The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2026

Trump came for Canada. We said no.

Stephen Marche

OPINION

Friday, Aug. 21, may go down in history as Canada's Liberation Day. It was the day America came for us, and we said no.

The trade negotiations between the United States and Canada had been moving forward in the weeks after President Trump first threatened 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, but just before midnight, Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the American proposal. “Last-minute changes in the U.S.-proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal,” Mr. Carney said in a statement. “Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses.”

It was a decision made, seemingly, on the spur of the moment, but the deep history of this country paved the way for

this one, critical gesture — a historic "no."

Mark Carney has chosen suffering, but he did what Canadians elected him to do.

Mr. Trump's tariffs on some \$20 billion of Canadian goods began immediately after his deadline passed. For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basket case of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president's slapdash vanity.

But Mr. Carney did not simply reject a trade offer on Friday. He was openly defiant of the new breed of American aggression. “We will not allow any nation to determine our future,” he said.

It was a unique statement for any leader in Canada to make. The country has long defined itself through its participation in global systems, seeing itself as a node in the larger orders of the world, the postwar trans-Atlantic order and, before that, the British Empire. Mr. Carney is taking Canada in another direction, emphasizing national sovereignty on every front — economic, political, military and technological.

While the prime minister's approach is certainly new, it emerges from deep reservoirs of the Canadian spirit. For nearly a decade, I was a columnist at Esquire magazine. During that time, one of the greatest discrepancies I noticed between Canadians and Americans — and Canadian and American men in particular — was in their basic idea of what earned respect. For Americans, the capacity to project power, the ability to make things happen, to win, MARCHE, PAGE 10

DAVIDE MONTELEONE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
GIORGIA MELONI, the Italian prime minister, on her strained relationship with President Trump.
"It's evident that with Donald Trump, I believed things would be easier, given our convergence on immigration and woke culture. Things have turned out otherwise."

The hard right's ‘global star’

The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions.

ROME

Giorgia Meloni of Italy has cut a path to power that others may follow

BY ROGER COHEN

Giorgia Meloni, daughter of the extreme right, likes to set records. As she settles into an armchair, she reflects on the secret of the political success that will soon make her the longest continually serving prime minister in the history of the Italian Republic.

“I am a person who imposes rules on herself,” she said in a rare interview. “The first rule is that I never say something I don’t think. There is no way to get me to say something I don’t believe; my brain short-circuits.”

She smiled, as if to say it's that simple, but of course it is not. She has remained something of an enigma, a tightly controlled one, as she has journeyed from post-Fascist roots to a pivotal place in the European politics she is changing.

Ms. Meloni chose to meet in a lounge adjacent to her Rome office. She is gracious to a fault. In such moments, it is hard to recall the way she may roll her eyes and stare daggers when angry, as she has been of late with President Trump, her ideological ally, and Pedro Sánchez, the left-wing Spanish prime minister, an ideological foe.

"I think people see the difference," said Ms. Meloni, who has been in office for almost four years, about four times the postwar Italian average. "They know if something's untrue, false — and I believe that's the biggest mistake a politician can make."

Truth is not exactly the political currency of this age, but Ms. Meloni has always marched to the beat of her own drum. The effect has been transformative. “Melonization,” or the numbing of horrifying history, has entered the lexicon.

It denotes the process Ms. Meloni now personifies, which allows a post-Fascist party — in this case, her Brothers of Italy — to shed the threat of violent authoritarianism and gain acceptance in the mainstream through pragmatic conservatism, or at least its appearance.

“I think what got me here” — to her office at Palazzo Chigi — “was the courage to stand on the uncomfortable side of history,” Ms. Meloni said, speaking Italian. “To opt to be against the current.”

Courage is by some distance her favorite word.

With Marine Le Pen, of the once-out-cast French far right, a strong candidate for next year's presidential election, and the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, leading polls in that country, the Meloni effect is about to be tested at the core of postwar European integration.

If Fascism in Italy, the land of its birth, can be made to seem remote, even irrelevant to political success, so too perhaps can the Holocaust in Germany and the collaborationist wartime Vichy regime in France.

It was Vichy's antisemitic nationalism that inspired Ms. Le Pen's father in founding the National Front, now rebranded as the National Rally.

Ms. Le Pen, it seems, will have a ready retort as she seeks to reassure French voters: Just look at Italy!

“Meloni is not a visionary leader, but she has become a global star and the emblem of the possibility that far-right nationalists can be absorbed,” said Giovanni Orsina, the director of the LUISS

Guido Carli School of Government in Rome.

Far from upheaval, Italy has found stability under Ms. Meloni. France has had six governments and Britain three prime ministers since she took office in 2022.

With President Emmanuel Macron of France departing next year, Ms. Meloni could become the doyen of European politics, in the way former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany once was, at a time when a fragmenting world order is in profound and uneasy transformation.

Yet the question of what transformation Ms. Meloni seeks remains open. MELONI, PAGE 2

U.S. military frustrated as A.I. race intensifies

WASHINGTON

Trump administration veers wildly in response to security implications

BY DAVID E. SANGER, DUSTIN VOLZ, ANA SWANSON AND JULIAN E. BARNES

Last month, many of the biggest military contractors in the United States received a letter from the Air Force with a stern warning: By Sept. 1, all the software they use for weapons and control systems must be free of products built by the A.I. company Anthropic. Failure to comply would put all their business with the Pentagon at risk.

Within a month, those contractors received an unexpected reversal: They could — for now — disregard the earlier instructions about purging Anthropic.

It was one more example of the chaos and contradictions in the tsunami of A.I. disruptions that have swept through the U.S. national security establishment in recent months. Agencies like the Pentagon, which still use airplanes designed in the 1950s, are struggling furiously to keep up with A.I. models whose powers multiply in a matter of months.

The tension has been magnified in the case of Anthropic, whose chief executive, Dario Amodei, has been locked in a public feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over restrictions the company tried to put on the technology's use by the world's most powerful military.

Without Anthropic's powerful Mythos model, it would be far more difficult for the National Security Agency to find and patch vulnerabilities in the Pentagon's own systems, senior N.S.A. officials argued. And it turned out that despite the original Anthropic ban, the N.S.A. was still able to use its products.

Critical tests were underway using Mythos to gauge its potential to hack into highly protected foreign networks, current and former officials said. Shutting down the use of Mythos, an A.I. model whose potential for conducting offensive cyberoperations is already shifting the digital arms race into overdrive, would have amounted to “unilateral disarmament,” according to one recently departed senior U.S. official.

From the Department of Defense to the Central Intelligence Agency and N.S.A., billions have already been spent on using artificial intelligence to develop weapons that could work with less human control or to test vulnerable military networks and even nuclear codes to make sure they cannot be cracked by adversarial A.I. systems. Artificial intelligence is critical to the Golden Dome, President Trump's vision — fanciful according to many experts — of a space-based missile shield.

But little of that work anticipated the powers of Mythos and its A.I. counter-A.I. RACE, PAGE 8

Flotilla activists allege abuse in Israeli custody

MURAD SEZER/REUTERS
Malika Baouya, center, sailed toward Gaza in a flotilla in May and was deported to Istanbul. She said that in Israeli detention, she heard activists “screaming, howling.”

PARIS

Seized while trying to enter Gaza, many tell of beatings and other mistreatment

BY CATHERINE PORTER, ELISABETTA POVOLEDO AND NIMET KIRAC

When Arno Meyns tried to sail to Gaza in May, Israeli forces intercepted his boat at gunpoint, took him to an Israeli ship and, he said, shoved him into a darkened shipping container.

