Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s foreign minister said on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for all commercial ships, but uncertainty remained after President Trump declared the U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports would remain in place.
Iranian pushback: Iran’s top negotiator said the strait would close if the United States continued its blockade, adding to the uncertainty.
Negotiations: President Trump’s public comments raised hopes that negotiations with Iran were going well enough to sustain the cease-fire as they worked on a long-term peace deal.
Trump extends sanctions exemption on some Russian oil as high gas prices persist.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that the U.S. government would not renew the sanctions exemption on Russian oil already at sea. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
Just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States would not extend a sanctions exemption on the sale of some Russian oil, the Treasury Department did just that on Friday, issuing one for about a month.
The renewed license will be in effect until May 16 and supersede the sanctions waiver on Russia that expired on April 11.
Trump has made numerous exaggerated and unverified claims over the course of the war since it began on Feb. 28. He has long called for zero uranium enrichment in Iran, and asserted at a Turning Point USA event on Friday that Iran would “never have a nuclear weapon.” Iran has previously offered to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, but has said it could never accept Trump’s zero-enrichment position. Experts have also said that retrieving Iran’s 970 pounds of enriched uranium would be a complex, lengthy process that would likely take longer than the reported 60-day window for American and Iranian negotiators to strike a deal.
Ghalibaf also said in his social media post that President Trump made seven false claims in a single hour. It was not clear which of the president’s claims he was refuting. Trump has been on a media tear all day, including saying that Iran had agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again and that the country would coordinate with the United States to send its enriched nuclear stockpile abroad. Both of those claims were denied in statements from Iranian officials. Ghalibaf said that Iranians would not be affected by what he referred to as media warfare and attempts to engineer public opinion.
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An anchored tanker off Muscat, Oman, last month, as the Strait of Hormuz was functionally closed by Iran. Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Doctors have been drilled for decades on the four big risks for heart disease, which kills more Americans every year than any other illness. The fearsome foursome: hypertension, smoking, high levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes. Yet for just as long, cardiologists have seen patients who have none of these problems die from heart ailments. And the heart specialists haven’t had the slightest idea why.
Up to a quarter of the people admitted to hospitals for heart attacks don’t have any of these four risk factors. Mysteriously, these “low-risk” heart disease patients actually have the worst outcomes. A 2023 analysis found that hospitalized acute coronary patients without any of the four hazards were 57 percent more likely to die compared with those who had at least one.
If the big known risk factors miss one in four patients, they still predict trouble as expected for the remaining three. That’s a good record. But it also means that of the roughly 920,000 Americans who die of cardiovascular disease every year, about 230,000 of them will have done so for no understandable reason.
This deadly puzzle has haunted cardiologist Paul Ridker for years. “I remember saying to myself that there must be some other fundamental determinant of heart disease,” says Ridker, who is director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dozens of studies and clinical trials later, Ridker thinks he has found the missing piece. His work, along with that of other researchers, now suggests that chronic inflammation—a prolonged and body-damaging state of immune system activation—may be the hidden factor that accelerates cardiovascular problems to a dangerous and deadly state. When cholesterol builds up in the arteries, it shape-shifts into a sharp and jagged form the body no longer recognizes, provoking the immune system to wage war against it and blood vessels. It is a battle with no winners, and the wreckage it leaves behind ends in heart attacks and strokes.
Initially treated with skepticism, this idea now is becoming widely accepted by other scientists. Heart disease is “a disease of inflammation,” says Kathryn Moore, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. And in the fall of 2025, the American College of Cardiology recommended that health-care providers routinely screen patients for inflammatory proteins.
If inflammation drives cardiovascular disease, then calming it might protect the organ beating in our chests.
The concept brings with it renewed hope for heart therapy. If inflammation drives cardiovascular disease, then calming it might protect the organ beating in our chests. In June 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new use of an inexpensive, inflammation-reducing drug for an old disease—gout—to treat patients with heart disease. In a 2020 clinical trial, researchers showed this drug, colchicine, could reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other complications by a dramatic 31 percent. And this big decrease was mostly among patients already taking the standard cholesterol-lowering medications: statins.
