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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Collage by Vogue; Photo: Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jay Bendt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Seventeen elements of the periodic table have taken on outsize importance because of their use in smartphones, electric vehicles, medical devices, and other technologies. They’re valued for their special chemistry, which gives them particular magnetic properties and other advantages. These traits come from the unique configuration of the elements’ valence electrons—the outer electrons commonly used in chemical bonds. In the rare earth elements, some of the valence electrons stay close to the atomic nucleus and tend not to interact with the atoms’ outside environment, and so they rarely form bonds. The result is that they have predictable, dependable chemical properties.

Humans have mined about 4.5 million metric tons of rare earth elements so far, and we know of only 90.9 million metric tons left on Earth. At today’s production rates, we will run out of these materials in 60 to 100 years. Efforts are underway, however, to find more deposits of the metals, which aren’t actually especially rare but are difficult to extract because they are usually found in low concentrations along with other elements.

Current mining methods are slow, energy-intensive, and highly damaging to the environment. They generate acidic and radioactive waste, and they leach toxic chemicals into the ground. “We have to figure out ways to do it better and cleaner,” says Justin Wilson, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He and his colleagues recently tested a new way to extract rare earth elements from recycled electronic waste. “I’m optimistic that we can collectively find solutions to these problems as long as the federal government remains committed to providing funding for this research,” Wilson notes.

WHAT ARE THE RARE EARTH ELEMENTS?

These chemicals are mostly the lanthanides, which occupy the second-to-last row of the periodic table, along with scandium and yttrium. Their unique properties arise largely from the configuration of the electrons in a sublevel called the 4f shell. “When I took freshman chemistry, no one ever talked about these elements; they were just the ones at the bottom of the periodic table,” Wilson says. Now their use in electronics “has put them in the spotlight.”

HOW MUCH HAS ALREADY BEEN MINED?

Most of the rare earth elements mined so far have come from China, which leads the world in the infrastructure and expertise to extract these minerals. The major U.S. source is the Mountain Pass deposit in southern California. Given the surging demand for the elements, however, countries around the world are actively looking for new stores of them.

HOW MUCH IS LEFT?

China, too, has the largest known global reserve of rare earth elements, followed by Brazil, India, and Australia. Given the race to discover new deposits, these figures could change. Many countries that had been content to let China lead in rare earth–resource mining before the recent tech boom are increasingly recognizing the importance of local options. This has been especially true in the U.S. since President Donald Trump imposed new tariffs on imports.

IT SEEMS LIKE THERE’S A LOT LEFT. SO WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

Rare earth elements are actually more abundant than precious metals such as platinum and gold. The challenge, however, is finding minable sources of them; they are often present in small amounts and difficult to separate from other elements. Extracting them is a laborious, multistep process

EXTRACTION

• Open-Pit Mining Approach: This technique involves removing ore from the ground, then transporting it to a leaching pond, where chemicals separate out the different metals. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: The toxic chemicals in the leaching pond can leak into groundwater and contaminate water supplies. The process also produces toxic waste.
• In Situ Leaching Approach: In this method, pipes pump chemicals directly into the ground to flush out rare earth elements. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: The chemicals are toxic and, as with open-pit mining, can contaminate groundwater. Both methods produce toxic dust, waste gas, and radioactive waste.

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Studio Terp

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Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., criticized the nationwide redistricting fight in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” arguing that the country is going through “a repeat of a history that led to some catastrophic consequences in our previous history.”

Clyburn was asked at the start of the interview whether he agreed with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who opposed his state’s redistricting and argued that “if you fight fire with fire long enough, all you’re going to have left is ashes.”

“I agree with him entirely,” Clyburn said.

Clyburn pointed to the emergence of Jim Crow after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period ended, saying these racist laws and Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson “made a mockery of democracy.”

“That is what we are approaching today,” he added, asking: “Are we going to continue our pursuit of a more perfect union, or are we going to make a mockery out of this democracy?”

His comments come after the Supreme Court allowed Texas to use a new congressional district map, which could help Republicans gain five House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Texas’ move set off redistricting battles across the country, with state legislators on both sides of the aisle pushing to redraw maps to favor their party.

Separately, Clyburn responded to former first lady Michelle Obama’s comments last month, saying that the U.S. is not ready for a female president.

Asked whether he agreed with Obama, Clyburn said that she “is absolutely correct,” but argued that it did not mean we should stop trying.

“If you look at the history, we demonstrated that we were not ready,” Clyburn said. “These are incredible women who have run: Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and I think that we are getting there. That’s why we can’t afford to turn the clock back.”

