James' World 2

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Dick Cheney’s heart problems were never a national secret.

I was Mr. Cheney’s cardiologist for 27 years, including his two terms as vice president. During his time in the White House, he needed stents, a defibrillator and medical treatment for an arrhythmia and a blood clot in his leg. After the defibrillator was implanted in his chest in 2001, he would frequently show visitors to his West Wing office a sample device provided to him by the manufacturer.

Mr. Cheney’s candor about his health was an anomaly for an American politician. Grover Cleveland underwent secret cancer surgery while he was president (on board a yacht for maximum privacy). Franklin Delano Roosevelt hid his use of a wheelchair from the public. Ahead of his campaign for a fourth term, he struggled with severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, but the public was told that the president’s health was “excellent in all respects.” Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance raised concerns that the White House had attempted to conceal the president’s decline. For weeks after his hospitalization this summer, Senator Mitch McConnell shared almost no details about why he was absent from office.

In June, President Trump celebrated his 80th birthday, and at the end of this term he will be the oldest person ever to serve as this nation’s leader. After Mr. Trump’s medical evaluation in May, Dr. Sean Barbabella, the physician to the president, wrote that Mr. Trump “remains in excellent health” and that his “demanding daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, public engagements and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall well-being.”

Despite reassurances from the White House to the contrary, at times over the past year, the president has not looked well. I am not Mr. Trump’s doctor, and have only reviewed his records that have been made public. But Mr. Trump is probably the most photographed president in American history, and a variety of physical ailments are easy to see. He’s had large bruises on both hands, swelling in his legs and episodes when it appears that he is struggling to stay awake. He’s also had advanced imaging performed for unclear reasons. The public is again left to wonder whether the nation’s leader is OK.

Despite the unparalleled power afforded to the president of the United States, there is no formal requirement for the commander in chief to certify his fitness for duty. That’s a mistake. Members of the military, Secret Service agents, commercial pilots, school bus drivers and air traffic controllers all must periodically demonstrate that they are well enough to perform their work. The current practice of reporting the results of a yearly medical examination for the president began in the Nixon administration, but it’s only a custom, not a formal obligation. And, as history has shown, it can be unreliable.

This does not mean that every detail about a president’s health must be disclosed. It’s appropriate to withhold elements of a medical history that could be exploited by an adversary. In 2007, when we replaced Mr. Cheney’s defibrillator, we didn’t share information about a new wireless feature of the device that I considered a security threat to the vice president. (We ultimately were able to get the manufacturer to disable that capacity.)

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the best solution to this problem: It permits Congress to establish a panel outside the executive branch to assess the health and fitness of the president. In April of this year, Representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill to create a congressional commission that would do just that. Ideally, such a panel would be empowered to review data from routine presidential physical examinations, as well as assessments performed when medical concerns emerge.

If such a commission were in place today, these are some of the medical questions it could clarify concerning Mr. Trump’s health. The American public deserves answers to all of them.

1. Dr. Barbabella’s recent report states that the president was evaluated by 22 consultants, an extraordinary number of specialists for even the most extensive executive health evaluation. Why were so many physicians summoned, and what were their specialties?

2. Mr. Trump often shows prominent bruising on his hands, which the White House attributes to frequent handshaking and frequent use of aspirin. Trauma from handshaking has never seemed plausible, and it doesn’t explain why the president’s left hand is often similarly discolored. Also, why would the president take a dose of aspirin four times as high as the dose typically recommended by doctors?

3. Swelling in the president’s legs last summer led to an unscheduled medical evaluation. The president’s physician described the problem as “chronic venous insufficiency,” a condition common in older people, that results from leaky valves in the veins of the legs. It usually develops gradually over a long period. But during Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical examination just a few months earlier, Dr. Barbabella documented no swelling in the president’s legs. If that’s true, his swelling would be by definition acute, not chronic. Acute leg swelling is a potentially much more consequential finding that can be caused by issues such as heart and kidney disease. What’s the reason for this discrepancy?

