James' World 2

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After my grandmother died, we had to clean out her condominium. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling, her studio apartment in a Berkeley, Calif., high-rise was filled with books. Every surface was stacked with them except for a couple of chairs, the tiny kitchen counter, the bed, and narrow connecting paths like game trails in a forest. The shelves were three books deep and bowed in their middle.

But this wasn’t chaos. Besides being a communist, a labor activist, and a speaker of five languages that I knew of (Yiddish, English, German, some Russian, and some Spanish, in addition to her ability to read Latin), Grandma had been a lecturer in library science at the University of California, Berkeley. Every shelf and every pile was a subject, placed in proximity to related subjects and alphabetized by author.

When my wife and I started excavating, we found another organizational layer. Some of the books had whole magazines stuffed into them—the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Smithsonian—folded open to an article that was relevant to their enveloping tome. Further into the stacks, a whole other classification system surfaced—articles neatly torn or clipped out, with notes stapled to them on which Grandma’s looping cursive noted their subject and bibliographic metadata.

This was more than a library. Sure, it contained books—objects that convey information—, but the condo itself was an object that conveyed information. It was what historian of memory Mary Carruthers calls an architectural mnemonic—a map of Grandma’s multivariate, interesting, and generally unshakable opinions. Its physical structure at every scale helped her to maintain not just her sources but her ideas and to send them forward in time to when she might need them. “The archive has always been a pledge,” according to a translation of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever, “and like every pledge, a token of the future.”

Not every pledge gets fulfilled, of course. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s once-pointed mind had become less deft; she couldn’t really understand her own archive anymore. Information theory says that for a message to arrive, both sender and receiver have to agree on its form and timing. And now the receiver was gone. This happens all the time—at the scale of studio apartments and entire societies, on time spans of years or millennia. Even organizations dedicated to creating things and trying to remember them don’t always know how to ensure that those things make it through time. That’s understandable. Nobody really knows how to speak to the future in a way that it will hear.

When we try to unravel information from the past, we’re limited by what archives and nature have preserved. “The technical structure of the archiving archive determines the structure of the archivable content,” as Derrida put it. Take the oldest known piece of human art, a 73,000-year-old drawing of crosshatched red triangles on a chunk of rock. South African archaeologists found it in a cave called Blombos, about 185 miles east of Cape Town. Whether these triangles were a vision of mountains, an econometric chart of the seal harvest or an accident of boredom is lost to time. Maybe humans were constantly going around drawing ochre triangles on fragments of rock, and symbolic thinking was common. Maybe only Paleolithic geniuses did it. Whoever drew that fragment was thinking about something, but no one here in the future can know what.

Even when humans create written language and records, they often fail to send information up the line. Most of what historians know about ancient Greece and Rome is because of a lucky accident—scholars in the Abbasid Caliphate, which extended throughout much of the Middle East, got scrolls from Alexandrian libraries and translated them. But which scrolls never made it? Archaeologists know that a Babylonian copper merchant named Ea-nasir had supply chain problems nearly 4,000 years ago, but only because of the fluke survival of clay tablets saying that happened. The shape of the archive of the past limits the knowledge of the future.

Nobody really knows how to speak to the future in a way that it will hear.

 

The northeastern coast of Japan is dotted with future-message failures—hundreds of “tsunami stones” mark past catastrophes dating back 600 years. One in the village of Aneyoshi denotes the level of a flood in the 1800s and warns people not to build houses any lower along the hillside; others advise people to flee to Nokoriya, the “Valley of Survivors,” or Namiwake, “Waves’ Edge,” the extent of a tsunami in 1611. People mostly ignore them. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 hit that very same coast, swept away a bunch of stones, and killed more than 18,000 people.

Another example: In 1850, on the main canal leading from the Merrimack River to the industrial mill town of Lowell, Mass., James Francis built a dam. As the engineer in charge of Lowell’s water-powered textile mills, Francis was convinced that the Merrimack was liable to flood. So he built a 27-foot-wide, 25-foot-tall, 17-inch-thick palisade out of experimental pressure-treated pine. The cost of a project like this, “Great Gate” in 2025, would be about $413 million. The gate was so heavy that it had no mechanism to raise or lower it—it just hung over the Pawtucket Canal, suspended by a massive iron chain. Locals called it “Francis’s Folly.”

Two years later, a massive rainstorm flooded the Merrimack. At 3:30 in the morning on April 22, 1852, a worker used a chisel to cut the chain. The gate dropped; the town was saved; Boston newspapers hailed Francis as a hero.

