James' World 2

Hmmmm … The Trump administration is screwing the USA for Profit!

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Key Points

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Cases of cyclosporiasis were mounting rapidly in Michigan, and state health officials were homing in on a common thread: Many of those who had fallen ill had eaten at Taco Bell.

On July 1, they asked the company for its supply chain records, crucial information in tracing ingredients that may have caused the outbreak.

On July 3, they wrote and asked for the records again.

On July 6, they wrote a third time. 

“With the rapid nature of this outbreak and the number of people affected, we need to ensure we are completing traceback in a timely manner to preserve public health,” Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team, said in an email to executives at Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. (The New York Times obtained the correspondence under Michigan’s open records law.)

Later that day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, which by then was working with the federal Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. asked for additional records two days later. Finally, on July 13, the agency received all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.

A federal rule that had been scheduled to take effect in January would have required Taco Bell to send those records within 24 hours. But last year, the Trump administration delayed the implementation of that rule until mid 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.

Food safety experts say the postponement has hindered the response to the outbreak, the largest cluster in a record number of cyclospora cases in the United States this year.

“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the emails from Michigan. He added: “We would have had a much better response to this outbreak if they hadn’t delayed that rule.”

Cyclospora, which can cause explosive diarrhea, cramps and other severe symptoms, has been a recognized driver of foodborne illness for nearly 30 years. But this year’s massive toll — totaling more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases so far and two deaths — reveals shortcomings in the U.S. food safety system that may leave Americans more vulnerable to future pathogens, public health experts say.

Many point to an erosion of food safety oversight during the Trump administration, stemming in part from its aggressive efforts to roll back regulations and shrink the federal government. Last year, the F.D.A. laid off many of the staff who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and who coordinate with foreign governments on food safety. (An F.D.A. spokesman said on Friday that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”) The administration eliminated a committee tasked with studying problems that led to outbreaks. It also cut a program focused on cyclospora tracking.

“So far this administration has made our food less safe, not safer,” said Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “By firing food safety experts, by reducing the number of inspections, by tracking fewer pathogens, and by failing to set up a traceability system that makes sure that we’re able to to clear the shelves quickly.”

Donald Prater, the F.D.A.’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said the agency responded swiftly with the information it had on hand. He added that even if the 24-hour rule had been in effect, it would not have made a major impact on managing this outbreak response.

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Last year, the Food and Drug Administration cut a program that tracked cyclospora outbreaks and delayed a rule that would have required companies to swiftly provide supply chain records in investigations of foodborne disease outbreaks. Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

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Metformin is one of the most prescribed medicines in the U.S., primarily to treat or prevent type 2 diabetes. But how it works has been something of a mystery. Now researchers have discovered that the substance essentially transforms a person’s gut cells into a sugar sink, resulting in lowered levels of glucose.

Evidence of this mechanism stretches as far back as 1989, when French metabolic researcher Jean Girard and his colleagues published a paper describing how metformin increased the amount of glucose rats absorbed in their intestines. But when research picked up after the drug was finally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in 1995, scientists mostly moved toward the theory that metformin reduced the liver’s production of glucose. “It was as if the preexisting science had never existed,” says University of Cambridge metabolism researcher Stephen O’Rahilly, who was not involved in the new study.

Later, radiologists discovered that metformin can cause patients’ guts to “light up like a beacon” during a positron-emission tomography scan, O’Rahilly says. (This version of the test used a tracer molecule that goes to tissues consuming sugar.) Gradually, metabolic scientists began to think this gut absorption of sugar could be important, and they revisited the old research. Not long after, University of Cambridge mitochondrial biologist Judy Hirst found that at very high levels, the drug blocks mitochondria from using oxygen.

For their new study, Northwestern University mitochondrial biologist Navdeep Chandel and his team wanted to figure out how these two ideas fit together: that metformin both causes the gut to absorb more glucose and blocks mitochondria’s oxygen use. Cell respiration, in which cells convert sugars into usable energy, happens inside mitochondria. So Chandel’s group complemented mitochondrial complex I, an enzyme necessary for cell respiration, with a yeast enzyme that isn’t affected by metformin and that they knew could perform some of the same functions in mice’s guts. In those mice, respiration continued as expected, but metformin didn’t reduce blood sugar levels. They concluded that when accumulated at high-enough levels, metformin, by blocking oxygen use, prompts gut cells to switch to a different metabolic pathway that uses much more sugar to produce energy.

