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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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For the first time in more than a decade, the Seattle Seahawks are playing in the Super Bowl—but what exactly is the team’s mascot? There’s no one bird officially dubbed the seahawk, but a few different species have taken on the nickname. Meanwhile, the team’s imagery and live animals at events seem to portray different bird species entirely.

The history of the name dates back to 1975, when fans suggested the “Seahawks” appellation for the city’s then-nameless team that would begin playing the next year. According to the government of Anacortes, Wash.—a city north of Seattle that claims to be the original home of the name seahawk for its high school mascot—the name arose as a nickname for the osprey because of its talons that are uniquely fit to catch fish. Ospreys go by other names, too, including river hawk and fish hawk, and they “embark on these long, arduous journeys and have to survive a lot of obstacles,” says Robert Domenech, executive director of the Raptor View Research Institute in Montana. “The Seahawks have had to survive and overcome lots of challenges and adversities to be able to make it to the Super Bowl, much like an osprey.”

Skuas, large predatory birds from the North Atlantic, have been referred to as seahawks as well. This species is known for its broad shoulders and its habit of aggressively attacking other birds—perhaps providing some inspiration for the team’s players as Sunday approaches. Skuas, however, are not technically hawks, because they don’t seize and grasp prey with their feet, Domenech says.

So do Ospreys or Skuas appear as the Seahawk mascot? The answer seems to be no: all different types of birds are used in the team’s imagery. The blues and greens of the Seahawks’ logo don’t match either species, with some saying the art instead nods to the brightly colored ceremonial masks of Seattle’s Indigenous communities. One ornithologist noted in 2015 that the logo looks strikingly similar to sea eagles, a group of birds including the bald eagle—the mascot for the 2025 Super Bowl–winning Philadelphia Eagles.

A live bird named Taima can be seen at some Seahawks games, but he is in fact an Augur Hawk, which could be because it’s illegal to use ospreys for commercial purposes. And finally, the Seahawks’ official costumed mascot, Blitz, does have an online profile to go by, but he claims no species—only that he’s 6’1” and loves reading, fitness, and bird-watching.

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Elon Musk sits comfortably at the top of the billionaires list as the world’s richest person.

Key Takeaways

• Despite an estimated net worth of $662 billion, Elon Musk supports the idea that money does not guarantee happiness.
• Musk advises people to focus on building useful products and services, saying that money should be a byproduct of creating value.
• Sociologist David Bartram suggests that at a certain threshold of wealth, money adds little value to people’s overall happiness.

With a net worth of $662 billion, Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He is also firmly at the top — the divide between him and the second-richest person in the world, Google co-founder Larry Page, is nearly $400 billion. 

Despite all of that wealth, Musk recently questioned the power of money to make life happier. In a post on X earlier this week, Musk wrote, “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.” The post has accumulated over 96 million views at the time of this writing. Musk did not elaborate further on what sparked his public musings. 

The Tesla CEO has spoken before about the role of money in his life. In a November conversation with investor Nikhil Kamath on the podcast People by WTF, he advised people to aim to be a “net contributor to society” rather than obsessing over how much money they make. 

“Aim to make more than you take,” Musk said on the podcast. 

He compared the pursuit of money to the pursuit of happiness, saying that if you make either your main goal, you will probably end up disappointed. Instead, he suggested focusing on creating useful products and services. “If you do that, then money will come as a natural consequence, as opposed to pursuing money directly,” he said. 

In November, Tesla approved a historic $1 trillion pay package for Musk that hinges on him meeting several product and financial milestones. The unprecedented pay is the biggest executive compensation proposal ever approved in corporate history. For Musk to receive the full pay, Tesla must hit an $8.5 trillion market cap, a feat never achieved before by any other company.

What experts have said about money and happiness

Sociologist David Bartram, an associate professor at the University of Leicester, told Business Insider that there is a link between wealth and happiness. Money does increase happiness, especially when people move out of poverty and into financial security. Higher income can reduce daily stress, improve health outcomes, and provide access to better housing, education, and leisure, all of which tend to boost life satisfaction, he said. 

