There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he said, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump for insight into why his administration made a choice or to explain a particular decision, and he’ll be at a loss for words. Ask him to comment on a scandal? He’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week, when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this on its own means the president isn’t working or paying attention to the duties of his office. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is, by most accounts, isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. He is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.
Traditionally, presidents have had a mostly free hand in the conduct of American foreign policy. But here as well Trump has handed the power of the presidency over to a set of figures — inside and outside of government — who are not so much acting on his behalf as they are acting in his stead. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, are orchestrating a war — and possibly regime change — in Venezuela, while Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, are busy pushing a so-called peace deal that would give large parts of Ukraine to Russia, rewarding Vladimir Putin for his decision to wage a war of conquest.
In his foreword to Theodore Sorensen’s 1963 book, “Decision-Making in the White House,” President John F. Kennedy wrote that the “heart of the presidency is therefore informed, prudent and resolute choice” and that the “secret of the presidential enterprise is to be found in an examination of the way presidential choices are made.”
What do we make of a president who chooses not to make these choices?
For Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the answer is to deliver that president an expansive grant of executive power. In a series of decisions on the court’s so-called shadow docket, Roberts and his allies have backed Trump’s repeated claims to virtually uncontested authority over the entire executive branch. The court has allowed the president to fire officials otherwise shielded by for-cause protections created by Congress, and has signaled quite clearly that it intends to overturn a New Deal-era decision that affirmed the power of Congress to create agencies that are independent of the president’s direct control.
Hmmmm… Give yourself a gold star if you can play the uTube video as described above the link below the picture!
Click the link below the picture
.
Carin Leong: What if people with type 1 diabetes could start making their own insulin?
Scientists have just taken a big step in that direction. They treated a patient with 80 million lab-made insulin-producing cells that are designed to hide from the immune system. This is the first time a cell transplant like this hasn’t triggered a rejection in a human, and researchers say that this opens exciting possibilities for treating diabetes and other autoimmune diseases in the future.
About two million people in the U.S. currently live with type 1 diabetes. It’s an autoimmune disease where the body mistakenly wipes out the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. Without this hormone, people have to rely on injections and pumps every single day to keep their blood sugar in check and avoid serious complications.
Scientists have tried replacing these insulin-producing cells before, but the body kept attacking them. And patients would need to take strong immune-suppressing drugs for life, which come with their own laundry list of side effects.
This time, researchers took donor cells and used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to deactivate two genes that normally flag the immune system to attack foreign cells while also boosting expression of a gene that discourages attacks by the body’s immune cells.
So 12 weeks after injecting these cells into the patient, they were still alive and making insulin in his body. Granted, it wasn’t a ton—about 7 percent of what he’d need to ditch insulin injections entirely. But experts say it’s a major milestone for his body to be producing even a little bit of insulin on its own and, most importantly, without the need for immunosuppressants. They’ll continue monitoring him over the next year and test higher doses of these edited cells. And if all goes well, this could potentially lead us toward a cure for type 1 diabetes.
.
What if people with type 1 diabetes could start making their own insulin?
.
.
Click the link belowfor article (click the share button on uTube video, then click the … on the share screen to Play it):
Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix. But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.
Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.
First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.
Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:
[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.
Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.
As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”
But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.
Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:
In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition thatfaced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.
Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project,which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”
As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.
Every few years I am reminded of one of my cardinal rules of journalism: Whenever you see elephants flying, don’t laugh, take notes. Because if you see elephants flying, something very different is going on that you don’t understand but you and your readers need to.
I bring that up today in response to the Trump administration’s 33-page National Security Strategy, released last week. It has been widely noted that at a time when our geopolitical rivalry with Russia and China is more heated than at any other time since the Cold War — and Moscow and Beijing are more and more closely aligned against America — the Trump 2025 national security doctrine barely mentions these two geopolitical challengers.