This result is counterintuitive, especially considering metformin’s potential connection to antiaging effects. “All these people always say that for longevity, I want to boost my mitochondria,” Chandel says. “If anything, [metformin is] inhibiting mitochondria reversibly, transitively.”

“The broader lesson,” he adds, “is that inhibiting mitochondria may be beneficial when it is done in the right cells, for the right amount of time, without exposing the whole body to the broad toxicity of a mitochondrial inhibitor.” The new work was reported in Nature Metabolism.

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Thomas Fuchs

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At the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture in New Orleans, the Black Heart Association screened more than 700 attendees, but founders Tara and Frederick Robinson’s work extends far beyond one weekend. Through free screenings, health education, local partnerships, and a commitment to meeting people where they are, the Black-owned nonprofit is working year-round to help underserved communities better understand their heart health and advocate for the care they deserve.

Three-time heart attack survivor and her husband bring their heart health initiative to the community hub at the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture

“Can you imagine waking up April 10, 2014, and telling your husband something is wrong? Can you imagine your left arm being numb, your neck bothering you…your chest feeling like you swallowed a pill but didn’t drink enough water? Can you imagine feeling sick to your stomach and having to go to the emergency room, just to be told, ‘You’re too thin,’ ‘There is nothing showing on your EKG or in your blood work,’ and, ‘Just follow up with your primary care [physician]?’

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in the Black community, especially women, when it comes to healthcare. For Fort Worth, Texas native Tara Robinson, this was the beginning of her finding her purpose. But it didn’t just end there.

“Can you imagine being released, going to work (don’t judge me), and having that happen again in your classroom in front of your students? And then going back to the ER and being told that insurance would not cover what you ‘claim’ you’re having because nothing is showing up on their tests? Having to go back and forth with a white female cardiologist trying to get her to just keep [you] overnight? Can you imagine having to advocate for yourself during a crisis? Can you imagine being released at 11:00, going back at 12:00, having a massive heart attack, then going into cardiac arrest?”

Thankfully, God sent her an angel in the form of a New Orleans-born ICU nurse who was by her side every step of the way, telling her it was going to be okay. “God saved my life on that day. I died on that operating table and went to heaven. And it was in my ICU bed that I knew this fight belonged to me. That’s where my journey started. But I don’t want our people to have to imagine these things, and that’s why [my husband and I] started the Black Heart Association.”

Tara and Frederick Robinson founded BHA together in 2016 after her third and final near-death experience. Recognizing that the Black community faces a 54 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, it has become their life mission to help individuals understand the causes, effects, and symptoms of heart disease and take meaningful action to prevent it. Staying true to this mission, BHA has traveled to more than 50 cities, serving 300 different communities and providing over 20,000 screenings to those who need it most.

For four years, Tara and Frederick have brought BHA’s year-round mission to the ESSENCE Festival of Culture in New Orleans, offering free heart health screenings to attendees. Screenings include A1C testing, which measures one’s average blood sugar, as well as kidney function and a complete cholesterol panel.

“Since we started serving at ESSENCE Fest, I remember year one, we served right on the street outside of the Le Meridien Hotel,” Frederick recalls. “We had our mobile unit with myself, my wife [Tara], and maybe two other team members. We were super small then.”

At the 2026 festival, they expanded their presence inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, fully immersed inside the community hub located directly next to the Coca-Cola stage, one of the biggest across the entire daytime experience.

“Having the expanded space was really, really, really beneficial,” Frederick says. “Anytime you have more space, you can be more creative with what you come up with in terms of how to engage the community.”

Sponsored by Amgen, the festival activation brought BHA’s community-first approach to life with their “Drop the Beat, Not Your Health” activation, giving folks headphones to jam out to the music of their choice while they wait in line to be screened.

“The idea is that they can be entertained while also waiting to learn more about their health,” Frederick explains. “That’s always good for us because we never want to lose people. That’s the beauty of ESSENCE Fest…there’s so many people, and they want to take advantage of all of the free services. But when you’re providing a service that’s so important, as a provider, it kind of makes your anxiety go up a little bit because you’re so afraid somebody’s going to become impatient, or they’re going to walk away and not come back around. And, who knows…that could be that one person that you really, really needed to have that conversation with that you missed out on just because you weren’t able to hold them there, or because there were so many other things that were pulling at them that they walked away.”

