James' World 2

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The Trump administration’s decision to scrap the “endangerment finding” on Thursday will have wide-reaching consequences for greenhouse gas emissions and, ultimately, could hasten climate change, increase risk to human health, and raise fuel costs.

But what is the “endangerment finding,” and what does the revocation of the legal precedent of this 2009 conclusion mean for you? Let’s break down the facts.

What is the endangerment finding?

To understand the endangerment finding, we need to rewind the clock to the Clean Air Act, the landmark 1970 law that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate air pollutants.

The act was originally used to target pollutants such as sulfur oxides and particulate matter, but it was intentionally written broadly so that Congress wouldn’t have to revisit it every time a new pollutant emerged, said Camille Pannu, associate clinical professor of law at Columbia Law School, to Scientific American last year.

In 1999, a group of environmental organizations and eventually states began petitioning the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Eventually, in 2007, the Supreme Court decided in the case Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, qualified as “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. The EPA was required to determine whether or not emissions from cars and trucks would endanger public health or if the science was too uncertain.

Flash forward to 2009: Lisa P. Jackson, then administrator of the EPA, issued the “endangerment finding,” which identified six greenhouse gases and held that they did indeed “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The rule became the bedrock on which all subsequent EPA regulations of greenhouse gases have been based. While it was in place, the EPA could not legally ignore climate change or completely cut greenhouse gas regulations.

What effect does repealing the endangerment finding have?

In the short term, EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks will be repealed and not replaced. The decision to repeal the rule, however, will face lengthy legal challenges.

The EPA has also proposed repealing regulations on industrial emissions and delaying rules designed to reduce methane emissions, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, from oil and gas facilities.

Rescinding the endangerment finding will also make it harder for future administrations to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without a new law or amendment passed by Congress.

How does climate change affect public health?

There is a robust body of evidence showing the harms of climate change on health. One of the most direct risks is through heat waves, which have become more intense, more frequent, and longer-lasting as global background temperatures have risen. Children, pregnant people, older people, and those who work outdoors are particularly susceptible to heat illness—causing issues from dehydration to death.

Climate change has also been linked to worsened seasonal allergies and higher risks of preterm birth. Additionally, it exacerbates smog and other air pollution that has been linked to asthma, cardiovascular disease, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. More extreme rains fueled by a warmer climate also raise the risks of drinking water being contaminated with toxic bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. And as temperatures warm and precipitation patterns change, insects that spread diseases—such as mosquitoes that spread malaria and West Nile virus and ticks that spread Lyme disease—are expanding their ranges.

Climate change also exerts a toll on mental health, causing mental trauma—as well as physical injury—from climate-fueled weather extremes such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. And research has shown that the effects from events such as hurricanes can cause deaths long after the storms.

Has the endangerment finding been at risk before?

In President Donald Trump’s first term in office, then EPA administrator Scott Pruitt sought to replace Obama-era emissions regulations with weaker ones that were favored by fossil fuel companies, the industrial sector, and car companies. This strategy would have allowed the endangerment finding to stand, dodging potential legal challenges.

When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his EPA replaced those weakened regulations with more stringent ones. At the end of his presidency in 2024, Biden announced his pledge to reduce U.S. emissions by up to 66 percent by 2035. Overturning Biden’s updated laws has become a focal point of Trump’s second term.

How does this fit in with the rest of Trump’s climate policy?

Trump has long referred to climate change as a “hoax” despite decades of rigorous research and evidence in support of global warming. He began his second presidency by once again removing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. In 2026, Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty under which the Paris Agreement was negotiated.

The current Trump administration has also sought to hobble the build-out of renewable energy in the U.S., particularly offshore wind turbines, which the president has falsely linked to the deaths of whales. And the administration has sought to bolster fossil fuels by opening more federal lands to drilling and ordering coal plants that were marked for retirement to stay open.

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The morning commute on northbound Interstate 405 at sunrise on 15 January in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Kevin Carter/Getty Images

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Senate Democrats and Republicans continue to clash over funding part of the government.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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Dozens of hair extensions—including artificial and natural braids—may contain synthetic chemicals that are a health and environmental hazard, a new study shows. At least 12 of the 169 chemicals detected in the new analysis have been associated with cancer, birth defects, and reproductive issues, and are included in California’s Proposition 65 hazardous chemicals list.