While the report surveys U.S. interests across the globe, what intrigues me most about it is how it talks about our European allies and the European Union. It cites activities by our sister European democracies that “undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
“Should present trends continue,” it goes on, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Indeed, the strategy paper warns, unless our European allies elect more “patriotic” nationalist parties, committed to stemming immigration, Europe will face “civilizational erasure.” Unstated but implied is that we will judge you not by the quality of your democracy but by the stringency by which you stem the migration flow from Muslim countries to Europe’s south.
That is a flying elephant no one should ignore. It is language unlike any previous U.S. national security survey, and to my mind it reveals a deep truth about this second Trump administration: how much it came to Washington to fight America’s third civil war, not to fight the West’s new cold war.
Yes, in my view, we are in a new civil war over a place called home.
First, I need to make a quick detour to “home.” These days there is a tendency to reduce every crisis to the dry metrics of economics, to the chessboard machinations of political or military campaigns, or to ideological manifestoes. All, of course, have their relevance, but the longer I have worked as a journalist, the more I have found that the better starting place for unlocking a story is with the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. They are often much better at revealing the primal energies, anxieties and aspirations that animate our national politics — and global geopolitics — because they uncover and illuminate not just what people say they want, but also what they fear and what they privately pray for, and why.
I was not here for the Civil War of the 1860s, and I was still a boy during our second great civil struggle, the 1960s civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But I am definitely on duty for America’s third civil war. This one, like the first two, is over the questions “Whose country is this anyway?” and “Who gets to feel at home in our national house?” This civil
war has been less violent than the first two — but it is early.
Humans have an enduring, structural need for home, not only as a physical shelter, but as a psychological anchor and moral compass, too. That is why Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” (my favorite movie) got it exactly right: “There’s no place like home.” And when people lose that sense of home — whether by war, rapid economic change, cultural change, demographic change, climate change or technological change — they tend to lose their center of gravity. They may feel as though they are being hurtled around in a tornado, grabbing desperately for anything stable enough to hold onto — and that can include any leader who seems strong enough to reattach them to that place called home, however fraudulent that leader is or unrealistic the prospect.
With that as background, I cannot remember another time in the last 40 years when I have traveled around America, and the world, and found more people asking the same question: “Whose country is this anyway?” Or as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nationalist Israeli minister, put it, in Hebrew, in his political banner ads during Israel’s 2022 election: “Who is the landlord here?”
And that is not an accident. Today, more people are living outside their country of birth than at any point in recorded history. There are approximately 304 million global migrants — some seeking work, some seeking education, some seeking safety from internal conflicts, some fleeing droughts and floods and deforestation. In our own hemisphere, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office reports that migrant encounters at our southern border hit historical highs in 2023, while estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that the total unauthorized population in America grew to 14 million in the same year, breaking a decade-long period of relative stability.
But this is not just about immigrants. America’s third civil war is being fought on multiple fronts. On one front it is white, predominantly Christian Americans resisting the emergence of the minority-dominated America that is now baked into our future sometime in the 2040s, driven by lower birthrates among white Americans and growth in Hispanic, Asian and multiracial American populations.
On another front are Black Americans still struggling against those who would raise new walls to keep them from a place called home. Then there are Americans of every background trying to steady themselves amid cultural currents that seem to shift by the week: new expectations about issues like identity, bathrooms and even a typeface, as well as how we acknowledge one another in the public square.On yet another front, the gale-force winds of technological change, propelled now by artificial intelligence, are sweeping through workplaces faster than people can plant their feet. And on a fifth front, young Americans of every race, creed and color are straining to afford even a modest home — the physical and psychological harbor that has long anchored the American dream.
My sense is that we now have millions of Americans waking up each morning unsure of the social script, the economic ladder or the cultural norms that are OK to practice in their home. They are psychologically homeless.
When Donald Trump made building a wall along the Mexican border the central motif of his first campaign, he instinctively chose a word that did double duty for millions of Americans. “Wall” meant a physical barrier against uncontrolled immigration that was accelerating our transition to a minority-majority-led America. But it also meant a wall against the pace and scope of change: the cultural, digital and generational whirlwinds reshaping daily life.
That, to me, is the deep backdrop to Trump’s National Security Strategy. He is not interested in refighting the Cold War to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy. He is, in my view, interested in fighting the civilizational war over what is the American “home” and what is the European “home,” with an emphasis on race and Christian-Judeo faith — and who is an ally in that war and who is not.