In 1936, there was another storm and an even bigger flood. Lowell was doomed! But someone remembered that really big gate. Workers once again rushed to the gatehouse. No one had a key, so they broke in. Someone shined a light into the decaying shack, which was empty except for a spike stuck through the floor. On the wall hung a sledgehammer. Above it, a sign read, “Take the hammer. Hit the pin.” The men followed the instructions. The spike broke the chain; the gate fell; the town was saved. Francis’s message to the future had been received.

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Federico Tramonte

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President Donald Trump has in recent months overseen military strikes against alleged “drug smuggling” boats off the coast of Venezuela, ordered a military buildup in its coastal waters, accused its president, Nicolás Maduro, of being part of a drug cartel, and, on Wednesday, seized one of the nation’s oil tankers.

What’s his problem with Venezuela? And why does he seem intent on dragging the U.S. into a war with the South American nation?

On any given day, Trump or his officials may blame Venezuela for sending too many migrants into the U.S., for sending migrants who are gang members, murderers, or other criminals, or for trading valuable resources with America’s enemies.

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi claims the tanker that was just seized off the coast of Venezuela was carrying sanctioned oil intended for Iran. Venezuela has denied this and called Trump’s actions an “act of international piracy.”

Immigration

Trump has frequently accused Venezuela of pouring illegal migrants into the U.S. During his 2024 re-election campaign, Trump regularly told his supporters that Venezuela was “opening up the prisons” and encouraging hardened criminals to flood across America’s borders.

He even cited immigration on Thursday when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked him about his intentions regarding Venezuela.

“Now that we’ve seized this tanker, is the campaign against Venezuela still just about drugs, or is it now also about oil?” Doocy asked.

“Well, it’s about a lot of things,” Trump replied. “But one of the things it’s about is the fact that they’ve allowed millions of people to come into our country from their prisons, from gangs, from drug dealers, and from mental institutions.”

He then claimed that 12,000 murderers entered the U.S. and insisted that “many of them are from Venezuela.”

As much as he’s spoken about his issues with Venezuelan migrants, immigration isn’t the issue that Trump has used to justify killing people in its recent strikes on what it calls “drug boats”.

Drugs

Trump has accused Venezuela of trafficking drugs into the U.S. and has used those accusations to justify lethal military operations on Venezuelan ships.

Earlier this fall, Trump approved military strikes on Venezuelan boats that his administration claims were used to traffic drugs. In an incident on September 2, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave an order to attack a boat carrying 11 people. According to a Washington Post report, Hegseth then ordered a second strike to kill the survivors.

None of the individuals killed in Trump’s boat strikes have been proven to be criminals in a court of law.

The president is not just accusing Venezuela of being the departure point for alleged drug traffickers, but accusing Maduro — the nation’s president — of being a top-level member of a drug cartel that ships drugs into the U.S.

Trump claims that Maduro is the head of the “Cartel de los Soles.” The cartel is a name given to military officers and other officials in the Venezuelan government who are corrupt and engage in drug trafficking. The term has been in use since at least the 1990s and doesn’t necessarily describe a structured organization in the way a typical drug cartel might be organized. Trump has not provided evidence that Maduro is involved in or leading drug traffickers in Venezuela.

On Thursday, the president bragged to Doocy that drug trafficking by sea was down, though his numbers seem suspiciously high.

“If you look at drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%,” the president claimed. “And nobody can figure out who the eight is, because I have no idea. Anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well. And we’ll start that on land too. It’s gonna be starting on land pretty soon.”

While drugs may be how Trump is justifying military action, what he really wants may not be what is leaving Venezuela, but what is buried beneath it.

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White House claims Venezuelan oil tanker was Iran ‘shadow vessel’ and defends seizure

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Crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside,  latkes are objectively delicious — and notoriously a pain to prepare. They’re finicky, time-consuming, and physically taxing, but when made correctly (and topped with sour cream and apple sauce), they can be exceptional. We reached out to professional chefs from around the country to discover how to make the best potato pancakes imaginable. Here are the seven of their most essential tips.

Use russet potatoes

“The secret to an excellent latke? Start with selecting the right potato,” says Hillary Sterling, executive chef of Ci Siamo in New York City. The potato variety you select will not only impact the taste and texture of your latke, but also how simple they are to prepare. Sterling opts for russet potatoes, which are drier and starchier than other varieties like Yukon gold. “[This] helps them stick together without adding too much moisture,” says Sterling.

