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When Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica on October 28, it showed just how devastatingly powerful a Category 5 hurricane can be—and then some.

It will be weeks before experts can truly assess just how badly Hurricane Melissa ravaged Jamaica and nearby islands. But scientists are already confident that climate change contributed to the storm’s horrifying strength, which sent winds gusting far beyond the minimum required for a Category 5. And Melissa could revive discussions swirling around whether the five categories of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale are sufficient to describe the monstrous storms that climate change can fuel.

What would a Category 6 storm look like?

The Saffir-Simpson scale breaks hurricanes into numbered categories based solely on peak sustained wind speeds. By this scale, a storm with sustained maximum winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour is a Category 1 hurricane. When a storm’s winds hit 111 mph, it becomes Category 3, which also marks the official designation of a “major hurricane.” The most severe classification under the Saffir-Simpson scale, Category 5, marks hurricanes with sustained peak wind speeds of 157 mph or higher.

But last year, hurricane scientists suggested that this “open-ended” nature of the Saffir-Simpson scale is no longer sufficient to convey the reality of modern hurricanes. They proposed the establishment of Category 6, which would begin at peak sustained wind speeds of 192 miles per hour.

As the researchers noted, so far, five storms reached this horrifying milestone, and all of them did so in years after 2010. Those storms were Hurricane Patricia in the eastern Pacific Ocean and four typhoons—which are not traditionally assigned categories—in the western Pacific: Haiyan, Goni, Meranti, and Surigae.

Hurricane Melissa didn’t quite meet the proposed Category 6 boundary, with initial measurements suggesting maximum sustained wind speeds of 185 mph. That leaves it tied with several other serious storms—the “Labor Day” hurricane of 1935 and Hurricanes Gilbert, Wilma, and Dorian in 1988, 2005, and 2019, respectively—for the second strongest peak sustained wind speed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The strongest sustained wind speed in the Atlantic on record occurred in 1980’s Hurricane Allen, which hit 190 mph, nearly grazing the researchers’ suggested Category 6.

Some scientists argue that extending the Saffir-Simpson scale is unnecessary, however. That argument rests on the fact that the scale includes not just category numbers and wind speeds but also notes about what kind of damage to expect from those winds. Indeed, Herbert Saffir, one of the scientists behind the scale, was a structural engineer who focused on wind damage.

Category 3 is described by the National Hurricane Center as causing “devastating damage,” with even well-built homes being vulnerable to losing their roof and the affected region facing a potentially days-long loss of water and electrical service. Both Categories 4 and 5 are described as causing “catastrophic damage”: “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months,” the rubric reads. At that point, Category 6 opponents argue, there’s little further distinction to be made about just how dire the situation will be.

And some are concerned that an additional category could have the opposite effect of the one intended. “It could inflate the scale such that life-shattering storms assigned lower categories would garner even less attention than they already do,” wrote University of Arizona atmospheric scientist Kim Wood on Bluesky.

Climate change and monster storms

Hurricane Allen’s shocking winds in 1980, before a noticeable trend of increasingly intense hurricanes was observed, are an important reminder that climate change does not directly cause monster hurricanes. Scientists prefer to describe climate change as “loading the dice” for, or contributing to, the strength of serious storms.

And scientists have already concluded that climate change did indeed contribute to the strength of Hurricane Melissa. An analysis by the nonprofit research organization Climate Central calculated that the waters Melissa traveled over as a Category 5 storm as it approached Jamaica were more than one full degree Celsius (two full degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than normal—a circumstance that climate change made more than 700 times more likely.

A second rapid analysis, this one conducted by the organization ClimaMeter, determined that climate change strengthened Melissa’s winds and rain by about 10 percent compared with how the storm might have played out under conditions where humans had not added heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Researchers will release other, similar “attribution analyses,” as these studies are known, in the coming days and weeks.

In general, however, scientists know that hurricanes are becoming more severe as climate change accelerates. Warmer ocean water fuels stronger winds, and warmer air holds more water, which can then become rainfall. Meanwhile, rising sea levels make coastal regions more vulnerable to storm surge. Studies have shown that as climate change continues, a higher proportion of hurricanes are reaching Category 3, while other evidence shows that even tropical storms and weak hurricanes are intensifying as well.

But the initial analyses also point to a weakness of the Category 6 idea and an inherent weakness of the Saffir-Simpson scale as a risk communications tool: the scale considers only wind speeds, but hurricanes’ storm surge and rainfall can be just as hazardous, if not more so.