The study, published today in Environment & Health, tested 43 hair extensions, including those made with synthetic hair, as well as untreated “raw” human hair and other biobased hair, such as those made from banana-based fibers. All but two of the products contained a hazardous chemical, and nearly 10 percent of them had organotin compounds—synthetic chemicals linked to endocrine-disrupting effects. Some had concentrations above the European Union limits. More research is needed, however, for government agencies to determine whether the chemical levels found in these products requires greater regulation, the study authors say.

“The hazardous chemicals we identified each carry their own risks,” says Elissia T. Franklin, lead author of the new paper and a research scientist at the nonprofit research organization Silent Spring Institute. “Our findings showed that these products can expose [people] to multiple chemicals over time, and through repeated use, these combined exposures add up.”

More than 70 percent of Black women in the U.S. use hair extensions at least once per year, including in hairstyles such as braiding—a staple of many Black cultures that’s been shaped by the slave trade, colonialism, and Western beauty standards. Chemical relaxers—another product commonly used to style Black hair—that permanently straighten curly or kinky hair have previously been linked to higher risk of uterine cancer.

“On one hand, I’m excited to get the work out and share this new knowledge with the world,” Franklin says. “On the other hand, I’m learning this new information leans towards the idea that my community is deeply polluted with harmful chemicals, even down to practices that are so embedded in the culture, like getting braids.”

Using a chemical library, Franklin’s team winnowed more than 900 chemical signatures picked up from the hair extensions down to dozens of potentially harmful compounds. In samples of synthetic hair, they found levels of chlorine as high as 277,000 micrograms per gram. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention reports that exposure to chlorine, a flame retardant, at 60 micrograms per gram for 60 minutes or more through inhalation can lead to lung irritation and impaired function. The researchers also flagged some samples with small traces of fluorine, a chemical that can lead to lower birth rates in high doses, as well as organohalogens and nitroaromatics—both known to have carcinogenic effects.

The study didn’t determine whether any particular amount of chemical exposure from the hair extensions was above legal standards or would necessarily cause health issues in people, however. This limitation makes it difficult to create safety guidance, Franklin says. But the work aligns with a growing trend: A 2022 study found traces of potentially harmful heavy metals in synthetic hair, and a 2025 analysis in Consumer Reports found that hair extensions used when braiding contained volatile organic chemicals—which can irritate the eyes, nose, and throat as well as cause potential long-term kidney and liver damage.

In the new study, the “detection of more different classes of potentially harmful chemical contaminants is evidence that these products contain more chemical types than our findings,” showed, says James Rogers, director of product and food safety research and testing at Consumer Reports, who led the 2025 analysis. He was not involved in the new paper.

Biobased hair products, such as those made from silk or banana-based fibers, are generally better options than other extensions. But the study found that some biobased extensions labeled as nontoxic contained unclassified complex chemicals. Although those chemicals might not be dangerous, Franklin advises caution: “Biobased doesn’t automatically mean safer.”

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The progressive Democrat razzed the president and Republicans amid fury over the Puerto Rican superstar’s Spanish-language set.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) ridiculed Republicans having a fit over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance this past weekend while strolling through the halls of Congress on Tuesday night.

Asked about President Donald Trump’s complaint “nobody” could understand the Puerto Rican superstar’s Spanish-language set, she told journalist Nicholas A. Ballasy, “I barely know what Trump’s saying half the time, so I feel him.”

Ocasio-Cortez continued to rib the right when asked about Florida Rep. Randy Fine’s plans to ask the Federal Communications Commission to look into supposedly “pornographic filth” which was part of the performance, as he announced in a Monday X post.

“I thought they didn’t understand what he was saying!” she quipped.

A bulk of the GOP outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance seems to be centered on sexually explicit lyrics in the song “Safarea,” a Puerto Rican expression for debauchery.

But the X-rated verse at the center of their criticism was not included in Sunday’s medley of songs, nor are the most lurid lyrics even performed by Bad Bunny on the recorded version of the track, according to translation on Genius.com.

In addition, less raunchy but still sexually suggestive lines delivered by Bad Bunny during his performance were bleeped during the Super Bowl broadcast, as Axios reported on Tuesday.

During Ocasio-Cortez’s catch-up with Ballasy, she also talked about what the Super Bowl set personally meant to her as a Puerto Rican American.

