James' World 2

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But he was surprised to discover who one of the V.I.P.s dining in his midst was: his country’s ousted dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

For more than five decades, the Assad family name has been synonymous with brutal autocracy. Now, the Assads are fugitives living in Moscow.

Both the deposed president and his brother Maher, one of the regime’s most powerful military leaders, have betrayed little about how they spend their days in the country that propped them up when they were in power and took them in when they fell.

But from witnesses and family friends, and digital clues left on hard-to-track social media accounts, reporters for The New York Times have uncovered glimpses into a life of luxury and impunity.

Details of the Assad family’s lives emerged from a Times investigation into the whereabouts of 55 of the regime’s highest-ranking officials. The people who spoke to The Times — including family friends, relatives, and former officials — insisted on anonymity out of concern for their safety.

The Assads’ luxurious exile began from the first moments they fled to Moscow via private jets and car convoys, according to a relative, two family friends, and two ex-military officers from the Fourth Division, which Maher al-Assad led. All of them have spoken to, stayed with, or met members of the Assad family.

Under the close guard of Russian security services, they first stayed in opulent apartments run by the Four Seasons, which can cost up to $13,000 per week.

From there, the deposed president and his family moved to a two-story penthouse in Federation Tower, the same skyscraper where the restaurant Sixty is located. Later, Mr. al-Assad was moved to a villa in the secluded suburb of Rublyovka, west of Moscow, according to a former Syrian official in touch with the family, another acquaintance, and a regional diplomat told by Russian officials.

The enclave is popular with the Russian elite and boasts a “luxury village” shopping complex. The Russian security services continue to guard Mr. al-Assad and oversee his movements, the former officials and regional diplomat said, and have ordered the family not to make public statements.

In February, the Russian authorities moved quickly, three other former officials said, when Mr. al-Assad’s son Hafez, 24, wrote about the family’s escape on social media and shared a video of himself strolling through Moscow. He has not posted online since.

Two acquaintances said they had seen Maher al-Assad, a baseball cap low over his eyes, several times at a gleaming skyscraper in Moscow’s business district where they believed he was living. One family friend said he lived in the Capital Towers buildings in that district.

In June, he was seen in a video on social media at the trendy Myata Platinum hookah bar in Afimall, a nearby shopping and entertainment complex.

While in power, Maher and the forces he led were accused of shooting unarmed protesters, enforcing “surrender or starve” sieges and running a regional drug trafficking operation estimated to have made them billions of dollars.

Judging by the activities of the Assad daughters, the family has retained significant wealth.

In November, the ousted dictator invited friends and Russian officials to a villa in the suburbs for an opulent party celebrating his daughter Zein’s 22nd birthday, according to a relative, a former regime officer, and a family friend whose children or close friends attended the party.

Ms. al-Assad’s cousin and Maher’s daughter, Sham al-Assad, also appeared to celebrate her 22nd birthday with an extravaganza, held over two nights in mid-September at a gold-tiled French restaurant called Bagatelle in Dubai and then on a private yacht.

The social media accounts of both women are set to private, with user names that don’t obviously signal their identities. But The Times found and confirmed the authenticity of the accounts through tips from relatives and family friends, then examined images and videos from public-facing Instagram posts by their friends.

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Aaron Byrd

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Amy Bies was recovering in the hospital from injuries inflicted during a car accident in May 2007 when routine laboratory tests showed that her blood glucose and cholesterol were both dangerously high. Doctors ultimately sent her home with prescriptions for two standard drugs, metformin for what turned out to be type 2 diabetes and a statin to control her cholesterol levels and the heart disease risk they posed.

The combo, however, didn’t prevent a heart attack in 2013. And by 2019, she was on 12 different prescriptions to manage her continued high cholesterol and her diabetes and to reduce her heart risk. The resulting cocktail left her feeling so terrible that she considered going on medical leave from work. “I couldn’t even get through my day. I was so nauseated,” she said. “I would come out to my car in my lunch hour and pray that I could just not do this anymore.”

Medical researchers now think Bies’s conditions were not unfortunate co-occurrences. Rather, they stem from the same biological mechanisms. The medical problem frequently begins in fat cells and ends in a dangerous cycle that damages seemingly unrelated organs and body systems: the heart and blood vessels, the kidneys, and insulin regulation, and the pancreas. Harm to one organ creates ailments that assault the other two, prompting further illnesses that circle back to damage the original body part.