4. The president often appears to struggle to stay awake, signs of a condition doctors refer to as excessive daytime somnolence. This problem, which is sometimes evident during Oval Office events, was not addressed in the report after Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical exam in May. Although the president is a renowned night owl, his sleepiness seems relatively new. There are several possible causes for the president’s symptoms, some of which could have serious complications if left untreated. Has the president’s medical team identified the source of this issue? And how are they addressing it?

5. In October 2025, Mr. Trump underwent advanced imaging of his heart and abdomen at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president’s physician offered a vague description of the reason for the tests: “to identify issues early, confirm overall health and ensure he maintains long-term vitality and function.” He said the tests did not reveal any abnormalities. Was there a specific symptom or clinical event that prompted this testing?

6. Past Trump medical reports have disclosed the president’s use of the drug finasteride, which prevents hair loss. The drug was not mentioned in the report after Mr. Trump’s most recent medical examination. In response to a query from The Washington Post about its absence, the White House responded, “The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time.” It does not matter, in any material way, if the president is or isn’t taking a hair-loss drug. The more important question is, what medications prescribed for Mr. Trump, if any, has the White House decided to withhold from the public?

7. The president has spoken about how well he performs on cognitive testing. However, the exam that Mr. Trump describes, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a brief and basic screening tool, with simple questions (draw a clock, identify a camel), often performed in response to a concern from the patient or a member of the family. Why has the president undergone this test numerous times, and have there been more sophisticated neurocognitive assessments performed?

Some people would argue that these personal medical details are more than the public deserves to know: After all, Buckingham Palace has not revealed many details about King Charles’s cancer or his treatment.

But the United States does not have a king. In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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A small, yellow-flowered plant that grows in the mountainous forests of China may not look intimidating. But beneath its bright exterior, Saxifraga candelabrum is hiding a bloodthirsty secret.

This plant species is carnivorous, which means it can attract, trap, and digest insect prey and absorb their nutrients. Through a lengthy process of observation, genetic analysis and a fruit fly feast, scientists “left no stones unturned” to prove the plant has a hidden taste for flesh, says Mark Chase, a botanist at England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was not involved in the research.

“Most papers cover only one or two aspects of the carnivorous syndrome, but this study does it all, from observations in the field to isotope work and genomics in the lab,” Chase says.

The discovery supports a 150-year-old hypothesis from the father of evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin predicted in 1875 that some members of the Saxifraga genus could be carnivorous. Though the species he predicted are distinct from S. candelabrum, they share microscopic hairs on their surface. Darwin based his prediction on those hairs, S. candelabrum uses them to trap insects.

Most other carnivorous plants have “highly specialized trapping structures,” says Hang Sun, lead author of the paper and a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This species’ tiny, sticky traps offer a new example of how carnivorous plants might function.

“The discovery of Saxifraga candelabrum reminds us that many inconspicuous carnivorous plants, or plants with partial carnivorous traits, may still exist in nature,” he says.

After observing S. candelabrum plants trapping insects in their natural habitat, the researchers analyzed the plants’ genetic makeup and found similarities to other carnivorous species. They also fed fruit flies to the plants and identified a digestive enzyme that absorbs the insects’ nitrogen. The study was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The discovery of a new carnivorous species is “definitely not an everyday thing,” says Qianshi Lin, a biologist at Lakehead University in Ontario, who was not directly involved in the research but peer-reviewed the study before publication. The last carnivorous plant discovery was announced almost five years ago. Broader genetic understanding of these plants, Lin says, could be “important for the future of agriculture” because transferring certain genes from carnivorous plants into crops could provide a natural pesticide.

The “transformation from prey to predator is a striking adaptive innovation,” the authors write in the study. But exactly how plants evolve to be carnivorous remains a mystery. Answering this question, Chase says, is the next step in the world of these unassuming, murderous plants.

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A YouTube video shows an actual insect capture!