However, Bartram cautioned that the relationship weakens as people become richer. These benefits follow a pattern of diminishing returns: each extra dollar matters less once basic needs and some comforts are covered. After a certain point, more money adds very little to how happy people feel day-to-day.

“Once you’ve got a few million, anything extra is meaningless for happiness,” Bartram told the outlet. 

Another expert, psychologist Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a contrasting take. He found in a 2021 study that happiness increased parallel to a person’s rising income, and there was no limit to the positive effect money had on happiness. So, the more money someone had, the happier they tended to be — no matter how much money they made. 

Killingsworth explained the findings to The Guardian, stating that he was shocked by the marked difference in happiness between those who are wealthy and those who are low-income. 

“If the differences in income/wealth are very large, the differences in happiness can be, too,” he told the publication. 

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This is the shift from AI as a tool to AI as an operator — and it changes everything.

What if your internet browser acted like a full-time employee — handling research, planning, and execution for you?

That’s exactly what OpenAI’s Atlas browser makes possible — and most people still aren’t using it.

And I’ll show you how solopreneurs are already using it to reclaim 40+ hours a week.

In this video, I’m breaking down eight plug-and-play use cases that solo entrepreneurs are using right now to scale toward six to seven figures and cut their workload in half:

• Content Creation: Identify breakout hooks, draft scripts, and organize everything into a single Google Doc automatically.
• Tab Chaos Killer: Ask Atlas what you were working on and instantly rebuild your workflow or automation plan from browsing context.
• Conversion Boost: Audit landing pages using the latest research and get a ready-to-run test plan for higher conversions.
• Inbox Cleanup: Auto-unsubscribe from dead senders and get a clean report of what changed.
• Inline Editing: Rewrite any draft in your tone of voice directly inside the page, no copy-paste needed.
• Smart Purchasing: Compare tools, gear, and software intelligently before you buy — save hours and avoid bad decisions.
• Content Intelligence: Scan Reddit, Substack, and YouTube to build next week’s posting plan based on real audience demand.

• SEO and Findability: Run compact audits for Google and AI search engines like Perplexity so people actually find your work.

Inside the video, you’ll learn:

• My full Atlas setup from blank browser → first automation
• The exact prompts I use to turn Atlas into a revenue-producing machine
• How to eliminate 40+ hours of manual work every single week
• Why “zero-click searches” mean your current business model must evolve now

The way you use AI just changed. This is how you build your edge before everyone else catches on.

The AI Success Kit is available to download for free, along with a chapter from my new book, The Wolf is at The Door.

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The reverend’s intellectualism and distinctive brand of man-up Christianity draws a wide audience to his church, the largest in New York.

One Saturday in mid-September, the Rev. A. R. Bernard took to the blue carpeted stage of the Christian Cultural Center, the 96,000-square-foot megachurch he built 16 years ago at the edge of Starrett City, in Brooklyn, with his usual accouterments: a smartphone, a bottle of water and a large glass marker board that he would soon cover in bullet points drawn from the playbooks of marketing specialists. Mr. Bernard, 63, is tall and slender, and on this day he wore a distressed black leather jacket, a white polo shirt, bluejeans and white tennis shoes — casual Saturday attire. On Sunday, you would find him impeccably tailored in a light wool suit and tortoiseshell glasses, looking more like the banker he once was than the pastor of a congregation of nearly 40,000.

Cameras on telescoping booms were cantilevered over the stage, which is bland and massive, like the set of a daytime talk show. It was the final morning of a weeklong women’s conference, and the female audience of more than 1,000 took out their own devices and cued up their Bible apps, poised to take notes.

When the pastor speaks, everyone takes notes, not just the younger congregants.

His church, the largest in New York City, has long been considered a required stop on the way to City Hall and beyond. Having served as an adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for all three terms, Mr. Bernard counts the billionaire among his many powerful friends. (In 2013, he flirted briefly with his own mayoral bid.) Mr. Bernard has met with the last two popes, and when Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, visited New York for the first time last year, he attended service at the church days before he addressed the United Nations. Mr. Bernard is a registered Republican, but he voted twice for Bill Clinton and twice for President Obama. The Clintons are old friends; they made sure to visit the church last spring in the days before the New York primary.