Diseases of these three organs and systems are “tremendously interrelated,” says Chiadi Ndumele, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University. The ties are so strong that in 2023 the American Heart Association grouped the conditions under one name: cardio-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM), with “metabolic syndrome” referring to diabetes and obesity.

The good news, says Ndumele, who led the heart association group that developed the CKM framework, is that CKM can be treated with new drugs. The wildly popular GLP-1 receptor agonists, such as Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro, target common pathology underlying CKM. “The thing that has really moved the needle the most has been the advances in treatment,” says Sadiya Khan, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University. Although most of these drugs come only in injectable forms that can cost several hundred dollars a week, pill versions of some medications are up for approval, and people on Medicare could pay just $50 a month for them under a new White House pricing proposal. The appearance of these drugs on the scene is fortunate because researchers estimate that 90 percent of Americans have at least one risk factor for the syndrome.

More than a century before Bies entered the hospital, doctors had noticed that many of the conditions CKM syndrome comprises often occur together. They referred to the ensemble by terms such as “syndrome X.” People with diabetes, for instance, are two to four times more likely to develop heart disease than those without diabetes. Heart disease causes 40 to 50 percent of all deaths in people with advanced chronic kidney disease. And diabetes is one of the strongest risk factors for developing kidney conditions.At present, around 59 million adults worldwide have diabetes, about 64 million are diagnosed with heart failure, and approximately 700 million live with chronic kidney disease.

The first inkling of a connection among these disparate conditions came as far back as 1923, when several lines of research started to spot links among high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high levels of uric acid—a sign of kidney disease and gout.

Then, several decades ago, researchers identified the first step in these tangled disease pathways: dysfunction in fat cells. Until the 1940s, scientists thought fat cells were simply a stash for excess energy. The 1994 discovery of leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells, showed researchers a profound way that fat could communicate with and affect different body parts.

Since then, researchers have learned that certain kinds of fat cells release a medley of inflammatory and oxidative compounds that can damage the heart, kidneys, muscles, and other organs. The inflammation they cause impairs cells’ ability to respond to the pancreatic hormone insulin, which helps cells absorb sugars to fuel their activities. In addition to depriving cells of their primary energy source, insulin resistance causes glucose to build up in the blood—the telltale symptom of diabetes—further harming blood vessels and the organs they support. The compounds also reduce the ability of kidneys to filter toxins from the blood.

Insulin resistance and persistently high levels of glucose trigger a further cascade of events. Too much glucose harms mitochondria—tiny energy producers within cells—and nudges them to make unstable molecules known as reactive oxygen species that disrupt the functions of different enzymes and proteins. This process wrecks kidney and heart tissue, causing the heart to enlarge and blood vessels to become stiffer, impeding circulation and setting the stage for clots. Diabetes reduces levels of stem cells that help to fix this damage. High glucose levels also prod the kidneys to release more of the hormone renin, which sets off a hormonal cascade critical to controlling blood pressure and maintaining healthy electrolyte levels.

At the same time, cells that are resistant to insulin shift to digesting stored fats. This metabolic move releases other chemicals that cause lipid molecules such as cholesterol to clog blood vessels. The constriction leads to spikes in blood pressure and heightens a diabetic person’s risk of heart disease.

The circular connections wind even tighter. Just as diabetes can lead to heart and kidney conditions, illnesses of those organs can increase a person’s risk of developing diabetes. Disruption of the kidneys’ renin-angiotensin system—named for the hormones involved, which regulate blood pressure—also interferes with insulin signaling. Adrenomedullin, a hormone that increases during obesity, can also block insulin signaling in the cells that line blood vessels and the heart in humans and mice. Early signs of heart disease, such as constricted blood vessel,s can exhaust kidney cells, which rely on a strong circulatory system to filter waste effectively.

The year before Bies’s car accident, when she was in her early 30s, her primary care doctor diagnosed her with prediabetes—part of metabolic syndrome—and recommended changes such as a healthier diet and more exercise. But at the time, the physician didn’t mention that this illness also increased her risk of heart disease.