Barefoot and soaked in seawater, Mr. Meyns found up to four men waiting there to attack him, he said.

“They started kicking me right away. It was dark. They punched me, too. They stopped for a moment, and then started again,” said Mr. Meyns, 34, a Belgian who is a captain for small commercial vessels.

Mr. Meyns was among more than 400 activists on a flotilla of roughly 50 boats who were apprehended on the Mediterranean Sea by Israel as they tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

The stated goal of the activists, who sailed from Turkey on May 14, was to bring food and humanitarian aid to the war-ravaged enclave. In reality, many expected to be detained, like those who had participated in similar flotillas, before reaching the territory. They hoped that media coverage of their journey would call attention to Israel's restrictions on supplies to Gaza, which tightened after the war began — and which later contributed, experts said, to famine in parts of Gaza.

The activists were captured days after setting sail. Interviews with activists and statements from Israeli officials both show that they were then held by Israel for roughly three days, first at sea aboard Israeli vessels, and later in the Port of Ashdod.

There, Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, walked among them, taunting them in a video he posted ISRAEL, PAGE 4

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Meloni, the hard right's ‘global star’

MELONI, FROM PAGE 1

GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
DAVIDE MONTELEONE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Top, Giorgia Meloni at a rally in 2022 with Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister. Above right, with her older sister, Arianna, and her mother, Anna Paratore, a novelist, in 1979. Above left, the Garbatella district of Rome, where Ms. Meloni grew up. Garbatella belongs to the left, yet Ms. Meloni, at the age of 15, joined a right-wing party with Fascist roots.
AUGUSTO CASASOLI/A3

Top, Ms. Meloni, center right, in Rome in 1995 in a counterprotest on Liberation Day, which celebrates Italy's liberation from Fascism. In 1996, she told French TV that “Mus-solini was a good politician.” In her interview, she referred to the Fascist period merely as a “particularly complex” time. Above, as a young politician in 2002.

Has she really become a democratic moderate at the age of 49? Or does a 19-year-old Neo-Fascist still lurk inside her, the militant with an angelic face who told French TV in 1996 that “Mussolini was a good politician” and that “everything he did, he did for Italy”?

A BRIDGE TOO FAR

Ms. Meloni wanted to be the bridge over troubled waters. The only leader of a European Union government invited to Mr. Trump's inauguration, she intended to build on their shared nationalism and hostility to immigration, and to ensure that the Western alliance remained functional.

So last year, when Mr. Trump, in a tone of oleaginous flattery, called her “a beautiful young woman,” she feigned indifference. Bigger things were at stake.

Still, provocations cascaded from the White House. The European Union had been created to “screw” the United States, Trump declared. Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, should be handed to the United States. NATO’s European allies were wimps, holding “a little back” in Afghanistan, where Italy lost 53 soldiers.

Ms. Meloni did her best to turn the other cheek. "It's evident that with Donald Trump, I believed things would be easier, given our convergence on immigration and woke culture," she said. "Things have turned out otherwise."

“Otherwise” is an understatement. In June, she became the first of several insulted European leaders to hit back hard at Mr. Trump. As a result, she and Mr. Trump have not spoken in several weeks, she revealed.

For her, the red line was crossed first in April when Mr. Trump attacked Pope Leo as “WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Ms. Meloni responded that such remarks were “unacceptable.” Trump snapped back: She was “unacceptable.”

You can criticize many things in Italy but not the Holy Father.

"I think what got me here was the courage to stand on the uncomfortable side of history. To opt to be against the current."

It was downhill from there. Mr. Trump floated a story that Ms. Meloni had “begged” him for a photograph together in June at the Group of 7 summit in France.

She was incandescent. She berated Mr. Trump: “Italy and I never beg.”

The deliberate fusion of nation and self expressed her sense of a mission to change the perception of Italy, from land of beauty and inefficiency to land of serious intent.

Her shared values with Mr. Trump were eclipsed by her single biggest foreign-policy objective: to overcome Italy's longtime status as the least of the major powers and give the world's eighth-largest economy geopolitical heft.

“I don’t like the idea of a submissive Italy, an Italy that sees itself as lesser than others,” she said in our interview. Her goal, she said, is to achieve “the biggest revolution that can happen in this nation — a revolution of pride.”

IN SEARCH OF A CAUSE

Ms. Meloni learned early to shun passivity. “I grew up with the idea that I was worthless,” she wrote in “I Am Giorgia,” her autobiography. “My reaction was to commit myself with all my being to demonstrate the contrary.”

Abandoned as an infant by her father, who left for Spain and whose death in 2012 left her “indifferent,” Ms. Meloni buried in a “black hole” the “pain of not having been loved enough,” as she puts it in her book.

She hardened. At 13, she had decided never to see her father again. It was an irrevocable choice, as when in 2023, she dumped Andrea Giambruno, her partner and the father of her daughter, Ginevra. (A video and an audio recording had caught what appeared to be his crude propositioning of female colleagues. The relationship “ends here,” she wrote the next morning on social media.)

The love of her mother, Anna Paratore, who wrote some 140 racy romance novels under the pen name Josie Bell, filled the void. Ms. Meloni grew up with her and an older sister in the Garbatella district of Rome, a working-class area with middle-class enclaves, including the one in which they lived.

Garbatella belongs to the left and always has. Yet Ms. Meloni, just 15, opted for the right of Fascist roots.

Her decision stemmed from outrage, she explained. The Mafia's assassination in the space of two months in 1992 of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two Sicilian prosecutors threatening it, felt overwhelming.

“I remember on a hot July day watching the images on TV,” she said, “and thinking we can’t go on like this. Basta!”

Mr. Borsellino had once been close to the extreme-right Italian Social Movement, or MSI, founded in 1946 by former members of Benito Mussolini's Fascist party. The fringe party stood apart from the vast political corruption scandal sweeping Italy in the early 1990s, which added to its appeal, Ms. Meloni said.

She called the headquarters of the MSI and discovered that an office of its Youth Front was “right around the corner.”

One day, she walked in. At the time, the post-Fascist right had no chance of attaining power, and even two decades later, when she co-founded Brothers of Italy, the party hovered around 3 percent of the vote for seven years. Yet she persisted.

A "COMPLEX" TIME

That Garbatella office now houses a branch of Ms. Meloni's party.

Ms. Meloni, of a generation distant from World War II, has denounced but not entirely disavowed Fascism, affirming “our opposition to all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.”

She used her inaugural speech to say that “the worst moment in Italian history” was when Mussolini promulgated the anti-Jewish race laws of 1938; thousands of Italian Jews were ultimately sent to their deaths under partial Nazi occupation.

In our interview, however, she referred to the Fascist period merely as a “particularly complex” time — so complex that its aftermath haunted her childhood and adolescence.

During the “years of lead,” from the late 1960s into the 1980s, Neo-Fascist and far-left groups were intent for different reasons on upending the postwar republic. Bombings, assassinations and massacres left more than 400 dead, including one prime minister, Aldo Moro, killed in 1978 by the leftist Red Brigades.

Such was the instability in which Ms. Meloni was raised and that, in various, less violent forms, long haunted Italy. She made stability her watchword.

Ushering her post-Fascist party into the mainstream, Ms. Meloni has refused to say that she is an anti-Fascist, which to her seems to denote the leftist groups of her youth for whom, in their words, "killing Fascists is not a crime."

“I know the name and the story of all the youths sacrificed on the altar of anti-Fascism,” she has written.

Of Neo-Fascist terrorism, Ms. Meloni has far less to say. Two rightist bombings left 102 people dead in attacks in Milan and Bologna alone.