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An Arizona man who pleaded guilty to murder charges after leaving his 2-year-old daughter to die in a sweltering hot car for hours as temperatures climbed to 109 degrees Fahrenheit has killed himself, officials said Wednesday.

Christopher Scholtes, 38, was found dead in his home Wednesday, the day he was set to appear in court for his sentencing, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover announced at a press conference.

“This little girl’s voice was nearly silenced because justice was not served appropriately this morning,” Conover said. “But it has not and will not be silenced due to the hard work of the people who work here at the Pima County Attorney’s Office.”

Online records for the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s office confirm that Scholtes died. He is survived by two other children and his wife.

The 2-year-old girl died in a car outside her family’s home July 9, authorities said. Security footage from nearby homes shows that she was left alone in the car for about three hours, according to officials.

Scholtes initially told police that when he arrived home that day, his daughter was asleep in her car seat and he did not want to wake her, according to a news release from the Marana Police Department. He added that he left his daughter inside the car seat with the vehicle running in the driveway and the air conditioner turned on, before going inside the house, according to the release.

The air conditioner was not on, according to authorities. A complaint later filed by prosecutors said that Scholtes knew the car and the AC automatically shut off after 30 minutes.

Prosecutors said that Scholtes, who was unemployed, found the child dead in the car shortly after his wife, a doctor, came home from work and wondered where she was.

The 2-year-old girl was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, officials said.

Scholtes was arrested July 12. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and child abuse charges in October and was expected to spend up to 30 years in prison, according to Conover.

Court documents later revealed that Scholtes was distracted by video games on the day his daughter died and “regularly” left his kids alone in the car.

Scholtes’ wife texted him “I told you to stop leaving them in the car, How many times have I told you,” as his 2-year-old daughter was being transported to the hospital, according to a documents.

He responded, “Babe I’m sorry!”

“How could I do this. I killed our baby, this can’t be real,” he added in a later text to his wife, according to the documents.

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Christopher Scholtes, a father who pleaded guilty to the murder of his 2-year-old daughter after leaving her in a hot car.via KVOA

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“My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she continued. “We have always led the way, and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Ms. Pelosi, who likes to use the phrase “resting is rusting,” led the House Democrats for 20 years, eight of which she spent as speaker. She has also been a prodigious fund-raiser and raised more than $1.3 billion for Democratic campaigns, according to her aides.

But she was reviled by conservatives, who painted her as the scary embodiment of liberal San Francisco values and blamed her for what they considered the nation’s decline.

She has been a chief irritant to President Trump, even to this day, calling him “a vile creature” in a CNN interview that aired this week. She presided over two of his impeachment votes in the House. And he has called her “Crazy Nancy,” with no sense of fondness for his foe.

Her Democratic colleagues said she was unlike any other politician with whom they had worked. Jackie Speier, a Bay Area Democrat who served in the House for 15 years, said that Ms. Pelosi would go down in history “as the most consequential speaker ever.”

“She has a command, a presence. All eyes turn to her,” Ms. Speier said.

Her retirement had been grist for the local and national political rumor mill for several years, and younger Democrats grew increasingly eager to run for her seat. They feared, however, that it would be folly to challenge one of the most powerful politicians in modern history.

Ms. Pelosi, for her part, told CNN days ago that she had no doubt she would win re-election if she were to run for another term.

Still, the overwhelming defeat Democrats suffered last year in the congressional and presidential races has prompted soul-searching within the party — and louder calls for older Democrats to step down and make way for new politicians with fresh ideas.

The race to succeed Ms. Pelosi was already shaping up to be a fierce one before she announced her retirement. Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco who is a champion of housing construction, and Saikat Chakrabarti, who worked as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, have already announced they were running for the seat, with or without Ms. Pelosi on the ballot.

In recent months, Ms. Pelosi has refused to discuss her career plans, insisting she was focused solely on the passage of California’s Proposition 50, a ballot measure to approve newly drawn House districts. She worked behind the scenes to help Gov. Gavin Newsom craft the measure, which passed on Tuesday, and to raise money for the effort.

It was considered one of her final achievements, both a blow to Mr. Trump, who had sought more Republican seats in the House by gerrymandering in conservative states, and a parting gift to the next generation of California Democrats who could benefit from as many as five additional seats in the state.

