James' World 2

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“I call it a tyranny of attention because there’s so many demands on our attention coming from so many different directions that we are simply overwhelmed and we don’t have the mental bandwidth to cope with it.”

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The Big Think Interview

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In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development.

Those fears are beginning to come true, according to executives and investors involved with companies that develop and sell vaccines and the technology that is best known for the Covid vaccines.

At conferences and in interviews, they described the emerging consequences of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the longstanding federal support for vaccines.

“There will be less invention, investment, and innovation in vaccines generally, across all the companies,” Dr. Stephen Hoge, the president of Moderna, said in an interview.

The Trump administration said it was not discouraging innovation.

But investors have grown hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington. Major manufacturers are reporting declining sales of their shots. Smaller companies are taking the brunt of the impact, with some stocks whipsawing in response to the changes.

Perhaps no vaccine maker has been hit harder by the federal policy changes than Moderna. Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly questioned the safety and effectiveness of the technology around which the company has built its business. The technology, known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, instructs the body to produce a fragment of a virus that then sets off an immune response. It can be more quickly tailored and manufactured compared to traditional approaches.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, saying its research design was flawed.

The health officials’ decisions are a striking departure from President Trump’s first term, when the federal government funded and shepherded Moderna’s Covid vaccine. The company’s stock price has plummeted more than 90 percent since its peak in August 2021, erasing about $180 billion in market value.

Pharmaceutical companies have dodged several of Mr. Trump’s threats, reaching favorable deals with the administration to avoid tariffs and keep prices high for most of the drugs they currently sell. But they have been unable to find common ground on vaccines.

“It’s a different world when you start discussing vaccines,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said last month. “There is almost like a religion there.” Asked what needs to change, Mr. Bourla said, “the health secretary.” Mr. Bourla also characterized Mr. Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”

Mr. Bourla talks about the president with a different tone. He once said Mr. Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for championing the Covid vaccines.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said, “We reject the claim that our approach to vaccines is anti-science or hostile to innovation.”

Mr. Kennedy has argued that Covid shots using mRNA are not effective because they do not prevent infection. He also once called them “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Like all shots, mRNA vaccines sometimes cause side effects, but extensive research has found the shots are safe overall and that serious reactions occur rarely.

Under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership, the department has canceled contracts for mRNA technology, limited the use of Covid shots, and remade a crucial committee that recommends which vaccines Americans should take and when.

Last month, federal health officials overhauled the childhood vaccination schedule, reducing the number of recommended immunizations to 11 from 17, deciding that that the six vaccines that were dropped should now be given only in consultation with a clinician.

The changes “sent a chill through the entire industry,” said Jeff Coller, a scientist who works on mRNA at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Coller advises several small mRNA companies and is on the executive committee of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, a trade group.

Mr. Nixon defended the administration’s changes. “Vaccine policy at H.H.S. is guided by evidence-based science, public health outcomes and transparency, not by the business models or public statements of pharmaceutical executives,” he said.

So far, vaccine manufacturers say that they have no plans to exit the market and that their businesses are resilient enough to withstand the new pressures. Insurers have promised to continue to cover the vaccines that are no longer federally recommended, at least until the end of this year, promising to soften the financial blow for companies.

And despite increasing vaccine hesitancy, industry officials say they hope that Americans will be swayed by a vast body of research showing that vaccines save lives.

“Not everybody looks to the top of H.H.S. to get all of their guidance on how to live their lives,” Paul Hudson, the outgoing chief executive of Sanofi, told reporters last month. Still, he predicted a continued slowdown in vaccine sales because of “the misinformation that is going around.”

Sanofi recently halted early development of an mRNA flu vaccine, but said its decision was motivated by concerns about effectiveness, not politics.

Vaxcyte, a vaccine company near San Francisco, said last summer that it was pausing development of vaccines to protect against strep and the diarrhea-causing bacteria Shigella, attributing the decision to other priorities and a changing political and business climate.

Lost jobs for American workers

The federal vaccine policies, coupled with declining demand for Covid shots, have translated into hard times for Moderna.

Last year, the company laid off more than 800 workers, a tenth of its work force. It also lost more than $700 million in contracts to develop a shot to protect humans against bird flu after the Trump administration canceled the agreements. And the company shelved vaccines to protect against herpes, chickenpox, and shingles.

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Moderna says it plans to pull back on late-stage studies of some of its experimental vaccines. Credit…Brian Snyder/Reuters

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On average, single adults in the U.S. report they have fallen in passionate love twice in their life so far, according to a new survey. And 14 percent of the 10,036 respondents said they had never fallen in passionate love at all.

