James' World 2

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When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have worked harder to elevate Kamala Harris’s profile, he didn’t know that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon be riding on her readiness to be president. But perhaps he should have.

It was July 2023, and while interviewing President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff in his law office in downtown Washington, D.C., I’d asked if the administration had done enough to showcase Harris as a governing partner to the oldest president in history. Promoting one’s vice president is “always hard,” Klain, who was known to be an advocate of Harris’s, told me then. “Obviously, I wish, you know—you could always do more, and you should do more.”

Four months before the election, and one week after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Harris’s capacity to lead the Democratic Party and the free world has never been more relevant. And yet many Americans, after three years of the West Wing’s poor stewardship of Harris, are now looking at their vice president as if for the first time.

In another version of the Biden presidency, this would indeed be Kamala Harris’s moment. A growing list of prominent Democrats, including Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina and, in a conversation with me this week, Senator Laphonza Butler of California, are touting Harris as the candidate best positioned to take on Trump in the event that Biden decides to withdraw from the race. Tim Ryan, the former congressman from Ohio who challenged both Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, has taken his support one step further, calling on the president to “rip the band aid off” and promote Harris immediately. A recent CNN poll shows the vice president now running closer to Trump than the president is.

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Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney who testified against him in his hush money trial, spoke out Saturday night after the former president was shot at during a rally.

Cohen shared a photo of the aftermath of the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, along with a brief statement on X, formerly Twitter.

“Whether you agree or disagree with someone’s political position, THIS IS NOT THE SOLUTION!” he posted alongside the photo of Trump surrounding by Secret Service agents with blood on his face.

Cohen, who worked for Trump as his attorney and within the Trump Organization between 2006 and 2018, later became an outspoken critic of his former boss.

In the past week, Cohen asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a case regarding Trump, asking whether citizens can hold a former president to account for their actions.

He recently had a prominent role in the New York hush money trial involving adult film star Stormy Daniels. Cohen had sent Daniels money in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election after she claimed that she had sex with Trump years prior.

Federal authorities began investigating Cohen in April 2018. He pleaded guilty in August 2018 to charges of tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations.

In December 2018, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison, fined $50,000, ordered to forfeit $500,000, and paid more than $1.3 million in restitution to the IRS.

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In May, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposed officially reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug. The move would effectively make weed legal with a prescription, thereby ending a key provision of the war on drugs instituted by then president Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. That “war” has traumatized, stigmatized, and incarcerated millions of people, particularly Black and Hispanic minorities. It also has greatly hindered science.

It should end with the complete removal of research barriers nationwide, and the DEA action is a beneficial step in that direction.

Specifically, this step by the Biden administration would reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule III drug within the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), moving it away from heroin, LSD, and peyote, and into the prescription drugs group. If successful, the initiative would further decriminalize marijuana use while also, to some extent, reconciling federal and state laws. Making marijuana legal nationwide at the prescription drug level may make it easier for researchers to study its impacts and therapeutic uses. Nevertheless, some significant hurdles to marijuana research will remain after the rescheduling.

Ironically, most Americans already enjoy a degree of leniency with marijuana that goes beyond Schedule III. Currently, 38 states support its medical use, and 24 states plus Washington, D.C., are allowing recreational marijuana consumption.

While this misalignment might seem inconsequential, it has a dark side. With the poorly controlled expansion of marijuana across the country, the drug will inadvertently end up in the hands of vulnerable individuals. Atop that list are the unborn, children and teens, for whom marijuana can interfere with brain development, as well as individuals with mental health disorders, such as anxiety, clinical depression, and schizophrenia; the symptoms of such conditions can worsen with use of the drug.

Although additional research is needed to confirm such vulnerabilities, the risks are real. And while the rescheduling of marijuana is a step in the right direction, it will likely fall short of giving scientists unrestricted access for research. To that end, marijuana should be removed from the schedule of drugs or placed in a different framework altogether. That would make marijuana fully research-accessible—a status commensurate with recreational marijuana in many states. Lawmakers need to support not just cannabis enthusiasm but, more importantly, the health and well-being of their constituents.

Success depends largely on how effectively the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) navigates the reschedule and ensures there’s enough high-grade marijuana to meet increasing research demands. The agency must establish reliable product consistency standards, particularly for the psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) ingredient in marijuana as well as toxic pollutants, ensuring consumer safety and public health. Unintentional overdosing has been linked to anxiety and panic attacks and, later, more severe mental, digestive, heart, and respiratory health issues. Scientists need reliable standards to enable reproducible studies, which can then also determine doses for medical uses.

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Imagine a weapon with no human deciding when to launch or pull its trigger. Imagine a weapon programmed by humans to recognize human targets, but then left to scan its internal data bank to decide whether a set of physical characteristics meant a person was friend or foe. When humans make mistakes, and fire weapons at the wrong targets, the outcry can be deafening, and the punishment can be severe. But how would we react, and who would we hold responsible if a computer programmed to control weapons made that fateful decision to fire, and it was wrong?