Not seeing these connections creates dangers for patients like Bies. “What we’ve done to date is really look individually across one or two organs to see abnormalities,” says nephrologist Nisha Bansal of the University of Washington. And those narrow views have led doctors to treat the different elements of CKM as separate, isolated problems.

For instance, doctors have often used clinical algorithms to figure out a patient’s risk of heart failure. But in a 2022 study, Bansal and her colleagues found that one common version of this tool does not work as well in people with kidney disease. As a result, those who had kidney disease—who are twice as likely to develop heart disease as are people with healthy kidneys—were less likely to be diagnosed and treated in a timely manner than those without kidney ailments.

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Jennifer N. R. Smith

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Key Points

• Today’s teens are drinking and smoking less, but many are spending more time online, where risky behaviors can be harder for parents to spot.
• Experts say this shift from in-person rebellion to digital risk-taking may leave kids more isolated and struggling with anxiety and loneliness.
• Parents can help by staying connected to their child’s online world, setting clear screen limits, and encouraging face-to-face friendships and activities.

If you ever snuck home smelling like cheap wine and cigarettes in an act of teenage rebellion, well, you might be showing your age. Research suggests substance abuse isn’t the vice it once was for teenagers.

According to new data from consumer research platform Attest, 20% of 15- to 16-year-olds have tried alcohol, down from 71% of 10th graders in 2000. The same survey, based on results from 1,000 U.S. parents, revealed that cigarette and drug use is also lower, with 14% and 6% of teens trying them, respectively. Meanwhile, 44% of 10th graders in 2000 had tried marijuana, according to the report.1

While these figures are parent-led (and therefore potentially conservative), it’s reflective of an overall decrease in trends of substance use, says Joel Stoddard, MD, child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Previous research confirms substance use among adolescents is on the decline.2

But experts warn this doesn’t necessarily mean teenagers are making healthier choices. In fact, our youngest teens, Generation Alpha—those born between 2010 and 2024—as well as older ones, could be at risk of something else insidious.

“The rebellion has moved online, and it’s much harder for adults to see,” explains Saba Harouni Lurie, LMFT, ATR-BC, family therapist and owner and founder of Take Root Therapy. “When I was younger, rebellion was visible. Now, a teen can sit in their room looking perfectly compliant while they’re engaging in all kinds of boundary-pushing behavior on their phone.”

So, what does this mean for parents? Experts say there are a few things they need to be aware of.

A Generational Change

The new study is part of a bigger, generational picture. And it’s global.

For example, a recent study into more than 23,000 Australians by Flinders University found Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) are almost 20 times more likely to say “no” to alcohol compared to Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964).3 

While fewer teens engaging in substance use sounds like great news, Lurie says Gen Alpha may be avoiding one set of risks, while becoming vulnerable to another. 

“What concerns me as both a clinician and a parent is that while substance use has declined, so has in-person socialization,” she says. 

Teens are going out less, spending far less time with friends in person, and engaging in fewer unstructured social activities. 

“So while the reduction in risky behavior is positive, I’m not sure we can conclude that Gen Alpha is simply choosing healthier lifestyles,” says Lurie.

Mackenzie Sommerhalder, PhD, assistant professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, agrees, saying, “One might conceptualize increased use of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) as risk-taking behavior. The negative side-effects of these tools on adolescent development are well known, and yet adolescents continue to engage with the tools.”

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“What else is being covered up?” the post said. “We need transparency for the American public.”

Twelve of the other missing photos pictured the infamous massage room on the third floor of Mr. Epstein’s mansion in New York. The room, which sat down the hall from Mr. Epstein’s bedroom, was where investigators say that many of his sexual assaults occurred — some of them against teenage victims. The shelves in the room were stocked with lubricants and a silver ball and chain, among other things.

The massage room images that were removed depicted paintings and photographs of nude women, some with their faces redacted. But other images and artwork featuring nude women remained on the site. And some photos of the massage room — including the nude imagery — also remained.

The missing photos were part of a vast collection of materials that the Trump administration was compelled to release after the passage last month of a law mandating that the Justice Department disclose all files in its possession related to Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking minors.

Despite mounting expectations, the released files, which included thousands of photographs and investigative documents, were something of an anticlimax. They added little to the public’s understanding of Mr. Epstein’s conduct, and also did not provide much additional insight into his connections to wealthy and powerful businessmen and politicians who associated with him.