“It just gives me so much pride to see what he did on the national stage,” she said. “Not only that, but really telling the story of America and all the Americas.”

The progressive went on, “I think it was incredibly inspiring and fun and joyful in a time that people find very challenging.”

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Bad Bunny

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What We’re Covering Today

• Bondi Hearing: Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to apologize to survivors of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who attended her testimony at a lengthy House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday. Ms. Bondi faced anger from Democrats and at least one Republican, Thomas Massie, who criticized her handling of the release of files related to Mr. Epstein, including redaction errors that revealed the identities of victims.

• Netanyahu Meeting: President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met for two and a half hours at the White House. Mr. Trump wrote on social media that “nothing definitive” was decided beyond a commitment to continue negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, which Israel considers an existential threat.

• Trump’s Tariffs: For a year, Republican leaders in the House have blocked challenges to Mr. Trump’s major trade strategy, tariffs, but dissent within the party has set up a vote to rescind the levies on Canada.

Bondi clashes with Judiciary Committee members over her handling of the Epstein files.

Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to apologize to survivors of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who were seated in the House Judiciary Committee room on Wednesday, and instead demanded that Democrats apologize to President Trump.

Ms. Bondi, imitating Mr. Trump’s tactic of going on the attack when facing tough questions, offered few answers, no admissions of fault, and many expressions of fealty and admiration for a president who has exercised direct control over her department’s actions.

Bondi is facing a barrage of questions about the relationship between three senior Trump officials and Jeffrey Epstein. Representative Becca Balint, a Democrat from Vermont, asked Bondi if she planned to investigate Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about his relationship with the sex offender. Bondi replied that he “had addressed this himself.”

When Balint mistakenly referred to Bondi as “secretary” at one point, Bondi cut in and said, “I am attorney general.” Balint shot back, “Excuse me, I couldn’t tell.”

At the House Judiciary Committee hearing, there was an intense exchange between Attorney General Pam Bondi and Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, over the Justice Department’s inadvertent release of victims’ identities and the redactions of a purported co-conspirator’s identity. “Who is responsible?” asked Massie, who co-wrote the law requiring the department to release the Epstein files. “Who in your organization made this massive failure?” Bondi responded by calling Massie “a failed politician.”Bondi has accused the Democrats of “theatrics” in her appearance at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. But the attorney general has been, by far, the loudest voice in the room. She has insulted several Democrats and has been repeatedly, if gently, blocked by Jim Jordan, a Republican and the chairman of the committee, from shouting over her questioners.

An uncomfortable and dramatic moment. Under pressure from Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, Bondi refuses to apologize over her actions in the case to victims of Jeffrey Epstein who are in the hearing room. Bondi, who appeared caught off guard, pivoted to attack Jayapal for trying to drag her “into the gutter.”The Epstein case, once an obsessive focus of the right, has become a political weapon wielded by Democrats in attacking President Trump and his appointees in the Justice Department and F.B.I.

The meeting between President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House ended at about 1:30 p.m. The leaders met for about two and a half hours.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that his meeting with Netanyahu produced no definitive agreement about how to approach Iran. “There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated,” he wrote. “If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference. If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be.”

Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have been meeting in private for nearly an hour at the White House as they discuss Iran.

Trump meeting with Netanyahu yields “nothing definitive” on Iran.

President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday that he “insisted that negotiations with Iran continue” over a possible deal over the country’s nuclear program, as the Middle East remained on edge over American threats to attack.

Mr. Trump said in a post on social media that “nothing definitive” came out of his meeting with Mr. Netanyahu at the White House. He said he told the Israeli leader that he preferred a deal with Iran, but warned that without one, “we will just have to see what the outcome will be.”

The six lawmakers who participated in the November video have repeatedly said they were simply restating a fundamental principle of military law, a point Senator Mark Kelly reiterated once again on Wednesday.

“It’s pretty black and white. I mean, it’s on a plaque, you know, at West Point,” the senator said, referring to the Loyalty to the Constitution plaque at the military academy. “When the law and orders are in conflict, you follow the law. It’s something we’re all taught.”

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who also participated in the illegal orders video in November, accused President Trump of weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies.

“This is an authoritarian playbook that many of us have watched play out abroad over and over and over again, except now we’re seeing it in the United States,” Slotkin said. She said the Trump administration was seeking to intimidate members of Congress to “get other people beyond us to think twice about speaking out.”