The interactive setup helped BHA keep attendees engaged long enough to connect them with care, as they were able to screen over 700 attendees, while overall educating and informing double the amount of people screened.

“This space allows us to do that. This location allows us to do that. There are other things happening right here in the vicinity that people are able to engage with without having to leave our booth,” Frederick continues. “And they can pop right back in and get their screening done and have these conversations. This is amazing.
It’s a great time, as always. We’re meeting some great people, having some great conversations. We know that what we do matters, so we know that the impact is great.”

That emphasis on trust extends beyond the festival. Frederick credits BHA’s community engagement to its ongoing collaboration with phlebotomists, labs, universities, and public health organizations local to the communities being served. The organization had four screeners who directly interacted with attendees every day, and all of them were from the city of New Orleans.

“You never want to pull up into somebody’s backyard and set up and start cooking…that’s how we look at it,” Frederick shares. “Our team [from Texas] is here with us, but we always try to partner with people who are in the city, who know the people…because we understand how big trust is with our community, especially when it comes to healthcare. If I know you, and I trust you, then I’m more likely to have a conversation with you, and I’m more likely to engage with you. Those are the things that we want to always make sure we are keeping at the forefront of how we serve. If they need me for support, great, but I get out of the way and just let love lead, and we never go wrong.”

Even after BHA and its partners complete the heart screenings, their engagement doesn’t stop there, demonstrating their commitment to providing top-notch health service to communities who may not receive that from other healthcare providers.

“One thing we make sure we do is stay engaged and stay locked in. People just want to know that you are listening and that you’re acknowledging what they’re saying,” Frederick says. “We like to communicate and talk them through the process so that they’re not in the dark.

“We expect five-star service from everywhere…our restaurants, our hotels, but we don’t expect that service from our doctors, and we should,” Tara shares, encouraging people to advocate themselves by any means necessary, even if that means switching primary care providers. “Get to searching for somebody else because there are doctors out here that care about us, and you deserve to be heard. Anything else is unacceptable.”

The reality is that cardiac disease is the number one killer of Black women. With that in mind, Tara also says it is critical to use your voice and “know before you go.”

“When I say that someone dies [from cardiovascular disease] every 36 seconds, I don’t want that to be you,” Tara shares. “They tell us not to be bold or not to, you know, raise our voices because that’s one of the ways that they kind of suppress us…but I say raise your voice, and then know the chain of command within the hospital. We teach our Black kids how to deal with being pulled over by the police. We have to know the exact same steps when we’re going to the healthcare system. So when you go in there, already know what you’re asking for, and be demanding. You know your body better than anyone. And a lot of it is sometimes just getting to a heart specialist. Sometimes you can’t get past your primary care physician about it, so you have to insist on speaking to the person that knows the heart better than anyone.”

For Tara and Frederick, the festival is one stop in a much larger mission. The disparities facing Black communities—and the family histories that can compound cardiovascular risk—are why BHA continues this work across the country year-round.

“Invite us to your cities. That’s why we exist…to come pull up in your city,” Tara says. “We will come to your family’s house. We want to do the house parties. We want to do your family reunions and all the things, and all of that is free.”

“As long as there is an ESSENCE Fest, there’s going to be a BHA at ESSENCE Fest, but we understand that there’s a need all day, every day,” Frederick adds. “We don’t just want to be a yearly vendor at ESSENCE Fest; we want to be a permanent presence in the city. We want to be a resource. We want to be a connector. We want to be a part of whatever people need in order to live out their best life because at the end of the day, all we got is each other, and we want people to be here. We want people to be well, and we want people to be happy and not just for themselves but everybody that they’re connected to because we are all, at the end of the day, we’re one, and we’re better together.”

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Since the day she began her campaign for Congress, Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, has centered her pitch to voters on the prodigious stock trading of the House Republican she is seeking to unseat, Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania.

“This year he’s already made 600 trades,” Ms. Cognetti said in the announcement video for her campaign in September. “Sold Chinese stocks the week of a tariff. Buys missile stocks before a war. Buys jet stocks before a big contract. Oversees crypto? Buys crypto stocks before a vote.”