Mr. Trump has, uncharacteristically, said nothing about the files, which contained far more material about one of his political adversaries, former President Bill Clinton, than about him. Still, the Justice Department has said that more disclosures from its files about Mr. Epstein would be coming in the next few weeks.

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A photo taken of a credenza in Jeffrey Epstein’s home — which contained at least one image of President Trump — was among the material removed from the site. Credit…Department of Justice

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By the time Maggie May, an Arkansas resident in her 30s, was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in 2024, she had been struggling for years with atypical anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that leads to severe food restriction and profound disturbances in body image. (Her name has been changed for privacy.) She had already tried traditional interventions with a psychotherapist and a dietitian, but they had failed to improve her condition. So when May heard about a trial of a new and unconventional therapy, she jumped at the opportunity.

The treatment was unusual in that, alongside talk therapy, May underwent several sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber: a dark, soundproof room where she floated in a shallow pool of water heated to match the temperature of her skin and saturated with Epsom salts to make her more buoyant. The goal was to blunt May’s external senses, enabling her to feel from within—focusing on the steady thudding of her heart, the gentle flow of air in and out of her lungs, and other internal bodily signals.

The ability to connect with the body’s inner signals is called interoception. Some people are better at it than others, and one’s aptitude for it may change. Life events can also bolster or damage a person’s interoceptive skills. Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues think a disrupted interoception system might be one of the driving forces behind anorexia nervosa. So they decided to repurpose a decades-old therapy called flotation-REST (for “reduced environmental stimulation therapy”) and launched a trial with it in 2018. They hypothesized that in people with anorexia and some other disorders, an underreliance on internal signals may lead to an overreliance on external ones, such as how one looks in the mirror, that ultimately causes distorted body image, one of the key factors underlying these conditions. “When they’re in the float environment, they experience internal signals more strongly,” Khalsa says. “And having that experience may then confer a different understanding of the brain-body relationship that they have.”

Studies have implicated problems with this inner sense in a wide variety of conditions, including anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Some researchers and clinicians now think that problems in interoception might contribute to many mental illnesses. Alongside this research, which itself is complicated by challenges in testing design and by a less than clear understanding of interoception, other groups are also developing therapies that aim to target this inner sense and boost psychological well-being.

This work is circling in on a central message: the body and mind are inextricably intertwined. “We have always thought about [mental health conditions] as being in the brain or the mind,” says Camilla Nord, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. But clinicians have long noted that people with mental illness frequently report physical symptoms such as abnormalities in heartbeats, breathing, and appetite, she adds.

The idea that the body can influence the mind dates back centuries. In the 1800s, two psychologists on opposite ends of the globe independently proposed a then novel idea: emotions are the result of bodily reactions to a specific event. Called the James-Lange theory after its founders, American psychologist William James and Danish doctor Carl Lange, this view ran counter to the long-dominant belief that emotions were the cause, not a consequence, of corresponding physiological changes.

Although this notion has garnered critics, it inspired a slew of studies. The 1980s saw a surge of interest in the role of physiological signals in panic disorders. Researchers discovered that they could bring on panic attacks by asking people to inhale carbon dioxide–enriched air, which can increase breathing rates, or by injecting them with isoproterenol, a drug that increases heart rate.

Breathing rate can affect how someone perceives the intensity and unpleasantness of pain.

 

These findings led some psychologists to suggest that physical sensations were the primary trigger of panic attacks. In the early 1990s, Anke Ehlers, a psychologist then at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and her team examined dozens of people with panic disorders and reported that these patients were better able to perceive their heartbeats than healthy individuals—and that this greater awareness was linked to more severe symptoms. On top of that, a small, preliminary study by Ehlers of 17 patients revealed that those who were more skilled at this task were more likely to relapse and start having panic attacks again. These observations hinted at a two-way dynamic: not only could physical sensations within the body cause psychological effects, but the ability to perceive and interpret those signals—in other words, one’s interoceptive ability—could have a profound influence on mental health.

Over the years, a growing body of evidence has indicated that interoception plays an important role in shaping both emotions and psychological health. A large chunk of this work has focused on the heart. With every heartbeat, blood rushes into the arteries and triggers sensors known as baroreceptors, which shoot off messages to the brain conveying information about how strongly and rapidly the heart is beating.