The results highlight the diversity of people’s experiences with love, says the study’s lead author, Amanda Gesselman, a psychologist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. “There’s a lot more variation than we really know about,” she says.

Researchers have proposed many ways to understand romantic love. One popular model is the triangular theory of love, which divides romance into three pieces: passion, intimacy, and commitment. The balance of these factors typically changes throughout the life cycle of a relationship, with passionate love happening earliest. “It’s that first feeling of magnetism to a partner, that feeling of obsession—just this intense longing to be together,” Gesselman says. It also typically fades over time and is often replaced by companionate love—a steadier, “warm and cozy kind of love,” she explains.

Stories of passionate love are everywhere—in movies, books, and the narratives we tell ourselves about what it means to live a fulfilling life. These stories often “really center the experience of passion and talk about how universal this is and how everyone feels it,” Gesselman says. Despite this, researchers have relatively little data about how common the experience is across the population.

Gesselman and her team analyzed data from 2022 and 2023 studies of singles in the U.S. Respondents between 18 and 99 years old were asked to report how many times during their life so far they had experienced passionate love. The average was 2.05 times across the whole sample and increased slightly with participants’ age.

Amanda Montañez; Source: “Twice in a Lifetime: Quantifying Passionate Love in U.S. Single Adults,” by Amanda N. Gesselman et al., in Interpersona, Vol. 20, No. 1, Article No. e733. Published online February 9, 2026 (data)

Not everyone experiences passionate love, the results show, but the chances increase with age. More than a quarter of people aged 18 to 19 reported never having felt it, and the number decreased to 7.6 percent for those older than age 70. Heterosexual men also reported feeling passionate love more times on average than heterosexual women, but no such differences appeared between men or women who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

The results suggest that passionate love is a widespread but infrequent experience for individuals, the authors write. But a big question remains unstudied, Gesselman says: How do people’s appraisals of these experiences change across the life cycles of their relationships and across their own life? People likely reevaluate their past romantic experiences as time goes on, a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding survey data like these.

A key limitation of the study is the fact that it included people of all age groups, who would have had different amounts of time to accumulate relationship experience. Furthermore, the study only included single people, which make up about 31 percent of the adult U.S. population. The results of a similar survey of all adults, including those with romantic partners, would likely look very different. Partnered people are likely to have experienced passionate love at least once, so a survey that excludes them can’t reveal the full picture of this phenomenon, notes Jaimie Krems, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.

Passionate love could also exist outside of romantic relationships. As the proportion of the U.S. population that is single continues to grow, it is increasingly important to understand the role these platonic relationships play in people’s lives, Krems says. “I think that is part of the human repertoire, to feel passionate love” in both romantic and nonromantic relationships, she says.

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Anna Vereshchak/Getty Images

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The interviewer did not ask a follow-up question on the topic. 

The former president also spoke out about the recent deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota, condemning what he described as “rogue behavior” of the federal government during the months-long enforcement surge. 

Obama compared the actions of the Trump Administration in Minnesota to behavior that “we’ve seen in authoritarian countries and we’ve seen in dictatorships, but we have not seen in America.”

“It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents,” he said, referring to the case of 5-Year-Old Liam Conejo Ramos.

“So the rogue behavior of agents of the federal government is deeply concerning and dangerous, but we should take a moment to appreciate the extraordinary outpouring of organizing, community building, decency, neighbors buying groceries for folks, accompanying children to school, teachers who were standing up for their kids, not just randomly, but in a systematic, organized way, citizens saying, “this is not the America we believe in,’” he said. 

Obama, whom Trump succeeded in 2017, had previously spoken out against the federal immigration operations in Minneapolis following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents.

In a statement with his wife Michelle posted on X after Pretti’s death, Obama claimed that Trump and officials in his Administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” instead of “trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed.”

“This has to stop,” Obama said. “I would hope that after this most recent tragedy, Administration officials will reconsider their approach.” 

The Trump Administration said Thursday it is winding down its massive immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota following months of unrest over excessive use of force by immigration officers in the state, including the shooting deaths of Pretti and Good.

“I have proposed and President Trump has concurred that this surge operation conclude,” border czar Tom Homan told reporters in a press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday.

President Donald Trump sent Homan, his top immigration advisor, to Minnesota late last month to address large-scale protests over excessive use of force by immigration officers in the state. Homan took over leadership of “Operation Metro Surge” from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and quickly set up meetings with local and state leaders, including sheriffs, police chiefs, Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

Obama also responded indirectly to the recent controversy over a video posted by President Donald Trump that depicted him and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. 