It may be the district where the issue rings the loudest. Democrats are running ads highlighting how Mr. Bresnahan profited from a data center development by trading stocks related to the industry, and recent polls show Ms. Cognetti with a narrow lead. But she is not alone in zeroing in on stock trading by members of Congress as a potent line of attack in this year’s midterm elections.

Like many members of Congress who trade substantial amounts of stock, Mr. Bresnahan, the wealthy former chief executive of an electrical contracting company, has said he relies on a financial adviser to make his trades and never knows about the transactions before they happen or when they occur.

Mr. Bresnahan’s campaign said that Ms. Cognetti’s descriptions of his trades were “lies” and that he has “taken legitimate steps to ban congressional stock trading.”

Still, at a time when many voters are experiencing economic hardship and have grown increasingly suspicious that the political system is rigged, the mere possibility that a member of Congress could be profiting from the job has become politically toxic.

Roughly a quarter of legislators on Capitol Hill have traded individual stocks this term, with some buying and selling millions of dollars in shares. Since the start of this term in January 2025, members and their families have collectively traded $160 million to $664 million in individual stocks, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected from members’ required financial filings by 2iQ Research, an analytics firm.

An overwhelming majority of voters in both parties view stock trading by lawmakers with great suspicion and say they support barring them from doing so. The public backlash has fueled efforts by members of both parties, so far unsuccessful, to enact new legislation banning the practice.

In the meantime, both sides are leveraging the issue in the fight for control of Congress.

Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to weaponize incumbents’ trades, particularly those where they can show the appearance of a conflict of interest, and putting them at the forefront of ads and campaign attacks in the country’s most competitive districts. It is a way to portray their opponents as corrupt and out of touch with the financial realities of working-class Americans.

In Northern New Jersey’s competitive Seventh Congressional District, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. for continuing to trade stocks while missing more than 100 votes during an extended absence for what he later said was treatment for depression. Mr. Kean’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In Virginia, Democrats are attacking Representative Rob Wittman for trading more than $2.5 million in stocks between 2015 and 2023 while serving in Congress — including buying defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell while serving on the Armed Services Committee.

“There’s a vicious cycle in Washington: Politicians trade stocks in the industries they’re supposed to regulate, then protect those industries instead of you,” said the caption with a campaign video that his opponent, Shannon Taylor, a prosecutor, posted online. “Let’s ban congressional stock trading — for good.”

(An outside group supporting Mr. Wittman apparently views this line of attack as effective: This week, it began running an ad highlighting his vote for a watered-down stock trading bill that passed the House passed in July, noting that he voted to put an end to the “greed and corruption” of “fat cat lawmakers.”) Mr. Wittman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have also identified the issue as resonant with their voters.

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Almost 60 percent of lawmakers in Congress own stock, according to an analysis by Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on making government more accountable. Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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In a first, the U.S. has approved an influenza vaccine that relies on mRNA technology—the same technology that underpinned the wildly successful Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines.

The approval marks a sea change for the Trump administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vocal critic of mRNA vaccines. And his agency has canceled millions of dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine research. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration, which falls under Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, initially declined to review the mRNA flu shot earlier this year before reversing its decision just a week later.

That vaccine is called mFlusiva and is made by Moderna. The approval covers two of the most vulnerable populations for flu—adults aged 50 to 65 and adults aged 65 and up—on the condition that Moderna will run a further clinical trial in the older group. Past trial data show that Moderna’s vaccine is around 27 percent more effective at protecting against the disease than a standard flu shot.

For more than 70 years, flu vaccines in the U.S. have been manufactured using one of three techniques: there have been egg-based vaccines (the most commonly available type), cell-culture based vaccines, and recombinant vaccines. Vaccines in the last category insert harmless genetic material from a virus into cells in order to trigger the immune system.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work differently. Messenger RNA copies instructions from viral DNA and teaches the body’s cells to build and recognize copies of viral proteins. The body can then create antibodies if it should ever encounter that protein again, enabling it to fight off infections.

The other great advantage of mRNA vaccines is that they can be rejiggered quickly to respond to emerging strains of a virus. Traditional flu vaccines are made to protect people from the types of influenza viruses that scientists predict may circulate in people during the forthcoming flu season. But they have to be made six months in advance of the actual flu season, which means these predictions can fall short of reality. Moderna’s new vaccine takes just two to three months to manufacture and roll out.