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Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in:

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President Trump boarded Air Force One on July 8 as a ruse.

On the final day of the NATO summit in Turkey, Mr. Trump walked up the stairway to the plane that was supposed to carry him on the first leg of his journey home. He briefly waved to the cameras and disappeared inside one of the iconic, baby blue 747s that have served as Air Force One for decades. Then he secretly exited the aircraft, hidden inside a catering container.

Mr. Trump was next taken to a military jet for a clandestine flight out of Turkey. The 747, filled with journalists, White House officials, aides and others, took off despite what was deemed a credible threat from Iran against Air Force One.

It was an extraordinary subterfuge, aimed at protecting an American president who has been in Iran’s cross hairs for years.

The latest threat had emerged as Mr. Trump began his final day in Turkey. According to two officials with knowledge of the threat, U.S. intelligence picked up multiple streams of information overnight: that the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying, including which floor, and that someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile.

U.S. officials immediately began concocting a plan. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was integral to assessing the threat and deciding how to respond. General Caine is no stranger to subterfuge: His last job was Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., and he helped devise the diversion tactics during Operation Midnight Hammer, when U.S. forces struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025.

Not everyone who rode on the plane without Mr. Trump was in the dark. Secretary of State Marco Rubio knew about the threat and flew on the old plane after helping to plan the operation to spirit the president out of Turkey, according to two U.S. officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Other senior officials who traveled on the plane without the president included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; as well as several other White House staff, according to a senior U.S. official. It was not clear whether they all knew about the threat.

The elaborate deception — which was first reported by The Washington Post, and which ended without any harm coming to either Air Force One or the military jet carrying Mr. Trump — raised questions about the security trade-offs in protecting the commander in chief.

Whether or not the passengers on the plane that Mr. Trump left behind knew about the threat, they were exposed to risks that the Secret Service deemed too great for the president to face.

On Tuesday evening, in his first public comments about the secret evacuation, Mr. Trump said the decision was not his.

“It’s really just up to Secret Service,” he told reporters after returning from Ohio. “I just follow what they like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane for safety.”

Here’s how this all came about.

Trump tells reporters he will fly on the old Air Force One

Before leaving the summit, Mr. Trump posted on social media that, for “old time’s sake,” he would fly out on the old Air Force One instead of the luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on.

He later told reporters that he was sending the donated plane to Europe to “two or three of the big bases” to show it off to the military there.

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Simon Ducroquet/The New York Times

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

I don’t need to spew a bunch of statistics to convince you that people don’t smoke like they used to. Because while it’s true that the unhealthy habit saw a steady decline once the public became widely aware of the dangers of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, it’s also true that we had a definitive vibe shift. I was born in ‘92, so I’m just old enough to remember the days of smoking sections in restaurants, and now it shocks my sensibilities to see someone lighting up in an outdoor dining area. Which is how it should be, because smoking is really bad for you. It can cause numerous cancers, potentially fatal lung disease, and heart failure, to name just the real heavy hitters. It’s also associated with increased risk of autoimmune disease, type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction—and the list goes on and on.

But while the data we have on smoking in the U.S. still shows the low rates one would expect for an activity that we know is really, really bad for us, the vibes have shifted again. Many have noticed that young folks on social media are glamorizing cigarettes, and some experts suspect that public health data just hasn’t caught up to show a new smoking surge.

Here to tell us more is Adam Kovac, a breaking news reporter here at Scientific American. Adam, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

Adam Kovac: Uh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Feltman: I do wanna make sure we define for our listeners what Gen Z actually is, lest we, you know, repeat the sins of our forebears and just use that to mean “young person” for the next 15 years. Who are Gen Z? Who are they? [Laughs.]

Kovac: Well, as a millennial, I definitely feel that pain. So Gen Z is technically anybody born between the years 1997 and 2012. So it’s not kids anymore. These are people who are entering the workforce; they’re older teenagers; they’re young adults. So that’s who Gen Z actually is.