Mr. Trump still has strong contempt for Ms. Pelosi.

“The retirement of Nancy Pelosi is a great thing for America,” he said on Thursday in a response to Fox News. “She was evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”

At a packed union hall in San Francisco on Monday morning, Ms. Pelosi was the emcee for a Proposition 50 rally that included Mr. Newsom and labor leader Dolores Huerta.

“This is a moment of truth for America,” Ms. Pelosi told the crowd. “It’s self-defense for our democracy.”

n the audience, union workers wore T-shirts that Ms. Pelosi had autographed for them and pins with drawings of six tiny Nancy Pelosis standing side by side, each wearing a suit in a different color of the rainbow.

At the rally, the ever-stylish Ms. Pelosi was sporting a green corduroy suit and green stilettos, never mind the fall she took in December on a marble staircase in Luxembourg that forced her to get a hip replacement and remain stuck for several months in dreaded flats.

Ms. Pelosi’s career in elected office has been a long one, but it did not span even half her life. Born into a politically powerful family of Democrats in Baltimore — her father and brother each served as the city’s mayor — Ms. Pelosi went the more traditional route for women of her age.

At first, anyway.

She met her husband, Paul Pelosi, at Georgetown University, and the couple moved to his hometown, San Francisco, where she stayed home to raise their five children. During that time, Mr. Pelosi grew his career as a venture capitalist.

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Representative Nancy Pelosi announced that she will not run for re-election. Her term ends in January 2027.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

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Every year, Halloween enthusiasts adorn their homes with synthetic cobwebs. But humans aren’t the only creatures who decorate their abodes.

Spiders bedeck their webs with “stabilimenta”—various woven patterns that are typically made of a different kind of silk than the rest of the web. In a new study published Wednesday, researchers reported that they found that these “web decorations” may help the spiders detect certain vibrations that can help them find their prey.

Arachnologists have debated the function of these ornaments for decades. Early researchers in the field called such a decoration a “stabilimentum” (Latin for a “support”) because they believed the structures helped stabilize webs. But this hypothesis has been proven wrong, says Gabriele Greco, a bioengineer at the University of Pavia in Italy and co-author of the recent study, which was published in PLOS One.

Scientists have also proposed that stabilimenta shield spiders from harsh ultraviolet rays, convey water for the arachnids to drink, or can either visually attract or repel prey. There is just one function that researchers widely agree on: stabilimenta help spiders of some species hide from predators. But “there are many different types of [web] geometries,” Greco says, “and this makes the possibilities of new functions available to spiders.”

A creature landing or moving on a spider web generates force. This force can become a vibration that travels through the silk that the spider can perceive. While reading old papers, Greco was unable to find any research into how stabilimenta shape those vibrations.

He and his colleagues chose to study Argiope bruennichi—a large spider that has yellow, black, and white stripes and spins classic webs with spiral patterns—because the species is easy to find and one of the only spiders that produces stabilimenta in Italy, said Greco. He and his colleagues took images of six different types of stabilimenta in the forests of Sardinia over the course of two years.

There was the classic, or “normal,” stabilimentum—a dense, thick, zigzagging thread. Similarly, the “juvenile” stabilimentum that was produced by juvenile spiders zigzagged, but it was not as thick. The researchers called web decor that was woven on only one side from the center of the web “reduced.” “Drafted” stabilimenta appeared as incomplete or thin zigzags. And some webs had no stabilimenta at all. Lastly, the team categorized a “platform” stabilimentum: a thick and dense network of silk, woven in a symmetric pattern in the middle of the web.

Once these structures were photographed, the researchers created computer simulations to model how vibrations spread through the various webs. They tested the effect that different directions of impact had on each web.

In the simulations, the team first found that stabilimenta had no effect on waves from the force of an object landing perpendicular to the web or hitting it from the side toward the center. “Until here, I was happy because this is exactly what I expected,” Greco says.

But sometimes prey gets stuck in a web and thrashes from side to side, emitting vibrations parallel to the spiral. Greco was surprised to find that stabilimenta in the platform shape can play a huge role in transmitting that vibration. In the simulations, a platform stabilimentum made it possible for some vibrations to reach the web’s far side by improving connectivity among the threads—a process that, in nature, would help the waiting arachnid detect prey. (A similar but milder effect came through with other stabilimentum shapes.)