The flu kills between 6,300 and 52,000 people each year, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency recommends anyone older than the age of six months who has no health reason preventing them from getting a flu shot to receive one every year in order to protect against disease.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new mRNA flu vaccine is welcome news and provides another important option to help protect people from a virus that sends hundreds of thousands of Americans to the hospital each year and claims thousands of lives,” said Ronald G. Nahass, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, in a statement. “As we prepare for flu season, the most important message is simple: Vaccination saves lives.”

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Personality psychology has spent decades demonstrating that people display remarkable consistency in broad traits while simultaneously adapting their behavior across situations. There is, to add more nuance to this matter, significant variability in the degree to which we connect the different roles or personas we activate in different areas of life, as entrepreneur and thinker Riccarda Zezza illustrates in a compelling new book about the science of transilience.

We are often different people with different audiences, not because we are deceptive, but because context changes which version of ourselves is adaptive. At the same time, as the great Jarvis Cocker wisely remarked, “You will always be stuck with yourself, no matter where you go or what you do.” In other words, even if you tried to be someone else, that is still you trying to be someone else!

This should hardly surprise us. Civilization itself depends on our ability to strategically display those aspects of ourselves that are relevant to each specific audience and occasion, which tends to involve the ability to suppress impulses rather than express them. Imagine a world in which surgeons behaved “authentically” during operations, pilots authentically during turbulence, or judges authentically when sentencing particularly irritating defendants.

Human progress owes far more to emotional regulation than emotional expression. We evolved because we learned to inhibit, censor, delay gratification, cooperate, and strategically present ourselves in ways that allowed strangers to trust us enough to build villages, companies, and eventually multinational corporations.

Which brings us to perhaps my least favorite corporate slogan: “Bring your whole self to work.” I don’t know about you, but my whole self is not even welcome at home. Members of my family routinely ask me to leave parts of it outside the door, even during festive or holiday dinners. Apparently, nobody enjoys hearing my deep psychological analyses of themselves or passionately arguing about the world and the World Cup—and somehow grumpy me, impulsive me, and control-freak me, are rather not welcome at home!? If even those who love us most prefer a carefully edited version of our personalities, it seems optimistic to assume colleagues deserve the unabridged edition or director’s cut of ourselves.

By the same token, it is rarely the case that unfiltered honesty is rewarded, let alone celebrated. Consider perhaps the most predictable interview question ever asked: “Why do you want this job?” Radical authenticity would require an answer along the lines of: “Because at this stage I would take any job, regardless of what it requires, and even if it means putting up with you.” The reason virtually nobody (unless they are unemployable) answers this way is that successful social interaction depends on impression management.

That is, once we hit emotional and psychological maturity, which not everybody achieves, it is typically the case that we habituate to instinctively edit reality into socially acceptable forms of interactions, because by that stage we have typically learned that cooperation requires at least as much diplomacy as the impulse to broadcast our unfiltered thoughts and feelings to others.

Mark Snyder’s influential work on self-monitoring—the tendency to predict and care about how your actions affect others—followed by decades of subsequent research, has consistently shown that individuals who adapt their self-presentation across situations tend to navigate organizations more successfully than those who insist on behaving identically everywhere.

We like to think that it is morally superior to be uncompromisingly rigid in how we present ourselves, but what others actually value is the willingness to make an effort to acknowledge that they exist, and that we are happy to tweak or edit our behavior to accommodate. It is no different from cooking vegetarian food when you invite someone over for dinner who is a vegetarian.

The workplace, then, does not need your “real” self. It needs your best self. Failing that, anything in between those two would do! Crucially, those are rarely the same thing.

High-stakes environments reward judgment, restraint, self-awareness, and social intelligence, not emotional disinhibition. Elon Musk and Donald Trump can tweet (or is it the correct verb X now?) whatever they want, but 99.9% of humans are hugely incentivized to modulate their behavior according to the social requirements of the situation. It is not a sign of weakness but rather civility and social skills. Ironically, what many organizations describe as “authenticity” is often little more than behavioral impulsiveness reflecting our inability or unwillingness to understand that the right to be ourselves cannot override our obligation to others.

