James' World 2

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Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.

On Jan. 14, at 7:44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis’s official X account announced that there were “reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis.” “Federal law enforcement,” as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called “ICE”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge.

They had been there since December, ostensibly in relation to a fraud investigation that fell well out of their departmental purview and settled instead for what appeared outwardly as a more indiscriminate pursuit of potential immigration violations. The Minneapolis metro area is not big: Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — home to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs — are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration’s first such immigration crackdown last year.

It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercised citizen’s smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE.

In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry. ICE officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on Jan. 7. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on Jan. 24 of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, by Border Patrol agents.

Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city’s X post on Jan. 14, a crowd of perhaps a hundred people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location, in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis’s north side, where, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, and milling around in the darkness beyond it were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.

The agents, in their masks and military-style kit, suggested a fierce omnipotence, but ICE and the other agencies have just as often been visibly unprepared to handle the policing situations their presence created in the city — or even the weather. Across the intersection, an agent slipped on the icy pavement and then fled, leaving an unsecured magazine full of live ammunition on the street, to the jeers of the crowd. Nearer to where I stood, an unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee was struggling to get clear of the crowd, escorted by a few officers on foot. “Get out of my [expletive] street!” someone yelled.

A woman in a fur-ruffed parka swung a plastic post at the rear windshield of the vehicle, which shattered with a dull crunch. It was not long before the air was alive with smoke grenades and sting balls and thick with tear gas. Faces peered out of second-floor windows along what had been, less than an hour earlier, a quiet residential street. “You killed Renee Good!” a man bellowed.

The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why: I saw no police officers. I had passed a Minneapolis Police Department cruiser parked some distance down the street, but here, where the agents were clashing with the crowd, they were nowhere to be seen. The federal agents themselves looked more like a platoon of soldiers navigating a hostile foreign capital than conventional law enforcement in an American city.

For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night, certain it would happen again.

‘Take Out That Phone and Hit Record’

Tim Walz, Minnesota’s embattled governor, appeared live on camera from his official residence on the night of the second shooting and clash. He described the federal deployment to his state as an “occupation” and “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”

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Federal agents stormed the city

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In an Indonesian cave system known for its prehistoric art, the oldest cave art yet found was hiding in plain sight. In a cave full of paintings that were well studied over the years, a faint hand stencil on the ceiling had been overlooked. A new chemical analysis of the stencil reveals that it dates back at least 67,800 years, an astonishing 15,000 years older than the next-oldest cave art found on the same island, Sulawesi. A nearby stencil dated to about 60,900 years ago.

“We knew that they were probably going to be old…, but we didn’t know how old,” says study co-author Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Australia.

The record-breaking finding, published today in Nature, might provide valuable information about the first humans to reach Australia.

The researchers used lasers—instead of the typical drilling—to take samples to date the art. This let them test more areas and therefore get a more accurate date range than they would have able to obtain with older methods.

The age of this previously undiscovered artwork is “really astonishing,” says Franco Viviani, a physical anthropologist who was not involved in the new study. Viviani adds that shifting back the time line of cave art gives us new insights into what ancient societies were capable of. “They confirm what is known today: that art is positively correlated to critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills,” he says.

Scientists were already aware of the ability of early humans and other ancient hominins to create art, such as shell jewelry made by humans at least 70,000 years ago and 57,000-year-old engraved bones attributed to Neandertals. Still, the cave art in the new study is among the oldest evidence yet of paintings by modern humans, and its distinctive style gives a view into the minds of the people who created it.

Consistent with a style that has, so far, only been found on Sulawesi, the hand is depicted with pointy, clawlike fingers. Researchers believe the style might serve to emphasize the close connection between humans and animals, which is “something we already seem to see in the very early painted art of Sulawesi, with at least one instance of a scene portraying figures that we interpret as representations of part-human, part-animal beings,” said study co-author Adam Brumm of Griffith University in a statement.