“This adds one more piece to the puzzle,” says Todd Blackledge, a biologist at the University of Akron, who was not involved in the study, “I think the really important take-home message of this paper is that they did not find a big, dramatic effect” of stabilimenta overall. He emphasizes that because the study was based on modeling, we still need to ask, “Does this really apply to real spiders in the real world?”

Greco sees this study as a starting point to categorizing stabilimenta’s effects on vibration, and next, he hopes to study such spooky effects in the wild.

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Spiders such as this Argiope bruennichi sometimes adorn webs with zigzagging stabilimenta.  Pierluigi Rizzo (member of Aracnofilia – Italian Society of Arachnology) (CC-BY 4.0)

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Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound after evading authorities, crashing a car, and fleeing on foot, Texas police said Thursday.

At around 10:33 p.m. Wednesday, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers attempted to stop a car for a traffic violation near Frisco, the Frisco Police Department said in a statement.

The driver allegedly refused to stop, prompting a pursuit that required assistance from Frisco police.

“After losing visual of the vehicle, troopers located it minutes later, crashed on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway,” the statement said.

Police said that the man, later identified as Kneeland, 24, ran away.

During the search for Kneeland, officers said they received information that he had “expressed suicidal ideations.” He was found at 1:31 a.m. local time, “deceased with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the statement said.

The Plano Police Department said in a statement that officers responded “to a call for a welfare concern” at an address associated with Kneeland around 11:40 p.m. Wednesday. They did not make contact with anyone at the residence, the statement said.

Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound after evading authorities, crashing a car, and fleeing on foot, Texas police said Thursday.

At around 10:33 p.m. Wednesday, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers attempted to stop a car for a traffic violation near Frisco, the Frisco Police Department said in a statement.

The driver allegedly refused to stop, prompting a pursuit that required assistance from Frisco police.

“After losing visual of the vehicle, troopers located it minutes later, crashed on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway,” the statement said.

Police said that the man, later identified as Kneeland, 24, ran away.

During the search for Kneeland, officers said they received information that he had “expressed suicidal ideations.” He was found at 1:31 a.m. local time, “deceased with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the statement said.

The Plano Police Department said in a statement that officers responded “to a call for a welfare concern” at an address associated

The case and manner of death will be determined by the Collin County Medical Examiner’s Office, the police statement added. Police said they are investigating the case as a possible suicide.

“It is with extreme sadness that the Dallas Cowboys share that Marshawn Kneeland tragically passed away this morning,” the Cowboys said in a statement.

“Marshawn was a beloved teammate and member of our organization. Our thoughts and prayers regarding Marshawn are with his girlfriend, Catalina, and his family.”

In a statement, Kneeland’s agent also confirmed his death overnight, but neither he nor the team said where or how the NFL player died.

“I watched him fight his way from a hopeful kid at Western Michigan with a dream to being a respected professional for the Dallas Cowboys,” Jonathan Perzley said in a statement, asking for “privacy and compassion” for those close to Kneeland.

“Marshawn poured his heart into every snap, every practice, and every moment on the field. To lose someone with his talent, spirit, and goodness is a pain I can hardly put into words. My heart aches for his family, his teammates, and everyone who loved him, and I hope they feel the support of the entire football community during this unimaginable time.”

The Cowboys selected Kneeland with their second-round pick in the 2024 draft, the 56th overall selection. He played in 11 games during his rookie season and appeared in seven in 2025, recording his first career sack in Week 1.

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Marshawn Kneeland in Inglewood, Calif., in 2024.Ric Tapia / Getty Images file

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Emily Bazelon: Hi, David. There are many legal controversies for us to dig into. Let’s start with the news — the argument at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in the case challenging President Trump’s tariffs. Do you think it went as badly for the Trump administration as I do? Were you surprised by anything? And how were you counting up the justices’ votes?

David French: Hi Emily! I agree with you that, on balance, the argument did not go well for the Trump administration, but it wasn’t a slam dunk on the anti-tariff side either. There was one surprising element to me — two of the court’s most conservative justices seemed to be sharply at odds with each other during the argument. Justice Gorsuch’s questioning was damaging for the administration’s case, while Justice Alito very clearly planted his flag for Trump’s tariffs.

At a couple points, Alito virtually took over the oral argument, pressing Neal Katyal, one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs challenging the tariffs, for several minutes at a time on a number of fronts. His most effective line of questioning concerned whether the term “regulate” could encompass imposing a fee. I thought Katyal handled Alito’s questions well, but I do think that exchange slightly shifted the momentum of the argument, at least for a time.