Mr. Bernard may have a reputation as a kingmaker, or “spiritual power broker,” as Bill Cunningham, the political consultant and former communications director for Mr. Bloomberg, described him recently, following a storied tradition of influential black pastors in New York City. But his tweedy intellectualism and distinctive brand of muscular, man-up Christianity also draw stars of pop music, film and sports to East New York.

He has been a spiritual adviser to Denzel and Pauletta Washington, and to the former pro football player Curtis Martin. Alonzo Mourning, a former pro basketball player, used to charter a plane to fly from Florida to attend Mr. Bernard’s services. Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who died last week from cancer, had been a congregant for decades, and his memorial service — his homegoing, in church parlance — was to be celebrated at the Christian Cultural Center on Saturday.

“He’s made me a better person through his teachings,” Pauletta Washington said. “My husband as well.”

Once a Nation of Islam follower and teenage civil rights activist who read Alan Watts and Krishnamurti before he read the Bible, Mr. Bernard presents more like a professor than a bible thumper. That he is a motorcycle-riding family man and father of seven sons as well as a martial arts devotee — inked into Mr. Bernard’s forearm is a Chinese character that translates as “the unfettered mind” — adds to his allure.

On that Saturday morning in Brooklyn, Mr. Bernard was writing swiftly on his marker board while the women in the audience called out encouragements. “You have a responsibility to get smarter,” he told them. “If you’re the smartest one in your group, get a new group. Develop your strengths. Manage your weaknesses.” As always, Mr. Bernard closed with this refrain: “Did you get anything out of this today?”

Then Karen Bernard, his high school sweetheart and wife of 44 years, stepped onto the dais and swiftly upstaged him. Though she has multiple sclerosis, she waved away the stool a burly security guard had brought for her and stood next to her husband, a smartly dressed figure in black patent leather platform shoes with stiletto heels, a delicate diamond bracelet circling her ankle. As her husband described the pneumonia that hit him hard last month — unlike Hillary Clinton, he was benched for two solid weeks — and how his wife had cared for him, Ms. Bernard scanned the crowd, eyebrows eloquently aloft, and said with perfect comedic timing, “Isn’t that what you do with a baby?”

Mr. Bernard winced as the crowd roared its approval.

Ms. Bernard is the not-so-secret sauce in Mr. Bernard’s global ministry. Their long marriage has been a touchstone in his preaching, and he has used their marital struggles as teaching aids. Mr. Bernard will tell you that his work has often been his mistress, and Ms. Bernard will just as quickly tell you how mad that has made her, and for how long (on this morning, she pinched his arm hard to make her point, which delighted her rapt audience).

In the early 1980s, Ms. Bernard miscarried twins while Mr. Bernard was on the road, she said. She blamed him for being absent, and she stayed bitter, she said, for a solid decade. “I thought about leaving him,” she said, but with seven sons, “I had nowhere to go. And my sons needed their father. And I loved him.”

It was after the Saturday service, and the Bernards were in the large, formal dining room of Mr. Bernard’s office suite at the church, an elegant, carpeted apartment with gleaming mahogany furniture that recalls the West Wing. There was a cadre of security guards brandishing walkie-talkies, along with a sizable crowd of family members, church employees and congregants, all milling about the many rooms, which are organized around a large, oval-shaped central hall.

“She had cause to walk away,” Mr. Bernard said, “but she stayed, and I really went to work on myself. I discovered a lot of things about myself I didn’t like. I’m a workaholic. I was all in. That’s when I began to develop teachings about men and men’s responsibilities. She hung in there, and things began to change, and the church just began to explode.”

The two met in high school in East New York, when he was 15 and she was 16. Mr. Bernard’s mother, Adelina Bernard, had been a Panamanian sprinter who qualified for the 1952 Summer Olympics but wasn’t able to compete because an affair with an older man left her pregnant, after which he rejected her and their son. She and Mr. Bernard moved to New York City when he was 4.