For her, the left was to blame for Italy's postwar troubles, and the “complex” period when her party found its roots was best set aside.

Speaking of Italian Fascism, she said in the interview: “Clearly, if we look at this history today, it’s one thing. If we looked at it standing in the midst of it, probably we would have seen it differently, no?"

The historian R. J. B. Bosworth, in his biography “Mussolini,” writes that Il Duce’s dictatorship “caused the premature deaths of at least one million people." They died in killing fields from Africa to Albania and Yugoslavia and, not least, in Italy itself.

Mussolini also drained the Pontine Marshes, built Milan's Central Station and, it is said, made the trains run on time.

Any moral appraisal of Mussolini's rule seem clear enough. But “Italy never settled its accounts with Fascism,” said Davide Conti, a historian.

"There was no Nuremberg because nobody wanted it, and if you prosecuted Italian Fascists, you had to turn to the Resistance, most of them communists," he said.

Ms. Meloni benefited from this vacillation, navigating a narrow path between commitment to Italian democratic freedom and curious ambivalence over the period of its loss.

She did not open the door to the far right; Silvio Berlusconi, starting in the mid-1990s, did that as prime minister for a total of nine years at the head of four governments. But she was the ideal politician to step through it.

Just 14 years after she walked into the Garbatella office, she was elected to parliament and became the youngest deputy speaker in the history of the republic. Two years later, in 2008, she set another record, as the youngest minister, at age 31. The third record, for governmental longevity, awaits her on Sept. 4.

The extreme right had always been seen as “dangerous, nostalgic, Fascist, racist, xenophobic,” said Fabio Rampelli, the vice president of the lower house of Italy’s parliament and a long-time confidant of Ms. Meloni who headed the Roman Youth section of the MSI when she joined it.

“And here was a very young woman, 5 feet, 3 inches tall, blonde and blue-eyed, smiling and sarcastic, who had nothing to do with Fascism — and from that moment on, all the people who continued insulting us just became ridiculous,” he said.

“Perhaps I was the right person at the right time,” Ms. Meloni suggested.

A TIGHT INNER CIRCLE

When Ms. Meloni took office, Matteo Renzi, Italy's former center-left prime minister, decided to give her a smart ring. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton had advised him that the worst decisions were the result of too little sleep.

“I said, ‘Giorgia, this job is beautiful but agonizing; please keep track every night of how much you sleep,’” Mr. Renzi recalled.

Ms. Meloni soon tossed the monitor. "She thought I was trying to control her," Mr. Renzi said.

“She trusts nobody,” said Gianfranco Fini, the former MSI leader who redefined the party as a democratic force in 1995 and steered Ms. Meloni toward a rapid ascent. “She makes her own calculations.”

Ms. Meloni works in a small cabal that includes her older sister, Arianna, and several of the extreme-right activists she met during her youth. They get the top jobs in the Senate, cultural institutions and elsewhere.

Her insular style has infuriated the left. Mr. Renzi, who heads a small center-left party called Italia Viva, recently caused a ruckus by suggesting that “the Addams Family” was governing Italy. He is trying to unite the left to defeat Ms. Meloni in the elections next year.

Elly Schlein, the leader of the Democratic Party, the largest party of the left, cited Italy's paltry economic growth rate of 0.5 percent, an 8 percent decline in real wages, some of Europe's highest energy bills and depleted public hospitals as evidence of a “wasted historic opportunity.”

“Stability can be a value, but when it’s immobility, people are unforgiving,” Ms. Schlein said of Ms. Meloni.

The prime minister hit back in our interview. She rattled off a long list of “parameters” — employment, inflation, illegal migrant landings, health spending, market spreads. “Tell me if they are not better,” she said.

These numbers have indeed moved in a positive direction, albeit sometimes fractionally.

“But it’s possible,” she said with characteristic sarcasm, “that I did nothing!”

"The best you can say is that there's been no disaster," said Veronica De Romanis, a professor of economics at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, noting that 1.2 million Italians are not in employment, education or training, with many leaving the country.

What Ms. Meloni has brought is fiscal discipline. Under Giancarlo Giorgetti, a respected finance minister, the budget deficit has come down to close to the European Union's limit of 3 percent from 7 percent. Italy's debt has been upgraded for the first time in 23 years.

For Ms. Meloni, who said in 2014 that “we are for leaving the euro,” the flip-flop to achieve this has been marked.

She knew Italy needed E.U. money, including about \$221 billion in pandemic recovery funds, which provided an enormous boost to the economy.

So, like a good European technocrat, the kind she had reviled, Ms. Meloni got in line on Italy's deficit. Like a good European NATO member, she backed Ukraine against Russia.

"Just about anything is reversible," said Salvatore Merlo, the deputy editor of the newspaper Il Foglio, who knows Ms. Meloni well.

Ms. Meloni's quest to reshape Italy's self-image is evident in small details. She almost never refers to the “republic” or the “country” when speaking of Italy, but always to the “nation.”

It is a marked shift from the language of her predecessors, designed to reinforce the idea of a community of blood and culture with every right to renewed national pride.

Of course, a republic is the home of equal citizens; nation as understood by Ms. Meloni has a lot to do with immemorial Italian lineage. For this reason, immigration has been a central and divisive issue.

This month, Ms. Meloni led a broad E.U. assault on Mr. Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, for supposedly lax immigration policies after thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, the small Spanish territory in North Africa.

The clash demonstrated Ms. Meloni's influence in pushing Europe rightward, as well as her capacity to engineer overheated emotion to feed her base.

At home, her immigration policies have been fiercely contested.

She quietly authorized some 450,000 visas for migrants to work in Italy's fields and factories and to look after Europe's oldest population. She also devised an investment plan for Africa to increase the appeal of making it at home rather than leaving.

A plan to send asylum seekers to Albania still faces legal challenges and has proved expensive, with paltry results. It looked like a fiasco until, in June, the European Union approved the “use” of “return hubs” to asylum seekers in “safe third countries.”

This has allowed Ms. Meloni to claim victory on the issue of European immigration policy.

Ms. Meloni tried this year to change the Constitution in a referendum that would have brought Italy's judges, long resented by rightist leaders as a liberal force, under tighter political control.

The shattering defeat she suffered on her most ambitious piece of domestic legislation appeared to be an indicator that not all Italians trust her with power.

"A victory would have led later to more profound modifications to the Constitution, in the direction of a stronger executive, a more presidential system," said Mr. Conti, the historian. "That is her fundamental aim."

Yet there is no sign of her support crumbling. It hovers around 27 percent, slightly above her score in the 2022 election. For now, a divided left does not have a leader of her stature, leaving next year's election wide open.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting in Rome and Piombino.

Using vodka and dirty jokes to conduct diplomacy

WASHINGTON

John Coale, left, a U.S. diplomat, with Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus's leader, in September last year. Mr. Coale said he followed advice to "yuk it up" with Mr. Lukashenko.
BELARUSIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. envoy says that effort got Belarusian leader to free 500 political prisoners

BY VALERIE HOPKINS

When John Coale, a friend of President Trump who is serving as a diplomat in Eastern Europe, was asked on short notice to meet with Belarus's strongman leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, he followed colleagues' advice to "yuk it up."

It was perhaps a surprising suggestion. The U.S. government had given Mr. Lukashenko the diplomatic cold shoulder after he asked President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for help in 2020 to violently suppress pro-democracy protests. Mr. Lukashenko further isolated his country by letting Mr. Putin use Belarus as a staging ground for Russia's invasion of Ukraine two years later.