At a controversial meeting of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel recently, members voted to remove a long-standing recommendation that all babies get a first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. Public health experts derided the move, which goes against evidence that the shot is safe and effective. Members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and agency officials cited a curious rationale for the change: a need to align the U.S.’s vaccine schedule with Denmark’s.
Shortly after the meeting, President Donald Trump ordered the CDC to fast-track a review of the U.S. vaccination schedule to align with that of other “peer, developed countries,” including Denmark. But there’s something rotten in this comparison.
The U.S. and Denmark have starkly different populations, disease rates, and health care systems. It makes sense that they have different vaccination policies.
“The United States is not Denmark,” says Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes a popular health newsletter and who previously advised the CDC on its COVID policy. “The health care and safety net system of the United States is drastically different than other high-income countries around the world. We should expect country-level policy decisions to vary.”
The U.S. has more than 340 million people; Denmark’s population is a little more than six million. Denmark is also much more demographically and economically homogenous than the U.S. And the countries have different burdens of disease.
Take hepatitis B—there were 99 new cases of chronic hepatitis B in Denmark in 2023, compared with more than 17,000 new cases in the U.S. Denmark also screens practically every single pregnant person for the disease, and most of those who test positive receive treatment. In the U.S., about 85 percent of pregnant people are screened, and many never get treatment. Hepatitis B is a liver infection, and if it is left untreated and becomes chronic, it can lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer and death.
The U.S. and Danish health care systems are incomparable. With the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. system operates largely on privately funded insurance. Denmark has a universal health system that is paid for by the government, and all residents have access to free care. The CDC’s advisory panel made no mention of this difference during its recent meeting, and the Trump administration has no appetite for a universal health care system in the U.S.
“Managing and following a small population with universal health care is much different than an enormous population with multiple delivery systems and multiple payers,” says Kathryn Edwards, a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It’s “like comparing apples and oranges.”
Jetelina concurs. In Denmark, people are less likely to fall through the cracks of their health system, she says, whereas the U.S. has a “very different health care capacity, and we don’t have a safety net.”
A consequence of universal health care systems is that countries like Denmark are also more likely than the U.S. to take cost-effectiveness into consideration when deciding which vaccines to recommend and to whom. Even though providing vaccines is generally far cheaper than treating a disease, it still costs money. For example, in the U.K., which also has state-funded universal health care, flu vaccines aren’t routinely recommended for children because the shots are more cost-effective in older adults. Similar logic may explain why the hepatitis B vaccine isn’t universally given at birth in Denmark.
A lot of the discussion at the December 5 ACIP meeting focused on hypothetical risks from the hepatitis B vaccine in babies born to people who test negative for the disease; there was very little emphasis on the societal benefits of widespread vaccination.
When it comes to targeting vaccination only to individuals born to parents who are known to have hepatitis B, Jetelina says, “we’ve tested this before.” Prior to 1991, the U.S. attempted to vaccinate only people at high risk for hepatitis B. “Even when mothers screened negative for hep B, and the birth dose was withheld, thousands of children did end up infected via another member of the household,” she says. In contrast, after ACIP recommended a universal birth dose in 1991, cases declined dramatically: in children, teens, and young adults up to age 19, cases of acute hepatitis dropped by 99 percent from 1990 to 2019.
The push to alter the U.S. hepatitis B vaccine recommendation fits into a broader effort by the Trump administration and many Republican lawmakers to prioritize individual freedoms over collective action. Yet strong public health systems—and vaccination in particular—rely on collective action to protect those who cannot protect themselves, such as immune-suppressed people, older adults, and young babies.
“I’m concerned about that,” Jetelina says. “If we land too much on individualism, diseases are going to come back.”
Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.
Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?
REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity, return to awake state autonomic functions, and dreams with associated paralysis.
The brainstem, particularly the pons and midbrain, and the hypothalamus are key areas of the brain that control REM sleep with hormone secreting “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells.
