James' World 2

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A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell where the group stopped, and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.

Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.

Echoing Cicero’s thoughts and at times its very words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional. Opponents of Mr. Trump’s plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.

Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.

For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.

The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero’s influence.

A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.

A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.” He argues that a corrupt “homelessness industrial complex” dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society.

“Some of them are cynical Marxists who clearly want mayhem and want to show that our civilization is broken,” he said.

Many on the left return the scorn, calling Mr. Lonsdale an emblem of the inequality that creates homelessness — a billionaire fighting a reverse class war to preserve an unjust order.

“He’s using the homelessness crisis to deflect attention from the broken economic system that both causes homelessness and enables people like him to become billionaires in the first place,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a progressive advocacy group.

As Mr. Lonsdale taps his fortune to shape views, it is easy to see a story of money and politics. But it is also a story of public fatigue. With unsheltered homelessness up more than half in a decade to about 266,000 people, Cicero succeeded in part by putting the status quo on trial.

A signature Cicero line is that there is “nothing compassionate” about leaving people on the street. Echoed by Mr. Trump, it may send an army of marginalized people down an untested path.

Banning Public Sleeping, State by State

Asked why he focused on homelessness, Mr. Lonsdale often begins by saying that a homeless person harassed his wife as she pushed their child in a stroller in San Francisco. “She just got screamed at, multiple times, and threatened by someone who has clearly lost their mind,” he said in an interview.

But Mr. Lonsdale’s conservatism took root much earlier. He cites Ayn Rand and Austrian free-market economists as teenage influences and used his perch as editor of The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, to assail “political correctness.” He blasted a student movement to raise custodians’ pay, warning it “destroys incentive for them to improve themselves.”

The magazine’s alumni include Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor who helped start PayPal, where Mr. Lonsdale landed an internship and found a mentor. They helped start Palantir in 2003 when Mr. Lonsdale was 21. He left after six years and became a tech investor. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion.

The subject of homelessness never arose in 2019 when Mr. Lonsdale hired Cicero’s first analyst, Judge Glock, who tackled technocratic topics like zoning laws and published into a vacuum.

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Joe Lonsdale, founder of the Cicero Institute, is an ally of President Trump’s whose group has commandeered Republican policy on homelessness. Credit…Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

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A few years ago, I wrote a memorable and quite controversial story about Jeanne Calment, who was then – and remains now – the official holder of the world longevity record. She was born in 1875 and died in 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days. At least that’s the official version of events. According to some doubters, the woman who died as Jeanne Calment was actually her daughter Yvonne, who fraudulently assumed her mother’s identity when Jeanne died in 1934. Yvonne was 23 years Jeanne’s junior. Still a good innings, but not a record-breaking one.

The matter remains unresolved, and so, for now, Calment remains one of the most important data points in biogerontology. When we ask, “how long can a person live?”, the answer is “at least 122 years and 164 days” – assuming Jeanne Calment really did live that long.

Whether a person could live longer has long troubled scientists. It’s an important question in biogerontology because, if we want to achieve life extension, we need to know what we’re aiming for. But it’s surprisingly hard to answer. Calment is an outlier: nobody else has reached 120, which is one reason for the suspicion. The second-longest-lived person was Kane Tanaka, who racked up 119 years and 107 days, and the oldest person today has just turned 117. Aside from a few mavericks, however, everyone agrees that there is a natural limit.

But where is it? There are two main ways of tackling this question. One is by studying demographic data on verified supercentenarians. One such frequently cited analysis produced an estimate of roughly 115, but did not rule out somebody living to 125. Another concluded that Calment’s record is likely to be broken fairly soon.

Another approach is by computer modelling. One such model analysed short-term fluctuations in red and white blood cell counts in adults aged 85 and over, which the researchers converted into a measure of their resilience to terminal age-related disease. At some point, resilience breaks down completely, marking the point of no return. The researchers concluded that this varies from person to person, usually kicking in at about 120. But even for the most resilient individuals, there is a hard upper limit of 150.