Based on the oral argument, I’d say that four votes seem strongly against the administration’s position (Gorsuch, Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson), two are softer votes against the administration (Barrett and Roberts), two seemed moderately sympathetic to Trump’s case (Kavanaugh and Thomas), and Alito was ready to defend Trump’s tariffs like he was making a goal-line stand in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl.

Is there any moment that truly stood out to you?

Emily: Two. Barrett zeroed in on the text of the statute Trump has relied on, in a way I thought was devastating. The question is whether the phrase “regulate … importation” gives Trump the authority he’s seeking. Barrett pointed out that those words are not tariffs or duties or imposts (that last one was not on my vocab list, I confess) or any of the other terms Congress traditionally has used for taking money from foreign sellers of goods that come into the United States. Barrett asked for an example, any example, of another law that functions the way the solicitor general, D. John Sauer, says this one does — “Can you point to any other place in the code or any other time in history where that phrase, together, ‘regulate importation,’ has been used to confer tariff-imposing authority?” she said.

Sauer could only come up with the precursor statute to the one Trump is using, which Barrett already knew about.

My point is that Justice Barrett, a determined textualist, seems very doubtful that the words in the emergency law Trump used to impose the tariffs mean what he says they mean. For textualists, that should be a death knell.

Alito, however, clearly read the same words differently. He thinks regulating importation equals tariffs. To me, it’s a great example, among many, of why textualism does not point to The One True Answer of how to interpret a law in the way that adherents of this method often claim it does.

The other moment was Gorsuch’s closing mic drop. “It does seem to me — tell me if I’m wrong — that a really key part of the context here is the constitutional assignment of the taxing power to Congress,” he said. “The power to reach into the pockets of the American people is just different, and it has been different since the founding.”

In other words, he’s suggesting that Trump is usurping one of the most important functions that the founders gave to Congress to ensure that the president would not be able to act like a king. That’s the crux of why Trump’s claim of authority here is such a blow to the constitutional separation of powers. Tariffs, as some of the justices pointed out, are taxes by another name. They raise revenue by imposing costs that companies can eat or pass on to consumers.

If the president can declare an emergency at a whim, as Trump has done by declaring a run-of-the-mill trade deficit a national emergency, and then tariff whoever he wants at whatever rate, which he has also done — Ontario, how dare you run an anti-tariff ad that uses Ronald Reagan’s actual words against this president? — then Congress is not a coequal branch. Not even close. Congress is just … sitting on the sidelines. The president can dun countries or maybe even companies he doesn’t like, raise all the revenue he wants, and Congress can’t do a thing about it unless it can come up with a veto-proof majority to revoke his self-declared emergency powers. Justice Gorsuch pointed out that under this scheme, as a practical matter, Congress can never get its taxing power back.

David: That Gorsuch quote is key — it felt to me like he was summarizing his own theory of the case, a theory rooted in the founding ideas of the country. Taxation is a core enumerated power of Congress, and the idea that it delegated its core enumerated authority through a broad, vague statute governing international economic emergencies seems to strike Justice Gorsuch as implausible.

As you note, there was another portion of the oral argument that brought this point home. Justice Gorsuch asked the solicitor general about the “retrieval problem” — the difficulty of taking power back from the president. It takes only a bare majority of Congress (with presidential assent) to delegate the power, but a supermajority to retrieve the power — unless a president actually wants to surrender the power Congress has given him or her.

This creates, in Gorsuch’s words, a “one-way ratchet” that results in the president accumulating more and more power at the expense of the legislature.

Gorsuch’s observation has profound implications beyond the tariff case. One way that administrations expand presidential power is by arguing that the judiciary isn’t the proper branch to check the president, that, in some instances, only Congress has the authority.

But, as Gorsuch notes, that check is often completely illusory in the absence of congressional supermajorities. I can think of a number of circumstances where Gorsuch’s observation is relevant, including — most notably — in the disputes over Trump’s deployments and attempted deployments of the National Guard. The administration is arguing that the courts shouldn’t second-guess the president and that if Congress wants to amend the statute that grants him the power to deploy the troops, it can. But is that a real check when Congress can’t act on its own absent a veto-proof supermajority?