But this treatment is not without controversy. Some recent studies of colchicine have not found protective effects, and many cardiologists are reluctant to use it. Ridker and other researchers are now testing different anti-inflammatory therapies with more precise modes of action. Although questions remain, many researchers believe this shift—seeing the vascular system not as a series of clogged pipes but as battlefields of inflammation—could transform public health and save millions of lives.
For many decades, the dogma among doctors and scientists was that atherosclerosis—the buildup of fatty substances, including cholesterol, in the arteries—was a passive, almost mechanical process, an inevitable by-product of aging. “We were taught that the plaque buildup in arteries was sort of like rust in a pipe,” says Jean-Claude Tardif, a cardiologist who directs the Research Center at the Montreal Heart Institute.
Yet there had been hints over the centuries that inflammation might play an active role in the process. In the mid-1850s, German pathologist Rudolf Virchow peered through his microscope at diseased blood vessels and saw angry, inflamed tissue within the plaques. In 1913, Russian pathologist Nikolai Anichkov wrote that he fed rabbits a high-cholesterol diet and found their arteries teeming with white blood cells, now known to be key markers of inflammation. For the most part, researchers interpreted these findings as evidence that inflammation might develop in response to atherosclerosis.
But it was also possible that things worked the other way around. Inflammation is a complicated process. It’s the body’s built-in alarm system, activated when the immune system senses that something untoward is happening. The body recruits immune cell soldiers to the scene, which launch an attack against any unwelcome intruders and cells they’ve infected. That’s why your throat gets red and swollen when you have the flu. Sometimes this alarm system becomes overzealous—fighting too hard or too long—and ends up harming the body’s healthy tissues in the process.
Pontiff denounces leaders who invoke religion to justify war, after US bishops offer him support after Vance remarks
Pope Leo XIV has said that the world is being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” who spend billions on war, in comments that will be seen as another sharp escalation in his almost week-long feud with the White House over the US-Israel war on Iran.
The first American-born pontiff did not mention Donald Trump by name, but used his speech in Cameroon on Thursday to denounce world leaders that invoke religion to justify violence against other nations.
His comments came as US bishops offered their full-throated support to the head of the Catholic church, who has been under fire from Trump for days after speaking out against the Iran war.
“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” Leo told a gathering at Saint Joseph Cathedral in the western city of Bamenda.
“They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.
“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters,” said the pontiff, who is on an 11-day tour of Africa.
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Pope Leo laments world ruled by ‘tyrants’ after Trump attacks
Thousands of displaced families flooded the main highway to southern Lebanon on Friday, hours after a 10-day cease-fire pausing Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah went into effect.
The fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has threatened the fragile halt in fighting between Iran and the United States until next week. The Lebanon cease-fire removes a major hurdle to ending the U.S.-Iran war because the Iranian government has insisted that the truce extend to Lebanon.
When the war began, Abdullah Raouf Hamzieh, 54, had to leave his home near Bint Jbiel, a town in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah and Israeli forces have clashed in recent days. He recalled feeling ecstatic when the 2024 cease-fire was announced, and said it felt like it was a win for Hezbollah. But as Israeli forces continued to strike Lebanon in the year since, his enthusiasm faded.
“It actually wasn’t a victory; it was a disaster what happened,” Hamzieh said. Now, he hopes that the temporary truce will finally lead to a more lasting peace.
Many Lebanese, especially those displaced by the war, still feel uneasy and uncertain about the days to come. Unlike the cease-fire in 2024, which was indefinite, this one is for only 10 days.
“If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be; it would be devastating,” said Israa Jaber, 54, as she sat in her car waiting in traffic heading south to her home in the town of Srifa. Jaber’s 9-year-old daughter Lamis, said she missed her teddy bears and her makeup, which she left at home in their rush to flee last month.
In Qasmiyeh, a town on the highway that runs along Lebanon’s coast, Lebanese army soldiers are using excavators to repair a bridge that links the road from the north to the south. The crossing has become the main bottleneck as thousands of people try to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.
Over the past month and a half, Israeli forces bombarded all of the main bridges on the Litani River, which divides northern and southern Lebanon. They hit the bridge in Qasmiyeh again yesterday, hours before the ceasefire was announced.
