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Right now, one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world: What was the planet like eons ago? Was it ever habitable? Did it host life?

One rock visited by Perseverance, called Cheyava Falls, is speckled with iron-rich minerals that might be able to answer these questions, scientists announced in September. On Earth, the presence of these minerals usually means microbes that used iron in the chemical reactions essential to their metabolism once lived there. Does the same hold true on Mars? A piece of Cheyava Falls is safely tucked inside the rover’s storage cache. If it can be shipped to Earth, analysis with the full range of laboratory equipment here could tell us the answer.

But Cheyava Falls’s ride to our planet might have fallen through. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth, known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. The Trump administration has proposed canceling the return portion of the endeavor. The mission’s fate, as of press time, rests with the U.S. Congress.

The situation has dismayed scientists who have longed to get their hands on Martian rocks. “We’ve been working for so many decades to try to make this happen,” says Vicky Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Colorado branch. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “It’s hard to watch.”

Even if the mission isn’t canceled, how to finish it remains an open question. In 2024 NASA said it was scrapping its initial, troubled plan for MSR—deemed too costly and too far behind schedule—to seek cheaper commercial approaches. The agency now has multiple options on the table but has yet to decide which course to take, if any.

At stake are potentially profound insights about Mars. We know that some three billion to four billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with lakes and seas on its surface. What we don’t know is whether life ever took hold there. Can we find out?

Perseverance touched down on Mars in February 2021 following a nail-biter of a landing. After the spacecraft had torn through the Martian atmosphere and descended toward the surface by parachute, a crablike, rocket-propelled platform called Sky Crane lowered the rover on cables to the surface. It landed inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) dent in the Martian landscape. A river once flowed there, and the bone-dry delta it left behind is visible from space.

If anything ever lived on Mars, Jezero is as good a place as any to look for signs of it. It’s nearly impossible, however, to send a mission to Mars that would be capable of finding life without help from labs on Earth. That’s why scientists have been lobbying since the 1960s for a way to bring pieces of Mars here.

MSR is the culmination of those efforts. In 2000, Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director—sometimes called the “Mars Czar”—was tasked with turning around the fortunes of an ailing program that had experienced multiple failures in the 1990s, including the loss of two orbiters and a lander. “I took the existing program down to the roots, almost a bare sheet of paper,” Hubbard says. The top priority, he says, was to find out: “Did life ever exist on Mars, and could it be there today?”

Interest in Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement from the White House lawn in 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim was later refuted—but it caused enough clamor to put the search for Martian life at the top of NASA’s agenda.

NASA put a plan in place. Rovers and orbiters would probe the planet to identify good places to look for evidence of life. Then a rover would head there to grab samples, and a third phase would bring them to Earth. In 2012, NASA announced the Mars 2020 mission, which would land a rover, later named Perseverance, to collect the samples. By 2030, a follow-up mission would collect these samples and return them to Earth at an estimated cost of slightly less than $6 billion. Perseverance launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in July 2020. Not far behind, scientists hoped, the retrieval mission would follow.

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A man on a plane TikTok’ed about getting a refund after a baby in a nearby aisle cried for 45 minutes. That man was a dick. A few years back, a lady on a South Korea–to–US flight gave out handwritten notes and care packages—earplugs, gum, candies—to atone for flying with a baby who might cry. That woman was a benevolent fool.

I can’t get my head around either of those standards—neither the “I’m sorry I cannot control the behavior of this defenseless human in my arms” position, nor this new “Why has this baby ruined my day?” schtick.

It’s the season of mass travel, December being the month we have to touch base with uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even MAGA-hatted distant cousins, lest we summon bad tidings and bah-humbugs—especially when a newborn’s involved. This time of year, it’s your duty as a parent to serve up your baby, oft dressed in velvet and doily, to cooing relations.

I am a loud person by nature—God blessed me with a voice that carries—but the thought of negatively impacting someone else’s experience with my presence is, by no stretch of the imagination, mortifying. I don’t talk during the movie or use speakerphone for public calls. But I have no qualms about my daughter’s lack of absolute silence in any situation. I’m sure you can Labrador-train a child to be seen and not heard, but a new-ish-born baby is a lasso of foghorns you can’t predict the trigger for, and parenting toddlers, on the whole, is fighting for your fucking life—every minute trying to swerve the carnage mainly seen in disaster movies. Many a traveling parent knows the piercing pain of their kid melting down when they should be buckling up, and shoving Cheeto after Cheeto into their mouth, or a sticky iPad into their stickier hands, to ease the onset of Armageddon. You’ve heard the verging-on-shrill pitch to their voice, the rising panic as their mile-high cub breaks the sound barrier.