Season immediately after grating

“The best way to ensure the crispiest latkes is to remove as much moisture as possible after you shred the potatoes and onions,” says Eli Sussman, chef and co-owner of Gertrude’s in Brooklyn, New York. One easy way to draw that moisture out is by seasoning the potatoes and onions immediately after shredding. Liad Balki, director of operations at Miznon, suggests placing the potato mixture in a strainer, seasoning it with salt, then letting it rest for 10 to 30 minutes.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze

Here comes the challenging bit. The only way to ensure dry shredded potatoes is by using your hands to squeeze or press the starchy water out — a bit of manual labor that makes all the difference. “Once grated, squeeze them like hell in a dish towel,” says 2022 F&W Best New Chef Caroline Schiff. “And when you think you’ve got all the liquid out, squeeze some more.”

How you choose to squeeze the water out is up to you. “You can use a kitchen towel, cheesecloth, or carefully press it through a strainer,” says Sussman. “The key is to get the mixture dry before adding in eggs.”

Add the right binder

While liquid doesn’t benefit a latke, starch certainly does. “When you remove the water, the potato starch goes with it, and you want that starch for binding and crispiness,” says Schiff. So, she adds potato starch back into the mixture — one tablespoon for every pound of potato. You can use store-bought (which comes as a powder) or the starch that sits at the bottom of your strained potato water — in that case, make sure you strain the liquid into a bowl instead of the sink.

For another binding agent, Sterling likes to use grated cheese like young Pecorino or fontina. “It helps hold the mixture together and gives the latkes a nice crispy outside, while still staying creamy on the inside,” she says. 

Pay attention to the oil temperature

Michael King, chef of Sungold and NoMad Diner in New York City, says a candy thermometer is essential for making latkes at home. “If your oil is too cold, your latkes are never going to get crispy enough,” he says. “Because they are really just a loose paste before they’re fried, oil that’s less than hot will seep into the grated potatoes, giving you a result far worse than a limp french fry.” But if your oil is too hot, Schiff says, your latkes will brown too quickly, “leaving the inside raw.” For perfectly golden brown latkes, keep your cooking oil between 350℉ and 375℉.

Don’t overcrowd your pan

Even if you’re making latkes for a crowd, you should avoid frying too many at once. “Don’t overcrowd your pan, as it will rapidly drop the temperature of the oil,” says King. “A good rule of thumb: However big your latkes are, leave that much space between them while frying. It might take longer, but it’s well worth it.”

Cool on a rack

When your latkes are done, do not throw them directly onto a plate. Instead, let them cool on a wire rack. According to chef Michael Hackman of Aioli Sourdough Bakery and Cafe in West Palm Beach, Florida, this ensures that the “bottoms stay crisp instead of steaming into sogginess.”

After all that effort, no one wants to be left with a soggy latke.

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Credit: Food & Wine / Photo by Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Michelle Gatton / Prop Styling by Christine Keely

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As the debate turned more tense, several Republicans, both for and against the new map, reported threats or swatting. Long-simmering ideological and stylistic divides among Republicans in Indiana spilled into the open, with many long-serving or institutionalist figures who opposed the map clashing with Trump-aligned conservatives who favored the plan. Republicans would have been expected to flip the only two Democratic-held congressional seats among the state’s nine districts if the new map had passed.

In the end, a slim majority of the Senate’s Republican caucus voted against the map.

That Indiana lawmakers voted at all showed the enduring power that Mr. Trump holds over his party. Many in the State Senate did not want to debate the map, which was proposed outside the usual once-a-decade redistricting cycle, and the chamber’s leadership relented and brought the bill to the floor only after the president and his allies stepped up their pressure campaign. The map’s defeat, though, showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to bend Republican officials to his will.

“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, a Republican who opposes redistricting and who recently reported a swatting incident at his home, a form of harassment in which law enforcement was called to respond to a nonexistent emergency.

Another Republican opposed to the new map, State Senator Spencer Deery, said that “I see no justification that outweighs the harms it would inflict upon the people’s faith in the integrity of our elections and our system of government.” He added that “it’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” and that “it’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.”

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Republicans make up a majority of the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen voted against President Trump’s new political map, which aimed to add Republicans in Congress.CreditCredit…Jon Cherry for The New York Times

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The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky.

Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.

The Leonids are an annual shower that occurs in early November and lasts through early December, when Earth passes through the stream of debris of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

Perhaps the most famous Leonid display in modern memory took place on November 17, 1966, when meteors seemed to fall like rain, and some witnesses said it felt as if Earth was plunging through space.

These storms tend to follow a 33- to 34-year rhythm tied to the comet’s orbit. Most years are quieter, however, which is the most likely outcome this week. The last major event occurred in 2002.

How to Watch the Leonids

The Leonids will reach their peak at 1 P.M. EST on November 17. Hundreds of long-tailed meteors will cross the sky at 44 miles per second, giving sky watchers a good chance to catch the display closer to dawn on November 18.