There have been heavy Israeli airstrikes in Dahiya, the dense area on the southern edge of Beirut. Ahmad Lahham, a Dahiya resident, expressed defiance on Friday and criticized the Lebanese government for trying to end to the fighting.
“I am standing in front of my destroyed house, you think I care? I don’t,” said Lahham, 48. He added: “They want peace with the enemy, and we still have blood on our ground.”
Some in northern Israel criticized the truce after it was announced on Thursday, arguing that it would do little to remove the threat posed by Hezbollah. “This is what it is like to have a government that cares about America’s interest, and not that of its citizens,” David Azoulay, the head of the Israeli border village of Metula, wrote on social media.
The cease-fire has brought relief to many in northern Israel, which faced intense Hezbollah rocket fire in the current round of fighting. These rocket launches continued into the last hour before the cease-fire went into effect at midnight. At least eight people were injured in the city of Nahariya on Thursday, according to the national emergency service.
After the cease-fire went into effect at midnight, thousands of displaced families hoping to return to their homes flooded onto the main highway to southern Lebanon. But since Israeli forces destroyed the two bridges connecting the highway to the south over the Litani River, vehicles have to snake one by one along an ad-hoc dirt crossing. That bottleneck has created four lanes of stand-still traffic that stretches for more than two miles. “We will make it home. Even if we have to walk, we will go home today,” said Ali Roumieh, 41, as he sat in his car.
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Celebrations broke out in Lebanon after its government agreed to a 10-day cease-fire with Israel. In both Israel and Lebanon, some people remained wary that the truce would hold. Credit Credit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
It may be April, but for most of the country, summer feels very much like it’s already here. This week, East Coast states will see unusually hot days, with temperatures in some major cities reaching as high as the 90s Fahrenheit (mid-30s Celsius).
New York City could experience daytime highs in the mid-80s F (around 30 degrees C), according to the National Weather Service (NWS). In Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, it could hit the 90s F. Richmond, Va., is expected to reach 94 degrees F (34 degrees C) on Wednesday.
The scorching temperatures are driven by an area of high pressure across the eastern U.S., with wind flow from the South and not a lot of cloud cover, says Maryland-based NWS meteorologist Frank Pereira. A low chance of storms, which can help break the heat, is also not helping.
Wednesday is expected to be this week’s hottest day in much of the mid-Atlantic. The NWS has warned that parts of North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania will have a “moderate” risk of heat-related health effects such as heat stress, with pockets of “major” risk around Washington, D.C.
“This is impressive heat for mid-April, arriving weeks earlier than we typically see in many cities,” said Matt Benz, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, in a statement. “Early-season heat can hit harder than people expect because it arrives before routines, clothing, and outdoor plans have adjusted to summerlike conditions.”
In New York City, for instance, April temperatures in Central Park typically fall somewhere in the 40s and 50s F (single digits to mid-10s C), according to data collected by the NWS dating back to the late 1860s. The highest April temperature ever recorded in the park was 96 degrees F (36 degrees C) in 1976 and 2002.
This year has already seen several broken heat records. In March, at least eight states saw the highest temperatures for that month ever recorded. And nine western states experienced their hottest winters in 2025. More records could fall: forecasters are increasingly predicting that an El Niño will return this summer, and it may drive up global temperatures.
More immediately, for the eastern U.S., relief is on the horizon—a “pretty strong” cold front will likely move in this weekend, and the high temperatures will abate, Pereira says.
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Daytime high temperatures predicted for April 14. Many East Coast states will see unusually hot days this week, with temperatures in some major cities reaching as high as the 90s Fahrenheit. National Weather Service
An extinction-level event can wipe out most species on Earth due to catastrophic conditions.
Potential extinction causes include solar flares, meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and human activities.
If you’ve watched the movies “2012” or “Armageddon” or read “On the Beach,” you know about some of the threats that could end life as we know it. The Sun could do something nasty. A meteor could strike. We could nuke ourselves out of existence. These are only a few well-known extinction level events. There are so many more ways to die!