This isn’t a movie; these were the kinds of questions delegates considered at the April Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems in Vienna. In the midst of this classically European city, famous for waltzes, while people were picking up kids from school and having coffee, expert speakers sat in special high-level panels, microphones in hand, discussing the very real possibility that the development and use of machines programmed to independently judge who lives and who dies might soon be too far gone to come back from.

“This is the ‘Oppenheimer moment’ of our generation,” said Alexander Schallenberg, the Austrian federal minister for European and international affairs, “We cannot let this moment pass without taking action, now is the time to agree on international rules and norms to assure human control.”

I reported on these meetings, these extraordinary discussions about our future happening parallel to the ordinary moments of our present, as the United Nations reporter for a Japanese media organization—Japan being the only nation in history to have experienced nuclear bombings, and thus very interested. And Schallenberg’s statement rang true: the need for international rules to prevent these machines from being given full rein to make life and death decisions in warfare is bleakly urgent. But there is still very little actual rulemaking happening.

The decades following the first “Oppenheimer moment” brought with it a simmering cold war and a world on the edge of a catastrophic nuclear apocalypse. Even today there are serious threats to use nuclear weapons despite their capacity to collapse civilization and bring human extinction. Do we really want to add autonomous weapons into the mix? Do we really want to arm computer screens that could mistake the body heat of a child for that of a soldier? Do we want to live in a world inhabited by machines that could choose to mass bomb a busy town square in minutes? The time to legislate is not next week, next year, next decade. It is now.

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If an invitation is too expensive, offer alternatives

Etiquette and financial experts alike approve of a social trend that emerged on TikTok known as “loud budgeting.” The gist is that, as budgets tighten, more and more people are feeling comfortable setting boundaries with the people in their life about what they can and can’t afford.

A loud budgeter might turn down an invitation to a fancy restaurant by saying, “Sorry, I only have $30 left in my food budget for the month.”

While that kind of communication may be appropriate between close friends, you needn’t even go that far, says Thomas Farley, an etiquette expert and keynote speaker known as Mister Manners. “You don’t need to give some hard-driving rationale for why you can’t make it, whether that’s money or some sort of conflict,” he says.

If it’s an opulent destination wedding that’s out of your price range, you’re fine sending your regrets along with a gift off the registry, Gottsman says. If it’s a luxury trip, you may say you can’t swing it this year, that you just made another major purchase, or that you simply don’t have room in your schedule. No need to go into specifics.

“You simply don’t have to take every invitation that’s offered to you,” she says.

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For the most part, Cori Lint was happy.

She worked days as a software engineer and nights as a part-time cellist, filling her free hours with inline skating and gardening, and long talks with friends. But a few days a month, Lint’s mood would tank. Panic attacks came on suddenly. Suicidal thoughts did, too.

She had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, but Lint, 34, who splits her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, struggled to understand her experience, a rift so extreme she felt like two different people.

“When I felt better, it was like I was looking back at the experience of someone else, and that was incredibly confusing,” Lint said.

Then, in 2022, clarity pierced through. Her symptoms, she realized, were cyclical. Lint recognized a pattern in something her doctors hadn’t considered: her period.

For decades, a lack of investment in women’s health has created gaps in medicine. The problem is so prevalent that, this year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to advance women’s health research and innovation.

Women are less likely than men to get early diagnoses for conditions from heart disease to cancer, studies have found, and they are more likely to have their medical concerns dismissed or misdiagnosed. Because disorders specifically affecting women have long been understudied, much remains unknown about causes and treatments.

That’s especially true when it comes to the effects of menstruation on mental health.

When Lint turned to the internet for answers, she learned about a debilitating condition at the intersection of mental and reproductive health.

Sounds like me, she thought.

What Is PMDD?

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, is a negative reaction in the brain to natural hormonal changes in the week or two before a menstrual period. Symptoms are severe and can include irritability, anxiety, depression, and sudden mood swings. Others include fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and changes to appetite and sleep patterns, with symptoms improving once bleeding begins.

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That’s Ted Cruz’s take on the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, which came under scrutiny after the president publicly unraveled in last week’s debate.

On Monday, the Republican senator from Texas tweeted to me: “There are only two options: (1) the Dems & their media shills were so clueless that they had no idea that Biden is mentally incompetent, or (2) they KNEW & they deliberately LIED about it. Both are damning. I vote #2.”

Cruz isn’t the only one taking aim at the media after the debate.

Right-wing commentators are imagining that news outlets covered up Biden’s frailty for years. Some on the left are asserting that the White House press corps should have probed Biden’s health more closely, which could have prompted a fuller primary process. Journalists (including the one writing this column) are doing some reassessing of their own, asking if the clearly aging 81-year-old president was given the benefit of the doubt too many times.

But I’m sorry, Ted Cruz, there are more than two options.

And after talking to top reporters on the White House beat, what emerges is a far more nuanced picture.

The national media wasn’t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published lengthy stories about Biden’s mental fitness. The public wasn’t in the dark about Biden’s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden’s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.

That’s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.

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