To state the blindingly obvious: Babies cry. Without vocab or motor skills, a baby can’t indicate even the smallest discomfort without Niagara-ing into their bibs. If a baby is wet, they cry. If a baby is tired, they cry. If a baby is hungry, they cry. A baby can cry at the scratchy label in a onesie, a slight gust of cold air, the 12-second gap between Ms. Rachel videos. A baby’s Spotify Wrapped is just the sound of them wailing at different pitches.

And it should go without saying that a baby crying isn’t a reflection on the parent or their parenting style. Happy, non-future-serial-killer babies cry. Well-watered, well-tended babies cry. A baby that doesn’t cry may seem aspirational for Christmas travel, but it’s more likely an issue for a medic.

I’m wondering what brings people online to bemoan babies crying on flights. Were they expecting to be shielded from the general public when they purchased their ticket for public travel? Were they hoping to pay for extra soundproofing along with their legroom? There’s something about the echo chamber of social media that has siloed us into hyper-individuals, fixated not only on our personal experience but on the things that threaten it. Rather than co-exist, we have refused to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.

The public-shaming aspect, especially of mothers, carries a certain subtext; it’s about a woman failing to disappear into the passing montage of a man’s day—about making herself known to him without courting his attention. There’s a sense that a woman is meant to carry out her job as a mother in perfect silence, like a fresco of the Madonna and child.

But the people judging babies that cry seem to forget that they were once babies that cried. And in a way, the complainers are still the babies—unable to modify their own emotions, to empathize, to rationalize. Where a baby lacks the development to properly express themselves, the complainers lack the maturity to shut up and noise-cancel. Instead of acting out, what they really need to do is grow up.

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Collage by Vogue; Photo: Getty Images

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On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.

So far, it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.

At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.

Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.

China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.

And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.

Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.

He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.

Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)

Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon.

In recent weeks, he has promised to use the tariff income flowing into the country to cut a government check of $2,000 for every taxpayer (“not including high income people!” he exclaimed on Truth Social in November). Last week, he declared at a cabinet meeting that “at some point in the not too distant future, you wouldn’t even have income tax to pay.”

The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.

The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.

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The president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers, who have been battered in large part by his trade policies. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Earlier this year, I got an Oura ring to track the state of my health. Soon, I was obsessing over my sleep and activity scores. The reports were generally positive except for one: heart rate variability, or HRV. That’s a measure of how much the time between heartbeats changes. Every morning, in bright red, my ring’s app singled out HRV and told me: “Pay attention.”

That didn’t sound good, although I had no idea why. Before wearable fitness watches, rings, and bracelets became so common and started including HRV as a data point, I had never heard of it. Even among heart doctors, its use has been limited. “I don’t think HRV is used in day-to-day clinical medical practice,” says Bryan Wilner, an electrophysiologist at the Baptist Health Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute. “But it’s gained a lot more popularity in regular consumers with these noninvasive monitors.”

Suddenly, we are all paying attention to HRV. And as reams of data are collected from hundreds of thousands of people like me, the measure has the potential to become a far more significant tool for diagnosis and therapy, although it isn’t there yet.

The average person’s heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute when they’re at rest, but it fluctuates all day long. Standing up after lying down changes your heart rate, as does jogging or fielding stressful questions at work. The time between beats changes, too, and that’s what HRV captures. Unlike arrhythmias, which are potentially dangerous disruptions in the heart’s electrical activity, HRV measures the very slight variation in periods—a matter of milliseconds—between consecutive heartbeats, tracked over a few minutes or longer.

“There is no specific [HRV] number for what’s bad, what’s good.” —Attila Roka, electrophysiologist

 

Both heart rate and HRV reflect the differing effects of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system, colloquially known as “fight or flight,” increases heart rate; the parasympathetic, or “rest and digest,” slows it down. Generally, the lower a person’s heart rate, the higher their HRV. A high HRV indicates a body that adapts to stressors and can recover more quickly.

It’s a sign of a balanced autonomic nervous system and a higher level of cardiovascular fitness. Low HRV signals the opposite—that the body is less able to adjust to the ups and downs of life. Stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, inadequate sleep, dehydration, and new medicines are among the many things that can lower HRV. Disease can reduce it, too. In people recovering from heart attacks or living with heart failure, low HRV is associated with a higher risk of death and further illness. “HRV is a window into how the autonomic nervous system is interacting with our heart,” Wilner says. Oura states on its app that it flags HRV because it is a sign of stress and recovery.

“There is no specific number for what’s bad, what’s good,” says Attila Roka, an electrophysiologist at the CHI Health Clinic Heart Institute and an assistant professor at Creighton University in Omaha. Anywhere from roughly 20 to 70 milliseconds is considered within normal range. The measure is highly individual, although it generally goes down with age. Mine hovered around an unusual 14 for weeks, and that’s why my ring alerted me.