When many meteors appear to streak from the same point in the night sky, that point is known as the radiant. This year, the shower’s radiant rises around midnight and climbs highest just before dawn, making the predawn hours the best time to watch.

Favorably for sky-gazers, the next new moon will arrive on November 20, which means there is only a thin waning crescent in the sky during the Leonids’ peak this week. Under dark sky conditions, observers might see as many as 10 to 15 Leonids per hour. Experts recommend using binoculars or telescopes and lying flat on your back with your feet toward the east. After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adjust, and you will begin to see meteors.

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US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.

Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”

“It was seized for a very good reason,” the US president added, declining to say who owned the vessel.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.

In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its own video edit of the seizure, soundtracked with an excerpt from LL Cool J’s song Mama Said Knock You Out. DHS has repeatedly faced criticism for poaching music for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads. DHS recently used a Sabrina Carpenter song, without permission, prompting the pop star to respond that the video was “evil and disgusting”.

LL Cool J did not immediately address the use of his song.

Venezuela’s government said in the statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy”.

It continued: “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

Earlier, speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.

Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.

Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.

On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.

On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.

The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.

In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.

That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.

“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”

“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.

“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”

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Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video

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Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.

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Ms. Machado, 58, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading a successful electoral challenge to Mr. Maduro last year. He disregarded the election results, declared himself the winner, and cracked down on dissent.

In an audio message published by the Nobel Peace Prize committee on Wednesday, Ms. Machado said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo to participate in the day’s festivities surrounding the awarding of the prize. But she arrived too late to attend the ceremony, at which her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel on her behalf.

Mr. Trump’s administration, which accuses Mr. Maduro of leading two drug cartels, has deployed the largest U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, carrying out fatal strikes on boats that it says were trafficking drugs and, on Wednesday, seizing an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

Yet the two leaders spoke by phone last month, and Venezuela recently began accepting U.S. deportation flights, raising the possibility that both sides could be edging toward a diplomatic settlement.

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María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press

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In 2018, at a Dubai resort next to the blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf, Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, stood before an audience of hundreds of petrochemical executives to set out his vision for the future of the world’s largest oil company. The goals he described weren’t primarily about energy. Instead, he announced plans to pour $100 billion into expanding production of plastic and other petrochemicals.

Nasser predicted that with a growing global population wielding more purchasing power every year, petrochemicals—compounds derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels and of which plastics and their ingredients constitute as much as 80 percent—would drive nearly half of oil-demand growth by mid-century. About 98 percent of virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels. In sectors that include packaging, cars, and construction, he said, “the tremendous growth in chemicals demand provides us with a fantastic window of opportunity.”

In the years since Nasser’s 2018 speech, Saudi Aramco, owned mainly by the government of Saudi Arabia, has acquired a majority stake in the country’s petrochemical conglomerate SABIC. Together, the companies have bought into huge Chinese plastic projects and built petrochemical plants from South Korea to the Texas coast. Aramco aims to turn more than a third of its crude into petrochemicals by the 2030s—a near tripling in 15 years.

Although the industry has framed its plans to pivot to plastic as a response to consumer demand for a material central to modern life, another factor is clearly at play: As the looming dangers of climate change are pushing the world away from fossil fuels, the industry is betting on plastic to protect its profitability. Ramping up plastic and petrochemical output, according to Nasser, will “provide a reliable destination for Saudi Aramco’s future oil production.” As one industry analyst observed of the company’s strategy, “the big picture imperative is to avoid being forced to leave barrels in the ground as demand for transportation fuels declines.”

Even ExxonMobil has acknowledged that electric vehicles’ widespread adoption will probably reduce cars’ need for oil. In one market forecast, the company, already the world’s largest producer of single-use plastics, assured investors that its plans to increase petrochemical production by 80 percent by 2050 will help the industry to pump and sell even more oil at mid-century than it does today.

But there is growing public awareness that all the plastic made for packaging and goods from the absurd to the essential comes at steep costs: the health impacts of the chemicals it contains, the emissions from its production, the mountains of waste that have built up as it is discarded, and the microplastics found everywhere from the most remote corners of the planet to our brains. Some governments have begun enacting legislation, such as bans on certain single-use items, but efforts to deliver more sweeping change hit a wall with the collapse in August of contentious negotiations on a global plastic-pollution treaty. More than 70 nations had pushed for limits on the amount of plastic produced to reduce the flow of waste into the environment. The industry has lobbied heavily against such caps, arguing that improved waste management and recycling are the solution, even though only a small percentage of plastic is currently recycled, and many types cannot be recycled by conventional means.

