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One of this year’s top Senate contests is something of a bizarro-world race.

The Republican candidate, despite being the incumbent, is little known and still trying to introduce himself to voters. He used his first ad to talk about starting his life in a foster home.

The Democratic candidate, despite being out of office, is a household name after spending half a century in politics. His first ad was very different — a scathing attack aiming to define his rival by tying him to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.

This is the upside-down picture in Ohio, where Senator Jon Husted, a Republican appointed last year to replace Vice President JD Vance, is hoping to fend off former Senator Sherrod Brown, a three-term Democrat who was unseated in 2024.

The race is central to determining which party controls the Senate in 2027. Democrats need to flip at least four Republican-held seats in November, and Ohio is widely seen as one of the most competitive contests.

The election is a test of how far even a Republican-dominated state has swung left during President Trump’s second term and of whether Mr. Brown, as he has done in the past, can outperform his party in a state where Democrats have been trounced in the last three presidential elections.

Now, as the general election begins — Mr. Brown faces only token opposition in the primary contest on Tuesday and Mr. Husted is unopposed — both sides are beginning an advertising war expected to exceed the $550 million spent on Ohio’s 2024 Senate race. The winner will serve the final two years of Mr. Vance’s term and then face re-election again in 2028.

Mr. Brown’s opening salvo last week sought to capitalize on Mr. Husted’s relatively low profile by highlighting $116,000 in campaign contributions he received in the past from Leslie Wexner, an Ohio billionaire who was the source of much of Mr. Epstein’s wealth. The ad was an attempt to both depress Republican turnout and hammer Mr. Husted as tied to corruption in Washington and Columbus, Ohio’s capital.

“Of all 535 members of Congress, who’s taken the most money from associates of Jeffrey Epstein?” the narrator asks in Mr. Brown’s first TV ad, which began airing on Friday. “Jon Husted, that’s who.”

Mr. Husted’s campaign manager, Drew Thompson, argued that Mr. Brown had Epstein ties, too, pointing to his past acceptance of campaign donations from Mr. Wexner’s wife — $12,700 in increments between 2011 and 2017.

“Who knows what that paid for?” Mr. Thompson said. “That’s why Ohioans voted him out after 32 years in Washington.”

National party leaders are watching the Ohio race closely.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, spent months urging Mr. Brown, 73, to attempt a comeback. Part of Mr. Schumer’s appeal to Mr. Brown was that he was the only Ohio Democrat who could win in an increasingly red state.

Mr. Trump carried Ohio by 11 percentage points in 2024 as Mr. Brown lost by three points, a gap that has encouraged Democrats to think that a better political environment will help the famously rumpled senator return to Washington.

The Ohio Senate race is expected to be one of the nation’s most expensive contests.

The main super PAC for Senate Republicans, the Senate Leadership Fund, has already earmarked at least $79 million for television and digital advertising, mail, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Its Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, will reserve about $40 million just on television advertising, according to a spokeswoman, Lauren French.

“Sherrod is doing it because he knows he’s probably the only one who can prevail,” said Aaron Pickrell, a Columbus-based Democratic strategist who ran the Ohio re-election campaign for President Barack Obama in 2012, the last time the state was truly a presidential battleground. “A lot of people don’t think we can win. To have Sherrod run ensures that there’s a level of resources commitment.”

Though he has been in office since the turn of the millennium, Mr. Husted has rarely been in a hard-fought general election.

He served for years in the State House representing a Republican-leaning district near Dayton, where he attended college and was a cornerback on a national championship football team. He became speaker of the Ohio House and briefly served in the State Senate before coasting to victory in statewide campaigns for secretary of state. Then he became the running mate and lieutenant governor to Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed him to replace Mr. Vance last year.

Now Mr. Husted is a sitting senator who lacks the usual advantages of incumbency in a year when an unpopular Mr. Trump is forecast to be a drag on all Republicans. He has long presented himself as a business-friendly Republican in the style of Mr. DeWine and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, though since entering the Senate, he has adopted a more Trump-friendly demeanor.