There’s a big difference between 125 and 150, and we’ll get onto this. But one thing these studies don’t take into account is future advances in medicine. In the 1920s, scientists believed that it was impossible to live past 105, according to biogerontologist Richard Faragher at the University of Brighton, UK. But over the following century, medical breakthroughs steadily added years to people’s life expectancies, helping (along with better nutrition and sanitation) to nudge the longevity record upwards.

What happens if that trend continues? To find out, a team at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, both in Moscow, Russia, ran a thought experiment. Imagine, they said, that we manage to cure all the theoretically curable causes of ageing. The only unfixable one is damage to the DNA in our cells, which accumulates remorselessly as we age. In that scenario, the upper limit of a human life soars to 194 years.

I’ll stick my neck out and say it ain’t going to happen in my lifetime, and also point out that the causes of ageing are not yet fully understood. Even so, it suggests there’s quite a lot of room for improvement.

But back to the real world. Why do upper age estimates vary so much? Re-enter Jeanne Calment. When I was reporting that story, I spoke to a longevity researcher called Saul Newman, then at the Australian National University in Canberra. He had just published a paper showing that a small number of errors or fraudulent entries in paper records such as birth certificates can significantly distort longevity data. He told me he suspected the Calments’ alleged identity fraud was just the tip of the iceberg.

Newman, now at the University of Oxford, has just published a book, Morbid: Debunking modern longevity science, revealing the shocking extent of those errors and frauds. In Greece, for example, around 70 per cent of centenarians were found to be dead, kept alive on paper so their relatives could keep on drawing their pensions. Even higher levels of pension fraud were discovered in Japan. People have historically inflated their age for many other reasons, to join (or dodge) military service, get married or get a job. Clerical errors are rife too, especially from the time when today’s centenarians and supercentenarians were born.

These errors inevitably feed into estimates of the upper limit of human longevity. If the demographic data used as an input is riddled with inflated ages, the output is probably also inflated. Garbage in, garbage out. People used in modelling studies are also tagged with an age, which could well be wrong. When the journal Nature asked Newman where this leaves the debate about a maximum human lifespan, he answered: “in an absolute shambles.”

When I was researching the Calment story, I also came across a 2011 paper that found that, across the whole world, 98 per cent of claims of lifespans over 115 could not be verified. The same paper also found that, in countries with rigorous birth records going back more than 150 years, not one person has been proved to have lived past 115. That, I think, is the best estimate we’ve got. Five score years and fifteen. I’m halfway there.

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First you hear the collars, like a chorus of bells softly ringing. Then, the patter of paws. You look up and see a mirage of floppy ears, wagging tails, and fur—it’s a pack of dogs approaching, shepherded by their seemingly fearless leader: the dog walker.

On any given day in New York City, there are countless dog walkers out and about, tending to some of the city’s estimated 600,000 dogs. And aside from caring for the beloved pets of New York while their owners are at the office or otherwise occupied, many dog walkers are a fixture of their neighborhoods—bringing a daily jolt of joy to kids at the bus stop, holding the door for postal workers, generally keeping an eye on things. They know the rhythm of the city, and they help keep things in tune.

For some, dog walking is a part-time job; for others, it’s a trade and a passion. For many New Yorkers, it’s a way to make ends meet so they can pursue creative interests as artists, performers, and writers. No matter their backgrounds, though, every good dog walker has one thing in common: a love of animals. They care about them, and connect with them. They’re able to divine things from the dogs, based on a tug of the leash or the tiniest twitch: Riley’s riled up; Cookie wants to fight; Lou needs to pee.

Costello Caldwell, 78

Costello Caldwell has been walking dogs on the Upper West Side since the early 1980s.

He grew up next door to a boarding kennel in Maryland, where he worked after school and during the summer, and quickly fell in love with dogs. When he moved to New York, he worked in fashion, retail, and restaurants until he got sick with pneumonia. As he recovered, he would sit in the park and see dog walkers who seemed happy. One day, he had an idea.