But first, what exactly is an extinction event? An extinction level event or ELE is a catastrophe resulting in the extinction of the majority of species on the planet. It’s not the normal extinction of species that occurs every day. It isn’t necessarily the sterilization of all living organisms. We can identify major extinction events by examining the deposition and chemical composition of rocks, the fossil record, and evidence of major events on moons and other planets.
There are dozens of phenomena capable of causing widespread extinctions, but they can be grouped into a few categories:
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The Sun Will Kill Us
If a strong solar flare hit the Earth, the results could be devastating.VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS, Getty Images
Life as we know it wouldn’t exist without the Sun, but let’s be honest. The Sun has it out for planet Earth. Even if none of the other catastrophes on this list ever happen, the Sun will end us. Stars like the Sun burn brighter over time as they fuse hydrogen into helium. In another billion years, it will be about 10 percent brighter. While this might not seem significant, it will cause more water to evaporate. Water is a greenhouse gas, so it traps heat in the atmosphere, leading to more evaporation. Sunlight will break water into hydrogen and oxygen, so it can bleed away into space. Should any life survive, it will meet a fiery fate when the Sun enters its red giant phase, expanding out to the orbit of Mars. It’s not likely any life will survive inside the Sun.
But, the Sun can kill us any old day it wants via a coronal mass ejection (CME). As you can guess from the name, this is when our favorite star expels charged particles outward from its corona. Since a CME can sent matter any direction, it doesn’t usually shoot directly toward Earth. Sometimes, only a tiny fraction of particles reach us, granting us an aurora or a solar storm. However, it’s possible for a CME to barbecue the planet.
The Sun has pals (and they hate Earth, too). A nearby (within 6000 light years) supernova, nova, or gamma ray burst could irradiate organisms and destroy the ozone layer, leaving life at the mercy of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Scientists think a gamma burst or supernova might have led to the End-Ordovician extinction.
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Geomagnetic Reversals May Kill Us
Scientists believe magnetic pole reversals were involved in some past mass extinctions.siiixth, Getty Images
The Earth is a giant magnet that has a love-hate relationship with life. The magnetic field protects us from the worst the Sun throws at us. Every so often, the positions of the north and south magnetic poles flip. How often the reversals occur and how long it takes the magnetic field to get settled is highly variable. Scientists aren’t completely sure what will happen when the poles flip. Maybe nothing. Or maybe the weakened magnetic field will expose the Earth to the solar wind, letting the Sun steal a lot of our oxygen. You know, that gas humans breathe. Scientists say magnetic field reversals aren’t always extinction level events. Just sometimes.
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The Big Bad Meteor
A big meteor impact could be an extinction level event.Marc Ward/Stocktrek Images, Getty Images
You may be surprised to learn the impact of an asteroid or meteor has only been connected with certainty to one mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Other impacts have been contributing factors to extinctions, but not the primary cause.
The good news is that NASA claims about 95 percent of comets and asteroids bigger than 1 kilometer in diameter have been identified. The other good news is that scientists estimate an object needs to be about 100 kilometers (60 miles) across to wipe out all life. The bad news is there are another 5 percent out there and not much we can do about a significant threat with our present technology (no, Bruce Willis cannot detonate a nuke and save us).
Obviously, living things at ground zero for a meteor strike will die. Many more will die from the shock wave, earthquakes, tsunamis, and firestorms. Those that survive the initial impact would have a hard time finding food, as the debris thrown into the atmosphere would change the climate, leading to mass extinctions. You’re probably better off at ground zero for this one.
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65 million years ago, a meteor struck the Mexican Yucatan peninsula, throwing tons of dust in the air and contributing to mass extinctions.MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, Getty Images
When China declared on Monday that the U.S. blockade of Iranian oil leaving the Strait of Hormuz was “dangerous and irresponsible,” it was a brief window into President Trump’s latest challenge: how to keep the Iran conflict from upending an emerging détente with China.
Mr. Trump is expected to land in Beijing in four weeks, in what was imagined as a carefully planned, highly orchestrated effort to recast the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.
The president has already delayed the trip once, and White House officials insist there is no discussion of putting it off again, even if the United States is still choking off Iranian oil exports. Ninety percent of those exports — more than 1.3 million barrels per day — were purchased by China before the American and Israeli attack began on Feb. 28.