As a fatherless, brainy teenager, he found a heady, male-centric blend of activism and spirituality in the Nation of Islam. But when he was a young associate at Banker’s Trust, and a colleague brought him and Ms. Bernard to hear Nicky Cruz, once the leader of the Mau Maus gang, speak about his own conversion to Christianity, Mr. Bernard’s world was upended.

He and Ms. Bernard began to host a Bible study in their Williamsburg kitchen, and it wasn’t long before they figured out that Mr. Bernard was very good at preaching. A deft speaker who uses traditional pastoral tropes like call and response, Mr. Bernard crafts his 45-minute sermons like mash-ups of a university lecture and a Baptist revival, though Mr. Bernard’s church is pointedly nondenominational.

“Coming from a heavy black radical activism, to embrace Jesus was a major thing for me,” he said. “Christianity was the religion of the oppressor, so I had to work through what I knew historically.” Investigating the religion and its central text as an academic would, he began to realize, Mr. Bernard said, “that I had an ability to articulate what I was reading and studying in a way that was not common within any denomination. I also realized that banking was not going to be my life’s calling.”

By the mid-1990s, his church was so popular that it had rapidly expanded from a congregation of 685 to more than 10,000. People came from all five boroughs, as they do today, some traveling hours to do so, and were folded into three Sunday services held in a former Key Food supermarket building in Brownsville, around which lines would start to form as early as 4 a.m. Nightclub goers on their way home grew curious about the crowds, which further swelled the church’s ranks. You might run into Cheryl James and Sandra Denton, two of the members of Salt-N-Pepa, the hip-hop trio; Angela Bassett; or Kim Cattrall, who played the sultry publicist on “Sex and the City.”

In the late 1990s, Disque Deane, the real estate investor and leader of the partnership behind Starrett City, the country’s largest federally subsidized housing complex, approached Mr. Bernard with a proposal for a 15-acre parcel on the edge of his development. As the pastor recalled, “He said, ‘I have a billion-dollar complex I need to preserve, and I’ve been studying you and I want you to build a church.” Mr. Deane did not finance the deal, Mr. Bernard added; the church raised the money and bought 11½ acres. When the $12.6 million complex was nearly complete, Ms. Bernard looked around and told her husband, “It’s not big enough.”

Like the Rev. Floyd Flake, senior pastor of the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Queens, and the Rev. Calvin Butts, who leads the 200-year-old Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Mr. Bernard now commands an enormous, culturally diverse congregation made up of parishioners traveling from all over the state, Mr. Cunningham said.

“So he crosses a lot of lines, a lot of boundaries,” Mr. Cunningham added. “If you’re a politician and you have a message about jobs or the economy or crime and you’re addressing that megachurch, your message will ripple out to all these different communities.”

Initially, Mr. Bernard’s sermons about male responsibility were attracting a lot of young men, which in turn, brought in more women. Church congregations typically skew more female than male, but at one point more than half of the Christian Cultural Center’s membership was male. (Now the split is 60/40 female to male, like many college campuses.)

The meat of those sermons is collected in “Four Things Women Want From a Man,” Mr. Bernard’s second book, out last May. It’s a slight book, as self-help primers tend to be, but there are a few pearls. Mr. Bernard uses the bible’s first couple, Adam and Eve, as his central metaphor. Adam, alone at first, is a clueless workaholic; Eve, created by God to help Adam get his act together, has better people skills and can multitask, even though Adam thinks she’s a nag.

Man up, men, Mr. Bernard exhorts, or you’ll lose her. Echoing animal behaviorists, he suggests women offer positive reinforcement if their menfolk behave properly.

Mr. Martin, the former football star, is one male congregant who has been avidly following Mr. Bernard’s teachings; he said the pastor is both his friend and a father figure. “He is the single most influential male in my adult life,” he said. Now 43, Mr. Martin began attending his church in the late 1990s, when he signed with the Jets. “A friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy speak,’” he said. “And I just kept going back. I’m a very practical person, and I think he has a tremendous gift for making what is complicated extremely simple. He can talk about God in a way that makes you attracted to God so you don’t get lost in all the rules and regulations.”