In one pivotal 2014 study, Hugo Critchley, a neuropsychiatrist at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England, and his team reported that this process can affect a person’s sensitivity to fear. By monitoring volunteers’ heartbeats while they viewed fearful or neutral faces, they found that people detected fearful faces more easily and judged them as more intense when their heart was pumping out blood than when it was relaxing and refilling. But participants with higher levels of anxiety often perceived fear even when their hearts relaxed.

Researchers have also demonstrated that bodily signals such as breathing patterns and gut rhythms can influence emotional reactions. People are quicker to react to fearful faces while breathing in than while breathing out, and breathing rate can affect how someone perceives the intensity and unpleasantness of pain.In more recent work, some neuroscientists have turned their attention to the gastrointestinal system. In 2021, Nord and her colleagues discovered that people given a dose of an antinausea drug that affects gut rhythms—processes within the stomach that help digestion—were less likely to look away from pictures of feces than they normally would have been. These disgust-related visceral signals, Nord speculates, may be relevant to eating disorders. “It’s possible that some of these signals contribute to feeling aversion to signals of satiety, making satiety very uncomfortable, a feeling you don’t want to feel,” she says.

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‘The supreme court is at the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off. Photograph: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

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In 2012, political ads suggested that some of my policy proposals, if enacted, would amount to pushing Grandma off a cliff. Actually, my proposals were intended to prevent that very thing from happening.

Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23 percent. The government will need trillions of dollars to make up the shortfall. When lenders refuse to provide the money unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue. Alternatively, the government could print more money, inducing hyperinflation that devalues the national debt — along with your savings.

Typically, Democrats insist on higher taxes, and Republicans insist on lower spending. But given the magnitude of our national debt as well as the proximity of the cliff, both are necessary. DOGE took a slash-and-burn approach to budget cutting and failed spectacularly. Europe demonstrates that exorbitant taxes without spending restraint crushes economic vitality and thus speeds how fast the cliff arrives.

On the spending-cut front, only entitlement reform would make a meaningful difference, since programs such as Social Security and Medicare represent the majority of government outlays. No one countenances cutting benefits for current or near retirees. But Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retirees should be means-tested — need-based, that is to say — and the starting age for entitlement payments should be linked to American life expectancy.

And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.

Our roughly 17 percent average tariff rate helps the revenue math. Doubling it — which seemed possible shortly after “Liberation Day” — would further burden lower- and middle-income families and would have severe market consequences.

I long opposed increasing the income level on which FICA employment taxes are applied (this year, the cap is $176,100). No longer; the consequences of the cliff have changed my mind.

The largest source of additional tax revenues is also probably the most compelling for fairness and social stability. Some call it closing tax code loopholes, but the term “loopholes” grossly understates their scale. “Caverns” or “caves” would be more fitting.

Consider, for example, the cavern of the capital gains tax treatment at death for those with enormous estates. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using Elon Musk as a proxy. If he had originally purchased his Tesla stock with, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Why? Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death. The tax code provision known as step-up in basis means that when Mr. Musk’s heirs get his stock, they are treated as if they purchased it for $500 billion. So no one pays taxes on the $499 billion capital gain. Ever.

This unusual provision makes sense when you’re talking about helping families keep their family farms. But it’s used by billionaires to avoid capital gains taxes. In order to raise more revenue, this cavern should be sealed for mega-estates over $100 million.

Sealing the real estate caverns would also raise more revenue: 1031 exchanges allow a real estate developer to defer and possibly avoid paying the capital gains tax on the profitable sale of a building. Depreciating the purchase price of a building, including the debt, shields income from taxes. As with the previous example, hugely profitable real estate properties held at death are not subject to the capital gains tax. I presume these provisions were originally intended to stimulate the real estate industry. Today, they insulate multibillionaires.

There are more loopholes and caverns to be explored and sealed for the very wealthy, including state and local tax deductions, the tax rate on carried interest and charity limits on the largest estates at death. It is not that the rich, in these cases, are cheating the government — they are playing by the rules. But given the potential peril ahead, we need to follow the Willie Sutton rule: Go where the money is.