Still, Mr. Coale gave it a shot, arriving in Belarus's capital, Minsk, last year armed with wisecracks and banter. As the special envoy to Belarus, he began building a relationship with Mr. Lukashenko over dirty jokes, vodka shots and weight-loss advice. Their rapport paved the way for Belarus to free 500 political prisoners and grant pardons for several hundred more. Its leader has also become a back channel between the United States and Russia, which is Belarus's closest ally.

In exchange, Mr. Coale has negotiated sanctions relief for Mr. Lukashenko and has offered a road map to normalizing ties between the United States and Belarus.

“Humor is a gigantic weapon,” Mr. Coale, 79, said in a recent interview in Washington at a private club overlooking the White House. “If you can get the other guy laughing, you’re halfway there and you’re not a threat.”

Their repartee embodies Mr. Trump's preferred personalized, deal-making approach to diplomacy. The president often sidelines career diplomats in favor of envoys like Mr. Coale, a lawyer with little previous government experience. Mr. Trump relishes the drama of high-profile prisoner exchanges and hostage releases, counting them as wins that offer a clearer narrative of success than more complex geopolitical conflicts.

Mr. Coale's efforts have earned him attention from the president. Mr. Coale said the two have discussed expanding his mission to include liberty for political prisoners anywhere in the world. The White House declined to comment publicly.

To critics, Mr. Coale is rewarding a corrupt, authoritarian government. Some Belarusians are uncomfortable with exchanging sanctions relief for political prisoners. Activists have called the judicial system “a conveyor belt” because new political prisoners are being locked up while others are being released. Some activists allege that effectively trading freedom for sanctions relief “encourages human trafficking.”

Mr. Coale rejects those complaints. He said he had two goals in Belarus: to free prisoners and to get its government “to want to be in the family of nations.”

Others advocates credited Mr. Coale and the U.S. State Department for the mass prisoner releases, calling them rare achievements.

"He does tremendous work without being preoccupied about being seen negotiating with Mr. Lukashenko," said Valery Kavaleuski, a former Belarusian diplomat and a founder of a prisoner advocacy group.

Mr. Coale, a Baltimore native, was a lawyer before he joined the Trump administration. He represented victims of the world's worst industrial disaster, the Bhopal gas leak in 1984, and negotiated the first large settlement with Big Tobacco companies in 1997, worth \$386 billion.

He was politically active, building connections with both Democrats and Republicans. He said he had been a Democrat but concluded the party moved further left than he was comfortable with. His wife, Greta Van Susteren, is a former Fox News presenter now at Newsmax TV.

After mainstream social media networks banned Mr. Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Mr. Coale said that several of the president's allies, including Senator Lindsey Graham, suggested he take on Mr. Trump as a legal client. At the president's golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Coale pitched the legal strategy that would eventually result in Meta, YouTube and X each paying tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits over their suspensions of Mr. Trump.

Eventually, Mr. Coale was offered a role in the administration, first as deputy envoy to Ukraine before the Belarus posting.

Home to about nine million people, Belarus is sandwiched between Russia and the European Union and is considered an important buffer zone between the two. Mr. Lukashenko's repressive rule earned him the label of “Europe’s last dictator” from Condoleezza Rice in 2005, when she was secretary of state. Washington has not had an ambassador in Minsk since 2008.

The two countries have pursued cautious engagement, including during Mr. Trump's first term, but that halted with Mr. Lukashenko's violent suppression of the 2020 protests. After years of isolating the strongman, Christopher W. Smith, a career diplomat widely credited for driving Washington's re-engagement with Belarus, quietly laid the groundwork for negotiations. The first meeting with Mr. Coale, the most senior U.S. official to come to Minsk in years, was another diplomatic coup for Mr. Lukashenko.

Twenty minutes into that first encounter, Mr. Lukashenko was inveighing against European leaders who have sought to isolate him. “He was ranting and raving about them, so I said, ‘They’re a bunch of cowards,’” Mr. Coale recalled, using a more vulgar term.

"I knew that's what he wanted to hear, something like that, to lighten everything up," Mr. Coale added with a chuckle, explaining that his views of other European leaders are actually more nuanced.

“He loved me after that,” said Mr. Coale, who is self-deprecating and projects a friendly, unpretentious confidence. “The Europeans didn’t.”

After the E.U.-bashing, it was time to drink. Mr. Coale said he downed two shots of Mr. Lukashenko's personal branded vodka, and then poured others on the floor to stay sober.

After toasts, Mr. Lukashenko told Mr. Coale that in addition to releasing an American citizen whose freedom Washington had sought, he would send home another American who hadn't been part of negotiations "because I like you."

“Humor is a gigantic weapon. If you can get the other guy laughing, you’re halfway there and you’re not a threat.”

During a subsequent meeting in Minsk in June 2025, Mr. Lukashenko noticed that Mr. Coale had slimmed down. The American told him about Zepbound, the once-weekly weight-loss injection that had helped him shed pounds. He had accompanied Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and Mr. Trump's envoy for Russia and Ukraine, and the meeting lasted more than six hours.

Shortly after, 14 political prisoners, including the husband of the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, were released.

Mr. Coale said that watching as political prisoners realized they were free was the biggest driver for him. “What motivates me is opening the doors” to vehicles carrying newly freed prisoners, he said.

He plans to leverage his relationships to help Russian political prisoners, too. Mr. Coale said he had been approached by the Russian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitri A. Muratov to facilitate a civilian prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine. While such an effort would be enormously complicated, Mr. Coale said he had received financial commitments from two organizations to resettle the prisoners elsewhere.

But first, he wants to get the rest of Belarus's political prisoners out of jail. He was expecting, he said, another big exchange very soon.

From a divisive Brutalist complex, they object to a new tower

LONDON

Left, outside one of the Barbican's residential buildings, in London. Above, the conservatory at the complex, which is also home to a theater and an art gallery. The Barbican is celebrated as an architectural masterpiece, but its design has long been debated. "I didn't like it when it was built," said Siân Phillips, below left, an actress and a resident.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HANNAH REYES MORALES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY STEPHEN CASTLE

Loved by fans, loathed by critics, the Barbican housing complex has divided opinion since it rose from the bombed-out ashes of central London after World War II.

When architects first proposed the high-density, concrete development in the mid 1950s, the Brutalist design was radical, with raised pedestrian walkways, triangular towers and serrated balconies. In 2003, respondents in one survey voted the complex the country's ugliest building.

But the 40-acre (16-hectare) site, which includes 2,000 apartments, a theater, an art gallery and an artificial lake, has come to be seen as a masterpiece. The complex won protected status in 2001 in recognition of its architectural significance. Its prime location and cultural cachet are reflected in property prices. A three-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot (102-square-meter) apartment is on the market for about \$2 million.

With the Barbican now an established part of the city's heritage, the tables have turned. Some of its 4,000 residents are battling against the construction of a 20-floor office building on the site's perimeter, which they say will overshadow their homes, block out light and disrupt London's skyline.

The dispute has stirred debate about the quality of buildings springing up across London's skyline and about finding the right balance between heritage conservation and urban growth.

"It steals light. It's overbearing. It's overlooking," said Jan-Marc Petroschka, chair of the Barbican Association, a residents' group, referring to the proposed office building, which is known as One Silk Street. An architect by profession, he has lived at the Barbican for more than two decades.

Mr. Petroschka said he does not oppose the redevelopment of the existing 1980s office building on principle — he praises some other new buildings nearby — but sees the latest proposal as an inferior design that prioritizes maximizing floor space and profit.

One of the building's developers bridles at that idea.

"I haven't spent my life having an interest in architecture to produce a poor building," said Stuart Lipton, partner at Lipton Rogers Developments, which is involved in the project. Mr. Lipton is a former chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, a government building-design watchdog.