The most vivid, elaborate, and emotional dreams occur during REM sleep.
The benefits of REM sleep are uncertain, but may be related to learning and storage of memory.
REM Definition
REM sleep is often described as a “paradoxical” sleep state due to its increased activity after non-REM sleep. The three prior stages of sleep, known as non-REM or N1, N2, and N3, occur initially during the sleep cycle to progressively slow bodily functions and brain activity. However, after the occurrence of N3 sleep (the deepest stage of sleep), the brain signals for the onset of a more aroused state. As the name implies, the eyes move rapidly sideways during REM sleep. Autonomic functions such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure begin to increase closer to their values while awake. However, because this period is often associated with dreams, major limb muscle activities are temporarily paralyzed. Twitching can still be observed in smaller muscle groups.
This is a digital illustration of areas of activity during REM sleep in the human brain, highlighted in red and green.Dorling Kinderley / Getty Images
REM sleep is the longest period of the sleep cycle and lasts for 70 to 120 minutes. As the duration of sleep progresses, the sleep cycle favors increased time spent in REM sleep. The proportion time spent in this phase is determined by a person’s age. All stages of sleep are present in newborns; however, babies have a much higher percentage of non-REM slow wave sleep. The ratio of REM sleep gradually increases with age until it reaches 20-25% of the sleep cycle in adults.
REM and Your Brain
REM Sleep. Numbering the traces from top to bottom, 1 & 2 are electroencephalograms (EEG) of brain activity; 3 is an electrooculogram (EOG) of movement in the right eye; 4 an EOG of the left eye; 5 is an electrocardiogram (ECG) trace of heart activity. 6 & 7 are electromyograms (EMG) of activity in the laryngeal (6) and neck (7) muscles.James Holmes / Science Photo Library / Getty Images Plus
During REM sleep, brain wave activity measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG) also increases, as compared to the slower wave activity seen during non-REM sleep. N1 sleep shows slowing of the normal alpha wave pattern noted during the awake state. N2 sleep introduces K waves, or long, high voltage waves lasting up to 1 second, and sleep spindles, or periods of low voltage and high frequency spikes. N3 sleep is characterized by delta waves, or high voltage, slow, and irregular activity. However, EEGs obtained during REM sleep show sleep patterns with low voltage and fast waves, some alpha waves, and muscle twitch spikes associated with transmitted rapid eye movement. These readings are also more variable than those observed during non-REM sleep, with random spiking patterns at times fluctuating more than activity seen while awake.
An electroencephalogram (EEG) uses electrodes to read small electromagnetic waves from the human brain.Graphic_BKK1979 / iStock / Getty Images Plus
The major portions of the brain activated during REM sleep are the brainstem and the hypothalamus. The pons and midbrain, in particular, and the hypothalamus contain specialized cells known as “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells. To induce the transition to REM sleep, REM-on cells secrete hormones such as GABA, acetylcholine, and glutamate to instruct the onset of rapid eye movements, muscle activity suppression, and autonomic changes. REM-off cells, as their name implies, induce the offset of REM sleep by secretion of stimulatory hormones such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, and histamine.
.
REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to freeze $73 million from New York on Friday for allegedly issuing commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants “illegally,” which could result in the “total decertification” of the state’s CDL program.
Why it matters: The warning comes amid the Trump administration’s broader goal of pushing undocumented immigrants out of the American workforce and a broader push to remove non-proficient English speakers off the road.
What they’re saying: “When more than half of the licenses reviewed were issued illegally, it isn’t just a mistake—it is a dereliction of duty by state leadership,” Duffy said in a Friday news release.
“Gov. Hochul must immediately revoke these illegally issued licenses. If they refuse to follow the law, we will withhold federal highway funding.”
“This administration will never stop fighting to keep you and your family safe on our roads,” he added.
Context: A non-domiciled CDL is a U.S. license for a non-citizen, and is routinely issued to foreign drivers who can meet all of the DOT licensing requirements.
The other side: “Secretary Duffy is lying about New York State once again in a desperate attempt to distract from the failing, chaotic administration he represents,” a NY DMV spokesperson told Axios in an emailed statement.