We’ve been talking a lot about the weaknesses in the administration’s position, but I fear that might leave readers with the wrong impression — that the outcome of this case is a foregone conclusion. I think the administration has a path to victory here. It can argue that the words “regulate … importation” in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (the full name of the statute before the court) should be read to encompass tariffs, especially when combined with the broad discretion presidents enjoy to conduct foreign affairs.

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Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

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Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recently announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will launch a review of the safety of the abortion pill, mifepristone. Health researchers say they’re concerned that the review will be politicized and based on flawed reports. More than 100 studies published over the past few decades have shown that the drug, which was approved by the FDA in 2000, is safe and effective at ending a pregnancy.

Given Kennedy’s history of misrepresenting scientific evidence about vaccines, autism, and Tylenol, some scientists say they worry that the health secretary will base the FDA report on unreliable sources.

“Based on what we have seen from this administration to date,” says Peter Lurie, the FDA’s former associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis, “there is every reason to fear that this study will be a cherry-picking, data-contorting exercise designed to support a predetermined conclusion of lack of safety.”

In a statement to Scientific American, Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the agency “is conducting a study of the reported adverse effects of mifepristone to ensure the FDA’s risk mitigation program for the drug is sufficient to protect women from unstated risks,” echoing an earlier statement from HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon.

Kennedy has frequently promoted the FDA review when addressing conservative critics who are impatient for the Trump administration to outlaw or dramatically limit abortion. Antiabortion groups were infuriated by the FDA’s recent approval of a second generic version of mifepristone.

In a post on the social media site X, Kennedy pledged to “review all the evidence—including real-world outcomes” for mifepristone, which is currently used in almost two-thirds of abortions in the U.S.

Kennedy has provided no timeline for the review’s release and few details about what it will encompass. But in a September 19 letter to state attorneys general, Kennedy cited a report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, that claims mifepristone is more dangerous than FDA analyses suggest and calls for ending telehealth prescription of the drug. The availability of Mifepristone via telehealth has contributed to an increase in abortion nationwide in spite of total bans on abortion in 12 states.

That report has serious methodological flaws, says Ushma Upadhyay, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, who dismisses it as “junk science.” She notes that the think tank report was neither peer-reviewed nor published in an established medical journal. The report also does not disclose the specific source of its data, which makes it impossible for other scientists to verify or try to reproduce its findings, she adds. In addition, it provides a false picture of mifepristone’s safety by misclassifying routine follow-up procedures as “serious adverse events,” Upadhyay says.

Kennedy has signaled that the president will be making final regulatory decisions about mifepristone. At a Senate budget hearing in May, Kennedy told lawmakers that “the policy changes will ultimately go through the White House, through President [Donald] Trump.” He said the think tank report “indicates that, at very least, the [drug] label should be changed.”

“Cherry-Picking” Evidence

Some scientists are concerned about Kennedy’s role in the review. When talking about autism and vaccines, Kennedy has often bolstered his arguments with “questionable sources that merely look real,” says Timothy Caulfield, research director at the Health Law Institute of the University of Alberta, who studies health misinformation. “He seems to do this mostly with wedge issues—vaccines, abortion, etcetera —that play to a political agenda.”

Kennedy has succeeded in raising doubts about the safety of proven interventions, including Tylenol, Caulfield says. “Doubt mongering is a very effective strategy, especially in the health space,” he says. “Once that doubt is present, it can have a large impact on the public’s health beliefs and behaviors.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, a leading antiabortion group, said in a statement on the group’s website that the FDA review “represents an historic opportunity” to reduce the use of the abortion pill “if handled thoroughly.” The group wants the FDA to conduct an “original investigation” rather than review published studies. It claims that there’s not enough evidence to show that the availability of Mifepristone by mail is safe and that previous studies on the drug were written by people who favor wide distribution of the pill.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit global human rights organization that advocates for abortion access, filed a lawsuit in September against the HHS and the FDA in an attempt to force the Trump administration to reveal the process and sources it will use to review mifepristone’s safety. “The public deserves to know what and who is behind decisions being made about their health and access to vital medications,” says Liz Wagner, a senior federal policy counsel at the organization.

Misleading Statistics

Basing the FDA review on the conservative think tank’s report on mifepristone would produce misleading results, Upadhyay says. A wealth of research has found mifepristone to be safe—so safe that the FDA under the Biden administration began allowing it to be dispensed via telehealth instead of requiring that pregnant people see doctors in person. Prescribers and pharmacies must meet special certification requirements to dispense the drug, and pregnant people are required to sign a patient agreement, Upadhyay says.