These clues about the culture of the people who created this art are especially interesting to researchers because they might shed light on the lives of the first humans to migrate to Australia. Archeologists have long suspected that Australia’s first settlers traveled through Indonesia, but because of uncertainties in DNA and archeological evidence that has been discovered to date, they have debated whether this happened 65,000 or 50,000 years ago. The presence of such old art suggests humans likely made their way to the continent even earlier, possibly managing to undertake the first intentional long-distance sea crossing.

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Goldie Hawn says her relationship with Kurt Russell works even without marriage.  Greg Doherty/Getty Images for St. Regis

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Hmmmm … MAGA is next lookout!

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Federal officials sought to portray a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday as a domestic terrorist, saying he wanted to “massacre” law enforcement, even as videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account.

The man, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Federal officials said he was armed, but there is no sign in videos analyzed by The New York Times that he pulled his weapon, or that agents even knew he had one until he was already pinned on the sidewalk.

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Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Account of Killing

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Cases of winter viruses in the U.S. have exploded in recent months—and soon kids may be less protected from them, thanks to new vaccine guidelines.

Amid a worsening respiratory illness season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently rolled back its universal childhood vaccine recommendations from addressing 17 diseases to just 11. The CDC no longer recommends that all children be vaccinated against influenza and rotavirus—instead, it recommends these vaccines based on individual discussions with doctors only. And the agency recommends that vaccines that protect against meningococcal bacteria and hepatitis A and B be given to children in high-risk groups only.

All of these vaccines remain available to parents who want their kids to receive them, and they are fully covered by both private and public insurance. Nevertheless, public health experts warn that the changes will reduce vaccination rates and increase disease rates.

Concerningly, the changes prominently affect seasonal diseases that spike during the winter and are notorious for causing high rates of pediatric hospitalizations and even deaths—most notably, influenza. The timing couldn’t be worse: nationwide health care visits for flu-like symptoms recently hit a record high in nearly 30 years of tracking.

“The speed at which the flu season is ramping up in terms of total cases is quite impressive,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And he anticipates the numbers will only grow. “We’re closer to the beginning than the end of the flu season,” Pekosz says.

It’s still too early to understand whether certain age groups are being hit worse this year than others, he adds, although the CDC has already reported 17 pediatric deaths this season. But the 2024–2025 flu season was remarkably deadly for kids—289 children were reported to have died of the virus, the highest number of pediatric deaths from flu since the CDC started tracking pediatric flu deaths in 2004. Of those who died that had a known vaccination status, only one in 10 was fully vaccinated—a testament to the flu shot’s protection.

Children are more likely than those in any other age group to catch the flu. Yet only slightly more than half of two-year-old children in the U.S. were fully vaccinated against the flu in 2023, the latest year for which full data are available. Until this month the CDC recommended annual shots beginning at six months of age. “Uptake for the flu vaccine has been relatively low and dropping,” says Flor Muñoz, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Baylor College of Medicine. So far this flu season, childhood vaccination is at less than 43 percent. More children may still get vaccinated, but for comparison, the pediatric uptake rate at this point in the 2019–2020 season, before COVID truly hit, was 54 percent.

The CDC’s new policy entirely removes the formal recommendation for the influenza vaccine for kids, leaving discussions of the vaccine entirely in the hands of parents and care providers. “To me, it doesn’t really make much sense to take away that recommendation when you know, scientifically, that there’s a benefit,” Pekosz says.

Instead, decisions about flu vaccination will be made through shared clinical decision-making—having health care providers discuss the risks and benefits of a medical intervention with the patient or their family.

But providers already routinely have these discussions with parents, says Kathryn Edwards, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and vaccinologist, now emerita at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “Parents are always part of the decision for vaccines to be administered.”

Shared clinical decision-making now applies to vaccines for three key infections; the COVID vaccine received the designation this summer, and the new guidelines extended it to the rotavirus vaccine, as well as influenza. Rotavirus causes a diarrheal infection that spreads year-round but is most common in the winter and spring. The disease has largely flown under the radar because vaccines introduced in 2006 starkly reduced hospitalization rates from the virus. This vaccine is administered orally and has had a relatively high uptake—vaccination rates have hovered between about 70 percent and 75 percent since the 2010s. Muñoz fears that the move away from a universal recommendation to shared clinical decision-making could result in increasing cases of and hospitalizations from rotavirus as soon as this year.