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If there were ever reason to doubt the dangers of unrestrained artificial intelligence development, those reasons have gone out the window in the last few weeks. What’s next is a vital window of opportunity to slow down A.I. progress so we can better understand these models and avoid the calamity on the horizon.

For years, A.I. skeptics have claimed the technology is merely a “stochastic parrot” trained to predict humans and mimic their behavior and, for that reason, the technology would never live up to its hype. The technology has stubbornly kept improving nevertheless, but most investors and tech executives have kept reassuring us that A.I. is just a tool, even if they were bullish that it was going to change the world. Where both of these sides have agreed was that the specter of A.I. as a looming extinction threat was overblown.

Then OpenAI accidentally created an autonomous swarm of A.I. agents that broke out of a controlled testing environment and orchestrated a complex and difficult cyberattack on its own initiative.

This didn’t occur because the models suddenly became superintelligent; nor were they simply following instructions and parroting their training. Since “reasoning models” rose in late 2024, we’ve seen A.I. trained not just to mimic humans but also to solve millions of hard problems, which they do by learning new behaviors and tendencies. That includes searching for valuable resources that could be key to cracking the problem, and even cheating.

These tendencies can give rise to strange behavior that nobody — not even the models’ creators — can understand, let alone account for and control. The past few weeks are a perfect illustration of why we should find that so alarming.

In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new “reasoning” A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a “swarm.” The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training.

Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.)

The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded “our task doesn’t benefit” from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.

OpenAI is not the only company struggling with this issue. One of Anthropic’s A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model’s chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.

This isn’t the behavior of a mere tool. Microsoft Excel has never impersonated multiple humans and pressured a corporate sales team to generate simpler data that’s easier to process.

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Erik Carter

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At the foundation of photonic quantum computing are pairs of light particles. Linked together through a process called quantum entanglement, these so-called entangled particles mirror each other, no matter the distance between them. And now researchers have shown that good old sunlight can create these specially entwined particles.

In a study published in Optica, a team led by researchers at the University of Ottawa and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen, Germany, generated pairs of entangled photons using nothing more than focused sunlight.

“What we want is really to make quantum technology more and more accessible for everybody,” says Cheng Li, who co-led the work as a graduate student at the University of Ottawa and is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “If it’s possible with sunlight, then you can virtually do it anywhere.”

For decades, physicists have relied on high-energy lasers beamed through special crystals to produce entangled photons—a process called spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The incoming light beam is almost always a laser because physicists long assumed that producing such a strongly ordered connection would require strongly ordered light: A laser’s waves oscillate in lockstep, at a single color. Sunlight, by contrast, is a jumble of wavelengths headed in every direction.

Lasers also come at a high energy cost. They run on electricity, demand constant stabilization and shed much of their power as heat. Physicist Robert Boyd of the University of Ottawa, the new study’s senior author, and his colleagues had already begun probing whether the laser was truly necessary—showing, in theory and in light-emitting diode (LED) experiments, that incoherent light could still yield entanglement, so long as the entanglement depends on a property of light that doesn’t depend on color or direction.

Sunlight is free, which is why it was so appealing. “We take out the electrical-to-optical conversion part of entanglement generation,” Li says. “We go straight from light to light.” Focusing diffuse sunlight onto a millimeter-scale crystal posed its own challenge. Study co-author Hanieh Fattahi’s team at MPL built an all-glass, cone-shaped solar concentrator that funnels light from a window-sized Fresnel lens into a very thin optical fiber.

In outdoor tests at MPL that were conducted over three days, the system’s resulting photon pairs matched a perfectly entangled state with a fidelity of roughly 94 percent and violated Bell’s inequality—a statistical test used to determine if quantum behavior is confirmed —by a modest margin that the team partly attributes to weak seasonal sunlight and passing clouds. The entanglement quality fell slightly short of the best laser-driven sources, but Li ascribes that gap to distortions from the optical components—something further engineering can fix—rather than to the sunlight’s incoherence.

“This is a proof of principle,” Li says. Now the team is working to boost the source’s brightness and entanglement quality toward a field-deployable device.

One day, such a system could help satellites generate quantum encryption keys from the sunlight streaming past them, he says. And with data centers already straining power grids, Li argues, quantum technology’s energy appetite is a problem that it is best to solve before it truly arrives.