“For me, good architecture is good business,” he said.

Mr. Lipton said that it would be a mistake to create a “timid” structure adjacent to something as unique as the Barbican. “You have to build something that is bold and contemporary,” he said, “which honors the Barbican’s scale, its material seriousness, its public role — but contrast is key.”

The disagreement comes amid a far broader debate in Britain around why it is so hard to construct new buildings, with critics blaming byzantine planning restrictions, local bureaucracy and opposition from residents' and environmental groups. The Labour government has tried to ease planning laws to tackle the housing shortage.

The office building next to the Barbican would have shops and cafes rather than housing. Critics of the project include the sculptor and artist Antony Gormley, a native Londoner.

Since objections were first raised, the original design has been scaled back, with the west side reduced to 16 stories, from 20. The amended plans were approved in May, despite around 1,800 objections, at a fractious meeting of a planning committee of the City of London, the municipality that governs the area. Objectors said they are considering a legal challenge.

The Barbican lies on the site of a Roman fort and a medieval Jewish cemetery, and includes a church, St. Giles Cripplegate, where the poet John Milton is buried and where the English civil war leader Oliver Cromwell was married.

After World War II, with much of the area reduced to rubble by German bombing raids, local administrators faced a challenge to attract people back.

The answer was a futuristic experiment. The trio of architects who designed the Barbican, Peter Chamberlin, Geoffry Powell and Christof Bon, were influenced by the modernist Le Corbusier. The Barbican would, the trio said, attract “young professionals likely to have a taste for Mediterranean holidays, French food and Scandinavian design.”

With car use booming, the structure was planned around a network of walkways above ground level intended to create a pedestrian oasis. Construction finally began in 1963, continuing until 1982, when the Barbican was opened by Queen Elizabeth II, who declared it “one of the wonders of the modern world.”

Not everyone was convinced.

The broadcaster Alistair Cooke dismissed it as a “cross between a medieval fortress and the worst of Le Corbusier,” and even some of its current residents admit they had doubts.

"I didn't like it when it was built," said Siân Phillips, a movie and theater actress. Now a convert — she has lived in the Barbican for around six years — Ms. Phillips, 93, expressed concern that part of her home will be overshadowed by the proposed office building. “We are now terrified because we’ve got this monster being built here,” she said.

The Barbican's exterior has featured in TV shows such as “Andor” and “Slow Horses” as well as in numerous music videos. Many who visit find the layout baffling. Some have found themselves lost, according to Trevor Kavanagh, a resident and former political editor of The Sun newspaper.

Mr. Kavanagh says he loves the location, the cultural amenities and the gardens. He fears that the light in his bedroom will be “absolutely obliterated” by the office development.

Mr. Lipton acknowledged that the structure “will affect the light of a very small number” of residents but said that his firm had “worked incessantly on assessing daylight and sunlight.”

“In their own way, they are all decent,” he said of the objectors, “but in a growing city, buildings grow.”

In one of the Barbican towers, Myra Stimson, a textile artist, and Paul Moriarty, a painter, both 65, said that they moved to the building around four years ago after selling a house they had renovated in southeastern London.

Ms. Stimson said she was determined to contest the office building. "As an artist," she said, "to lose your light is catastrophic."

Flotilla activists allege abuse in Israeli custody

ISRAEL, FROM PAGE 1

EMRAH GUREL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
EREMY PIPER/REUTERS

AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS
Top, Arno Meyns, at left, a Belgian activist who took part in a flotilla that aimed to enter Gaza in May. He said he was punched and kicked in Israeli custody. Above left, Juliet Lamont, another flotilla activist, who recounted being raped in a shipping container. Above right, Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who taunted detainees in a video.

to social media. At least two of the activists were immediately deported to Greece, while the rest spent the night in prison in southern Israel before being deported to Turkey, they said.

After the detainees arrived in Turkey, the flotilla's organizers soon announced that the detainees had made “numerous reports of physical abuse” as well as “deeply disturbing accounts of sexual humiliation and degrading treatment carried out by Israeli forces.”

More than 50 were brought by ambulance to hospitals from the airport in Turkey, according to a lawyer for the flotilla. Over the following days, activists began returning to their home countries, where they often sought more treatment and gave more detailed accounts of their detention to international news outlets. Their accusations spurred condemnations from global leaders and investigations by prosecutors in countries including France and Italy, and by police officers in Australia.

Israel denied the accusations, saying that the activists had been treated in accordance with the law. They released brief videos showing activists hugging each other in detention and receiving water from an Israeli officer.

In the months that followed, we separately interviewed 24 activists, all but one of whom spoke on the record. We also reviewed records provided by medical authorities in Australia, France, Italy and Turkey. All of the activists gave consistent accounts of a pattern of abuse, first aboard the Israeli vessels and then on Israeli soil.

Twenty-two said they were subjected to varying kinds of physical assault. The 23rd said she had witnessed such violence, and the 24th, a doctor, said she had treated injuries caused by it. Seven people said that they were hospitalized after Israel released them. Six provided medical records that showed they had variously suffered fractured ribs, a fractured vertebrae, a broken coccyx, a firearm wound and a collapsed lung.

Four said they had been shot with what they thought were rubber bullets or beanbag rounds while detained on an Israeli ship. Three said they were shocked with what they believed to be tasers while being beaten inside a shipping container.

The convoy — known as the Global Sumud Flotilla — was the largest of at least eight failed attempts by pro-Palestinian activists to sail to Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Its members came from dozens of countries and included seasoned campaigners who had long opposed Israel's existence. One of its organizers attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, and another praised Hamas's attack on Israel in 2023. The members also included first-time participants — doctors, sailors, a bookshop owner, and a lawmaker — many of whom had joined the flotilla to protest Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza after the Hamas attack.

The activists' accusations echo even graver accounts made for years by Palestinians detained by Israel.

Since the start of the Gaza war, thousands of Palestinians from Gaza have been held incommunicado for weeks or months, usually without charge, and routinely subjected to abuse, according to investigations by the United Nations, international rights groups and both Israeli and Palestinian campaigners. A previous investigation by The New York Times found that dozens of Palestinians have died inside Israeli prisons, while others have faced abuse including electric shocks, beatings and broken bones. One Palestinian told The Times that he was raped with a stick.

Israel has denied systematic abuse at its detention facilities.

By their own accounts, the activists were treated less punitively than most detained Palestinians and for a much briefer time. Even so, international law experts said that the treatment that they described would constitute a breach of international law.

"Anyone detained under the protections of the Geneva Convention is not supposed to be subjected to violence, like beating and tasering or burning someone," said Janina Dill, an expert on the laws of war at Oxford University in England.

At least four different branches of the Israeli security forces were involved in detaining the captured flotilla activists. Israel's military and its prison service both rejected allegations of abuse. The police referred a request for comment to the foreign ministry, which denied the accusations.

The military said in a statement that its “orders require respectful and appropriate treatment of flotilla participants” and that “no specific incidents of deviation from these binding procedures are known.” The Israel Prison Service said the detainees were held “in accordance with the law, with full regard for their basic rights.” It added that the service “rejects attempts to portray systematic abuse or unlawful conduct.”

The foreign ministry accused the activists of making “false allegations” that had been “scripted in advance, for one goal only — defaming Israel.” The ministry described the activists as “anarchists” and “agitators.”

INTERCEPTED AT SEA

Israeli naval commandos began intercepting the flotilla's ships on May 18, in an operation that took more than 30 hours to complete, activists said, because of the large number of ships.