“This is straight from the authoritarian playbook,” said Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, in response to a failed attempt by the Trump administration to secure an indictment against him and five other Democratic lawmakers who posted a video warning active-duty service members that they are not obligated to follow illegal orders. He said members of the U.S. Congress have a “responsibility and obligation” to oversee the executive branch, and “criticize when necessary.”

“This is the master alarm flashing for our democracy,” Kelly said Wednesday at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “It is threatening the very foundation of our system, that we have a right to free speech, to lawfully speak out and protest our government without fear of retaliation.”

Senator Kelly said Republican leaders in Congress needed to speak out against the Trump administration’s attempt to criminally charge the six Democratic lawmakers who posted the illegal orders video, adding that Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, “seems to be fully on board with us being thrown into jail.”

Democrats push for transparency on Venezuelan oil money under U.S. control.

Congressional Democrats are escalating their efforts to ensure more oversight of hundreds of millions of dollars in Venezuelan oil proceeds being controlled by the Trump administration in what they say is an unregulated and opaque arrangement susceptible to corruption.

Top Senate Democrats introduced legislation on Wednesday calling on the White House to submit to independent accounting of the funds and their uses after lawmakers unsuccessfully pressed Cabinet officials for justification for the administration’s approach. Democrats said their goal was to force the administration to close offshore accounts holding the money and instead use domestic financial institutions that would be subject to congressional oversight.

The House is set to vote on canceling Trump’s tariffs on Canada.

The House is set on Wednesday to consider a Democratic-written measure that would rescind tariffs President Trump imposed on Canada last year, taking a largely symbolic but politically consequential vote that Republicans have fought for a year to prevent.

The measure, sponsored by Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, offers the House its first opportunity to formally register support or opposition to Mr. Trump’s trade policy since he began deploying tariffs as an economic strategy upon his return to the White House.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived at the White House to meet with President Trump, according to a senior administration official. The two men plan to discuss how their nations should approach Iran.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, came to the defense of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is under scrutiny for having closer ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein than initially disclosed.

“Secretary Lutnick is one of my best friends in the whole wide world, so I am very comfortable working with him,” Hassett told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

A day earlier, the commerce secretary acknowledged at a Senate hearing that he had traveled to Epstein’s island and had another encounter with him, years after claiming to have cut ties. The White House has stood by Lutnick.

Federal debt is projected to hit record levels, the Congressional Budget Office warns.

In the first year of his second term, President Trump has tried to radically reshape America’s economy. He has slashed taxes, raised tariffs to their highest levels in almost a century, unilaterally canceled federal spending, pushed down immigration and pressured the Federal Reserve to sharply lower interest rates.

When it comes to the overall federal budget, though, the effect of these dramatic changes has nearly been a wash. The country is still on track to borrow what economists consider an alarming amount of money in the coming years. But the situation, on paper at least, has gotten only somewhat worse, but not significantly, under Mr. Trump’s unorthodox policy mix.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in a social media post that his party would not support a stopgap bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, raising the threat of a shutdown of the agency when funding lapses this weekend.

Bipartisan talks have appeared deadlocked as Democrats push for new guardrails on federal immigration enforcement operations. Republicans have outright rejected many of the proposed restrictions.

A Border Patrol commander congratulated the agent who shot a Chicago woman.

Shortly after a Border Patrol agent shot a 30-year-old Chicago woman five times, Gregory Bovino, who was leading the federal government’s immigration raids across the city, reached out to offer his congratulations.

“In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!” he wrote to the agent.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Department of Homeland Security: The agency hired a social media manager from the Department of Labor for a key communications job, despite posts he made on Labor Department media accounts that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging.

• Deleted Post: Vice President JD Vance’s office deleted a social media post that broke with administration policy in acknowledging the Armenian genocide after he visited a memorial to the estimated 1.5 million Armenians killed over a century ago.

• U.S. Troops in Nigeria: The Pentagon will send about 200 troops to help train Nigerians to fight militants, but they will not be involved in combat. U.S. forces have been assisting local soldiers with identifying potential terrorist targets.

• Gordie Howe International Bridge: A Detroit billionaire lobbied the Trump administration hours before President Trump said he would block the opening of a bridge connecting Detroit to Canada, officials said. Here’s what to know about the project.