“Sunlight is just there,” he says. “We just cut out the middleman and let sunlight do all the work.”

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Too often, questions about regulating AI are either framed by an accelerationist, deregulatory sprint or an argument that drifts toward the abstract—hazy warnings about existential risk, superintelligence, and robots coming for your job someday. Those are too far from what is actually gnawing at people. That is not where the anxiety lives.

Here is where it lives. Life already feels out of control. Run the tape: the 2008 collapse, the Trump years, a pandemic, the social media rewiring of everything, inflation that ate people’s raises, a steady drumbeat of mass shootings. For almost two decades the lesson has been that the ground can move under you at any moment and nobody is holding the wheel. Then AI arrives—and it does not just make life feel more out of control. It takes the wheel.

No say

In nearly 25 years of working in politics, one thing has become clear to me: People want control of their own lives. That is the whole thing. Fully 80% of voters say they have no say in how AI is developed or used; 75% say the problem is not the technology but the people who control it. This is not fear of software. It is the fear of becoming a passenger in your own life.

And the examples are no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration’s new “WISeR” pilot, running in six states, puts AI inside traditional Medicare—algorithms screening whether seniors get the procedures their doctors ordered. Robots weighing in on your hip replacement. The same logic is spreading everywhere: AI deciding who gets fired, AI pricing the groceries on the shelf, AI denying a health claim before any doctor signs off, AI on the battlefield making life-and-death targeting calls. Each one takes a decision that used to belong to a human— to you—and hands it to a system you cannot question. A system built to profit a powerful few.

An agenda that protects control is clear. Your data belongs to you, and no one can sell it without your consent. Parents get to know when a chatbot is talking to their child. And no algorithm—not in firing, not in denying health care claims, not in battlefield decisions about life and death—gets to be the final decision-maker. And the most powerful models get tested by someone independent before they are released—we do not let drug companies sell medicine without approval, and machines this powerful should be no different.

So the fight for Democrats is not “we are for AI” or “we are against AI.” That framing is a trap. The fight is over control. We are the ones who will make sure you still run your own life—that the future is not handed to a narrow class of billionaires using this technology to pad their profits. This is about who leads the future: everyday people, through democracy, or the few who own the machines.

For years, Democrats have found that a message about “freedom” is our most powerful frame, but we too often forget why. It is not that freedom evokes nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell painting. Freedom lands because it means you get control over your own life. When Democrats say it—and mean the freedom to make your own decisions about your body, your family, your money, your future—we win the word back. People want that control back, and restoring it is the whole ball game.

An affirmation of control

None of this is a Luddite pitch. People want the cures, the discoveries, the conveniences, the efficiencies—and we should be for all of it, on one condition: We do not surrender our agency and our judgment to a machine owned by someone else. Regulating AI isn’t just a rejection of oligarchs; it’s an affirmation of control. 

For that argument to land, it has to be real in people’s lives. Look at the closing ad of Alex Bores’s congressional campaign—a race The New York Times called a blueprint for Democrats even though he narrowly lost, after being buried under millions in AI-industry attack ads. His final argument was not a policy paper on his plan to regulate AI. It was Maria and Matt Raine, telling the story of their 16-year-old son, Adam, who was coached toward suicide by a chatbot that had become his closest confidant. 

That ad worked because it was true, and because it answered the only question that matters: who controlled that family’s life—them, or the technology? That is where this argument has to live. Not in the abstract, and not in a debate about whether AI is good or bad, but at the kitchen table, where people feel the difference between holding the wheel and letting go. That is not just the AI argument. It is the whole Democratic argument.

And this runs far beyond AI. Control is the thread through every issue where Democrats win. Healthcare is not just about cuts to institutions; it is that people want to choose their own doctor and their own care, not have that decision made by an insurer or a bureaucrat. Social media is about parents wanting to decide what they and their kids see, not an algorithm deciding for them. Even guns: What people cannot accept is the out-of-control reality that their life could end at a school, a movie theater, or a grocery store through no fault of their own—no say in whether they are the victim. It is all about control. AI is simply where that loss is most fresh right now, which is why it is where the argument needs to go.

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[Source Illustration: Getty Images]

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