Dario Carotenuto, an Italian opposition lawmaker who took part in the flotilla, said he first saw the commandos on May 19. The boat that he traveled on was more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Gaza, well outside Israel's maritime border, according to a screenshot from an app that monitored a tracker in his backpack.

Activists said they reworked shirts into bandages, bread into makeshift compresses and plastic bottles into splints.

Three Israeli speedboats roared toward the 80-foot (24-meter) vessel, he said, prompting activists to enact an interception protocol they'd trained for. They donned their life jackets and sat together on deck, arms raised, he said.

The boat's plastic windows were shattered by rubber bullets, Mr. Carotenuto said.

“There were at least two or three soldiers pointing their guns at us,” he said. The activists view the Israeli raid as an act of piracy. The Israeli military said it acted legally to maintain its maritime blockade of Gaza.

Michael N. Schmitt, a former U.S. military lawyer and professor at the United States Military Academy in New York State, said countries can act in international waters to enforce a blockade and temporarily detain people during such an operation to ensure the safety of their military personnel. However, it is illegal to abuse those detainees, he said.

The activists who spoke to us were divided between two makeshift prisons on what many described as two separate warships. Some detainees spent up to two nights and two days there — though others, captured later, spent less.

The detainees said they had to sleep on the floor. Some said the space was so cramped that they were forced to sleep in shifts.

Both floating detention centers consisted of several shipping containers, topped with barbed wire and arranged to form an open-air courtyard, the activists said. A row of portable toilets lined one side. Armed, masked officers surveilled the space from above, they said, occasionally providing bottled water and bags of bread.

Ten activists said soldiers threw flash grenades into the courtyard, often with the apparent intent of dispersing detainees. Thirteen said that guards also fired rubber bullets or beanbag rounds into the courtyard.

Mecid Bagcivan, a Turkish N.G.O.

worker, said he was shot in the right thigh at close range. The Times interviewed Mr. Bagcivan at his hospital bed in Istanbul, hours after surgery on that limb. His hospital report, reviewed by The Times, said it was hit by a firearm, without specifying the munition.

TAKEN TO A SHIPPING CONTAINER

At one detention site, detainees were each taken inside a darkened shipping container, where most were kicked and punched, according to all 17 of the interviewees who had been held at that site. Three also said they were shocked with what they thought was a taser.

Mr. Carotenuto recalled entering the container carrying his shoes in one hand and holding up his trousers with the other, since his belt had been confiscated, he said. Inside, he said, he was kicked in the ribs and leg and punched in the face. An Italian medical report noted many bruises on his body.

Juliet Lamont, 55, an Australian activist and filmmaker, said she was raped in the container.

She said she was brought there with chains around her ankles, as well as zip ties binding her wrists. Inside, five men hit her, pulled out clumps of her hair and punched her in the ribs and face, Ms. Lamont said. At one point, she said, her underwear was wrenched down and something was inserted into her vagina.

“It was big enough to be a hand,” Ms. Lamont said. “It didn’t feel metallic enough to be a gun.”

Eight days later, she had a rape test at a hospital near her home in Australia. The local sexual assault service in New South Wales said in a letter that it had provided her with an “acute response” at an emergency department, followed by “ongoing therapeutic support.” The letter did not detail the results of the test.

The Israeli foreign ministry characterized the rape allegation, which Ms. Lamont has recounted to other media outlets, as “an outright lie,” but it said Israel would investigate it if it received an official complaint. No such complaints have been made to Israel about the treatment of activists on this flotilla because, its organizers said, it was “legally untenable” to rely on Israel to investigate itself.

Activists described the trauma of overhearing other activists being abused.

“We could hear them screaming, howling,” said Malika Baouya, 48, a French nurse. “I couldn’t take it anymore, I was trying to plug my ears.”

Ms. Baouya suffered a fractured vertebrae, according to a hospital report, and was told by doctors to wear a neck brace for eight weeks.

Dr. Margaret Connolly, an Irish general practitioner, said she brought a stethoscope and medicine on the voyage in case fellow activists got sick.

These supplies were confiscated soon after Dr. Connolly was captured, she said. The Israelis then refused to provide her with alternatives to treat the wounded.

“They just ignored me,” she said.

Instead, Dr. Connolly, 67, and other captured medics were forced to improvise. They reworked shirts into bandages, bread into makeshift compresses and plastic bottles into splints, she and others said.

On the second day of detention, some of the flotilla participants nominated Dr. Connolly — the sister of Ireland's president — as their spokeswoman.

“I begged for water, I begged for clothes and I begged for painkillers. And worst of all, I had to beg for sanitary towels,” Dr. Connolly said.

TAUNTED IN PORT

By May 20, the activists had been brought to Ashdod, a port in southern Israel.

Mr. Carotenuto and a prominent Italian journalist were deported that day — perhaps, the lawmaker said, because of their higher profile.

The other activists faced abuse. Dozens were forced to kneel facedown, some with their hands tied behind their backs, as shown in footage distributed by Mr. Ben-Gvir, the Israeli minister. That video, later deleted, was captioned: "This is how we receive terror supporters. Welcome to Israel."

The footage also showed Israeli officers grabbing a female activist's head and shoving her to the ground, her wrists bound by zip ties. Mr. Ben-Gvir's office declined to comment.

Thirteen activists said they were beaten in the port, in some cases by masked men.

“They took me into a tent where there were four or five men who beat me,” said Adrien Pain, 31, a sailor from Marseille.

Mr. Pain said a masked man forced his legs apart and kicked him in the testicles, twice.

Later, the activists were driven to Ketziot Prison, about 65 miles to the south, before being brought the next morning to an airport and flown to Istanbul.

Now recovering at home, several activists said that though they had been traumatized, it was worth it to publicize the plight of Gazans.

“We made some impact,” said Mr. Meyns.

He would, he said, “probably” join another flotilla.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Laura Chung from Sydney, Australia.

Experts see risks in cutting exercises with South Korea

JUNG YEON-JE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
American and South Korean troops participating in the Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises last year. President Trump ordered this year's exercises scaled back.

WASHINGTON

BY ERIC SCHMITT AND HELENE COOPER

For years, the U.S. and South Korea militaries have participated in one of the largest military exercises in the world, with thousands of troops from both countries preparing for possible North Korea aggression.

On President Trump's orders, the Pentagon curtailed this year's exercises and scaled back some live-fire components of the drill, which were already underway.

Current and former military officials say the move is likely to undercut U.S. military readiness in the region at a time when allies are questioning the Trump administration's commitment to longstanding partnerships and countering China.

The president's decision is also unlikely to affect the person he hoped to sway: North Korea's dictator, Kim Jongun.

The exercises, called Ulchi Freedom Shield, usually run for 11 days and have sometimes included 17,000 or more U.S. troops and 50,000 South Korean troops.

In past years, the sessions have featured some computer simulations carried out in a large bunker south of the capital, Seoul, intended to check the allies' readiness to repel a North Korean attack.

This year, some 18,000 South Korean troops were to take part in Ulchi Freedom Shield. The Pentagon has not said how many American troops had been expected to participate.

The United States has also canceled a joint amphibious landing exercise, known as Ssangyong, with South Korean forces that was set for next month, citing resource constraints driven by the war in Iran, the South Korean military announced on Monday.

While both countries have insisted that the exercises were defensive in nature, Mr. Kim has long called them provocative. North Korea's Foreign Ministry has condemned the drills as “a rehearsal for an aggressive war.”

The country conducted two ballistic missile tests off its east coast this month, vowing to “respond to a new level of a threat with a new level of a deterrent.”

Mr. Trump seemed to agree with North Korea, saying in a post last week that the country under Mr. Kim had been “unthreatening and respectful” while he has been president.