I believe in free enterprise, and I believe all Americans should be able to strive for financial success. But we have reached a point where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve the wealthiest Americans’ contributing more.

Of course a much-faster-growing economy would save us from the debt cliff. This truism has long rationalized politicians’ failure to act: Faster growth, promised with tax cuts, is always just around the corner, but that corner never arrives.

Yes, taxes can slow growth. But most of the measures I propose would have a relatively small impact on economic growth. If my party wants to be the one to give working- and middle-class Americans greater opportunity — to be the party that is trying to restore some sense of confidence in our capitalist system — this would be a start.

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Ben Hickey

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In the future, a caregiving machine might gently lift an elderly person out of bed in the morning and help them get dressed. A cleaning bot could trundle through a child’s room, picking up scattered objects, depositing toys on shelves, and tucking away dirty laundry. And in a factory, mechanical hands may assemble a next-generation smartphone from its first fragile component to the finishing touch.

These are glimpses of a possible time when humans and robots will live and work side by side. Some of these machines already exist as prototypes, and some are still theoretical. In situations where people experience friction, inconvenience or wasted effort, engineers see opportunity—for robots to perform chores, do tasks we are unable to do, or go places where we cannot.

Realizing such a future poses immense difficulties, however, not the least of which is us. Human beings are wild and unpredictable. Robots, beholden as they are to the rules of their programming, do not handle chaos well. Any robot collaborating or even coexisting with humans must be flexible. It must navigate messes and handle sudden changes in the environment. It must operate safely around excitable small children or delicate older people. Its limbs or manipulators must be sturdy, dexterous, and attached to a stable body chassis that provides a source of power. And to truly become a part of our daily lives, these mechanical helpers will need to be affordable. All told, it’s a steep challenge.

But not necessarily an insurmountable one. To see how close we’re getting to this vision, I visit the Stanford Robotics Center, which has 3,000 square feet for experiments and opened in November 2024 at Stanford University. There, I am greeted by Steve Cousins, the center’s executive director and founder of the company now known as Relay Robotics, which supplies delivery robots to hospitals and hotels. He believes robots will become indispensable to modern life—especially in areas such as caregiving, which will need more workers as the world’s population ages. “Robotics is about helping people,” he says.

In some roles, robots’ abilities can surpass those of the flesh and blood. Yet it’s also true that there are certain jobs only humans ever could or should do. The Stanford Robotics Center is one attempt to probe that boundary and find out just how many tasks of daily life—at home, at work, in medicine, and even underwater—are best offloaded to metal and plastic assistants.

One skill in particular is a significant stumbling block for robots. “The biggest challenge in robotics is contact,” says Oussama Khatib, director of the center. Lots of robots have humanlike hands—but hands are more complex than they seem. Our articulated fingers belong to an appendage built of 27 bones and more than 30 muscles that work in concert. Our sense of touch is actually a synthesis of many senses, relying on cellular receptors that detect pressure and temperature and on proprioception, or our knowledge of our body’s location and motion. Touch and dexterity enable humans to outperform current robots at many tasks: although children often master tying their shoes between the ages of five and seven years, for instance, only machines designed specifically to tie shoelaces can do so at all. Many robots rely not on hands but on “jaw grippers” that bring two opposing fingers toward each other to hold an object in place.

Impressive demonstrations of robotic hands, such as when Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot was recorded snatching a tennis ball out of the air in 2024, often rely on teleoperation, or remote control. Without a technician guiding Optimus off-screen, playing catch would be out of the question for the robot.

In the early 1960s, the first industrial robot arm—a bulky, 3,000-pound machine—was installed in a General Motors plant in Trenton, N.J. Named Unimate, it was designed for “programmed article transfer,” as its patent describes. In practice, this meant the robot used its gripper to grab and lift hot metal casts from an assembly line. Unimate’s proprioception was crude. A handler had to physically move the arm to put it through any desired motion. It could carry out basic tasks, including hitting a golf ball and pouring a beverage from an open can—which a Unimate robot demonstrated for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show in 1963.