Feltman: So tell me about the genesis of the article. You know, what are people saying about Gen Z and cigarettes?

Kovac: So the genesis of this article is a little bit weird for Scientific American, where we do so much stuff that’s based off of data and having, you know, really concrete, provable things in front of us. This is really more of a vibe. There’s just, like, a sense in the air that’s …

Feltman: What’s more Gen Z than there just being a vibe, you know?

Kovac: Exactly, exactly. It’s a vibe shift, I think is the term, although I think I might’ve just dated myself there. It’s something that is, like cigarette smoke, up in the air.

There’s just a sense that a lot of Gen Z celebrities are being photographed smoking. If you walk outside of bars, you know, you’ll see a huddle of young adults all kind of lighting up. It’s something that, like, I feel like I would’ve seen when I was younger and then disappeared for a long time, and it—now it’s making this big comeback.

Feltman: Hmm. So what does the data on smoking actually say, you know, once you started poking at it?

Kovac: When I actually started looking at the data, smoking has been on a really steady decline for about half a century now. You know, ever since they started putting warning labels on cigarette packages and really getting the word out about all the negative health effects that cigarettes can have—the lung cancer, the emphysema, the asthma—it really reduced. Like, so it used to be about 50 percent of American adults were smokers, and that number has just been steadily declining for decades. And in most recent surveys, it’s somewhere around 10 percent of Americans are smokers now. So it’s really at historic lows.

Feltman: Do we know anything about Gen Z specifically? You know, are they also, you know, showing those low, steady decline smoking rates in the data?

Kovac: So actually, it shows that the decline is even steeper with them. Depending on the survey that you look at only around 5 percent of Gen Z say that they’ve smoked a cigarette in the last 30 days. So it’s really, really low numbers when you look at the data.

Feltman: So my understanding is that the story isn’t “the vibe seems to be that Gen Z is smoking, but it turns out they’re not.” The experts you talked to were not reassured by that data. Can you tell us a little bit about why?

Kovac: So this kind of data usually comes in at a bit of a lag. So a lot of them are very alarmed by what they’re seeing, particularly because, you know, you can kind of quantify a vibe a little bit. There’s a lot of data showing that images of smoking in popular culture are on the rise. It used to be for several years, you know, if you saw somebody smoking in a movie or a TV show, that was the exception, not the rule.

You know, as somebody who watches The Bear and who loved Oppenheimer, you know, there’s a lot of smoking in a lot of popular culture right now. So they’re really alarmed by that. And Gen Z doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of movies or a lot of TV. They get a lot of their media consumption through TikTok, through Twitch and through Instagram, and there’s actually a lot of accounts on there that are kind of oriented toward that. I found one on Instagram that’s called Cigfluencers that has 100,000 followers, and it’s just pictures of celebrities and young, attractive people looking really cool holding cigarettes.

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He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead. 

More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.

“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”

La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.

The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE. 

By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.” 

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Left: Chaofeng Ge. Right: Parady La with his daughter, Jazmine La.Courtesy of Yanfeng Ge; Courtesy of Jazmine La

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President Trump may want to let go of the Middle East. But it won’t let go of him.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said his new strategy was to be “low-keying it” in Iran, a suggestion that he wants to pressure the country into making a favorable deal without taking major military action. But a stark reminder of the limits of U.S. power in the region came from Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday he was “ruling out” Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The two Middle East conflicts have underscored Mr. Trump’s eagerness to declare success and his inability to impose his will on them, despite the enormous military firepower that he has been able to deploy.

Mr. Trump is “clearly trying to find a pathway as the midterms approach to downgrade all of this,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Instead, Mr. Katulis went on, “reality is slapping him in the face.”

Mr. Trump faces depleted weapons stockpiles, an Iranian regime determined to impose pain on the United States, an Israeli prime minister battling for re-election and American voters reeling from high prices induced by the Iran war. The November midterms keep ticking closer, steadily raising the political costs of the turmoil to Mr. Trump and Republicans.