An electrocardiogram is the gold standard for measuring HRV. Cutting-edge pacemakers and defibrillators monitor it, too, and experts are investigating the use of HRV with heart disease patients to predict the onset of atrial fibrillation (Afib) in time to prevent it, says Pamela Mason, chief of cardiac electrophysiology at UVA Health in Virginia. Afib is an irregular, rapid heart rhythm that can lead to blood clots and other problems. Physicians also use Holter monitors, small devices that patients wear on their chests for a few days, to capture a full picture of cardiac activity, including HRV.

Devices like Apple watches and Oura rings work by looking at pulse fluctuations rather than electrical heart signals. Few studies have examined how accurate these devices are. But what’s more important for the average person, experts say, is the relative change over time. “You need to get a baseline HRV,” Wilner says. “HRV is most powerful when you’re measuring it over several weeks and can see a graphic trend on how it’s being affected by everything that’s going on in your life.”

HRV might one day be used to assess mental health. “If you’re in a constant fight-or-flight kind of state mentally, you’re going to lose heart rate variability,” Mason says. Conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder are likely to be associated with dysregulated nervous system activity. Even among people without medical or psychiatric disorders, studies have found a link between decreasing parasympathetic activity and emotional upset, suggesting HRV tracks psychological states.

Low HRV, in relatively healthy people, does have some remedies. “The best way to improve heart rate variability is exercise,” Mason says, “and it’s going to need to be more strenuous than gentle walks.” Pick up the pace to pick up your HRV. Drinking more fluids—water is good—also helps.

For people like me, Mason’s advice is to not obsess. Instead, consider what you could do to take better care of yourself. Prodded by red HRV alerts, I drank more water and consumed less caffeine, went to bed earlier, and engaged in vigorous exercise more regularly. Since then, my HRV has been higher than 30! Not that I’m obsessing over it.

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Jay Bendt

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Friday afternoon brought a significant development in President Donald Trump’s quest to extra-constitutionally restrict birthright citizenship, when the Supreme Court granted cert in Barbara v. Trump. The case will be heard early next year. Last year’s birthright citizenship case was a technical—but vitally important—dispute around the powers of federal district court judges. This time, the administration is swinging for the fences in an effort to do away with the substance of the 14^th Amendment once and for all. On this week’s Amicus podcast, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the surreal proposition that a case that should never exist is now poised to be taken seriously as a matter of law. A portion of their conversation is excerpted below, edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: This is a clean vehicle for the justices to decide whether the Constitution does, in fact, grant birthright citizenship to virtually all people born here. Trump issued an executive order on his first day back in office, on Jan. 20, 2025, that purported to strip birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants who are here on temporary visas, as well as undocumented immigrants moving forward. That, of course, violates the plain text of the 14^th Amendment, a federal statute, and more than 120 years of Supreme Court precedent. But he did it anyway. 

We thought we were going to get a big decision on this last term, but in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court ended up taking away the nationwide injunctions that had blocked the policy instead. This time around, Barbara v. Trump is a pretty clean shot at the fundamental question on the merits: Can Trump do this? The Justice Department is not trying to fight any kind of procedural or equitable issues here. This was a class action, and the administration accepts that. The lower courts ruled against the government. The administration is saying, “Just give us a win and tell us that we can implement this policy.” So this is the fight: This is the big one we’ve been waiting for after the fake out last year. By the end of June 2026, the Supreme Court will have told us whether or not we still have a 14^th Amendment.

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Finally, we’ll get a decision on the merits here. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Win McNamee/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, and SupremeCourt.gov.

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The court’s three liberal justices warned of the far-reaching consequences for the structure of the modern government if the majority sided with the Trump administration in the Federal Trade Commission matter.

A decision in the president’s favor, they said, would call into question the constitutionality of job protections extended to leaders of more than two dozen other agencies Congress has charged with protecting consumers, workers, and the environment.

Justice Elena Kagan said such a ruling would “put massive, uncontrolled, unchecked power in the hands of the president.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the administration’s lawyer that “you’re asking us to destroy the structure of government” and to take away from Congress its ability to insulate independent agencies from political pressures.

In response, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said that “the sky will not fall” if the justices give the president this new power. “In fact, our entire government will move toward accountability to the people,” he said.

Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has fired government watchdogs, leaders of independent agencies, and rank-and-file federal workers, drawing multiple legal challenges.

The Supreme Court has generally allowed the firings to take effect through temporary emergency orders. Monday’s case presents the first opportunity for the court to issue a conclusive ruling on the underlying legal questions of Mr. Trump’s firings.

Next month, the justices will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. The justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank may be uniquely insulated from presidential interference because of its history.

At issue on Monday was Mr. Trump’s firing in March of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the F.T.C. Mr. Trump said he was removing her because she did not align with his agenda, despite a law that says the president can remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Ms. Slaughter promptly sued.

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The Supreme Court in Washington.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

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