Mr. Martin brought his friend Carra Wallace, now chief diversity officer in New York City’s office of the comptroller. She was coming off a divorce — “I like to say I married late and divorced early,” she said — and was attracted to Mr. Bernard’s teaching method: “You take notes, you’re able to study and think about it.” These days, Ms. Wallace attends the 8 a.m. service, an hour’s train ride from her home in Battery Park City. “You get your message in, and then you have your day.”

Mr. Bernard, who is the chief executive of his church, as well as its senior pastor (his six-figure salary is determined by a board), is at heart a practical evangelist. When it was reported in the run-up to the presidential election in 2012 that African-American ministers were encouraging their congregations not to vote because of President Obama’s position on gay marriage, Mr. Bernard bristled at being lumped into that group.

“Let me give you three powerful reasons why I would never tell my congregation not to vote: Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney,” he told a reporter on MSNBC, referring to the young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. “Don’t let same-sex marriage be the deciding factor.” He went on to give a meticulous, and theologically agile, mini-lecture on the separation of church and state, on why same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue, and how his own faith nonetheless requires that he obey its tenets.

Last year, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, Mr. Bernard delivered a sermon about how societal norms and laws change over time. “I used the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit as one example,” he said. “That’s the law, but most people are doing 65, so that’s the norm. If they hit 95, which is the extreme, the police will pull them over. Over time, cultural practices can move from extreme to norm to law.”

Change is a process, not an event, he likes to say.

This election year has come with its own challenges. In June, when Donald J. Trump’s team invited a group of evangelicals to advise the candidate, Mr. Bernard was among them. Mr. Bernard has since stepped away from that role, he said, because he felt more like “window dressing,” as he put it, than a genuine adviser. The two had met years ago, weirdly, at Maya Angelou’s 80th birthday party, where Mr. Bernard was the keynote speaker; the setting was Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which perhaps explains the unlikely pairing of that presidential hopeful with the poet and civil right activist.

“If I’m going to advise you,” Mr. Bernard said, “it’s because I’m going to really, genuinely advise you. O.K., politics is a weird game, I get it. But when I found out that no matter what we were saying, he continued the same path, I said: ‘You know what? I need to step back and remain neutral.’”

Ms. Bernard, with typical candor, said, “I never met Trump, but Trump just has issues, and it’s obvious he has issues.”

Two weeks ago, when Elena George, a celebrity makeup artist, was preparing Donna Brazile, the veteran political analyst now serving as interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, for her role on CNN’s round table after the first presidential debate, they phoned Mr. Bernard to join them in a prayer. “I told Donna, ‘We need reinforcement,’” Ms. George recalled.

“He quoted scripture,” Ms. Brazile said. “And it was helpful.”

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For American football fans, the Super Bowl is the crescendo of the sporting calendar. Even if your team doesn’t make the big night, watching the game is undeniably exciting, eliciting a combination of yelling, cursing, crying, drinking, praying, cheering, and—for some lucky fans—jubilation. That emotional roller-coaster is part of the fun, right? Well, not to rain on anyone’s parade, but the science suggests that big sports events like the Super Bowl could carry some hidden health risks.

All the excitement, unfortunately, doesn’t come without some physiological effects. Watching a game can raise your blood pressure and heart rate—and sporting events are linked to higher rates of cardiac events, such as heart attacks.

In one recent study, researchers found that fans of the German soccer team Arminia Bielefeld—which competed in the German Cup finals for the first time ever in 2025—saw their stress levels rise by 41 percent during the game compared with regular days. The results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports.

“This was a game of a century, kind of a Cinderella story,” says Christian Deutscher, a sports economics professor at Bielefeld University and an author on the study. Using smartwatch data, the researchers monitored fans’ heart rates and stress levels for 10 days before the game and for 10 weeks afterward. Over the course of the study, the day of the game was “by far” the highest-stress day, Deutscher says.

Fans who consumed alcohol tended to have higher heart rates, as did fans who watched the game in person compared to those who watched it on television. And after a heart-wrenching loss to VfB Stuttgart, stress levels among the Arminia Bielefeld fans stayed elevated throughout the day, the study found.