Mr. Brown, on the other hand, is a challenger with 50 years in elected office at a time when Democrats across the country are looking for fresh faces.

“The only challenge for Sherrod is that he’s an older guy,” said Nan Whaley, a former mayor of Dayton, Ohio, who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2022. But she added, “In Ohio, that’s handy. Our voters are older here in Ohio.”

Ohio Republicans expect to paint Mr. Brown, long an economic populist, as a left-winger out of touch with normal Americans.

“This is not J.F.K.’s Democrat Party,” said former Representative Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, a Republican who spent a dozen years in Congress. “It’s pretty far left.”

If Mr. Husted is known for anything in Ohio, it is for being placed in the awkward position of having to testify for the defense in a major corruption trial involving top energy executives in the state. Mr. Husted already testified once in a related case that resulted in a mistrial. He is expected to be called to testify again in October — timing that Ohio Democrats hope will lead to a pre-election news cycle that will lift Mr. Brown’s chances in November.

Available polling suggests that the race is either a dead heat or that Mr. Husted is narrowly ahead, but even in conservative Ohio, the political environment is shifting against Republicans.

“I tell everybody I think every Republican is going to have a tough time because you’re running into a headwind,” said former Representative Jim Renacci, an Ohio Republican who lost a Senate race to Mr. Brown in 2018. “It’s almost a match of where I was in 2018.”

More on the 2026 Midterm Elections

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• Close Midterm Races: Democratic officials have added eight candidates to a list of top contenders in congressional midterm battlegrounds, wading into a handful of contested primaries to make clear the party leadership’s preference.

• U.S. Senate Race in Texas: Many of the wealthy donors who have bankrolled Ken Paxton, the firebrand Texas attorney general, have decided to watch the race from the sidelines, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

• Did Harris Pick the Wrong Race?: Some Democrats wish Kamala Harris had decided to run for governor in California, where Democrats are struggling to break through, rather than weigh another White House run.

• U.S. Senate Race in Ohio: The unusual contest — with a little-known incumbent and a well-known challenger — shows how Democrats are hoping to capitalize on G.O.P. voters’ anger at the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

• Louisiana Primary: Voters and key voting rights groups filed multiple lawsuits against the governor of Louisiana over his order to suspend the state’s House primary, arguing that he had overstepped his executive powers by delaying the election to give lawmakers time to draw a new congressional map.

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Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, left, is running again for the chamber against Senator Jon Husted, a Republican who was appointed to his seat by the governor to replace Vice President JD Vance. Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times; Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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European Great Tits and 36 other bird species on the continent are more afraid of women than they are of men, according to a recent study—and researchers have no idea why.

In the study, men could get about a meter closer to birds than women could before the animals flew away, according to the results. This pattern remained regardless of what the men and women were wearing, what their height was or how they tried to approach the creatures. That suggests birds may be able to suss out the sex of a human, though the researchers aren’t sure how.

“I fully believe our results, that urban birds react differently based on the sex of the person approaching them, but I can’t explain them right now,” said Daniel Blumstein, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.

The researchers looked at birds living in urban centers in five European countries. They included birds that are known to flee as soon as a human approaches, such as magpies, and those that tend to flap off later, such as pigeons. The outsize fear response to women was consistent across the species.

In the paper, the team hypothesized that birds may be sensing chemical signals, such as pheromones, or using cues such as body shape to recognize a person’s sex. But more research is needed before they can come to any conclusions. Notably, previous findings in mammals also suggest these animals can tell men and women apart: for example, lab rats have been observed to feel greater stress when male researchers handle them than when female researchers do so.

“We have identified a phenomenon, but we really don’t know why. However, what our results do highlight is the birds’ sophisticated ability to evaluate their environment,” said study co-author Federico Morelli, an associate professor at the University of Turin, in the same statement.