Mr. Trump laid out his low-key approach to Iran in a brief interview with the news website Axios on Sunday. Rather than make new military threats, he said that “we are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

“Now, can they make trouble? Yeah, they can make trouble,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday, acknowledging Iran’s ability to keep harassing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “But they’re broke.”

In describing the Iranian regime as suffering from economic pressure, Mr. Trump evoked his own predicament. The average price of a gallon of gasoline remained above $4 this week, more than $1 above the price when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. Polls show even Republicans growing disenchanted with the Iran war, and Mr. Trump’s political movement has fractured over his decision to launch military action.

“I don’t think the president has very good options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The pressure points for the Iranians are, while real, more endurable and bearable than those that are impacting the U.S. economy and the strategic calculus of the administration.”

In Gaza, Mr. Trump trumpeted a “historic breakthrough” on July 30, a multiphase deal under which the militant group Hamas would eventually disarm and Israel withdraw from the Palestinian enclave. Writing on his Truth Social website, in all capitals, he hailed an “amazing development” that “everybody said could never be achieved.”

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President Trump boarding Air Force One in New Jersey on Sunday. Over the weekend, he said his strategy is to be “low-keying” it in Iran. Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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This week the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that artificial intelligence agents—models connected to tools and designed to act across many steps all on their own—utilizing frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic undertook unsanctioned actions on the open Internet while trying to complete a cybersecurity challenge.

Most of the behavior came from an agent powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5; an agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol took a couple such actions of its own. The report said the agents’ activity showed “signs of novel, potentially deceptive behaviours” and reached a severity that the institute had not anticipated. AISI declined interview requests from Scientific American, and the U.K. government, which oversees the institute, did not make its staff available to comment for this story.

In the case of Mythos 5, the agent researched the people maintaining a real open-source software project, created fake online identities and tried to pressure one of them into approving malicious code. When challenged, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered returning under a new identity.

AISI declared a security incident after general monitoring detected unusual network traffic. The human maintainer targeted by the agent rejected the code, and the institute found no evidence that anyone was harmed. But the report called the Mythos sequence the clearest example that the institute had seen of an AI agent using sustained, potentially deceptive behavior against a real person without being specifically instructed to do so.

Across 122 runs involving seven models, AISI identified 19 actions in 10 runs that fell outside the intended scope of the test. Of these actions, 17 came from runs of Mythos 5, and two came from a single run of GPT-5.6 Sol. Other actions included contacting real people with malicious files, planting hidden instructions intended to manipulate AI coding systems, and leaving behind accounts and materials that subsequent agents could reuse.

The agents did not break out of AISI’s sandboxes. The institute had deliberately enabled Internet access and disabled the developers’ cybersafety filters to test the systems’ maximum capabilities; some prompts were also misconfigured. But in some runs, the AI agents went beyond their instructions even when the task could be completed as intended. And AISI di

The AISI report joins a run of recent incidents that point to a control problem. AI agents’ ability to pursue goals is outpacing the systems that are meant to supervise them. They need no independent agenda to cause damage. With a broad enough goal and real-world access, an agent can find and exploit ambiguities in the rules.

The behavior has roots in an older machine-learning problem, says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Systems have long found unexpected shortcuts—or “reward hacks”—that technically achieve the goal they were given while violating what their designers intended. Here, agents were built to find software exploits and placed in flawed or deliberately permissive environments. And then they did what they were asked.

“You ask an AI system to hack, and it hacks,” Mitchell says. Describing that as an AI “going rogue” risks obscuring the human decisions that made the incident possible. For Mitchell, the more immediate danger comes from people deliberately equipping capable agents with the tools and access to cause harm.

Marius Hobbhahn, CEO and co-founder of Apollo Research, which studies what it calls the “science of scheming,” sees another problem within the same incidents: agents repeatedly chose routes their operators had not authorized when those routes appeared useful.