The results echo similar experiments involving American sports fans. In one 2009 study, for instance, researchers saw an increase in cardiovascular-linked deaths in Los Angeles in the days after the Rams lost the 1980 Super Bowl. And when the Raiders, then based in L.A., won the Super Bowl four years later, there was a decrease in all deaths.

The Super Bowl phenomenon parallels another holiday trend—the spike in heart attacks during Christmas and New Year, says Keith Churchwell, a former president of the American Heart Association. “For people with underlying disease,” the stress of these events “puts them at higher risk,” he says. At the same time, people are more likely to forget to take their medications for things like high blood pressure, heart rate, or cholesterol. Sports betting can amp up the stress, too, he says.

Watching sports in general isn’t harmful, however. Indeed, there’s solid evidence that sports fandoms can have positive psychological effects. “Like any pastime, there’s going to be pros and cons,” says Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University. “Sports fandom is not unique in that.”

According to Wann, people who identify with a local sports team often feel a greater sense of connection to others, which is correlated with higher levels of collective self-esteem and lower levels of loneliness. In a 2024 study, Wann and his colleagues surveyed sports lovers about what they get out of being a fan and found that many felt a keen sense of belonging.

“It gives you this ability to meet this innate need we have to belong,” Wann says. “We are very much social creatures.”

To enjoy this Sunday’s Super Bowl safely, Churchwell recommends fans make sure they take their regular medications, avoid drinking too much, and eat the healthiest foods possible—and get a good night’s sleep the night before.

For those of us most invested in the game—looking at you, Seattle and New England—a Super Bowl loss can hit hard. To ward off any negative mental health outcomes, Wann recommends that viewers try to remember their team’s entire season and keep in mind why they’re a fan.

“It doesn’t make the outcome less important,” Wann says, “but it gives them other reasons to understand that the outcome is not the only thing that’s important.”

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Today show host Savannah Guthrie posted a 22-second video on Instagram Saturday evening alongside her siblings, directly addressing those believed to be holding her 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie.

“We received your message, and we understand,” Guthrie said in part. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to u,s and we will pay.”

The Context

The video from the Guthrie children comes as law enforcement agents were seen towing a blue SUV from Nancy Guthrie’s neighborhood on the sixth night of their search. Guthrie was last seen at her home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, last Saturday.

Her disappearance has received national attention, including from President Donald Trump’s administration. The Pima County Sheriff, Chris Nanos, has said the matter is being treated as a criminal investigation, with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies assisting in the case.

Heith Janke, special agent in charge of the FBI Phoenix division, said at a Thursday press conference that the agency is aware of a ransom letter that was sent to local and national media outlets, and that, as with “every lead, we are taking it seriously.”

What To Know

Local outlets and national media reported receiving purported ransom communications, including an email demanding cryptocurrency, which authorities said they were treating as evidence while evaluating authenticity. CBS affiliate KOLD and TMZ reportedly received notes that investigators have not yet verified.

The ransom notes reportedly demanded payment in bitcoin and included a deadline of 5 p.m. Thursday, though it didn’t specify a time zone. If the payment wasn’t made, the note specified another deadline of Monday, investigators said Thursday. Janke confirmed at a Thursday press conference that authorities were aware of the ransom letter sent to local and national media outlets.

In the Instagram video released Saturday evening, Savannah is joined by her sister Annie and her brother Cameron:

“We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay,” Guthrie said in the emotional plea.

Investigators examined what officials described as apparent blood outside the residence and collected DNA samples from the home while noting they had not identified any suspects or persons of interest. NBC News reported that the samples were still being tested and that a technology issue with in-home cameras complicated the search for video.

Reporters from the USA Today Network observed dried blood droplets at the home’s entrance; the sheriff’s office did not confirm whose blood was present.

What People Are Saying

Savannah Guthrie, in an earlier statement posted on Instagram: “We believe in prayer. We believe in voices raised in unison, in love, in hope. We believe in goodness. We believe in humanity. Above all, we believe in Him. Thank you for lifting your prayers with ours for our beloved mom, our dearest Nancy, a woman of deep conviction, a good and faithful servant. Raise your prayers with us and believe with us that she will be lifted by them in this very moment.”