“There are several possibilities for what cues birds are picking up on. It could be smells, it could be people’s [gait]. But how do we test this? Perhaps a study resembling Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks,” said Blumstein, referring to the famous British comedy show sketch.

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Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four-stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.

Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?

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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images

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The New York Times won three Pulitzer Prize awards on Monday, including for an investigation into how President Trump is profiting from his deal-making, and news photography documenting starvation and destruction in Gaza. The Times also won for opinion writing, for columns by M. Gessen analyzing the rise of authoritarianism.

The Athletic, the sports site owned by The New York Times Company, won in the audio category for the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out.” The podcast is produced by Meadowlark Media and licensed by The Athletic.

Reuters and The Washington Post each won two awards. The Post won the prestigious public service prize for its exhaustive coverage of the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal agencies, including the extent of job and funding cuts and how they were reshaping the country.

The Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917, are given out annually by Columbia University for excellence in journalism, literature, and the arts. The journalism winners are decided by juries from a pool of more than a thousand entries.

The breaking news reporting prize went to the staff of The Minnesota Star Tribune for coverage of a shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis that left two children dead and injured many more.

The staff of The Times won for investigative reporting for articles that revealed the extent to which Mr. Trump and his inner circle were enriching themselves through national security dealings.

The explanatory reporting award was given to Susie Neilson, Megan Fan Munce, and Sara DiNatale of The San Francisco Chronicle for “Burned,” a series that uncovered the faulty algorithms, used by insurers, that devastated Californians who lost their homes to wildfires.

The Pulitzers reintroduced the beat reporting category this year after 20 years. Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters received the award for their reporting that showed how Meta tolerated ads for scams and banned products to protect its revenue. Reuters was also awarded the prize for national reporting. The staff members involved, including Ned Parker, Linda So, Peter Eisler, and Mike Spector, examined how the president expanded his executive power and sought retribution against his political enemies.

Another new category this year was opinion writing, instead of the previous editorial writing and commentary categories. M. Gessen of The Times was given the award for a collection of reported essays that mixed history and the author’s personal experience in their native Russia to examine the actions of the Trump administration.

The local reporting prize went to two winners. The staff of The Chicago Tribune was recognized for coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s immigration sweep throughout the city. And Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk of The Connecticut Mirror, along with Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne of ProPublica, were recognized for a series that showed how Connecticut’s towing laws have led to abuses by towing companies against drivers.

Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau, Aniruddha Ghosal, and Yael Grauer of The Associated Press were given the international reporting prize for an investigation that showed how governments around the world are using American-made surveillance technology for mass surveillance.

The feature writing prize went to Aaron Parsley of Texas Monthly for his personal account of surviving the Central Texas floods in July that destroyed his home and took the life of his nephew.

Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News was awarded the criticism prize for his architecture criticism, which the Pulitzer Prize Board said used “wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.”

The illustrated reporting and commentary prize went to Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson of Bloomberg for “trAPPed,” a graphic novel that showed how digital scams are targeting wealthy Indians using the threat of arrests and forcing them to comply with bizarre conditions.

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A photo that was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning entry by Saher Alghorra, a contributor to The New York Times, in the breaking news photo category. It showed a child wounded in Gaza City being transferred to a hospital in April last year. Credit…Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

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When the Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century C.E., Europe was plunged into chaos as barbarian Germanic forces advanced south—or so the story goes. But a new study shows that some communities on the continent actually coalesced, becoming more cosmopolitan and diverse.

“Traditionally, the whole story … was seen as a clash of civilizations between Germanic hordes in the north and the Roman Empire in the south,” says Joachim Burger, an anthropologist and a population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. But Burger and his colleagues have shown otherwise: in a new study published today in Nature, they found that “it’s actually more a story of peaceful integration,” he says.