He added that “just because it doesn’t seem that we are ready, doesn’t mean we should stop the pursuit.”

“My dad used to tell me all the time, ‘Son, the darkest part of the night is that moment just before dawn.’ And so we may be in a dark moment as it relates to women serving as president, but we may be in that moment just before dawn, where the woman will serve,” he continued. “And in order for that to happen, they have got to run.”

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Rep. James Clyburn

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Where Things Stand

• Boat strike: Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Pentagon of concealing video of a strike that killed two survivors of an attack on a vessel in the Caribbean because it is “very, very difficult to justify.” Mr. Smith told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s suggestion that releasing the video could “compromise sources and methods” rang hollow after videos of other strikes had been made public. “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it,” Mr. Smith said. Read more ›

• Kennedy Center: Mr. Trump is scheduled to become the first president to host the Kennedy Center honors on Sunday night. Mr. Trump has largely taken over the institution, installing himself as chairman and personally approving the honorees. Read more ›

• Bessent’s holdings: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he divested from his holdings of thousands of acres of North Dakota soybean farmland to comply with his federal ethics agreement. He drew criticism from ethics watchdogs for being slow to sell the properties, which posed potential conflicts of interest. Read more ›

Trump blasts a Democrat lawmaker for not switching parties after receiving a pardon.

President Trump on Sunday upbraided Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, for not switching parties in his re-election bid after Mr. Trump pardoned him and his wife on bribery charges last week, saying Mr. Cuellar’s decision displayed a “lack of LOYALTY.”

Mr. Cuellar was indicted by a federal grand jury last year on charges that he and his wife had accepted roughly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank in exchange for promises that he would use his position in ways that would benefit Azerbaijan and the bank.

In a break from precedent, President Trump takes a starring role at the Kennedy Center Honors.

President Trump is slated to host the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night in an event that will pay tribute to the actors Sylvester Stallone and Michael Crawford, the singers Gloria Gaynor and George Strait, and the band Kiss.

While past presidents have typically watched from a designated box in the opera house of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Trump will be the first president to host the event, putting his administration’s cultural takeover of Washington and its institutions on vivid display.

Democrats call for releasing classified video of deadly boat attacks.

Top Democrats called on Sunday for the release of classified video of the U.S. military’s first operation targeting a boat in the Caribbean in early September, an attack that has faced heavy scrutiny in part for its follow-up strike that killed two survivors.

Democrats and Republicans have offered starkly different descriptions of the video, which was seen by some members of Congress but has not been made public. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said it was “simply not accurate” that the video of the Sept. 2 strike on the boat carrying 11 individuals showed the survivors trying to flip a capsized boat, rescue its cargo, and continue trafficking drugs, as Republicans in Congress have maintained.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not committed to releasing the full video of a strike that killed two survivors of an attack on a vessel in the Caribbean.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Postpartum depression descended on Kristina Leos like a heavy fog that separated her from everyone she loved. She could see her newborn baby girl, her two older kids, and her husband, but she felt like a ghost passing through their world. “I was going through the motions, but it was like I was looking down on my family,” she recalls.

Leos, 40, a nurse who lives in Midlothian, Tex., tried several different antidepressants and doses. None helped. She messaged a friend, anxious that she was unfit to be a mother. She even asked if they would take her new baby, Victoria. Although Leos never considered hurting her kids, there were times when she was driving home from work and wondered what it would be like to drive off a bridge. “I just had no fear of dying,” she says. “I didn’t care what happened.”

In December 2023, nine months after Leos gave birth to Victoria, her doctor told her they were running out of options. She was down to serious choices, including infusions of ketamine (a drug that alters the anatomy and activity of brain cells), electroconvulsive therapy, or admission to a psychiatric hospital.

Then Leos remembered seeing something on social media about a new drug specifically for postpartum depression. Unlike older antidepressants such as Prozac, this medication worked on brain chemicals that are particularly affected by pregnancy. She asked her doctor about it, and they decided to give it a try. Leos began the medication on New Year’s Day 2024. Three days later, her world shifted. “I was driving on the highway, and I could literally feel this huge cloud lifting over me,” she says. “And every day I got better and better.” The drug, called zuranolone and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2023, has since relieved depression in thousands of women.

This kind of help is needed desperately. For new mothers, the overall leading cause of death during the first year after childbirth is not bleeding or infection, according to one study encompassing 36 states. What kills more are mental health problems, which account for approximately 23 percent of maternal deaths in the country. These disorders include a lot of cases of postpartum depression. Yet fewer than half of the women who show signs of such illness are diagnosed, and even fewer receive any form of treatment.