• Georgia Ballot Inquiry: An unsealed search warrant affidavit shows that a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., was set off by a leading election denier in the Trump administration and relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked.

Justice Department: Prosecutors failed to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video in the fall that reminded members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, four people familiar with the matter said.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi testifying at the Capitol on Wednesday. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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Hmmmm … Followers of Christ know the answer!

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The big bang wasn’t a bang in the traditional sense—but it was nonetheless the start of important things: for one, space; another, time. Thirdly, it began the conditions and processes that eventually resulted in us humans, who can sit here and wonder about space and time. The Big Bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to the logic of human brains, it seems like there must have been something before the Big Bang, even if “before” is the wrong word because there was no time until after.

The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the origins of the origin of the universe. Counterintuitive and impossible as it may seem, cosmologists are even making progress in determining which wild ideas might peel back the veil on that early era, even though it remains inaccessible to telescopes.

For millennia, what happened before and at the beginning of the universe was not a question scientists could even scratch at. Cosmological queries were the dominion of philosophers, says Jenann Ismael—herself a philosopher of physics at Johns Hopkins University. The most fundamental query, of course, is where we come from—a question as popular among philosophers as it is with the rest of us. Other questions, Ismael says, include doozies such as “What are space and time? Does time have a beginning? Does space have boundaries?”

Even after cosmology became a hard science, the field was a bit sketchy, Ismael says. “The science was one-and-a-half facts,” she adds. The sentiment, she says, is usually attributed to physicist James Jeans. But that has changed in the past century or so as the philosophers’ musings have wandered into the realm of theory, experiment, and data. “These old conceptual questions are arising in ways that have new angles, a new spin, and a new framework,” Ismael continues.

It’s unclear whether science as a discipline—and scientists as people—will ever be able to answer some questions definitively. After all, no one can “see” before the Big Bang, and no one will ever be able to—at least not directly. But the current and future universe, researchers are learning, may contain clues about the distant past.

And as scientists push the boundaries of what can be known, they are testing their theories about the before before—the only way to get closer to potential truth. “I’m happy to listen to any framework, but I only start taking it seriously when it produces a clean observational target that a real instrument can go after,” says Brian Keating, a cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego. “If there isn’t a discriminant you can measure, you’re doing metaphysics with equations.”

Here are three ideas that he and other scientists take seriously about the cosmos’s ultimate origins.

The No-Boundary Proposal

Quantum mechanics is the physics of the extremely small, ruled by statistics and uncertainty. It’s also what may have shaped the early universe. To understand the quantum cosmos, scientists calculate the probability of a given output from a certain input.

In cosmology, the “output” is the universe as it looks today. “The question is: What should the input be?” says Jean-Luc Lehners, former head of the Theoretical Cosmology group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany.

Physicists can break up the problem into chunks of outputs and inputs. If they consider the modern universe to be the output, they can try to figure out what input might have produced it. Then they can step backward by taking that input as a new output and determine what conditions earlier in the universe might have produced that state, and so on. They can theoretically (if they have a lot of time on their hands) do that forever, going in steps to reach the before before—and even before that.

That infinite regression, however, didn’t make sense to physicists Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, who worked on the question together in the 1980s. They decided to eliminate the universe’s ultimate input—its “beginning.” Instead, they formed a model of the universe called the no-boundary proposal. They suggested time and space form a closed, rounded surface: a four-dimensional hemisphere of spacetime.

Does that not make sense? Try this: imagine the universe like the globe of Earth. The big bang is the North Pole. There is no “before” it, just as there is no north of north. Before becomes irrelevant as a concept. “It’s almost like a Zen idea,” Lehners says. And it’s one he’s toying with in calculations to see if he can re-create the universe we see today from a round place with no north of north.

“The no-boundary proposal has a decent amount of support, or at least interest, within the physics community,” says Sean Carroll, a professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He notes that some scientists worry about how well-defined the idea is, but he finds it to be a “natural starting point,” given what we know about quantum gravity.

A Bouncing, Cyclic Cosmos

Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at Princeton University, has another idea about what happened before the universe as we know it began. It stands in opposition to an idea that he helped shape: this concept suggests that, after the Big Bang, spacetime expanded very quickly for a very short period of time called inflation. The inflation scenario is meant to explain why the universe looks flat and similar in every place our telescopes can look.