The researchers analyzed human remains at various grave sites in Germany and determined that two genetically distinct groups of people—a settlement of ancient Roman soldiers and a neighboring group of people of northern European descent—intermarried and developed a shared culture, including a common burial method, after the fall of Rome in C.E. 476.

The researchers analyzed 258 ancient genomes collected from grave sites on the Roman Empire’s border in what is now southern Germany that dated to between C.E. 400 and 660. They compared these with a reference set of other ancient and modern genomes and revealed that former Roman soldiers, who carried with them a mix of DNA from Italy, southeastern Europe, and the Balkans, traveled to villages on the empire’s frontier where people with DNA from areas such as what are now northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands lived. The oldest genomes from the burial sites suggest that these two groups didn’t mix much before the fall of Rome. But after that time, they did, with intermixed families being buried together.

These later burials are called row-grave cemeteries because the graves were perfectly parallel to one another. This practice started among communities with northern ancestry but became the norm after the two communities came together. The grave sites also include features that suggest a strong emphasis on monogamy and the nuclear family. And the researchers say these practices, such as kin being entombed together, likely came from Roman culture.

“At the time, this is a quite unique and new pattern that was developed in late Roman society and even codified in laws,” Burger says. “But now we see it … in an early medieval, presumably Germanic society. So late antiquity isn’t actually finished; it’s just transforming into a new, less urban and more agricultural society.”

“It was really a tight kin group,” says Toomas Kivisild, a professor of human evolutionary genetics at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium, who was not involved in the study. Other post-Roman communities in Europe, such as in England, do not show such closeness among families, he says. “The kinship intensity in those cemeteries is far less intense compared to [these new findings].”

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A concise founder-focused article arguing that while attention and virality can be engineered, long-term business value comes from protecting audience trust through disciplined monetization decisions and a clear “Trust Stack” filter.

Key Takeaways

• We live in an era where going viral is often a repeatable process rather than a random stroke of luck.
• Engineered attention can grow your audience fast, but one bad monetization decision can permanently destroy the trust that makes it valuable.

Generating attention is no longer a dark art. It is a highly predictable engineering problem. Between algorithmic hooks, short-form video mechanics, and optimized content funnels, fast-growing founders and operator-led brands can manufacture reach at an unprecedented scale.

We live in an era where going viral is often a repeatable process rather than a random stroke of luck. But while attention can be engineered with the right playbook, trust cannot. For founders building a sustainable business, confusing these two distinct assets is a fatal commercial mistake.

The monetization trap

The moment a founder, creator or operator achieves real scale, whether that means tens of thousands of dedicated newsletter subscribers or hundreds of millions of video views across platforms, the monetization pressure begins. The inbox inevitably fills with partnership offers, sponsorship deals, and affiliate opportunities. On paper, these deals look like pure margin. They offer immediate, high-yield cash flow for simply inserting a pre-roll ad, posting a link or sending a dedicated email.

In reality, many of these offers are highly toxic loans taken directly against your brand’s equity. As the audience’s value grows, the inbound offers become increasingly aggressive. They often rely on fake urgency, manufactured authority, or opaque value propositions designed to separate your followers from their capital as quickly as possible. For founders, the real business choice is rarely about whether they should monetize, but how they can do so without creating irreversible reputational damage.

The cost of manufactured virality

This tension is particularly visible in high-stakes, high-reward niches like finance and fintech, where the cost of bad advice is devastating. Consider the trajectory of Ivan Patriki, a fintech marketing expert, founder of Amora Media, and co-founder and growth operator at QuantMap. Patriki sits at the exact intersection of attention economics, creator growth, and monetization pressure. Having built a large finance audience and generated hundreds of millions of views, he understands intimately that modern virality is deliberately engineered. He has seen exactly how creator funnels in the finance space are built, moving audiences systematically from short-form discovery to long-form authority, and finally into high-ticket conversion funnels.