Emerging research on the biology of postpartum depression shows that it is not like other severe mood disorders neurologically or biochemically. Rather, it is a result of dramatic changes in hormone levels that come with pregnancy and childbirth. Studies have shown that levels of progesterone and a related hormone, allopregnanolone, rise significantly during pregnancy. Then the levels drop sharply after delivery. Some women are particularly sensitive to this drop, which can disrupt the brain circuitry that regulates mood, leaving them unable to effectively deal with the stresses of motherhood. Zuranolone is designed to offset that drop-off.

Growing knowledge of the neurobiology of postpartum depression is also pointing toward methods for earlier and more reliable detection. Many experts hope that identifying biomarkers that predict which women will develop the condition, as well as the introduction of the new medication, will take the stigma away from the illness and stop both health-care workers and patients from viewing it as a sign of personal weakness or poor parenting. “It is a serious mental illness,” says Kristina Deligiannidis, a reproductive psychiatrist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health in New York State. “We just want to empower women to seek treatment.”

Challenges do remain. The price tag for the two-week course of zuranolone is nearly $16,000, raising concerns about how insurance coverage and looming Medicaid-eligibility cuts could restrict access, especially because Medicaid covers about 40 percent of births in the U.S., and researchers are still trying to figure out why the pill doesn’t work for everyone. “Not every single person that takes it is going to have a fabulous remission of their symptoms,” says Samantha Meltzer-Brody, a psychiatrist and founder of the perinatal psychiatry program at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. Still, she views the medication as a major milestone. “It can work remarkably well for more than half of people, and it’s rapid-acting,” she says. “That’s a game changer.”

For centuries, medicine has struggled to fully grasp the causes and consequences of postpartum depression. Descriptions go as far back as ancient Greece: physicians wrote about women who showed signs of a depressed mood, and even psychosis, after childbirth. During the Middle Ages, new mothers with depressive symptoms were often believed to be possessed by demons or suffering from an imbalance of bile or other body fluids. Postpartum mood disturbances have also been grouped into vague or broad diagnoses such as melancholia, mania, or neurosis, which did little to help patients.

Even in modern times, such distress is often dismissed as “baby blues”—the mood swings that affect most new moms but typically resolve within a couple of weeks. But postpartum depression is more intense and long-lasting. It can cause profound sadness and despair, disrupting the crucial bond between mother and child, and its consequences can affect multiple generations. Every yea,r approximately 500,000 women in the U.S. experience the condition. Approximately 30 percent of women with postpartum depression continue to experience symptoms one year after giving birth. For some, these problems can persist for as long as 11 years.

Yet postpartum depression is not officially recognized as a standalone illness. It did not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the so-called bible of psychiatry, until 1994. Even then it was listed as a subtype of major depression. In the most recent major edition, DSM-5, released in 2013, it is still subsumed under the “major depression” label, with the added phrase “with peripartum onset.” These additional three words reflect evidence that almost half of women develop symptoms during pregnancy, not just after.

Because postpartum depression has been lumped in with major depression, the two have often been treated the same way. Therapy has relied on traditional antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. This approach is rooted in the idea that depression stems from low levels of chemical messengers such as serotonin and norepinephrine that help to govern mood. These antidepressants aim to boost levels of these messengers in the brain.

Not everyone who takes zuranolone is going to have a fabulous remission. Still, it works well for more than half the people. That’s a game-changer.

But in recent decades, the research community has recognized that focusing only on these chemical imbalances leaves out other factors that may underlie postpartum depression—including genetics, inflammation, hormonal changes, and neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt and form new connections.

Some scientists suspected that fluctuations in hormones such as estrogen and progesterone—called neurosteroids because they act in the brain—played an important role. Yet when research groups started examining the levels of various hormones and neurosteroids, they did not see consistent differences that explained why some new mothers developed depression, and others did not.

Then, about 17 years ago, Jamie Maguire, a neuroscientist now at Tufts University, stumbled on some unusual behavior in mice that had just given birth, and her observation helped to connect the dots. At the time, Maguire was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying an ailment called catamenial epilepsy, in which brain seizures become more frequent or more severe during certain phases of the menstrual cycle. She was interested in how neurosteroids might protect against these seizures. Some neurosteroids have been shown to dampen brain activity by strengthening certain effects of a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This chemical can inhibit neurons, making them less likely to fire. Maguire genetically engineered mice to have altered receptors for GABA on their neurons, making it hard for them to react to the chemical. Without this “brake” on neural activity, the mice’s brains became hyperexcitable. That extreme state can contribute to seizures.

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