When asked about it, Obama commented on how there is a “sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television.” 

“What is true is there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sense of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office. So that’s been lost,” he added. 

Trump has refused to apologize for posting the video, saying he instructed a staffer to share it but that he had not seen the offending part.

“I didn’t see the whole thing,” Trump said. “I looked at the first part, and it was really about voter fraud in the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is. Then I gave it to the people. Generally, they look at the whole thing. But I guess somebody didn’t.”

TIME has approached the White House for comment. 

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Former President Barack Obama speaks at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum, Dec. 5, 2024, in Chicago.Erin Hooley—Associated Press

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The racist online video that President Trump recently shared and then deleted generated a bipartisan furor because of its portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. What was little remarked on was how it presented Mr. Trump himself — as the “King of the Jungle.”

After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.

While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties, and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman, and omnipresent persona, leading to idolatry.

His picture has been splashed all over the White House, on multistory banners on the side of federal buildings, on annual passes to national parks, and maybe even soon on a one-dollar coin. His name has been etched on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the U.S. Institute of Peace, on federal investment accounts, special visas, and a discount drug program, and, if he has his way, on Washington Dulles International Airport, Penn Station in New York, and the future stadium of the Washington Commanders.

His White House is pressuring the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery to display portraits of Mr. Trump by his supporters. A group of cryptocurrency investors has shelled out $300,000 to forge a 15-foot-tall gold-covered bronze statue of Mr. Trump called “Don Colossus” to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla.

His administration is considering designating a new class of battleships in Mr. Trump’s name. His allies are pressuring foreign leaders to endorse his bid for the Nobel Peace Prize and threatening consequences for resisting. Some supporters in Congress have even proposed adding his face to Mount Rushmore, an effort that, for the moment, has gained little traction.

This spree of self-aggrandizement goes beyond mere vanity, although Mr. Trump suffers from no particular shortage in that department. “I really have a big ego,” he noted at the National Prayer Breakfast this month, an assessment that drew no disagreement. What Mr. Trump is actually doing, though, is making himself the inescapable force in American life.

“This is not just egotistical self-satisfaction, it’s a way of expanding presidential power,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian. “A president is more powerful, I assume he believes, if he is ever-present than if he keeps his head down.”

Cults of personality are traditionally associated with dictators and demagogues, not democrats. They are figures like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini, and, more recently, the shirtless, horseback-riding Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But Mr. Trump does not seem concerned that he might be heading down a dangerous path.

Indeed, last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he suggested that authoritarianism was not necessarily something to eschew. “Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person, I’m a dictator,’” he said after delivering a rambling speech. “But sometimes, you need a dictator.”

His staff did not reject the notion that he was fostering a cult of personality when asked for comment. Indeed, it released a statement seeming to argue that one would be deserved.

“President Trump is going to go down in history as the most successful and consequential president in our lifetime,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in the statement. “He built the most powerful political and cultural movement ever. His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him.”

But even some former Trump aides said his fixation on glorifying himself served a hunger for dominance that had not translated into making the lives of everyday Americans better.

“This is a man drunk on power with an already enormous ego that was further inflated by winning the presidency again — and the popular vote,” said Sarah Matthews, who was a deputy White House press secretary for Mr. Trump in his first term before resigning in protest after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ms. Matthews, now affiliated with an opposition group called Home of the Brave, said that rather than focusing “on what’s best for the American people,” the president was concentrating on “building monuments to himself” and exacting revenge against perceived enemies. “It reinforces the perception that this presidency is more about elevating one man than serving the country,” she said.

The notion of a cult of personality has become an increasing theme of the political discourse in recent months. Consider the last 10 days alone: Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, referred to “the personality cult of Trump.” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, addressing a Democratic convention, said Republicans were “nothing more than a personality cult.” And Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said democracy “will prevail over cult of personality.”

Other presidents have encouraged hero worship, and plenty have been honored with monuments. But for the most part, they were more restrained than Mr. Trump, leaving the most ostentatious expressions of reverence to others and generally after they had left office.

George Washington set the standard from the start. Knowing that as the first president he would be establishing precedent, he deliberately shunned the trappings of royalty and declined to be called “Your Majesty” or “Your Highness,” opting instead for the more humble “Mr. President.”

It is true, of course, that the capital of the new nation was named after Washington during his presidency, a decision made by three commissioners he appointed. But historians said he had no known hand in encouraging it.

