did that day. Ask me what I had for breakfast and you will be met with a blank look. On other days, I can tell you the details of interviews I did, the plans I made, which snacks I packed my daughter for school and how much of each she ate.

The difference between them doesn’t seem to correlate to how I slept. In fact, only one factor seemed to matter: how much I rested. I have long thought that, on days when I am rushing around, I am just more stressed, which may affect memory formation.

But there could be another reason: the role of rest itself.

We all know that a lack of restorative sleep impairs our cognitive abilities. When we are sleep-deprived, we can struggle to recall what we have learned, absorb new information and sustain focus. We may also be aware that resting while awake seems to partially restore our sleep-deprived minds.

Now, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are revealing how certain housekeeping and cognitive tasks that happen during sleep can also occur, to some extent, while we are awake.

This is “the last piece of the puzzle” that may answer why wakeful rest helps to fulfil some of the functions of sleep, says neuroscientist Thomas Andrillon at the Paris Brain Institute.

Local sleep

For decades, sleep was understood to be a global state that affects the whole brain at once. In deep sleep, the brain reverberates with slow brainwaves – in which neurons slowly cycle in sync between firing and silence – and mostly disconnects from the surrounding environment.

But in recent years, research has complicated that perspective. In 2011, a team of sleep researchers, including Tononi and his long-time collaborator Chiara Cirelli, also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a paper describing an odd phenomenon. When rats were sleep-deprived yet awake, their brains showed sudden bursts of sleep-like slow waves – but only in clusters of neurons at a time. The team called it local sleep and considered it to be part of a broader phenomenon that exists in various forms across the animal kingdom (see “Sleeping with part of the brain”, at the end of this story).

These bouts of local sleep were incredibly brief: a few hundred milliseconds, at most. But they had a noticeable impact. When rats were trained to reach for sugar pellets, they were more likely to fall short if their sleep-deprived minds had slipped into local sleep first. “If it happens at the wrong time, in the wrong area, you have impaired performance,” says Cirelli.

That isn’t just true of sweet-toothed rats. Humans also show local sleep states just before experiencing an attentional lapse. And we are more likely to experience both when we are tired, which is why doing something routine but with high stakes – like driving a car down a highway – can be dangerous when we are sleep-deprived.

But Tononi, Cirelli and their colleagues’ latest study, published in June, indicates there is an upside to local sleep.

In addition to describing local sleep, Tononi and Cirelli are known for coming up with one of the most compelling explanations for why we sleep: the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. As we take in information all day long, our brains form and strengthen thousands of neural connections. These connections are energy-hungry, so we can’t keep them all. Sleep, they posit, is when our brains go to work decluttering what we don’t need, which helps with storing what we do.

Could local sleep offer the same sort of housekeeping, just on a micro-scale? To find out, they genetically modified brain cells in mice so that a laser light could switch those neurons “on” or “off”, mimicking the pattern of slow-wave sleep. In one experiment, they put a local neural network to sleep in awake mice that were sleep-deprived.

Afterwards, they found that the part of the mice’s brains that had “snoozed” for 30 minutes showed reduced markers of synaptic strength – a sign that decluttering had already started – unlike the part that had stayed fully awake. They also noticed that, during global sleep later on, there was less slow-wave activity in the bit of the brain that had napped, presumably because its housekeeping function had already partly been done – which also indicated that local sleep seemed to have reduced that brain region’s need for sleep.

These changes in brain activity were also reflected in behaviour. Normally, if a mouse learns a new task and then is sleep-deprived, its later recall is diminished. But when, in a different experiment, the sleep-deprived mice had local sleep induced across multiple networks for an hour after learning something new, they remembered the task just as well as the mice that took an actual nap. “This is the first piece of evidence that suggests that local sleep can do the job of sleep, and not badly,” says Tononi.

Both Tononi and Cirelli are quick to point out that local sleep is no replacement for sleep in general. While they pushed the phenomenon to its limits in the laboratory to see what it was capable of – and what its underlying purpose might be – the fleeting bursts of local sleep that we experience in the real world aren’t the same as a night’s rest. If your brain can get to wo

rk on decluttering connections all at once, as in global sleep, that is clearly better and more efficient, says Tononi.

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Jason Ford

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We’ve all done the infinite scroll on the Netflix app, spending an hour looking for something to watch before giving up. Sometimes there are just too many shows to choose from. And the last thing anyone wants is to get a few hours into a series that’s not worth finishing.

To save your precious time, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite shows on Netflix. From some of the streamer’s most iconic flagship series, such as Stranger Things and The Crown, to reliable comfort watches including Younger and Scandal, the platform has something for everyone. We’ve also found underrated or critically acclaimed originals you can’t find anywhere else. We’ll let you know which series have just arrived or are about to leave, too, so you can prioritize your watch list.