But Patriki also saw firsthand what happens when that engineered attention reaches critical mass. The inbound monetization opportunities he received often included dubious financial offers, aggressive trading platforms, and products that relied on fake “live” selling environments or manufactured scarcity. The upfront payout for promoting these products is notoriously high, but the cost is entirely borne by the creator’s credibility.

Instead of renting out his audience to the highest bidder for a quick cash injection, Patriki leveraged his understanding of market data and audience needs to co-found QuantMap, a platform backed by decades of market data and long-range historical testing. By building a product that actually served his audience’s need for institutional-grade analytics, he protected his most valuable asset: his trust.

Reputational debt is a commercial liability

Patriki’s experience highlights a critical lesson for any founder or operator-led brand navigating the modern digital landscape. Trust is not a soft, intangible concept reserved for public relations statements; it is a hard, measurable commercial asset. When you endorse a bad partner, promote a misaligned offer, or push a leaky funnel, you might secure a short-term revenue spike. But you also accumulate what is known as reputational debt.

This debt manifests in your business metrics in very real, painful ways: lower future conversion quality, weaker repeat customer rates, a drastic drop in organic referrals, and a deeply skeptical audience that requires higher and higher incentives to take action.

Once an audience learns that a founder views them merely as extraction targets rather than a community to serve, the dynamic changes permanently. Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) skyrockets because your organic reach no longer converts, and your Lifetime Value (LTV) plummets because nobody buys from you twice. Brand recovery in the digital age is incredibly expensive, and in many cases, it is entirely impossible. The internet has a long memory, and a burned audience rarely returns.

The trust stack: A founder’s decision filter

To avoid this trap, fast-growing founders need a rigorous, objective decision filter before they attempt to monetize their attention. Before accepting a sponsorship, launching a partnership, or pushing a new product to your audience, you must evaluate whether the offer strengthens your authority or quietly rents it out. Founders should run every commercial opportunity through a framework we can call the “Trust Stack”:

• Product Clarity and Audience Fit: Is the value proposition immediately clear, or does it rely on obfuscation, complex jargon, and hype? If you cannot explain exactly how the product works, how it makes money, and why your specific audience needs it in one simple sentence, it does not belong on your platform.
• Incentive Transparency: Are the risks, fees, and incentives out in the open? In sectors like fintech, software or health, hidden fees or unstated risks destroy credibility instantly. If a partner asks you to obscure the terms and conditions or downplay the risks, you must walk away.
• Operator Credibility and Compliance: Who is actually behind the offer? Are they operating in a regulated jurisdiction with clear compliance standards, or are they hiding behind offshore entities and anonymous holding companies? You are lending them your face and your reputation; you need to know exactly whose business you are legitimizing.
• User Recourse: If something goes wrong (if the product fails, the software crashes, or the service severely underdelivers), what is the recourse for the user? If your audience gets burned, they will not blame the faceless sponsor or the third-party vendor; they will blame the founder who told them to buy it.
• Reputation Survivability: This is the ultimate stress test. Fast-forward twelve months into the future. If this product, company, or platform collapses publicly in a scandal, will your personal brand and business survive the association? If the answer is no, or even a hesitant maybe, the short-term payout is simply not worth the existential risk to your company.

Long-term authority over short-term extraction

We operate in a highly saturated ecosystem where attention is increasingly commoditized. Anyone with the right playbook, enough capital, or a clever algorithm hack can buy or manufacture their way to a million impressions. But converting those fleeting impressions into a sustainable, high-margin, long-term business requires an audience that fundamentally believes what you say.

Founders must stop viewing their audience as a natural resource to be aggressively mined and start treating them as partners in a long-term ecosystem. A bad monetization strategy is a silent killer; it quietly rents out your hard-earned trust until there is nothing left to sell. By applying a strict trust filter to every commercial decision, founders ensure that every dollar they make today actively strengthens their authority for tomorrow.

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  The Need to Build Trust

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