At first, the Chinese were relatively quiet about the military action, knowing that the shipments already at sea and an impressive stockpile of emergency reserves of oil would likely tide them through. They ignored Mr. Trump’s demand that China send warships to keep the strait open. They produced standard-issue calls for both sides to stand down.
But once the blockade began on Monday, and facing the prospect that Chinese-flagged cargo ships, some manned by Chinese crews, could be turned away by the U.S. Navy, the tone shifted.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made his first public comments on the war on Tuesday, saying that the world could not risk reverting “to the law of the jungle.” He never mentioned the United States or Mr. Trump. But he did not need to, adding during a meeting with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi that “to maintain the authority of international rule of law, we cannot use it when it suits us and abandon it when it doesn’t.”
It was a clear reference to Mr. Trump, who in January told The New York Times that “I don’t need international law,” adding, “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He made it clear that he would be the arbiter of when international legal constraints applied to his actions.
China’s foreign ministry, playing its accustomed role in signaling between Washington and Beijing, took a tougher line, accusing the United States of a “targeted blockade” that “will only aggravate confrontation, escalate tension, under the already fragile cease-fire, and further jeopardize safe passage thorough the Strait of Hormuz.”
For his part, Mr. Trump has largely refrained from uttering much criticism, even when it became clear last week that U.S. intelligence agencies had obtained information that China might have sent a shipment of shoulder-fired missiles to the Iranians, for use in the conflict. The intelligence was not definitive, and there is no evidence that Chinese missiles have been used against U.S. or Israeli forces.
“I doubt they would do that,” Mr. Trump said. He quickly added that “if we catch them doing that, they get a 50 percent tariff,” employing his go-to threat against any country defying his will. But he has dropped the subject, perhaps recognizing that any threat of new tariffs could derail his hopes of announcing a trade deal, the lowest-hanging fruit in U.S.-China diplomacy.
“President Trump has created the circumstance where two of his biggest goals are in direct conflict,” said Kurt Campbell, a former deputy secretary of state under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the chairman of the Asia Group, which he founded.
“One is to monitor and control all cargo coming through the strait, which includes China’s,” he said. “And the other is his desire for a manifestly positive visit to Beijing.”
Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China, David Perdue, was in the Oval Office late on Tuesday, discussing the upcoming visit. National security officials said that before the Iran conflict broke out, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had negotiated the outlines of economic initiatives the two countries would announce.
Far less progress has been made on the major security issues, according to U.S. officials, including how to talk about the future of Taiwan, or China’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal, or its military buildup in the South China Sea and the confrontations it has sparked with the Philippines.
With a month to go before Mr. Trump lands in Beijing, it is still unclear how the two leaders will structure a conversation about the blockade — if it is still in force — or about the display of U.S. military power that began with the seizure of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, then proceeded with Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran.
But there is considerable evidence the Chinese military is intently focused on how the United States pulled off both attacks. Chinese officials appear concerned about the speed at which the Iranian leadership was decapitated in the opening hours of the war.
“There is a lot of speculation about what can break the U.S.-China détente, and undermine the summit,” said Rush Doshi, an assistant professor at Georgetown University and former adviser to Mr. Biden on China. “It hasn’t been issues like A.I. chips, or even rare earths,” he added, referring to two areas of intense competition between the two nations. “But it could be Iran.”
President Trump meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea last October. They will meet again next month. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
“Compleximers”—materials that can be molded like window glass but that resist impacts like plastic does—shouldn’t exist, researchers say. Nevertheless, a few grams of one such substance sit in a laboratory at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
In Nature Communications, Wageningen physical chemist Jasper van der Gucht and his team describe what makes compleximers as meltable as glass yet as hard to break as plastic. Someday, this paradoxical stuff could make it easier to fashion and fix sturdy protective gear such as helmets.
Window glass, called silica, and most plastics are “glassy” materials—when they cool from their liquid states, they don’t solidify into crystals with neatly arranged atoms like water does when it freezes into ice. Instead, they form an amorphous mass that feels like a solid but has randomly arranged atoms like a liquid.