“I bought uniforms for five of my friends, dressed us all the same way, borrowed all the dogs in the neighborhood that I knew, and we took a walk down Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue. I called it ‘goin’ fishing,’” he says with a laugh. He had business cards with his business name—Royal Wolves Academy—made, and he styled not only the people but the dogs, too, with special leashes.

“This is New York City, and they love a drama. They see five people walking down the street with a bunch of dogs all dressed the same way, they will stop their conversation and pay attention.” It worked. By the end of the day, he had his first seven clients. “That’s how it all began.”

Caldwell, 78, who is an artist and has made headlines for his eye-catching style, lives in the neighborhood. He walks dogs in Riverside Park, seeing the same people every day. “They call me the mayor of this area,” he says.

“Clothing is part of my art,” he says, describing his look as an eclectic mix, like Indiana Jones meets the Marlboro Man, meets Peaky Blinders. “It’s easy for me to love walking dogs because I put fashion into it. I give them leather collars and leather leashes, and I write their names on everything. I make diaries for the owners to look at in leather-bound agendas. I burn their names into the leather. So to me, all of this is art.”

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“They call me the mayor of this area,” says Costello Caldwell, a dog walker on the Upper West Side known for his eclectic style. Photographed by Peter Fisher

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Federal officials on Friday sharply cut how much water Arizona, California and Nevada can draw from the Colorado River over the next two years in an attempt to stabilize a system on the verge of collapse because of climate change and overuse.

The existing rules governing use of the river and of the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead, were set to expire this year, just as drought constricts the Colorado’s flow and both lakes shrink to record lows. Friday’s announcement by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reduced the allocation for the three states by about a quarter, in total, reducing Arizona’s share by the most, about a third.

The plan formalized voluntary cuts the states had already offered to accept and settles months of uncertainty over how the water supply will be managed in the coming years. But it does little to solve the underlying crisis: The river’s flow is diminishing, and reservoirs are drying up, but communities and farms still use unsustainable amounts of water.

“If the next couple of years are dry, the risk to Colorado River water users is extraordinary,” said Jennifer Pitt, who directs the Colorado River Program at the National Audubon Society. “There is no buffer to rely on anymore.”

In the short term, the cuts will require the three states, which make up the river’s lower basin, to rely more on groundwater, to limit or cut off some users, and to invest more in water-efficiency projects. They could also increase pressure on the agriculture industry, which uses the majority of the river’s water. Nearly half of the water goes toward growing crops used for animal feed, such as alfalfa.

That burden will fall hardest on Arizona, which holds some of the most junior water rights in a byzantine priority system based on the longest-standing uses of the river and a century-old agreement among seven Western states and Mexico.

Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, said the state would rely heavily on aquifers where it has stored unused portions of its Colorado River water allocations in past years. The Arizona Water Banking Authority reports that it has built up a store that is slightly larger than the state’s total annual river allotment.

The Colorado supplies water to 40 million people, 5.5 million acres of farmland and about two dozen native tribes. Two Mexican states also use the river.

But the waterway has transformed since communities first began tapping it. Its flow has diminished by about 20 percent across two decades of drought, a period scientists say is the driest for the Southwest in 1,200 years.

The Trump administration’s plan sidestepped a conflict over how to bring water consumption in line with that dwindling supply, a question that water officials say may ultimately be up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The downriver states had already volunteered to make the cuts announced Friday in an effort to break a deadlock in negotiations. But the administration didn’t impose any mandatory water use cuts that upstream states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — have refused to accept.

Andrea Travnicek, assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department, which includes the Reclamation Bureau, said in a statement that the administration would continue to work with states to find consensus.

The lower basin states said the cuts reflect their willingness to share in the pain of a shrinking water supply. Upper basin water officials have maintained that communities there cannot commit to permanent cuts when their water supply each year is largely determined not by reservoir levels, but by year-to-year fluctuations in winter snowpack. Snowpack hit record lows this winter, driving major water shortages and sending reservoir levels plummeting.