After helping to establish inflation theory, however, Steinhardt started doubt the idea—in part because it has required constant tweaking to keep it consistent with our measurements of the cosmos. “It’s really hard to think of a historical example where that actually led to what turns out to be the right answer,” Steinhardt says. “Almost always, that’s a sign that the Titanic is sinking.”

Time to get in a lifeboat, he thought. So he came up with a cyclic universe: one that balloons significantly in size, as ours seems to be doing now, then shrinks a little and then starts expanding all over again. “When people think about contracting universes, they’re usually thinking about things coming to a crunch,” Steinhardt says—the cosmos collapsing back down into an infinitesimally small point. That’s not what Steinhardt is talking about: he thinks the universe perhaps contracts slowly—to a smaller fraction of its size but not to nothing. That shrinking smooths things out in ways inflation fails to explain, he says, while still producing a cosmos that appears flat and the same in all directions.

Steinhardt adds that what looks like a big bang is actually not: the universe expands, then slowly contracts, and then quickly goes back to expanding. The fast transition between contraction and expansion is not a bang but a “big bounce.”

teinhardt hopes to test this idea not just by examining the past but also by taking data from the present and watching the future carefully. “It makes an obvious prediction, which is that the current phase of accelerated expansion can’t continue forever,” Steinhardt says. “It must end.” This idea, in turn, raises a new question: “Could it already be in the process of ending now?” he asks.

Our measurements about how the universe is expanding come from relatively faraway objects that emitted their light a long time ago. Things could have changed, and we might not know yet because the effects would be hard to measure. “We’d have to look at objects very close by in order to detect it,” Steinhardt says. That’s not cosmologists’ forte, and they would have to develop new techniques and instruments to look nearby for such effects.

Even more intriguingly, Steinhardt says that because “nothing bad happens to space” during the contraction and bounce, information—even objects such as black holes—can pass from before the bounce to after. “There might be things in our observable universe which are from before,” he says. Keep an eye out.

Mirror Universe

Another big idea about the before before is of interest to Latham Boyle, a researcher at the Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, who was formerly Steinhardt’s graduate student. Like the big bounce concept, Boyle’s favored proposal is pretty simple conceptually—and it similarly eschews inflation. “There’s the universe after the big bang and the universe before the big bang,” he says, “and they’re kind of mirror copies of one another.”

Picture this, Boyle says, like the points of two ice cream cones touching each other, with their contact representing the Big Bang. “Time marches away from the big bang in both directions,” he says. On our side, it goes forward; on the mirror side, it goes backward. What happened before the Big Bang is the reflected opposite of what happened after. And that doesn’t just include time: here, there is matter; there, there is antimatter. Here, left is left; there, left is right.

Boyle has ideas for observations that could support (or nullify) his theory, which is called the CPT-symmetric (charge-parity-time-symmetric) universe. For one, a CPT-symmetric universe wouldn’t have sent gravitational waves shimmering through space from the beginning of the universe, as classical cosmology theories predict. Astronomers have been hunting for such signals. If these waves are eventually detected, that would rule this idea out.

Boyle’s hypothesis also predicts that dark matter could be explained by a particular kind of neutrino. He hopes cosmological instruments will reveal more information about neutrinos soon. The model’s connection to particle physics, among other aspects, makes this idea intriguing, Carroll says.

“What I like here is the economy,” Keating says, “and the fact that it sticks its neck out,” focusing on the kinds of specific, physical predictions experimentalists like him need.

The Test of Time

Each of these scientists is attached to their own idea. But Lehners, interviewed late last year, isn’t confident any of them will stand the test of time—whatever time is. “I think it’s completely preposterous that, in the year 2025, we should understand the beginning of the universe,” he says. “Why not in the year 2,000,025 or whatever?”

nd even if researchers think they are getting close, they could be approaching a false summit: that frustrating place that looks, when you’re hiking, like the top of the mountain but is actually a mere bump blocking your view of the true peak—or your view of what you think is the true peak but is, in fact, just another bump. “In general, I think that it’s extremely plausible that there was something before the big bang,” Carroll says, “but it’s also very plausible that the big bang was truly the beginning. There’s too much we’re just unsure about, and I am a bit skeptical that the state of the art is good enough to allow us to draw any firm experimental or observational conclusions out of any of these models.”

But cosmologists aren’t studying the ultimate origins because they think the mystery will be resolved in their lifetime. Lehner imagines himself as part of an intergenerational project helping humanity trek closer and closer to a truth we may never find.