Experts worry the CDC’s new approach to vaccines will erode other recent victories for children’s health as well. Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is another “big hitter” winter infection, alongside flu, Edwards says. Traditionally, nine in 10 children have caught the virus within their first two years, and it sends more than 58,000 kids younger than five years old to the hospital every year in the U.S. The disease is the leading cause of hospitalization in babies.

An RSV vaccine for pregnant people and a protective antibody shot for babies were both approved for general use in 2023. In the 2024–2025 season, the prevention efforts caused “a remarkable reduction in the burden of RSV,” Edwards says. The new guidelines don’t change RSV vaccinations for either pregnant people or babies, but Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has questioned the antibody shots’ safety despite evidence from clinical trials.

Other standard childhood vaccines—including against polio, measles, whooping cough, and chickenpox—remain fully recommended for all children, but experts still worry that the broad hits to the vaccine schedule will ultimately reduce those vaccines’ usage as well.

In addition, reducing pediatric vaccine coverage for very contagious infections will increase overall cases for everyone as children spread illness among their peers and older family members. And for seasonal illnesses, the risk runs highest during the winter. “We are really surrounded by a sea of viral infections,” Edwards says.

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Fajrul Islam/Getty Images

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Note: There are links in Delayed Orgasm, Sober Sex, S.T.I. Decline, and Romantasy.

Click each link read the associated article then click the next link etc.. The set of links appears after each article.

Give yourself a Gold Star if you can read all of the articles. Have fun!

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What to Know About Your Sexual Health

Sexual health can be an important part of personal well-being. The information below can help you demystify this often misunderstood topic.

• How to Improve Libido: Experts say scheduling sex is fine, but there are even more effective ways to cultivate intimacy.

• Delayed Orgasm: The condition affects one in 10 men over 40, and can make sex difficult.

• Sober Sex: For those who rely on alcohol to loosen up, getting intimate without it can be tricky. But there are big payoffs, experts say.

• S.T.I. Decline: After decades of unrelenting increases, rates of sexually transmitted infections in the United States are showing hints of a downturn.

• Romantasy: Books in this genre have helped some readers talk openly about yearning, sex, and desire. And it’s spilling over into their bedrooms.

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Does string theory—the controversial “theory of everything” from physics—tell us anything about consciousness and the human brain?

Outside of the theory itself being devised by conscious humans using their brains, there’s scant reason to think so. In a nutshell, string theory is a sprawling realm of theoretical physics that assumes that tiny vibrating strings are the fundamental basis of reality. If valid, it offers ways for unifying the quantum mechanics that govern the universe on small scales with the gravitational force that shapes the cosmos at larger scales. But the proposed strings are so unimaginably minuscule, and their associated math is so difficult and diverse, that the theory is widely considered to be experimentally unverifiable. Consciousness, meanwhile, is a notoriously slippery and ill-defined thing, but it generally seems to be an emergent property of biology, such as assemblages of neurons within our brains.

No meaningful overlap exists between these vastly disparate domains. Or does it? A new paper, published last week in Nature, posits that some of the arcane math of string theory actually helps explain the wiring of a brain’s neurons—as well as the branching of other “physical networks” such as tree limbs, blood vessels, and anthills. “The work,” trumpets one institutional press release, “represents the first time string theory … has successfully described real biological structures.”

Senior author Albert-László Barabási, a distinguished professor and network scientist at Northeastern University, emphasizes that the paper isn’t claiming any profound, direct relationship between string theory and neuroscience. Rather, it’s showing how mathematical techniques that have been developed in string theory can be used to better describe how physical networks organize themselves. But even so, using string theory’s math to understand neural wiring would be a surprisingly practical feat, given that the theory is so tenuously tethered to physical reality that skeptical physicists have called it “not even wrong.”