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, said that officials there “remain hopeful that a longer-term seven-state agreement can be reached over the coming months.” Becky Mitchell, the state’s chief negotiator on Colorado River issues, added that the state remains “committed to developing a solution.”

J.B. Hamby, California’s chief Colorado River negotiator, called the plan issued Friday “a bridge, not a permanent solution” and called for upstream states to step forward with “robust action” of their own in the coming years.

“The Lower Basin has shown what meaningful action looks like,” he said in a statement. “Now

we need the entire basin to do the same.”

Mr. Buschatzke said the focus should now shift to “a longer-term, equitable, basin-wide outcome that includes shared sacrifices.”

Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a Democrat who is running for re-election, stressed that the state stands ready to “fight” in court for any water it is owed.

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The Colorado River at Horseshoe Bend near Page, Ariz., last month. Credit…Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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Two decades ago, renewable energy was a bit player on the world stage. Today renewables account for nearly half of all global electrical capacity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, and there’s a lot more in the pipeline. It’s a stunning surge showing that the renewable revolution appears unstoppable. Clean energy still faces challenges, though. To meet them, countries and companies are taking some big swings to push this revolution into a new phase—with ambitious projects that may or may not pan out.

One of the most significant problems is that solar and wind are intermittent, and the lithium-ion batteries currently available can’t store enough energy from renewables to reliably meet demand. To squeeze the most juice out of solar and wind, we need longer-term storage, leading some in the industry—notably in China—to reach for a technology that has been shelved for decades. Chinese companies are also pushing the limits on how large and how far offshore turbines can be so they can take advantage of steadier, stronger winds. Other ventures are trying to broaden the appeal of geothermal energy and crack the code on tidal power, one of the biggest untapped sources of power on the planet. Here are some of the most audacious of these projects. —Andrea Thompson

Geothermal Energy for (Almost) Anywhere

Pulling heat from the earth without perfect geology

Name of project: Fervo Energy’s Cape Station
Location: Utah
Name of technology: Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)
Power generation: A projected 100 megawatts by early 2027, with 500 megawatts in total under construction

How it works: Fervo drills down and then sideways, creating a network of long fractures in rock as deep as almost 2,750 meters (although future depths may vary); it then pushes water through these cracks to draw heat out of the earth. The large network of fissures exposes much more water to much more hot rock than single-pipe geothermal setups do, increasing efficiency. To execute the design, Fervo has translated oil and gas fracking’s pressurized fluid injections from softer sedimentary shale rock to hotter, harder volcanic rock. (Experts say seismic monitoring is advanced enough that work can be paused if risks of quakes above magnitudes people can feel rise too high.) At a demonstration facility called Project Red, Fervo connected test wells to a preexisting power plant, where it has been generating three megawatts of power since late 2023.

Why it’s needed: Unlike solar and wind, geothermal energy can be used 24/7. But to be economical, traditional geothermal requires perfect geology: hot rock that water naturally passes through and a reliably recharged water source to keep the heat flowing. This necessity has limited its use to a handful of spots on Earth. By adding fractures, EGS creates more places where geothermal is economically feasible. Other companies have targeted different geothermal strategies, and geothermal has been met with a wave of enthusiasm from the U.S. government.

What the experts say: Jefferson Tester, a Cornell University engineering professor, says he’s excited by the work Fervo is doing but worries that the company might have promised its funders too much too soon. “You’ve got to prove that this thing actually works for a sustainable period of production,” he says. “The proof will come only with what you find out in the field.” (Fervo Energy did not reply to interview requests.) —Meghan Bartels

The Power of the Tides

Predictable motions of the ocean can provide reliable, renewable energy

Name of project: MeyGen
Location: Scotland
Name of technology: Tidal stream energy
Power generation: Six megawatts (increasing to 65 megawatts by 2031)