“Here is the truth: Commercial Drivers Licenses are regulated by the Federal Government, and New York State DMV has, and will continue to, comply with federal rules.”
“Every CDL we issue is subject to verification of an applicant’s lawful status through federally-issued documents reviewed in accordance with federal regulations.”
“This is just another stunt from Secretary Duffy, and it does nothing to keep our roads safer. We will review USDOT’s letter and respond accordingly.”
Catch up quick: The Trump administration has sought to crackdown on the amount of non-citizen drivers on the road and attempted to prohibit states from issuing non-domiciled CDLs earlier this year.
A D.C. Court of Appeals judge blocked that move in November, but some states, such as Virginia and Georgia, have paused new applications as the legal challenge unfolds.
State of play: Roughly 18% of all truck drivers are immigrants, and the often-grueling industry is already short of tens of thousands of drivers.
Nonetheless, several high-profile fatal crashes involving immigrants over the years have spurred the wave of new restrictions.
By the numbers: Duffy said 53% of New York’s non-domiciled CDLs reviewed by DOT were issued “unlawfully or illegally.”
The review only sampled 200 licenses, but 107 of them violated federal law, according to DOT.
Zoom in: Duffy said NY’s DMV system automatically issues an 8-year license to drivers, regardless of if their work authorization or legal status expires before then.
He also said that the state frequently skips verifying if applicants have a visa or are in the country legally.
Zoom out: The administration also announced it was revoking roughly 9,500 licenses for failing to meet the president’s reinstated English-language proficiency requirements earlier this week.
That move essentially reversed an Obama-era order that softened the ELP requirements back in 2016.
What we’re watching: DOT will trigger the funding freeze if NY doesn’t fix the problems the department identified within 30 days.
.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference on May 20 in Austin, Texas. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
You know how it goes: You’re trying to get some shut-eye in your bunk after a long shift of scraping samples of prebiotic material from red rocks in Utopia Planitia, and before you know it, your alarm bell rings. And then you see it woke you up a full 477 microseconds early!
Life on Mars is tough. Figuring out the exact time isn’t much easier.
Even on the larger end of the timescale, Martian chronometry is not exactly simple; the planet takes about 687 Earth days to go around the sun, making calendrical coordination with Earth pretty hairy. It also spins on its axis—completing one Mars day—in 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds (to distinguish this period from an Earth day, we call it a “sol,” referencing the Latin word for the sun). Keeping track of your schedule on Mars would be different than doing so on Earth. But still, at its core, it would just be a matter of conversion.
Building an accurate Martian clock, on the other hand, can be very tricky, depending on how accurate you want it to be. When you start to slice time into smaller and smaller bits, the problem concerns not only engineering but also fundamental physics. That’s because the flow of time on milli- and microsecond scales is affected by relativity, gravity and orbital mechanics, which can vary radically from world to world.
The good news is that a pair of physicists did all the associated mathematical heavy lifting for Mars and published their results on December 1 in the Astronomical Journal. With their help, we can fine-tune our Martian timepieces.
It was Albert Einstein who really first got this ball rolling. Among many other things that emerged from his special theory of relativity, he postulated that time does not necessarily flow the same for two independent objects. The most commonly used example of this is how a clock runs more slowly when it is moving relative to an observer. The effect is pretty small until that motion nears the speed of light, whereupon it can get very large.
But there’s another twist to relativity: besides relative motion, gravity affects time’s flow as well! The stronger the gravity, the slower a clock will tick relative to some observer far away, where the gravitational effects are weaker. Both of these phenomena can affect us on Earth: GPS satellites, for example, orbit far above Earth, where gravity is weaker, so their clocks run faster than those on the surface. But the satellites’ rapid orbital motion also slows their clocks. Combined, these effects cause their clocks to tick about 38 microseconds faster than ones on the ground. This profoundly affects their accuracy in mapping, throwing them off by about 10 kilometers per day. Think about how angry you’d be if your smartphone’s map app was off by a kilometer or so after only a half hour of use. Happily, GPS takes all this into account, so the positional accuracy it calculates is pretty high. But this situation just shows how important relativity can be
What does this have to do with the Red Planet? Well, for one thing, while Mars is a rocky world like our own, it’s much smaller, about a tenth the mass of Earth. Its surface gravity is some three times less than what we feel at home. So on Mars, I’d only weigh about 65 pounds (29 kilograms)! I bet my knees and back would feel a lot better about that.