Companies “know they can’t hold their finger in the dike” of an energy transition, says Judith Enck, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official and president of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group based at Bennington College. “They have to find a gigantic new market, and they have landed on plastic.”Plastic production has been rising steadily since the end of World War II, when companies poured resources into finding and promoting peacetime uses for a material whose military applications—from nylon parachutes to polyethylene insulation for radar sets—had proved invaluable. Consumers snapped up the flood of new goods and disposable packaging, and the annual output of plastic has climbed from two million metric tons in 1950 to more than 500 million today. A cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons had been produced by 2015, according to a landmark study that was the first to quantify the total amount of plastic created. According to Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the study, the total has since risen past 10 billion metric tons. About three quarters of all that plastic has become waste, Geyer’s team reported: 9 percent was recycled, 12 percent was incinerated, and 79 percent ended up in landfills or the environment. If current trends continue, 1.1 billion metric tons of plastic will be made annually by 2050—and the cumulative total will be enough, Geyer says, to cover the U.S. in an ankle-deep layer.

Today, half of all plastic goes into single-use items, which are often tossed away almost as soon as they’re acquired. A million plastic bottles are purchased each minute, according to the United Nations’ environment agency, and five trillion plastic bags are used every year. In 2016, Americans alone used more than 560 billion plastic utensils and other disposable food-service items.

Plastic, of course, is not just in throwaway packaging. It is a defining, inescapable part of modern life, widely used in construction, clothing, electronic goods, and cars. It plays a key role in health care as a component in gloves, syringes, tubing, and IV bags, not to mention artificial joints, limbs, and hearts. It is also not just one material: there are thousands of types and subtypes, each with its own combination of chemicals that yields desired properties—varying degrees of hard or soft, rigid or flexible, opaque or transparent. One analysis found that 16,000 different chemicals are used in making plastics, including additives such as stabilizers, plasticizers, dyes, and flame retardants. More than 4,000 of those substances pose health or environmental dangers, and safety information was lacking for another 10,000, the researchers estimate.

By design, plastic does not readily decompose. Instead, it fragments into increasingly minuscule pieces—reaching down to the nanoscale—that have been found just about everywhere scientists have looked. They suffuse the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They’ve been detected in blood, semen, breast milk, bone marrow, and placentas. Scientists are only beginning to explore what this omnipresence means for the health of humans and the environment, but the signs are worrying. One recent study found microplastics in tissue from human kidneys, livers, and brains, and a study of 12 dementia patients’ brains showed greater accumulations than those of people without the disease. Other research found the tiny particles in the neck-artery plaque of nearly 60 percent of patients tested; three years later, the rates of heart attacks, strokes, and death were 4.5 times higher among people whose samples contained microplastics.

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Buying toys this time of year can be so overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there’s some new, must-have toy being shoved in your face, and it’s incredibly hard to quiet the noise. You want to give your kids toys they’re excited about, but so many options means you’re bound to give them gifts that they are bored with 36 hours after opening the box. This year’s Romper Toy Box is all about toys that are made to last. Some are heirloom quality, some are sturdy and built to take a beating, and some are just the kind of simple toy we’ve forgotten about — the kind of toy that your kids can spend hours playing with.

From pretend play to activity sets, STEM kits, and more, this list has plenty of toys you won’t regret buying for your kids. There are varying price points, as well, and a lot of these are also chosen with you, the parent, in mind. Do you really need toys in your house that take two adults to set up, with 800 small pieces, only for your kids to be over it after 10 minutes?

I think every parent is looking for a toy that will unlock their child’s creativity, their love of play, and actually hold their attention — and that’s what Romper Toy Box 2025 is all about.

There are a million dollhouse options out there, but I love one that’s built to last, like The Dollhouse from Blueberry and Third. It comes completely blank, so you can decorate it however you want with paint, wallpaper, and accessories, and it’s built in a 1:12 scale, so you can add in your own furniture and dolls. It’s also enormous and just so classic. A great, heirloom-quality toy this Christmas.

I know it’s not new anymore, but my son has used his Yoto daily for over a year, and it still looks and works like it’s brand new. This year, we’re asking grandparents for the Yoto Club membership so my son can pick a new card or two each month (we keep them all in this inexpensive little organizer for compact storage and easy travel). We love the classic bedtime stories and the daily kids’ podcasts they put out, and that it’s nice screen-free background noise when we’re playing and drawing together.

I had a microscope set as a kid, and I still remember the countless hours I spent looking at the slides it came with and making my own from leaves, bugs, and feathers I found outside. For the curious kids in your life, it’s a top tier gift.

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