How it works: Since 2016, MeyGen, located between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, has been the world’s largest tidal stream energy project. It exploits the fact that the tides that ebb and flow along our planet’s coastlines carry tremendous energy, with a harvestable potential estimated at 1,200 terawatt-hours per year, more than a quarter of annual power generation in the U.S. That energy can be harnessed in much the same way that wind farms harness moving air. “In very simple layman’s terms, you’re putting a wind turbine underwater,” says Drew Blaxland, CEO of Proteus Marine Renewables, which developed MeyGen’s four 1.5-megawatt turbines. The turbine blades spin with each incoming and outgoing tide, capturing the ocean’s kinetic energy to power a generator that produces electricity.

Why it’s needed: Unlike other renewable energy sources, tides are highly predictable. “We can tell at any point in time, any day, exactly how much energy we’re producing,” Blaxland says, “which you can’t do with wind or solar.” Tides are as brutal as they are reliable, though; saltwater corrosion, ocean debris and the sheer force of rushing water often cause turbines to fail. But one of MeyGen’s turbines has reached a major milestone in performance, running for more than seven years without unplanned maintenance. Built on massive foundations and equipped with blades that adjust to align with the tide, the turbines are engineered to withstand extreme, fast-flowing marine currents. MeyGen plans to add 20 turbines by 2031, boosting its capacity to 65 megawatts. According to Ampeak Energy, which owns the project, the site could ultimately produce nearly 400 megawatts.

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But Moss is Jewish, is running to represent a district with a strong Jewish community, and is a supporter of Israel. His backing of a two-state solution and disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu had traditionally been Democratic orthodoxy. However, that’s no longer the case.

In contrast, El-Sayed is a virulent critic of Israel. Earlier this summer, he told CNN: “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” And he said that if you’re “a Democrat and you believe in human rights,” the only reason one could support Israel is campaign contributions.

The candidate, who is Muslim, also said, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as the commitment I’ve got to my own kids,” but to many, his criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitic tropes. That’s particularly true after he campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has made antisemitic remarks and praised Hamas. The result has left many in Michigan’s Jewish community wary of El-Sayed and looking for outreach from him and his campaign to assuage their concerns.

“I think we both recognize it’s going to take Jeremy Moss voters and Abdul El-Sayed voters to vote for the same ticket to beat Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and MAGA extremism, and as we saw on Tuesday night’s results, there is a lot of overlap there,” Moss tells Slate. “But we’re going to sit down, and Abdul’s going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.”

As the political season turns from primaries to the general election, much has been made of the tension between centrist and progressive candidates. But some of those divides are more easily healed than others. Democratic differences over healthcare can be brushed aside by all parties involved, agreeing that their positions are superior to the GOP approach. Same with questions about policing or immigration or a host of other issues. But it remains to be seen if the divide in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be bridged when a growing number of Democrats no longer support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state—and when, at times, anti-Zionist rhetoric has spilled over into antisemitic rhetoric.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Finn Gomez/Getty Images, USA Today Network via Reuters Connect, Sarah Rice/Getty Images, and Getty Images Plus.

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The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy.

President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud.

The New York Times editorial board is tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion in the United States, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before Mr. Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but still a strong democracy. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran and Russia. Based on Mr. Trump’s statements and actions about the 2026 midterms, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — manipulating the law to stay in power— up one notch, to Level 3:

Together, Mr. Trump’s actions have left constitutional scholars and democracy experts anxious about this year’s midterm elections. They wonder if the Trump administration may use false pretenses to send federal agents to Democratic-leaning areas to intimidate people and suppress voting. Experts are also worried that after the elections, Mr. Trump may pressure legislators not to certify the winners, as he unsuccessfully tried to do after the 2020 presidential election. Even if he does not take these extreme steps, the gerrymandering campaign he has demanded has probably tilted the competition for control of the House of Representatives at least 2.5 percentage points in Republicans’ direction.