But this also means a clock on Mars feels less gravity than one on Earth, so it will run faster. And unfortunately, plugging this into Einstein’s equations to calculate that advancement is no easy task.
First, you have to define what the average surface of Mars is. After all, if you’re on a mountain, you’re farther up from the average elevation than you’d be if you were in a valley, where you’d feel a different amount of gravitational force.
But you can’t just average between the highest peaks and lowest valleys to arrive at some clear median. Oh, no. Just as a world can have varying surface elevation, it can also have a varying subsurface composition, with some regions being denser (and thus having greater local gravity) than others. Still, factoring this in alongside things like a global rotation rate and the influence of any massive orbiting moons, it’s possible (though difficult) to determine the average surface for any given world.
We did this properly for Earth in the late 20th century—and thanks to our extensive robotic orbital reconnaissance, we’ve done it more recently for Mars, too. Once calculated, Mars’s average surface can be used to gauge gravity’s influence on clocks anywhere on the planet.
Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank.
In a recent interview, Dimon advised workers to develop skills like critical thinking, communication, and writing to unlock “plenty of jobs.”
Other CEOs, like Amazon’s Andy Jassy, agree with Dimon that curious minds get ahead.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says that it’s certain that AI “will eliminate jobs.” However, he also notes that mastering a few skills can help workers protect themselves.
Dimon, who leads the largest bank in the U.S. with $3.9 trillion in assets, told Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures recently that AI taking over tasks “doesn’t mean that people won’t have other jobs.”
“My advice to people would be critical thinking,” Dimon said in the interview, which aired earlier this week. “Learn EQ [emotional quotient or emotional intelligence], learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You’ll have plenty of jobs.”
Critical thinking involves the ability to analyze information and question assumptions, while a high EQ allows workers to handle conflict and collaboration well. Communication and writing skills mean explaining ideas clearly.
Dimon says these skills matter in every field, not just banking. He previously highlighted the importance of soft skills in CEOs, stating last year that good leaders get out from behind their desks to meet and communicate with clients and competitors. They are curious, ask a “million questions” and learn from every interaction, he said.
Other CEOs agree with Dimon that curious minds get ahead. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a video published by Amazon last year that the difference between people with successful careers and those who stay “stagnant” is a hunger for learning. “You have to be ravenous and hungry to find ways to learn,” Jassy said.
Research has shown that using AI can lead to a drop in critical thinking skills. A study published earlier this year from MIT suggests that the use of chatbots like ChatGPT could weaken the neural connections that help users process information and think critically.
Brandon Daniels, the CEO of Exiger, an AI-powered supply chain risk management company, told Entrepreneur last month that if AI is used correctly, it actually demands deeper critical analysis, not less.
Daniels agreed with Dimon that workers need to develop critical thinking skills to get ahead in the age of AI and argued that to get the most out of AI, users need to fact-check it. Daniels said that the best results arrive when people combine their own judgment with AI, rather than letting the technology do all the work.
“We need more significant critical reasoning skills,” Daniels said. “The AI, in order to be effective, has to understand the nuances of your question, and you have to understand the limitations of the response.”
.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concluded a year ago in Vancouver, but the pop superstar isn’t done with her record-breaking live show just yet. On Friday, she dropped the concert film “The Eras Tour: The Final Show” on Disney+ along with the first two episodes of a behind-the-scenes six-part documentary series, “The End of an Era.”
While cameras captured preparation for the tour long before its first date in March 2023, the crew was supposed to join Swift on the road in Vienna in August 2024. But her three shows in that city were canceled after two men were arrested and accused of plotting a terrorist attack there, with her concerts as a target. The first episode focuses on how Swift struggled to get past that moment, and the second has a lighter feel, capturing how the production continued to evolve on the road (particularly with one amusingly overwhelmed special guest: Florence Welch).