For decades, scientists have thought, based on experimental observations, that the lower a glassy material’s melting rate, the less impact it can bear. Both slow-melting window glass and faster-melting plastic abide by this rule: the former changes state slowly but shatters easily, whereas the latter solidifies and melts abruptly but can better withstand impact. But van der Gucht and his team found that compleximers completely defy this law. The trick could lie in the material’s structure: its long chains of molecules, called polymers, are held together by a far-reaching kind of bond.
The researchers initially created compleximers, a term they coined, as an easily recyclable alternative to a type of plastic called thermoset. Thermosets are made up of polymer chains held tightly together by extremely hard-to-break chemical bonds, which makes them very stable but hard to recycle. The researchers added charged molecules, which made the chains cling to one another using an ionic, “opposites attract” type of bond instead, and they incorporated water-repelling compounds to stop the chains from disintegrating in water. The charged molecules’ ionic interactions—which hold over longer distances than the previous chemical bonds—may help compleximers stay compact rather than rapidly expanding to melt immediately when heated, the team suggests.
Ionic interactions could improve the mechanical properties of glass-forming materials and make them easier to work with, says University of Chicago chemical engineer Matthew Tirrell, who was not involved in the work.
The slow melting also means compleximer-based objects are easier to fix than ones made of thermosets; “just by heating it with a heat gun, you can repair a scratch or a crack,” van der Gucht says.
Both researchers say this rule-defying material could also give physicists a better understanding of how glass forms, a phenomenon called the glass transition. Finding these long-range interactions that make glassy materials melt differently, van der Gucht says, “should help theorists explain the glass transition in a more general sense.”
Just like grape farming requires year-round preparation, building a successful company requires consistent effort, patience, and focusing on sustainable growth rather than quick wins.
Just as crops need protection from disease, businesses must proactively guard against threats to keep operations running effectively.
The most enduring companies focus on long-term value and steady development instead of chasing fast profits or short-lived success.
What comes to mind when you try to picture a future tech CEO? Do you picture a lone programmer working out of his humble garage in Palo Alto, bent over a motherboard with a screwdriver in a pair of Levi’s 501s? Or do you imagine some Ivy Leaguer building the next major social media platform in his dorm while his roommates are busy going to parties and trying out for the rowing team?
No matter what you’re thinking of, I’ll bet it’s not a teenage kid harvesting grapes in rural Washington State. But that’s exactly how my career started, and I’m glad it did.
Before I was the CEO of an industry-leading power dialer for outbound sales teams, I spent my days helping out on my parents’ concord grape farm: a 700-acre property located a few hours southeast of Seattle.
Pruning vines, managing canopy growth, and shearing clusters might not seem analogous to living in Silicon Valley or going to Harvard. But these experiences taught me some of the most memorable and valuable lessons of my life.
Now it’s time to harvest those lessons and bring them to you. Here’s what growing grapes in my youth taught me about how to grow a company.
A time to plant and a time to harvest
One lesson from my childhood that I come back to over and over again is that growth happens in cycles. It’s rarely consistent and linear. You have to plant seeds before you can reap the fruits of your labor.
Concord grapes are normally harvested at the end of the summer or early in the fall. It’s an immensely satisfying time of year. You can tell they’re ready to come off the vine because they turn a distinctive, dusky shade of purple that makes them stand out like precious stones in the early morning sunlight. Dawn is the best time to collect them, just after the morning dew dries.
But that means you spend the rest of your year working, and working hard. Grapes don’t grow by themselves. Winter is for pruning and cutting back dead wood so that your fruit-producing canes are free to grow. Spring is when you’ll maintain your trellises and monitor your grapes for weeds or signs of disease. And canopy management will eat up most of your summer as you remove excess leaves to increase the amount of sun and airflow your crops are getting.
That takes a huge amount of effort, especially when you’re doing it for 700 acres. But every phase is an essential part of producing the end product.
The same thing applies to PhoneBurner. Tech companies that are market leaders face immense pressure to innovate. But we can’t just deploy new features all the time if we want to grow the platform sustainably. For instance, we could have rushed into parallel dialing to help customers dial contacts faster. Instead, we focused on making our single-line power dialer faster and easier to use. It may not chase vanity metrics, but it helps teams have more real conversations while protecting their caller ID reputation.