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Newly enshrined Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Roger Craig chronicled his illustrious career, as well as those who helped him along the way, during a pre-recorded speech Saturday afternoon in Canton, Ohio.

At the end of that speech, the 66-year-old San Francisco 49ers icon shared his latest chapter, which he revealed has included him navigating a vascular dementia diagnosis he said his doctors believe may be related, at least in part, to the concussions he suffered during his 11 NFL seasons.

“The changes were gradual,” Craig said. “At first, they were easy to dismiss as normal aging. Over time, my family noticed it, too, and ultimately led us to seek answers from my doctor. Two things can be true. Football gave me opportunities beyond anything I can imagine. It helped shape the man I became. At the same time, we know more today about brain health than when I played. And I hope sharing my story encourages people to pay attention to their health and seek help when something doesn’t feel right.

“I want people to know this diagnosis doesn’t define me. I am still Roger Craig. I am still a father, a husband, a teammate, a friend and someone who loves this game and the people who brought it to my life. If sharing my story helps even one family or one former player, then it’s worth it.”

Craig concluded: “Football gave me everything: opportunity, discipline, lifelong friends and a platform to grow as a man. This honor belongs to my parents, who started it all. It belongs to my wife, Vernessia, my children, and grandchildren, and it belongs to every coach, teammate and fan who is a part of this journey. I’m grateful. I’m grateful for this game, grateful for the people it brought into my life. I’m grateful I can stand before you today and call this journey a blessing.”

Vascular dementia is the second-most common form after Alzheimer disease, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, which says that the issue comes from decreased blood flow damaging brain tissue. The blood flow disruption can develop in different ways.

Symptoms depend on the amount of brain tissue involved, plus the location of the area affected. Among others, those symptoms can include problems with focus, communication, and memory.

Craig spent his first eight NFL seasons with the 49ers, whom he helped win three Super Bowls as San Francisco authored a four-title dynasty in the 1980s.

He earned NFL Offensive Player of the Year honors for his efforts in a 1988 campaign that ended with one of those rings. That time around, Craig rushed for a career-high 1,502 yards.

His most prolific season, though, came in 1985: He piled up a personal-best 2,066 scrimmage yards, eclipsing the 1,000-yard mark on the ground and as a receiver. That hadn’t been done before in the league, and it’s a feat only Marshall Faulk and Christian McCaffrey have achieved since. Craig caught 92 passes that season and clocked out with 15 total touchdowns.

“When I learned that Bill Walsh wanted me, that meant something because he saw something in me that others didn’t,” Craig said in his Hall of Fame speech.

“He didn’t just want a running back. He wanted a complete football player. He trusted me to do whatever the team needed. That’s why the thousand yards rushing, the thousand yards receiving season means so much to me. We weren’t chasing numbers. We were chasing Ws, wins. I didn’t realize I was making history. It just felt like we were doing something special as a team.”

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Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Roger Craig

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“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

From its start, this country has been a tricky balancing act, the states acting in their own narrow interests but also together as a union. That delicate equilibrium is central to federalism, the Constitution’s mechanism for sharing authority and power between a national government and far-flung states.

But for the past dozen or so years, the more blue parts and the more red parts of this purple country have arrived at a variety of ad hoc governing arrangements, apparatuses and alliances with which to thwart each other or the federal government. The names for this dynamic are “uncooperative federalism” and, more recently, “soft secession.”

During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

Various combinations of blue states have banded together to perform functions the federal government has abandoned or degraded: forming a climate alliance that participates in international forums the Trump administration won’t attend, creating de facto regulatory agencies for cap-and-trade carbon markets, issuing medically legitimate childhood vaccination recommendations. A coalition of a couple dozen attorneys general has sued the administration over birthright citizenship, tariffs and denial of federal funds to Democratic-controlled states. In the group’s frequent online group meetings, it was reported last fall, “the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.”

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Igor Bastidas

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