American troops have been through this before. Mr. Trump abruptly canceled the exercise in 2018 during his first administration, without notifying Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

At the time, Trump administration officials said they wanted to give negotiations meant to rein in North Korea's nuclear ambitions an opportunity to succeed. Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kim three times but ultimately failed in that goal.

Back then, officials said the military could weather one big interruption in the exercise schedule but that readiness would suffer if the drills lapsed for several years.

After Mr. Trump's recent announcement, the Pentagon declined to say which specific training events would be canceled, modified or conducted through computer simulation. But former commanders said two main components would be affected: the testing of high-level command problems and other issues and training for large scale, on-the-ground live fire and troop maneuvering. Both are valuable from a military readiness perspective, commanders said.

A Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said the American and South Korean militaries would continue training on their own before the exercise ended on Aug. 21, but that they would not train together, as had been previously scheduled.

“Of course it hurts readiness,” said Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And readiness relates to deterrence. If the Chinese or North Koreans feel that

U.S. deterrence is not as strong, they might think there are opportunities there."

Mr. Cha also disputed the notion that canceling the exercises would help Mr. Trump to get a nuclear deal with North Korea, pointing to the 2018 talks that ultimately collapsed in Hanoi in 2019 over disagreement about relief from U.S. economic sanctions and the scope of North Korea's nuclear disarmament.

Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, a retired top commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said that scaling back live-fire training hurts troops' ability to hone their combat skills.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump complained that South Korea had not supported the Trump administration in its war against Iran. He also said the military exercises were expensive, “with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!).”

The estimated cost of this year's exercise was \$6.9 million, the Pentagon official said, adding that any savings resulting from the changes have not yet been determined. But former commanders said the vast majority of those costs had already been paid, for expenses like U.S. troop movements in and out of South Korea.

MYKAL MCELDOWNNEY/INDYSTAR, VIA USA TODAY NETWORK — REUTERS

Voter anger makes Ohio a battleground again

NORTH RIDGEVILLE, OHIO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MADELEINE HORDINSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Above left, Diane Sheets, 77, who said that politicians don't seem interested in helping people. "They might understand, but I don't think they care," she said. Above right, a list of objections to a data center project, presented at a public meeting in Millersport, Ohio.

State leaned Republican in recent years, but key midterm races are in play

BY CAMPBELL ROBERTSON AND JESSICA CONTRERA

Across Ohio, a state that receded from the U.S. political battle zone as its voting patterns turned increasingly Republican, signs of discontent this year are everywhere.

In packed public forums, residents rage about data center projects. In grocery store aisles, shoppers lament to cashiers how little they can get for \$50. In the soybean and corn fields, farmers express anxiety and pessimism. The basics of life and business have gotten punishingly expensive, and many have come to doubt that relief is coming anytime soon.

“It’s all dumpy. Businesses are closing, the roads look like crap,” Kim Hall, 59, said as she shopped at a Dollar General in North Ridgeville, Ohio, last week. “Grocery prices are outrageous, and I can barely afford to live.”

Frustration like hers is evident in every region and demographic in the state, and it's why Ohio may be up for grabs in this year's midterm elections. With the general election 70 days away, recent polls showed dead heats for governor and a coveted Senate seat. Enough congressional seats are in play for either party to swing control of the House. Come November, the state that once bragged "So goes Ohio, so goes the nation" will find out if it is truly inching back toward being a battleground state.

But how voter frustrations will play out is anyone's guess. Ms. Hall, who worked as a cook at McDonald's until a kidney cancer diagnosis last year, was once an enthusiast for President Trump. In 2024, she voted for Kamala Harris. This fall, she said, she is likely to give up on voting.

“I don’t like anybody,” she said. “I don’t agree with any of them.”

Nan Whaley, a former mayor of Dayton who ran for governor in 2022, said she believes that Ohio Democrats are landing with their message: "You hate everything and you can't be mad at the Democrats. They haven't been in control."

She is reluctant to make predictions, having seen Democrats in Ohio get burned by false hope before, but the vibe is clear.

“People are just so — I’ve just not seen them this pissed,” she said.

On this, even the state's Republicans agree. Jim Renacci, a former congressman who also ran for governor in 2022, has been flooding his Facebook page with dire warnings to his fellow conservatives. Ohio, he said in an interview, is at heart a state of independents who lean conservative, but those people must be won over when they have many reasons to stay home instead of voting.

“You can get mad at me for posting this. But I am just delivering the message,” he wrote to his followers this month, adding: “The biggest issues for Independents are: Iran War. Gas prices. Food prices. Utility bills. Rent.”

In rural Mercer County on the state's western border, that list also includes the costs of fertilizer and farm machinery, which were increased by the Iran conflict and the global trade war. Few in the deeply conservative area are inclined to blame the president. But some of the farmers who were loading cattle at the Mercer County fair allowed that business conditions were getting scary, and that was before Mr. Trump announced on Friday that he planned to lower tariffs on foreign beef imports.

Diane Sheets, 77, who splits a 160-acre (65-hectare) soybean farm with her sister and works at a travel plaza to make ends meet, said that politicians just don't seem interested in people's economic troubles.

“They might understand, but I don’t think they care,” she said. “Do you see them trying to help us any time?”

This same sense of powerlessness is fueling the fury over data centers.

In Millersport, a village outside Columbus, a school cafeteria was packed for a hearing last week about a proposed power plant that would provide energy to a \$2.1 billion data center project being built on nearby farmland. The residents in the cafeteria were virtually unanimous in opposition: A Democratic state-house candidate wearing a Pride pin railed against the process, her criticisms later echoed by an Air Force veteran wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” shirt with an Infowars logo.

It's not just in Millersport. Those packing into meeting halls across the state express detailed objections about the ramifications for local waterways, the unfairness of tax breaks and the ef-

"The way things look, it's hard to have hope for anything, honestly."

WAYNE HARRIS, 68, above, who opposes solar farm and data center projects in the Millersport, Ohio, area.

fects of pollution on children who live nearby. But their protests tap into a deeper conviction — that outsiders are making decisions about their communities without their consent.

"The way things look, it's hard to have hope for anything, honestly," said Wayne Harris, 68, whose anger was kindled by a planned 1,550-acre solar farm near Millersport, and burned hotter with the arrival of the data center.

In both cases, he said, he learned about a major project in his community only after it was too late to do much about it. Both projects would “ruin” the quiet rural life residents had known, he said. He has written letters to the president on down, but he does not expect anyone to step in given the power of the corporations behind the projects.

“They have all the attorneys and all the money,” he said. “They just kind of laugh in your face at you, like, ‘We can do what we want.’”

Mr. Harris blamed the Biden administration for the solar farm and said he did not trust Amy Acton, the Democrat running for Ohio governor. But the backlash to data centers across the state has become so widespread that Republican campaign officials are nervous.

In a recent memo sent to tech companies, first reported by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that Democrats were harnessing the backlash to data centers in the Ohio Senate race, and that they were doing it “because it works.”

In campaign ads, former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat angling for a comeback, has labeled the Republican incumbent, Senator Jon Husted, as “the face of data centers in Ohio.” Ads for Mr. Husted, meanwhile, have disparaged Mr. Brown’s previous Senate tenure, saying “Sherrod Brown is Washington.”

“More than any other thing in this race,” the Republican memo read, “data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

If the Senate race has Washington's attention, the governor's race embodies many of Ohioans' frustrations. The Republican nominee, Vivek Ramaswamy, captures one element of voter rage: He's a billionaire who made his mint off pharmaceuticals, finance and technology. But the Democrat, Dr. Acton, carries her own baggage in an environment where trust is in short supply: She guided state Covid policy in the opening months of the pandemic.