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters at a Monday press conference: “We believe now, after we’ve processed that crime scene, that we do in fact have a crime scene, that we do in fact have a crime. And we’re asking the community’s help.”

“We make a plea to anyone who knows anything about this, who has seen something, heard something, to contact us,” he added. “Call 911. We don’t need another bad, tragic ending. We need some help.”

President Donald Trump on Truth Social: “I spoke with Savannah Guthrie, and let her know that I am directing ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family’s, and Local Law Enforcement’s, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY. We are deploying all resources to get her mother home safely. The prayers of our Nation are with her and her family. GOD BLESS AND PROTECT NANCY! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

What Happens Next

The Guthrie family has pleaded publicly for proof of life and direct contact with whoever could be holding Nancy.

Investigators have advised anyone with information to contact the Pima County Sheriff’s Department at (520) 351-4900.

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Australian-born presenter, Savannah Guthrie, poses alongside her mother, Nancy Guthrie, during a production break whilst hosting NBC’s “Today Show” live

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President Trump has seemed immune to the usual rules of politics.

The man who once boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing support from voters regularly shatters political and legal norms at home and abroad, with few obvious consequences.

But every once in a while, Mr. Trump runs smack into whatever boundary remains and is forced to pull back, offering a glimpse into the country’s tolerance for his behavior.

The chaotic White House response to a racist video clip of the Obamas that Mr. Trump posted online was one moment where the administration realized that its usual reactions to criticism — laugh it off, double down, move on — would not work. And while Mr. Trump does not, as a rule, acknowledge wrongdoing — and did not in this case, either — he deleted the clip in the face of widespread outrage in what amounted to a remarkable climbdown.

“It is surprising, in itself, to ever see him take a step back to do anything other than, in the moment, double down and triple down, so in that sense it is surprising; it feels significant,” said Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who now serves as a partner at West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and strategy firm in Washington.

Mr. Trump still enjoys strong support from Republicans. The White House often points to a string of successes as evidence that, for all the controversy over the president’s style and his tactics, his strategies are working. European allies are on track to spend more for their own defense, which Mr. Trump demanded, and he has intervened in a number of overseas conflicts, including winning the freedom of the 20 living Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party and anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans will remain united together against the radical Democrats, who will destroy our country once again, if given the chance, with wide-open borders, noncitizens voting in elections, and horrible economic policy.”

It’s undeniable that Mr. Trump often skates through controversies that would have sunk any other politician. He continues to lie about having won the 2020 election and even a criminal conviction didn’t keep him from winning the presidency for a second time. In recent weeks, his administration threatened to shut down a major infrastructure project if it didn’t have Mr. Trump’s name on it.

Still, with the midterm election in November, Mr. Trump has been forced to backtrack — even if only by degrees, and even if only temporarily — at key moments, including on Friday when the White House moved to contain a bipartisan backlash over the video clip portraying the Obamas as apes. In another case, after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minnesota, Mr. Trump first justified the killing yet after widespread criticism, he toned down some of his language about Mr. Pretti’s death.

On Friday, the White House at first dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage” over an internet meme. But it soon became clear that Mr. Trump was facing a rebuke from members of his own party, starting with Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate and one of Mr. Trump’s close allies, who called the clip “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” From there, a chorus of criticism poured in from Republicans.

By midday, the White House had taken the post down and blamed an unknown “staffer” for the mishap. By the evening, Mr. Trump said he did not realize the clip of the Obamas had been spliced into the end of the video. Asked if he condemned the racist depiction of the Obamas, he said: “Of course I do.”

But he notably declined to apologize, saying it wasn’t his mistake.

In recent months, Mr. Trump also has walked back his positions on the violent crackdown in Minneapolis, which left two U.S. citizens dead, and his threats to take over Greenland “one way or the other.” He also clearly feels the heat over the economy as Americans express deep uncertainty about the cost of living.

Republicans, though, may be starting to realize that Mr. Trump has eroded support on issues like the economy and immigration, which typically have been strengths for the Republican Party.

“What Trump does not understand is that political gravity is political gravity no matter who you are and how dominant you’ve been,” said Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest critics among Republicans.

Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist based in Arizona, said the controversy carried additional weight for the party, which has long tried to make inroads with the Black and Hispanic communities. “He’s losing that. He’s now going to burn those gains to the ground.”

He said that although Mr. Trump did not apologize for the post, deleting it was as close as the president would get to acknowledging that it was wrong. And even that may be short-lived.

“He can’t admit a mistake, and therefore he cannot learn from the mistake,” Marson said. “So do I think this could happen again? 100 percent. Is this the last time that he posts or reposts something that is offensive and racially charged? I’m sure that it is not.”

Mr. Trump has a pattern of snapping back to his original stance after backtracking under political pressure. After the bloody rallies in Charlottesville, Va., during his first term, Mr. Trump bowed to pressure from his aides and condemned white nationalists.

A day later, he reverted to blaming “both sides” for the deadly violence.

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President Trump spoke about the video clip of the Obamas on his social media feed as he traveled on Air Force One on Friday. Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

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For years, scientists have viewed cancer as a localized glitch in which cells refuse to stop dividing. But a new study suggests that, in certain organs, tumors actively communicate with the brain to trick it into protecting them.

Scientists have long known that nerves grow into some tumors and that tumors containing lots of nerves usually lead to a worse prognosis. But they didn’t know exactly why. “Prior to our study, most of the focus has been this local interaction between the nerve [endings] and the tumor,” says Chengcheng Jin, an assistant professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study, which was published today in Nature.

Jin and her colleagues discovered that lung cancer tumors in mice can use these nerve endings to communicate way beyond their close vicinity and send signals to the brain through a complex neuroimmune circuit. They also confirmed the circuit exists in humans.

Setting up this circuit starts with a process called innervation, in which lung tumors wire themselves into the vagal nerves—the internal information highway that connects the vital organs to the brain. Within this highway, Jin’s team identified a specialized group of sensory neurons that communicate directly with the central nervous system. “Our study suggests that the tumor actually hijacks these existing pathways to promote itself,” explains Rui Chang, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine and a co-author of the study.

When a tumor develops, it employs vagal neurons to send signals screaming up to the nucleus of the solitary tract—the region in the brain stem that, under normal circumstances, keeps functions such as blood pressure, heart rate or digestion in check. The signal sent by the tumor exploits this system, much like malicious code used by a hacker.

Instead of recognizing the tumor as an invader that needs to be destroyed, the brain processes the signal and activates the sympathetic nervous system, mainly known as the driver of the fight-or-flight response. This sympathetic surge is caused by the release of noradrenaline, which, in the context of cancer, has catastrophic consequences.

The noradrenaline is released directly in the tumor’s immediate neighborhood, where it attaches to macrophages—the frontline cells of the immune system that identify, eat, and destroy threats. The macrophages are covered in docking stations called β2 adrenergic receptors, which normally tell the cells when to be aggressive and when to “chill,” preventing the immune system from destroying healthy cells. When the noradrenaline released by the brain-controlled nerves binds to these receptors, it effectively reprograms the macrophages to switch sides.

In this suppressed state, they start releasing chemical signals that act as a “do not disturb” sign for the rest of the immune system. This neutralizes one of the body’s most effective weapons: T cells, the specialized assassins that physically kill tumor cells. Because the brain has ordered the macrophages to create an immunosuppressive shield, the T cells lose their energy, stop multiplying, and fail to recognize the cancer as a threat.

“The authors characterized an entire bidirectional tumor-neural pathway that promotes tumor growth, with huge relevance to human health,” says Catherine Dulac, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.

Jin and her team also looked for ways to stop tumors from talking to the brain. By mapping this loop from the lung to the brain and back again, the researchers identified several new places where they could “cut the wire.” The study showed that blocking any part of the brain-tumor circuit reawakened the immune system.

“Obviously, the perspective for application to cancer treatment is extremely promising,” Dulac says. Jin and Chang say we’re still rather far away from translating their findings into therapeutic strategies, however.

“What we are talking about is going from a mouse model to human. I think there’s still a long way to go,” Chang says.

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