Sometimes the best shows aren’t the ones that win all the awards; they’re just the ones that let you unwind and have fun. This week, we recommend Outer Banks, which is heading into its fifth and final season this week. The show is an action-adventure-mystery about a group of teens living is coastal North Carolina who are on a hunt for a long-lost treasure that might save their beloved home. The series introduced us to stars like Chase Stokes and Madelyn Cline and is a fun, breezy binge. And if you love entertainment industry inside jokes, check out all four seasons of the fun French series Call My Agent! The show is a wry look at the inner workings of a French talent agency, and a feature film version of the show will drop on Netflix in September.

If you’re looking for your next favorite series, here’s our roundup of some of the best shows you can stream on Netflix right now. And if you’d rather go with a movie instead, here are our picks for the best movies on Netflix.

Outer Banks (2020 to present)

Netflix’s original action-adventure series Outer Banks has been a massive hit for the streamer since it first premiered in 2020, and it’s coming to an end this summer. The show is set in a coastal town in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and pits the haves (the “Kooks”) against the have-nots (the “Pogues”). Naturally, the Pogues are the heroes of the story as the Kooks try to take what little land and assets the Pogues have left. And while all of that is happening, the Pogues, led by John B. (Chase Stokes) are constantly on a hunt for (literal) treasure, stemming from the disappearance of John B.’s father who was on a hunt for gold before he vanished. Check the show out now; the fifth and final season arrives on Aug. 20.

Call My Agent! (2015 to present)

The French series Call My Agent is about a group of talent agents at a fictional firm. Though the agents aren’t real, the show is filled with real celebrities playing often egotistical and difficult versions of themselves (almost all of them are French, you’ll see the likes of Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno appear throughout the series). The show consists of four hilarious seasons, and a feature film, Call My Agent! The Movie is arriving in September. If you’re a fan of inside-Hollywood style shows, it’s a fun option.

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“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping analyst at Windward, a maritime analysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

“It’s extremely labor intensive to provide for that kind of persistent defense,” said Joshua Tallis, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

“Iran’s threat over the strait will remain significant for the foreseeable future,” said Mona Yacoubian, a director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

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The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, in a handout photo, conducting operations related to the Strait of Hormuz in April. The Navy has said it has about 20 warships in the Gulf of Oman.  Credit…U.S. Navy, via Getty Images

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A warming climate and a dearth of summer sea ice have opened the Arctic to cargo shipping—a reality that seemed impossible just decades ago.

Some countries believe the Arctic route could provide an alternative for international traders seeking to avoid the conflict-stricken Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz.

Already, one Chinese company has started container ship voyages during the summer on the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the northern coast of Russia to Europe via the North Sea. China especially views the route as an “Ice Silk Road” that avoids Middle East trouble spots.

The decision to try the Northern Sea Route is also, at least in part, practical: The subpolar route is shorter than the standard one—so the trip takes about 20 days compared with around 40. And it may be cheaper for Asian exporters than the regular path. The latter goes through the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indo-Pacific with the Indian Ocean, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden.

“The Arctic shipping routes offer an alternative trade corridor with the potential to overcome the Malacca Dilemma—China’s lack of control over strategic shipping lanes,” says Arctic shipping analyst Malte Humpert, who founded the nonprofit Artic Institute in Washington, D.C.

The move is also seen as a sign of growing economic cooperation between Russia and China, he adds. China uses the Northern Sea Route to deliver cargo to Europe, and Russia uses it to deliver oil to Asia. The conflicts in the Middle East make it more attractive. “The situation around Hormuz and the Red Sea has encouraged some niche container operators to give the [Northern Sea Route] a try,” Humpert says.

None of this would be possible without climate change. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–funded research group, 17 summers with the lowest sea-ice cover on record have occurred in the past 20 years. NASA data, meanwhile, show the Arctic sea-ice extent is shrinking by about 12 percent every decade.

The shrinking ice cover will “absolutely” result in increased shipping along the Northern Sea Route during the summer months, says Anastasios Leonburg, a marine risk consultant for the insurer Allianz Commercial and a former merchant ship captain. “The implication for shipping is more accessible routes and more navigable seasons,” he says.

Expanding Arctic shipping is also triggering environmental concerns. Campaigners worry it will result in more black carbon emissions from shipping fuel that could cause the sea ice to melt more quickly. For this reason, the use of heavy fuel oil—a cheap, high-energy, tarlike material that is left over from refining crude oil—has been banned in the Arctic by the International Maritime Organization since 2024, but loopholes still exist.

The Oslo-based environmental watchdog Bellona Foundation analyzed a journey on the Northern Sea Route last year by a large Chinese cargo ship named Istanbul Bridge. The group’s analysis found the ship may not have been built to properly withstand ice along the route—exposing it to potential accidents—and that it may have used heavy fuel oil.

Given geopolitical tensions, new international agreements to govern Arctic shipping seem unlikely. Russia alone sets regulations for the Northern Sea Route—and environmentalists fear that, without enforcement, efforts to open the region to global shipping risk destroying the fragile ecosystem that made the shortcut available in the first place.

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