It remains unclear how far Mr. Trump will go this fall. He does often make statements that amount to little. But his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election should make clear that the threat is real. He has demonstrated that he prioritizes his own interests over the national interest. He is often willing to defy bipartisan traditions and even act illegally.

Politicians from both major parties and federal judges should be prepared to push back forcefully against any attempt he and his allies make to interfere with the 2026 elections. If the president succeeds in perverting the results, he will be emboldened to take similarly unconstitutional steps in 2028.

This editorial is our fourth version of the autocracy index, which we first published in October 2025. The updated version includes chronological lists of the antidemocratic steps Mr. Trump has taken in all 12 categories, and we plan to update them again in the months ahead.

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The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office

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For most of my adult life, I have noticed something odd. Some evenings, I can barely remember what I did that day. Ask me what I had for breakfast and you will be met with a blank look. On other days, I can tell you the details of interviews I did, the plans I made, which snacks I packed my daughter for school and how much of each she ate.

The difference between them doesn’t seem to correlate to how I slept. In fact, only one factor seemed to matter: how much I rested. I have long thought that, on days when I am rushing around, I am just more stressed, which may affect memory formation.

But there could be another reason: the role of rest itself.

We all know that a lack of restorative sleep impairs our cognitive abilities. When we are sleep-deprived, we can struggle to recall what we have learned, absorb new information and sustain focus. We may also be aware that resting while awake seems to partially restore our sleep-deprived minds.

Now, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are revealing how certain housekeeping and cognitive tasks that happen during sleep can also occur, to some extent, while we are awake.

This is “the last piece of the puzzle” that may answer why wakeful rest helps to fulfil some of the functions of sleep, says neuroscientist Thomas Andrillon at the Paris Brain Institute.

Local sleep

For decades, sleep was understood to be a global state that affects the whole brain at once. In deep sleep, the brain reverberates with slow brainwaves – in which neurons slowly cycle in sync between firing and silence – and mostly disconnects from the surrounding environment.

But in recent years, research has complicated that perspective. In 2011, a team of sleep researchers, including Tononi and his long-time collaborator Chiara Cirelli, also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a paper describing an odd phenomenon. When rats were sleep-deprived yet awake, their brains showed sudden bursts of sleep-like slow waves – but only in clusters of neurons at a time. The team called it local sleep and considered it to be part of a broader phenomenon that exists in various forms across the animal kingdom (see “Sleeping with part of the brain”, at the end of this story).

These bouts of local sleep were incredibly brief: a few hundred milliseconds, at most. But they had a noticeable impact. When rats were trained to reach for sugar pellets, they were more likely to fall short if their sleep-deprived minds had slipped into local sleep first. “If it happens at the wrong time, in the wrong area, you have impaired performance,” says Cirelli.

That isn’t just true of sweet-toothed rats. Humans also show local sleep states just before experiencing an attentional lapse. And we are more likely to experience both when we are tired, which is why doing something routine but with high stakes – like driving a car down a highway – can be dangerous when we are sleep-deprived.

But Tononi, Cirelli and their colleagues’ latest study, published in June, indicates there is an upside to local sleep.

In addition to describing local sleep, Tononi and Cirelli are known for coming up with one of the most compelling explanations for why we sleep: the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. As we take in information all day long, our brains form and strengthen thousands of neural connections. These connections are energy-hungry, so we can’t keep them all. Sleep, they posit, is when our brains go to work decluttering what we don’t need, which helps with storing what we do.

Could local sleep offer the same sort of housekeeping, just on a micro-scale? To find out, they genetically modified brain cells in mice so that a laser light could switch those neurons “on” or “off”, mimicking the pattern of slow-wave sleep. In one experiment, they put a local neural network to sleep in awake mice that were sleep-deprived.

Afterwards, they found that the part of the mice’s brains that had “snoozed” for 30 minutes showed reduced markers of synaptic strength – a sign that decluttering had already started – unlike the part that had stayed fully awake. They also noticed that, during global sleep later on, there was less slow-wave activity in the bit of the brain that had napped, presumably because its housekeeping function had already partly been done – which also indicated that local sleep seemed to have reduced that brain region’s need for sleep.