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Cars

At a campaign rally in September 2024, Trump extended his grocery pledge to cars, telling supporters: “We’re going to get the prices down… groceries, cars, everything”.

However, the average price of a new car topped $50,000 (£38,411) for the first time ever in September, up from $48,283 (£37,092) in January, according to Kelley Blue Book, a US vehicle valuation research company.

Car prices typically rise 2-3% a year, explained Erin Keating from Cox Automotive.

“Tariffs, which have been the biggest factor in the automotive industry over the last 12 months, have been nothing but inflationary.”

She explained new car prices are increasing by about 4% a year, with tariffs contributing at least one percentage point.

“We really think in 2026 that’s going to go higher because most of the manufacturers are holding their fire on raising prices directly due to tariffs, but they’re going to have to come in at some point.”

Keating did point to tax breaks for people in Trump’s spending bill, which she believes may incentivise people to buy new cars.

When asked about the rising price of cars, a White House official told BBC Verify the administration had taken historic regulatory actions to “reverse the left’s radical energy scam and save billions annually”.

Gasoline

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The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation. In my 20s, there seemed to be an endless supply of commentary about how we millennials were lazy and entitled, just like the members of Generation X before us were slackers. Members of Gen Z get the bad rap of being “unemployable,” because apparently, they do not prize achievement for its own sake, or they’d rather be influencers because the internet has broken their brains.

Gen Z-ers don’t even deserve this perfunctory slander, because the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal over the past decade.

Certainly, the job market seems grim in this moment. Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, described it as “an awful traffic jam.” “If you’re just out of college, you’re trying to merge into a freeway and nobody is letting you in,” he explained. Employers at companies like Airbnb and Intuit almost sound excited talking to The Wall Street Journal about staying lean and culling the number of employees they have, as long as it creates short-term profits.

But the whole experience of work for young people has been tortured for far longer than the economy has been stalled. Earlier this year, my colleague David Brooks spoke to a college senior who called young Americans “the most rejected generation,” describing the hypercompetition that has bled into all aspects of life, even for the most privileged college-educated strivers.

Because most job applications are submitted online, the bar to applying is so much lower than it was in the analog world decades ago, and so for any open role, applicants are competing with hundreds of people. The sense of scarcity and lack starts earlier, because so many selective colleges boast about their record-low admissions rates.

But now artificial intelligence is performing the first few rounds of culling, including early screening, which is further dehumanizing and gamifying the application process. Richard Yoon, who is an economics major at Columbia, told me that when his peers have multiple interviews for jobs in finance, he asks if they heard back from any of them. They tell him: “You don’t understand. Like 19 of those 20 interviews were with bots.”

It’s customary for job seekers to review their résumés for keywords they think A.I. likes, Yoon told me, so that they might have a chance of getting through the digitized gantlet and one day making human contact that could possibly lead to a job offer. Or at the very least, a real-life networking connection. Yoon called the process “dystopian.”

But once you actually have a job, the real dystopia begins. Young people feel as if jobs offer far less mentorship and more micromanaging. Stevie Stevens, who is 27 and lives in Columbus, Ohio, told me that she left a full-time job in July at an exhibition design and production firm because she felt hyperscrutinized and undersupported. “Managers expect you to do six jobs in a 40-hour workweek. My company had mediocre benefits and offered little to no professional growth or training,” she told me.

Stevens also said that what she calls “surveillance state technologies” — apps that synthesized her personal data to determine her level of effort — are part of that feeling of micromanagement. Though she doesn’t have benefits through work now and deals with more uncertainty as a freelancer, she is happier because she has autonomy and control over her time and her efforts.

For the past several years, employers have used “bossware” to track worker productivity. A Times investigation in 2022 found that across professional fields and pay grades, employers were tracking keyboard use, movements, and phone calls, and docking employees for time that they perceived to be “idle.”

That kind of tracking doesn’t account for things like conversations with peers, thinking — you know, with your brain — or, if you work in a warehouse, taking a rest so your body doesn’t fall apart. At least older workers knew a time before this tracking was ubiquitous, and at this point might be senior enough to have the leverage to push back against the most extreme types of surveillance.