Yet Carson gave the machine’s business end a wide berth. Maintaining a respectful distance from robot arms is, after all, a long-standing norm, part of the structured environments that have helped manufacturing robots succeed for the past 60 years. Moving them out of such orderly domains, as the roboticists at Stanford are trying to do, is hard. Khatib says he and his colleagues are “taking robots to a world that is uncertain—where you don’t know where you’re going exactly and where, when you touch things, you [might] break them.” He seeks inspiration from what he calls human “compliance,” or the way we adapt to our environment by touch and feel. Guided by these principles, he developed a pair of cooperative robot arms equipped with grippers, named Romeo and Juliet.

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Consumers increasingly expect to see value quickly. Shoppers expect same-day delivery, comparable prices, immediate responses, subscription options, and easy return processes. All of these things are considered in a brand and product’s value, says Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.

He calls it the Amazon-ification of business. 

These changes have made it more important than ever for every business to pay attention to time to value, or TTV—a measure of how long it takes for a customer to fully realize the value of your product.

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Photo illustration: Inc. Art; Getty Images; Unsplash

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The material includes thousands of documents related to past investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, as well as hundreds of images. Some depict politicians, pop stars, and royals; others show women whose faces have been redacted.

Here’s the latest.

The Justice Department released thousands of documents and hundreds of photographs related to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, responding to a deadline set by Congress and reviving a scandal that has dogged the second Trump administration.

The significance of the disclosure was unknown, given the volume of the records and how much Epstein material has been previously disclosed. And because the Justice Department said that it had withheld some documents, citing ongoing investigations or national security concerns, the release is as likely to reignite the furor over the so-called Epstein files as quell it.

The Epstein files include a 1996 child porn complaint that the F.B.I. ignored.

A woman who once worked for Jeffrey Epstein filed a complaint to the F.B.I. about his interest in “child pornography” in 1996, about a decade before investigators began scrutinizing his predatory behavior.

The woman, Maria Farmer, has for years said that she had called federal investigators in the summer of 1996, but the F.B.I. had never publicly acknowledged her original report, even to Ms. Farmer. Some people following the Epstein case had accused her of inventing the story. After the release of thousands of Epstein files on Friday, The New York Times contacted Ms. Farmer about a report stamped with the date of Sept. 3, 1996. She broke down in tears.

President Trump’s name is rarely mentioned in the latest release of Epstein files.

President Trump’s name is rarely mentioned in the batch of Jeffrey Epstein files that his Justice Department released on Friday, based on a preliminary New York Times scan of thousands of documents and hundreds of photographs.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were close friends for years, The Times has reported, and Mr. Trump’s initial refusal to release federal files related to investigations into Mr. Epstein sparked speculation about whether those files featured Mr. Trump. His allies have previously confirmed that his name appears in the files about Mr. Epstein.

Bill Clinton features prominently in the newly released files.

The first tranche of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into Jeffrey Epstein appeared to focus significantly on material connected to former President Bill Clinton, at a moment when Republicans have fought to shift public attention away from Mr. Epstein’s friendship with President Trump.

The dozens of photos released on Friday include one of Mr. Clinton in a hot tub and another showing Mr. Clinton swimming in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell, who conspired with Mr. Epstein to operate his sex trafficking operation , along with a second woman. Another shows a woman seated closely with Mr. Clinton on what appears to be an airplane. There is also what appears to be a candid shot of Mr. Clinton speaking with Mr. Epstein and pictures of him with the musician Mick Jagger.

One of the redacted files, containing 119 pages and entitled “Grand Jury NY,” is entirely blacked out. The Justice Department went into federal court twice in Manhattan seeking the release of grand jury materials arising from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Even though a judge agreed to the department’s second request, it appears as if the grand jury materials remain shielded from the public.

Almost two hours after the Justice Department made public thousands of documents from its Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump has not yet commented on their release. The case has long haunted him politically.

The files contain a set of phone message notes written years ago for Jeffrey Epstein. One message, dated Nov. 8, 2004, from a caller whose name was redacted, said: “I have a Female for him.” The following January, he got another message with identical wording: “I have a female for him.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called for more information on the redactions in the files released by the Justice Department today.

“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” he said in a statement. “For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”

The law that required the release of the files allowed the Justice Department to redact some information. The department is required to file a report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in 15 days that details the legal basis for the redactions that it made.

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Jeffrey Epstein in a photograph included in Friday’s release.Credit…Department of Justice

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