Here are five key takeaways.
Goals for the Eras Tour were always lofty.
“The End of an Era” shows that many people in Swift’s circle — including her mother, Andrea — were skeptical about her idea to make the tour an extravaganza lasting over three hours. But Swift’s intention was always to “over-serve” her fans. Maximalism — and giving attendees an escape from the everyday — was the point.
“We got a list of about 40 songs,” the bassist Amos Heller says. “This is insanity. What are we going to cut? And I think we added three songs.”
The series shows that Swift had specific ideas for the band — there are lots of shots of her enthusiastically air drumming and vocalizing musical parts — and worked out the surprise numbers that varied from night to night with each artist. In one scene, she and Ed Sheeran rehearse their duet on “Everything Has Changed,” intently watching each other’s fingers as they play acoustic guitars.
The Eras Tour was touched by tragedy.
The first episode digs into how Swift handled two frightening events that happened in quick succession. In late July 2024, three children died after a knife attack in Southport, England, at a Swift-themed dance class. The next month, Swift’s Vienna dates were called off after the thwarted terrorist attack. As Swift planned to return to the stage in London, cameras caught her battling what she called a “physical reaction” to her nerves. “It sort of feels like we’ve done like 128 shows so far but this is the first one where I feel like, I don’t know, like I’m skating on thin ice,” she says.
In interviews, Swift likens her job to a pilot flying a plane, where she has to remain calm so nobody else has a sense of alarm. Though she breaks down following a private meeting with survivors of the Southport attack and families affected by it, the show must go on: “It’s my job to be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform.”
Swift loves secrets.
Yes, viewers do see Swift getting into what appears to be a cleaning cart in order to make her way to the stage.
She also details how her team worked surreptitiously to incorporate songs from “The Tortured Poets Department” into the set after its release in April 2024. They constructed a “top secret” facility to rehearse that portion, but couldn’t play the music on speakers as they learned the choreography because it hadn’t been released yet.
Swift’s penchant for secrecy is also invoked when she plans to bring Welch out at Wembley Stadium for a rendition of “Florida!!” Welch, who has headlined arenas for years with Florence + the Machine, is still taken aback by the scale of Eras. (She likens arriving onstage with Swift to landing on Mars.)
Swift has changed her football allegiances.
Swift is engaged to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, but fans will definitely notice that in footage of early Eras rehearsals, she’s wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt. (It’s a display of loyalty to her home state’s team before she switched allegiances.) Kelce doesn’t physically show up in the first two episodes, but his voice is heard in phone calls to Swift, marveling at her onstage skills. She tells him, “Some people get a vitamin drip. I got this conversation.”
Choreography has long been a challenge for Swift.
The second episode focuses heavily on the tour’s dancers as Swift integrates “The Tortured Poets Department” into her set. Viewers get a chance to meet Kameron Saunders, who praises Swift for giving a dancer with his body type a featured role, and Amanda Balen, who was retired and working as an associate to the choreographer Mandy Moore when Swift asked her to appear onstage.
Swift admits that choreography hasn’t always been her strongest suit. “It’s taken me a really long time to be even fine at choreography,” she says. Moore has been able to teach her the moves from a “lyrical perspective.” “I don’t do eight counts,” Swift explains, “I learn based on what syllable of the lyric I’m attaching the movement to, and I can’t really learn any other way.”
.
Taylor Swift onstage at the opening night of the Eras Tour in March 2023.Credit…Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Kenny Holston/The New York Times
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/REM_sleep_brain_activity-1a23fffa91b44145bdb9d9a6907b0c6e.jpg)
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/REM_sleep-85feb7f9a84f4169ac977bec0fbc6dac.jpg)
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/EEG-a63ebfc68f5e412db0882957eb52868d.jpg)
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/woman_dreaming-5081da90c33547c891904ed54ca9849a.jpg)
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference on May 20 in Austin, Texas. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Emmeci74/Getty Images
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
James' World 2 