Studying such a physically and philosophically inaccessible topic is fundamentally different from other types of science—those quests at least exist in our plane of space and time. It almost seems like the question isn’t actually within the realm of science. But science often involves probing things we cannot access, at least at the start, philosopher of physics Ismael says. Scientists predicted atoms before we could see them, and black holes and dark matter still lie beyond our ability to detect directly—yet investigating them is clearly scientific. “I think the benchmark for what counts as science has moved,” she says. And it will continue to—including, perhaps, backward to the before that may not be a before.

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With the Milano Cortina Olympics officially under way, it’s time to spend the next two weeks becoming ridiculously obsessed with a group of elite winter athletes. Oh, but there are so many sports and so many cuties, and your boss says it’s “unprofessional” to have Peacock streaming on your second monitor all day? I’ve got you. Here, all the stars, moments, and cafeteria dispatches you should know about from the Winter Olympics.

Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté

There was a point last week when it looked like Guarino Sabaté wasn’t going to be allowed to perform his Minions-inspired short program. However, if enough people get upset about something, suddenly a “copyright-clearance issue” can disappear. Thankfully for all of us, Guarino Sabaté took to the ice in his full Minions regalia and had a blast doing it.

Sturla Holm Lægreid

Men will really air out your business on the world stage instead of going to therapy! After winning a bronze medal, Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he cheated on his girlfriend three months ago and came clean just before the Games. “I told her a week ago. And it’s been the worst week of my life,” Lægreid said. The athlete admitted that she dumped him (good for her) and that he hoped “committing social suicide” by coming clean on TV “might show her how much I love her.” I hope he has a backup plan.

Team USA’s first gold medal at the Games came from downhill skier Breezy Johnson. Unfortunately, it broke almost immediately. Following her podium ceremony, Johnson’s medal became disconnected from its ribbon and broke into three pieces. This may be something for the International Olympic Committee to look into — Alysa Liu’s gold medal also broke almost immediately. Hopefully, they have hot-glue guns in Italy.

The Curling Baby!

Switzerland’s mixed-doubles curling team is a married couple: Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann and Yannick Schwaller. That is already cute, but they brought their 18-month-old, River, to the Olympics as well. To make matters even cuter, the kid clearly has a knack for his parents’ sport. A not-insignificant chunk of NBC’s curling coverage was focused on River, who already handles the broom like a pro.

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

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The former chief described his conversation with Mr. Trump to the F.B.I. in October 2019, two months after Mr. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, the memo shows. Mr. Reiter told The Miami Herald, which reported on the document earlier, that the call with Mr. Trump occurred in July 2006.

The account highlights the shifting explanations Mr. Trump has given about what he knew — and didn’t know — about Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell. He has denied knowledge of Mr. Epstein abusing underage girls, but also said last year that the financier “stole” young women who worked at his Mar-a-Lago club. The White House has said Mr. Trump barred Mr. Epstein from the club “for being a creep.”

After Ms. Maxwell was arrested, Mr. Trump did not raise any concerns about her behavior. “I just wish her well, frankly,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Maxwell in 2020. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said she could not confirm the call had taken place but that, if it had, it would corroborate Mr. Trump’s statements that he had kicked Mr. Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago.

She said the phone call “may or may not have happened in 2006 — I don’t know the answer to that question.”

“What I’m telling you is that what President Trump has always said is that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club, because Jeffrey Epstein was a creep,” she added. “And that remains true, and this call, if it did happen, corroborates exactly what President Trump has said from the beginning.”

In the F.B.I.’s written account of the interview with Mr. Reiter, Mr. Trump is depicted as someone eager to relay to the police his concerns about Mr. Epstein’s conduct.

But in July 2019, shortly after Mr. Epstein’s arrest, Mr. Trump was asked by reporters if he had “any suspicions” that Mr. Epstein “was molesting young women, underaged women.”

“No, I had no idea. I had no idea,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “I haven’t spoken to him in many, many years. But I had — I didn’t have no idea.”

The White House on Tuesday referred questions about Mr. Reiter’s account to the Justice Department. The Justice Department, in a statement, said it had not corroborated the chief’s recollection of the conversation: “We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the president contacted law enforcement 20 years ago.”

Mr. Reiter declined to comment.