These changes in brain activity were also reflected in behaviour. Normally, if a mouse learns a new task and then is sleep-deprived, its later recall is diminished. But when, in a different experiment, the sleep-deprived mice had local sleep induced across multiple networks for an hour after learning something new, they remembered the task just as well as the mice that took an actual nap. “This is the first piece of evidence that suggests that local sleep can do the job of sleep, and not badly,” says Tononi.

Both Tononi and Cirelli are quick to point out that local sleep is no replacement for sleep in general. While they pushed the phenomenon to its limits in the laboratory to see what it was capable of – and what its underlying purpose might be – the fleeting bursts of local sleep that we experience in the real world aren’t the same as a night’s rest. If your brain can get to wo

rk on decluttering connections all at once, as in global sleep, that is clearly better and more efficient, says Tononi.

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Jason Ford

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We’ve all done the infinite scroll on the Netflix app, spending an hour looking for something to watch before giving up. Sometimes there are just too many shows to choose from. And the last thing anyone wants is to get a few hours into a series that’s not worth finishing.

To save your precious time, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite shows on Netflix. From some of the streamer’s most iconic flagship series, such as Stranger Things and The Crown, to reliable comfort watches including Younger and Scandal, the platform has something for everyone. We’ve also found underrated or critically acclaimed originals you can’t find anywhere else. We’ll let you know which series have just arrived or are about to leave, too, so you can prioritize your watch list.

Sometimes the best shows aren’t the ones that win all the awards; they’re just the ones that let you unwind and have fun. This week, we recommend Outer Banks, which is heading into its fifth and final season this week. The show is an action-adventure-mystery about a group of teens living is coastal North Carolina who are on a hunt for a long-lost treasure that might save their beloved home. The series introduced us to stars like Chase Stokes and Madelyn Cline and is a fun, breezy binge. And if you love entertainment industry inside jokes, check out all four seasons of the fun French series Call My Agent! The show is a wry look at the inner workings of a French talent agency, and a feature film version of the show will drop on Netflix in September.

If you’re looking for your next favorite series, here’s our roundup of some of the best shows you can stream on Netflix right now. And if you’d rather go with a movie instead, here are our picks for the best movies on Netflix.

Outer Banks (2020 to present)

Netflix’s original action-adventure series Outer Banks has been a massive hit for the streamer since it first premiered in 2020, and it’s coming to an end this summer. The show is set in a coastal town in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and pits the haves (the “Kooks”) against the have-nots (the “Pogues”). Naturally, the Pogues are the heroes of the story as the Kooks try to take what little land and assets the Pogues have left. And while all of that is happening, the Pogues, led by John B. (Chase Stokes) are constantly on a hunt for (literal) treasure, stemming from the disappearance of John B.’s father who was on a hunt for gold before he vanished. Check the show out now; the fifth and final season arrives on Aug. 20.

Call My Agent! (2015 to present)

The French series Call My Agent is about a group of talent agents at a fictional firm. Though the agents aren’t real, the show is filled with real celebrities playing often egotistical and difficult versions of themselves (almost all of them are French, you’ll see the likes of Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno appear throughout the series). The show consists of four hilarious seasons, and a feature film, Call My Agent! The Movie is arriving in September. If you’re a fan of inside-Hollywood style shows, it’s a fun option.

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Click the link below the picture for 55 more titles!

Netflix

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“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping analyst at Windward, a maritime analysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

“It’s extremely labor intensive to provide for that kind of persistent defense,” said Joshua Tallis, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

“Iran’s threat over the strait will remain significant for the foreseeable future,” said Mona Yacoubian, a director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

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The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, in a handout photo, conducting operations related to the Strait of Hormuz in April. The Navy has said it has about 20 warships in the Gulf of Oman.  Credit…U.S. Navy, via Getty Images

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