Decisions like that were our way of tending the vineyard — being deliberate about where we invested our time so we could strengthen the parts of the platform our customers rely on most.
Protecting your crop as a lesson in risk management
Grapes and technology are both more vulnerable than you might think, and grapes aren’t the only thing that grew on my parents’ farm. If we weren’t careful, we also got black rot and mildew. Keeping our grapes safe meant constantly taking steps to prevent those threats and mitigate the damage they caused whenever they did manage to show up.
Outbound calling has its own version of crop disease. Phone numbers can get mislabeled as spam, blocked by carriers or filtered before they ever reach the person you’re trying to call. When that happens, it doesn’t matter how strong your team or message is — your calls simply stop getting through.
That’s why PhoneBurner released ARMOR® and was among the first to focus heavily on number reputation, answer rates and Responsible Communications™ practices. If your numbers aren’t healthy, your calls won’t reach people. And if your calls don’t reach people, nothing else in your outbound strategy has a chance to work.
Growth and sustainability
Finally, I want to push back against a narrative I hear about all too often in tech: that successful entrepreneurship looks like getting in on the ground floor of an idea when it’s profitable, making a lot of money quickly, and then getting out before it inevitably collapses. I have never believed in this kind of approach to business, and I never will.
None of the really successful people I’ve met in my lifetime have been flash-in-the-pan founders. The Forbes business empire is 108 years old. Steve Forbes, whose advice I once asked for at a book signing in my twenties, never staked his family’s legacy on a quick cash grab. The risks he took were calculated to help him continue his stewardship of what the generations before him had started.
I don’t work full-time on the family farm anymore, although I try to help out whenever I’m back in the area. But working there years ago helped me understand the value of building things that last, and that’s the attitude I’ve applied to all of my business ventures — from PhoneBurner to the DRIVE (Data Reporting Information and Visualization Exchange) Conference at the University of Washington, which I founded in 2011 and which is still going strong today.
Few Americans — 24 percent — think the war in Iran has been worth the costs and benefits, according to a survey from Ipsos and Reuters, released on Tuesday. Another 22 percent were not sure.
Even among the president’s core supporters, there is a divide: 55 percent of Republicans said they thought the war was worth the costs and benefits, a far cry from the vast majority of his base who support Mr. Trump on most other issues. Instead, as the war stretches into its seventh week, 20 percent of Republicans said they thought the war had not been worth the cost, and another 24 percent were not sure.
The survey was taken after the cease-fire and after President Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
This poll adds to other evidence that fissures over the war are emerging within the Republican Party. A CNN poll taken in late-March found that Republicans who did not identify as “MAGA” were significantly less likely to support the war than “MAGA Republicans.”
Young Republicans are also far less likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s decision to take military action than are Republicans older than 45.
This is the first time Ipsos has asked the costs-and-benefits question. But the survey also included a question that has been repeated since the war started, and found that just 35 percent of Americans approved of the military strikes in Iran. That number has remained stable among all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, over the last month.
More on the Fighting in the Middle East
Global Economic Warning: War in the Middle East has upended the world economy, the International Monetary Fund said, warning in a report that disruptions to oil markets could slow growth, fuel inflation and raise the possibility of a global recession.
Strait of Hormuz: Shipowners and shipping experts said they did not expect a large number of vessels to return quickly to the strait because of concerns that the United States’ blockade plan lacked detail on how commercial vessels would be protected if they decided to go through the waterway.
Iran’s Internet Blackout: As the country’s near-total internet blackout extends into its seventh week, Iranian businesses and academics are arguing that the shutdown not only violates citizens’ rights but further destabilizes the country’s already weakened economy.
Israelis on the War: The ongoing war has left many in Israel despairing over how little they believe the fighting accomplished compared with the objectives laid out by their leaders.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An anchored tanker off Muscat, Oman, last month, as the Strait of Hormuz was functionally closed by Iran. Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Maria Corte
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Thomas Fuchs
A future tech CEO
James' World 2 