Speaker Mike Johnson last year described Mr. Trump as an “informant” against Mr. Epstein. Mr. Johnson later clarified his remarks, saying he was not sure he used the right word, but that “President Trump was never a hindrance to the Epstein investigation. He was trying to assist in that.”

Mr. Trump has said that he “didn’t know” why Mr. Epstein was recruiting employees from Mar-a-Lago, but claimed that he threw him out of the club amid a dispute over stealing spa workers.

But other documents in the Epstein files appear to undercut that account, according to Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who reviewed unredacted portions of the documents this week.

“Epstein’s lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and he had never been asked to leave,” Mr. Raskin said.

“It seems to be at odds with some things that President Trump has been saying recently about how he had kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of the club,” he added.

Revelations about Mr. Trump’s connections to Mr. Epstein have been a constant source of headache for the White House as it has tried to distance the president from the notorious sex offender.

Mr. Trump was friendly for at least 15 years with Mr. Epstein, and they were repeatedly spotted together at parties. But Mr. Trump has frequently tried to downplay their relationship.

Mr. Trump has said that the men broke off contact years ago, though there have been several explanations for the falling out.

In 2002, Mr. Trump told New York magazine, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

But two years after Mr. Trump called Mr. Epstein a “terrific guy,” the two men became rivals over an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that had fallen into foreclosure.

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The former police chief’s account highlights the inconsistent statements President Trump has made over the years about his relationship with both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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The latest bout of brutally cold weather that has beset the eastern U.S. for weeks sent wind chills into the negative teens and 20s Fahrenheit (negative mid-20s to negative low 30s Celsius) in the U.S. Northeast over the weekend. Meanwhile, out West, winter has brought record-breaking warmth that is more suited for spring and even summer. “I’m sitting here in a T-shirt in early February, a mile high in Colorado,” says climate scientist Daniel Swain of the California Institute for Water Resources.

This stark disparity is the product of a persistent atmospheric pattern. That pattern is about to break, however, and the weather fortunes of the two halves of the country are set to switch.

To explain what’s happening, let’s review a favorite winter weather bugaboo: the polar vortex. The vortex is like a circular rushing river of wind that corrals the bitterest cold air up in the Arctic. When the vortex weakens, that tight circle becomes wavier, akin to how a slow-moving river tends to meander in bends across the landscape, Swain says.

Where the vortex bends southward, cold air follows. And if it bends southward in one spot, it must bend northward in adjacent areas. In this case, the northward bend is happening over the western U.S., where it has pulled up warmer air.

Those bends tend to be set up in ways that reinforce background conditions related to Earth’s geography, Swain says. In the case of the U.S., the location of the Rockies, as well as the boundary between the Pacific Ocean and the land, means that, on average, a weak ridge (a northward bend in the jet stream) forms over the West and a weak trough (a southward bend) establishes over the East. The present dichotomy “is an amplification of that background pattern—a dramatic one,” Swain says.

The rapid warming of the Arctic may be making such weakening of the polar vortex more common, but researchers aren’t yet sure. “To the extent that it’s doing so, it hasn’t been enough to overcome the fact that that source of bitterly cold air isn’t as bitterly cold as it used to be,” Swain says.

This effect bears on the current situation. For the period of December 2025 to January 2026, no part of the contiguous U.S. had record cold. But 21 percent of the country had the warmest such period since 1940, according to climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

And as winters get warmer overall, these bouts of bitter cold become more disruptive because they are so unusual. People are less acclimated to freezing weather, and businesses may not make contingency plans. “For someone who is 25 or 30 years old, they may have had the coldest week in their life,” Swain says, whereas, for those out West, “it’s been the warmest winter regardless of age.”

Though the consequences of the cold have been widespread and acute—with travel disruptions, power outages, and scores of deaths—the warm western winter will also take a toll. Its consequences, however, will be delayed, with the potential for drought, water shortages, and a higher risk of wildfires in the coming months.

The upcoming weather switch up likely comes down to a subtle atmospheric shift. Understanding the details would take a dedicated study to unpack all the influences, Swain says, but it could be a change in where storms in the tropical Pacific are occurring, which can knock things around in the atmosphere like dominoes. Whatever the cause, temperatures will rise to more seasonable levels in the eastern U.S., and cooler, wetter weather will come to the West. Any rain or snow will be welcome, Swain says, but will be unlikely to erase the current deficit.

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