It’s no wonder, then, that a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July found that young worker despair has been rising in the United States for about a decade. Its co-authors, David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a yearly federal health survey of 400,000 Americans, focusing on how many bad mental health days — ones described as containing “stress, depression and problems with emotions” — a worker had in the past month. They then created a mental despair measurement using the number of bad mental health days, comparing mental despair across demographic, employment, and educational characteristics.

Blanchflower and Bryson found that for workers under 25, mental health is now so poor that they are generally as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts, which is new in the past several years. The rise in despair is particularly pronounced among women and the less educated. Last year, job satisfaction for people under 25 was about 15 points lower than it was for people over 55. This was true in the same year that satisfaction rose for every other age group, according to a survey from the Conference Board. The unhappiness of young workers seemed so pronounced in the past year, whether because of the rapid rise of A.I., the uncertainty of the market, or some other rancid combination of post-Covid malaise and general disaffection.

I called Bryson to find out more about why young workers are so unhappy. He has two hypotheses. One is that the perception of work satisfaction has changed: Young people expect to be happier than previous generations were, in part because they’re using social media to compare themselves to some of their peers, only to then find themselves disappointed by the tedium of their own 9-to-5s. But the other hypothesis is in line with what I’m hearing from young people: The workplace is markedly worse.

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Eleanor Davis

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You generally have reasons, good or bad, for your beliefs. You can reflect on those reasons: “Why do I think there’s a serial killer in the attic? It’s because the floor creaked.” And, paragon of rationality that you are, you can also adjust your beliefs when additional evidence demands it: “Having scoured the attic, baseball bat in hand, I must conclude that it’s just an old, creaky house.”

This cognitive skill is known as belief revision. It’s long been considered a hallmark of human rationality that distinguishes us from other animals. It relies on a reflective awareness of our own thought processes—thinking about thinking, or metacognition—that other species don’t obviously possess. But a new study, published today in the journal Science, shows that our closest evolutionary relatives also reason in surprisingly sophisticated ways.

In a series of experiments, researchers tested chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda to see how the animals juggled different sources of evidence. Each experiment revolved around food hidden in one of several boxes: The chimps would pick the box they thought was most promising based on an initial clue. Then they’d get another clue that sometimes conflicted with the first. Given the chance to update their decision, they almost always chose the box predicted by a rational-choice model and only changed their mind when the new information was stronger than what they already knew. “The chimps knocked it out of the park,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s obvious this is so easy for them.”

Most impressively, the animals even accounted for clues that undermined earlier evidence. If they heard something bouncing around inside box 1, they would assume, at first, that it was an apple—but then the experimenter would pull out a stone. Realizing they had been misled, the chimps would immediately opt for box 2, even though it appeared uninspiring a moment before. This was “the cherry on top,” says study co-author Jan Engelmann, a comparative psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “None of us thought they could do it because it’s just so complex.”

Of course, lots of animals obey reason without reflecting on it; an amoeba is acting rationally, in some sense, when it follows chemical signals toward food. This “unreflective responsiveness to evidence,” as it’s been called, is a mere shadow of human rationality. But Engelmann argues that chimpanzees’ ability to scrutinize evidence and gauge the certainty of their own knowledge comes much closer to the real thing. “It’s very hard to explain the chimps’ behavior without appealing to some notion of reflection,” he says.

Christopher Krupenye, who studies animal cognition at Johns Hopkins University and was not involved in the study, agrees. He’s agnostic about the content of that reflection—without language, it’s unclear how animals could mentally represent the propositions that make up human beliefs (“I hear rattling, so there’s probably an apple in the box”). It’s possible the chimps think primarily in pictures. Regardless, Krupenye says, “all of this suggests they’re not just driven by simple, emotional responses. They have rather complex awareness.”

Clearly, however, there’s still more to human rationality. According to study co-author Hanna Schleihauf, a comparative psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the crucial ingredient may be social interaction—we’re able to sharpen our beliefs through discussion. “This is really what makes humans so special,” she says. “We give and ask for reasons.” Indeed, some cognitive scientists think our reasoning skills evolved so that we could argue with one another.

This study reminds us that those skills evolved from somewhere—namely, from cognitive abilities that were already present in the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin predicted that our extraordinary mental powers would turn out to be extensions of capacities found throughout the animal kingdom. If chimpanzees are truly capable of reflection, the gap between us and our primate cousins narrows a bit further. As Hare puts it, there’s no need to search the stars for intelligence akin to our own. “We already know we’re not alone,” he says. “There are beings here, considering the world in a way that we think of as being rational.”

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