“He was surprised that the commissioners chose the name, though he did not object,” said David O. Stewart, a Washington biographer. “As near as the evidence shows, George Washington very much liked having the city named after him. He was not without ego, and devoted great energy and attention to developing the capital city.”

The iconic Washington Monument, however, came decades after his death, much as the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and Kennedy Center were not erected or named until the presidents they honored were gone. Mount Rushmore was carved after Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were all in their graves.

No sitting president ever had his face put on a coin while in office except for Calvin Coolidge, whose laconic personality did not exactly lend itself to cults. And Herbert Hoover surely would have preferred not having his name attached to the Great Depression shantytowns called Hoovervilles, although the Hoover Dam was named for him while he was in office. (Franklin D. Roosevelt stripped the name; Harry S. Truman restored it.)

“Presidents don’t name things after themselves, people name things after presidents — and there is a big difference between the two,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University and the author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

“One is an expression of power and a demand for respect and status,” she said. “The other is an acknowledgment by the public of a job well done, a grateful public giving a president respect and status.”

Many presidents have enjoyed being the center of attention. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth notably said her father “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” Others struggled with that kind of politics. George H.W. Bush painfully tried to avoid the first-person singular “I” in sentences because growing up, his mother taught him that it sounded boastful.

Boastful is not something Mr. Trump ever learned to avoid, nor can he fathom why predecessors passed on self-promotion. When he visited Mount Vernon during his first term, he expressed surprise that Washington did not name the estate for himself. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you,” Mr. Trump told people.

With Mr. Trump, it goes beyond names and memory. He wants to be seen as superlative in every way — and flawed in no way. His first-term executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, wrote in her memoir that when she expressed concern one day that he seemed exhausted, she was remonstrated by Hope Hicks, the president’s close adviser: “Donald Trump is never tired, and he is never sick.” To even question his health, Mr. Trump himself said in December, is “seditious, perhaps even treasonous.”

Personality-driven politics serve to bind followers of a movement to their leader more than to any particular policy prescription, making his success or failure their own. Veneration and loyalty are central, and ideology secondary. The leader is presented as infallible, uniquely qualified, even divinely delivered for this moment in history.

Mr. Trump has played to these themes since taking the national political stage. “I alone can fix it,” he declared when running in 2016. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said on being inaugurated again last year.

The efforts to exalt himself, however, have accelerated in the past year far beyond his first term and have increasingly come to resemble eccentric regimes in far corners of the world. To those who have spent time in the former Soviet Union, the “Don Colossus” statue bears a striking resemblance to the rotating gold statue erected by Saparmurat Niyazov, the megalomaniacal former dictator of Turkmenistan who called himself Turkmenbashi and even renamed the months of the year after himself and his family.

“There is no settled definition of a cult of personality, but for us this qualifies,” Benjamin E. Goldsmith of the Australian National University and Lars J.K. Moen of the University of Vienna, who have studied Mr. Trump’s hold on his supporters, said in a joint email.

The two scholars, who published a paper on the phenomenon in the Political Psychology journal, said the personality cult allowed Mr. Trump to dominate Republican primary contests, right-wing media, and his party’s majorities in Congress. Those who stand against Mr. Trump are deemed traitors and punished accordingly.

“For us, this is the major threat to U.S. democracy from Trump’s cultlike following,” they wrote. “Congress is transformed into an enabler, even when the executive makes disastrous policies, undermines the rule of law, or might attempt to fix elections. The system can transform into an electoral autocracy. Our bet is that we’re already far along that path.”

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Trump Nominee on ‘White Erasure’: Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s pick for a senior State Department post, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing that a loss of a dominant white culture is weakening the country.

• Economic Outlook: Solid jobs data and a soft inflation reading for January are welcome news for Trump. But the bigger economic picture is less encouraging.

• Rail Tunnel Funding: Federal funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel between New York City and New Jersey, which had been suspended for more than four months, has begun to flow again after lawyers for the Trump administration told a federal judge that it would comply with her orders.

• ‘Board of Peace’ Funding: The United Arab Emirates and the United States have each committed more than $1 billion to Trump’s new international initiative, officials said.

• Attack on Climate Regulation: The Trump administration has repealed the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change. A legal battle over the repeal is expected to reach the Supreme Court.

• Troops in Nigeria: The first wave of U.S. military personnel has arrived in Nigeria to assist the country’s armed forces in targeted counterterrorism operations aimed in part at protecting Nigerian Christians.

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