The potential linkage, Barabási says, springs from the fact that “physical networks are physically costly and thus try to optimize themselves,” even if we don’t yet know what exactly they optimize. The simplest approach would be a “wiring diagram” following the shortest routes between any two nodes to minimize length, but detailed three-dimensional scans and maps of physical networks have revealed more complex branching geometries and connections that show that some different optimization must be occurring. So instead Barabási and his team sought to explain how the structure of physical networks optimizes for minimal surface area rather than other factors such as length or volume.

“For many of these networks, like the vascular system that carries blood or the neurons that use ion channels to pump out neurotransmitters, you’re really talking about a tube, and the greatest cost is to build the surface,” he says. “But modeling surface minimization is a hell of a mathematical problem because you need to create locally smooth surfaces that patch into each other in a continuous way.”

Barabási’s former postdoc and the study’s first author, Xiangyi Meng, now an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, realized that the seemingly intractable calculation was essentially identical to one for which string theorists had already developed sophisticated tools.

“While the mathematics of minimal surfaces has deep historical roots, our work relies on a specific advancement that classical geometry does not offer,” Meng says—namely, a subtype of string theory called “covariant closed string field theory,” which was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Barton Zwiebach and others in the 1980s.

Covariant closed string field theory allows physicists to compute the smoothest, most efficient interactions—akin to minimal surfaces—between certain types of strings by treating them as vertices (corners) and edges; this approach is important for string-theory-based attempts to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. In the case of physical networks, Meng says, it offers a way to represent their growth as a series of sleevelike surfaces that are smoothly sewn together. “Crucially, classical minimization tends to collapse sleevelike surfaces into trivial wires,” he says. “Zwiebach’s formulation prevents this, maintaining a finite thickness for every link. This fundamental insight is what allows us to model the three-dimensional reality of physical networks, such as of neurons or veins, which must retain volume to function.”

The team then tested its approach against high-resolution 3D scans of physical networks, including those of neurons, blood vessels, tree branches, and corals. In each case, they found that the string theory model produced a closer match than simpler classical predictions. In particular, the team’s model more accurately replicated the observed numbers and alignments of branches. “So what we were seeing is a behavior that’s not specific to the brain but universal across physical networks,” Barabási says. “It’s a very important step, I think, in understanding the mechanisms of how brains and other physical networks wire themselves and why they’re unusual.”

“This paper nicely shows that if you think [of physical networks] in terms of surface-area costs rather than wire length, things start to make more sense,” says Michael Winding, a systems neuroscientist at the Francis Crick Institute in England, who was not involved with the work. “That’s genuinely interesting. People usually think about surface area in terms of its effect on electrical properties—like how fast signals move within a neuron, rather than as a construction cost to build a neuron.”

As for whether comprehending the wiring of the brain really demands techniques from the frontiers of theoretical physics, questions remain. Bona fide experts in both domains are few and far between. But one, Vijay Balasubramanian, a string theorist and brain-focused biophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is skeptical.

“I’m not sure that this study marks a critical breakthrough in our understanding of physical networks, and many experts may find the claimed relationship to string theory unconvincing,” he says. “So any assertion of revolutionary importance here seems premature. That said, this effort to apply physical principles to understanding biological networks makes a welcome addition to the scholarship in biophysics and neuroscience and will hopefully inspire further investigations.”

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To help start the conversation, we asked experts what they wished men knew about their sexual organs. Here’s what they said.

Erectile dysfunction can be a sign of chronic disease.

Around 50 percent of men over 40 will suffer from erectile dysfunction at some point, and the issue can represent broader problems with circulation.

Good blood flow is essential for achieving and maintaining an erection, and that is only possible with a healthy heart. A 2008 Dutch study of 1,248 men ages 50 to 75 found that those who said they had erectile dysfunction were at least 60 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the six years after the study concluded.

“Think of the penis as a barometer of somebody’s overall cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Matthew Ziegelmann, a urologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Difficulties with physical arousal may be a sign of Type 2 diabetes or high cholesterol, for instance, both of which damage the lining of arteries and elevate the risk of a stroke or heart attack.

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Claire Merchlinsky/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty

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