While Dr. Acton is fighting the state's rightward lean, Mr. Ramaswamy is facing a more acute problem: representing the party in power before a broadly unhappy electorate. In a June New York Times/Siena poll of likely voters in Ohio, nearly 30 percent of voters, and 40 percent of independents, said the economy or cost of living was the most important issue in deciding their vote for Congress. In that same poll, people disapproved of Mr. Trump's handling of the cost of living at a ratio of nearly two to one.

Some Republicans say Democratic optimism is misplaced. Years of infrastructure building and Republican control in the state, they say, has given their party a firewall.

“Those built-up grass roots advantages are hard to overcome in one outlier cycle,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Republican consultant and a former Ohio deputy attorney general.

In reliably Democratic Summit County, at the cafe of a locally owned health foods store, a group of liberal voters wrote postcards to voters, all with the same message, designed to tap into the rage of the moment.

"Dear Eric, While working families struggle, billionaires and MAGA politicians are cashing in," they wrote over and over, before advocating that Eric — or Heather or Barbara or all the other names on their precisely targeted list — come out and vote for Mr. Brown.

Bill Jordan, a retired law professor who has organized postcard-writing events since 2020, used to instruct his companions to write to people in states like Georgia or Virginia, where races felt more winnable. This year, Mr. Jordan, 76, has his hopes up for Ohio. His list was designed to drum up turnout from young people and voters who had cast their ballots for Democrats in the past but typically skipped the midterms.

Campbell Robertson reported from Millersport, Dayton and Celina, Ohio; and Jessica Contrera from North Ridgeville and Akron, Ohio.

The billionaire shaping homelessness policy

Many states have considered banning homeless camps, above left. Joe Lonsdale, above right, has lobbied for such measures.

Joe Lonsdale has urged Republicans to enact tough measures to clear streets

BY ELLEN BARRY AND JASON DEPARLE

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was its third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails.

“We're Hoosiers — we're better than that,” Ron Alting, a Republican state senator, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump's, made its initial efforts.

Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero's agenda that it was hard to tell where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference; Cicero lobbyists worked the bill; and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy.

Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 states have passed them. But the group's sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.

Echoing Cicero's thoughts and at times its words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional.

Opponents of Mr. Trump's plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.

Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.

For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.

The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero's influence.

A co-founder of Palantir, a data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise.

Many on the left say Mr. Lonsdale is an emblem of the inequality that creates homelessness — a billionaire fighting a reverse class war to preserve an unjust order. “He’s using the homelessness crisis to deflect attention from the broken economic system that both causes homelessness and enables people like him to become billionaires in the first place," said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a progressive advocacy group.

Cicero first found success in Missouri, where a measure to create a camping ban succeeded as part of an unrelated bill the governor signed.

A win in one state — any state — built momentum. By the time the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the law on procedural grounds the following year, Cicero was on its way. Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah were among the states where camping bans followed.

The head of the group's homelessness work, Devon Kurtz, 28, claims that camping bans save lives by encouraging treatment. That view has drawn retorts from many in the field, who say that there is no evidence to support it and that treatment is in short supply.

“It’s absurd to think that fining people will get them into treatment,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. “Many people are desperate for treatment and can’t get it.”

But Mr. Kurtz says many homeless people need the push that the threat of fines or arrest can provide. “They need that accountability; they need that supervision,” he said.

Catholic leaders said the law would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd Indiana's jails.

Though Cicero rose by focusing on states, Mr. Trump's re-election expanded opportunity: Most homelessness policy and money come from Washington.

By congressional design, most of the \$4 billion a year that the government spends goes to Housing First — long-term rental aid with voluntary treatment. Cicero wanted the opposite, tem-

JONATHAN ALCORN/REUTERS

porary “transitional housing” (capped at two years) with treatment mandates.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump released a seething video that pitted “dangerously deranged” people who “squat and do drugs” against “hard-working, law-abiding citizens.” Still, new policy was slow to emerge. Scott Centorino, who worked on homelessness issues at the White House Domestic Policy Council, later offered an explanation: The council wanted guidance from groups “in the trenches” like Cicero.

“We didn’t know what to do about it from a federal level,” he said at a closed-door Cicero conference in June, which an attendee taped. “We didn’t have somebody in our team, and I’ll include myself in this, who had a really strong grasp of what the federal authorities were in this space.”

In helping draft the executive order, he consulted with Cicero “to kind of bring you a sense of what the solutions might be.”

Asked about the comment, Centorino who is now a Cicero Institute fellow — said that he had also consulted with federal homelessness officials and other outside groups.

Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group, described the order as “the most harmful policy proposal on homelessness in my career.”

A few months after the executive order, HUD issued an annual document called a Notice of Funding Opportunity. It had long been the lifeblood of Housing First, directing about 90 percent of homelessness aid to long-term housing. Following the principles in Mr. Trump's order, HUD sought to move two-thirds of the money to time-limited programs with work rules or treatment mandates. Mr. Lonsdale exulted.

“A lot of the permanent bureaucracy is in the hard left,” he said in an interview soon after. “We’re stopping them from doing it their way and forcing them to do it a different way.”

Opponents sued, arguing that only Congress could alter the program so profoundly and warning that as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people could lose housing. A federal judge blocked the initial plan and a revised version (which cited Cicero four times), both times on procedural grounds. HUD is appealing. In the meantime, the money has been dispensed under pre-Trump rules.

“Housing First has fueled a self-serving homeless industrial complex,” and “enabled dangerous encampments and addiction,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement.

Dennis Culhane, a homelessness scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, contends the opposite, saying the problem is a shortage of Housing First funds.

He said the idea that homeless people do not need housing aid was “a radical assertion that runs contrary to experience and common sense.”

Georgia Gee and Ryan Mac contributed reporting.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES
About 73,000 wild horses roam federal public lands in the American West, where they are protected from hunting or capture. Each year, around 9,500 are offered for adoption.

Wild horses going to slaughter

Top, Clare Staples feeding newly rescued wild horses at Skydog Ranch, a horse sanctuary near Bend, Ore. Above, wild horses in an area overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting them from hunting or capture. The sale of wild horses was once rare but started to rise after President Trump took office.

A legal loophole is allowing the protected mustangs to be stripped of protections

BY DAVE PHILIPPS

They once had run free through the desert mountains of the U.S. West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled.

Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”

Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn't seem to matter.

The horses were packed into metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) east to the pens of a livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for \$25 each.

A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night. From there, the mustangs disappeared. The trader won't say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.

But that's not the government's concern. It got what it wanted: two more trucks of wild horses off its books.

An examination of government records by The New York Times found that all over the United States, the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau's actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.

Livestock inspection records show that the mustangs sold by the government soon ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada.

The U.S. government's sales of wild horses were once rare but started to rise after President Trump took office. In 2025, they more than doubled to 3,700 horses, according to bureau records.

In that time, the bureau has sent about 500 horses to Mr. Jones.

In an interview, Mr. Jones said he was able to resell the horses quickly, though he didn't advertise online or even post a FOR SALE sign at his corral. He would not say where the horses went and denied selling any to slaughter.

The government can spend more than \$3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market but sells each for as little as \$25. A horse can fetch up to \$750 at a slaughter plant. The potential for profit keeps buyers coming.

By selling mustangs at a huge loss, animal welfare organizations say, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses is, instead, subsidizing their destruction.

"The B.L.M. is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they're doing it in plain sight using a third party," said Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary in Oregon called Skydog Ranch.

The bureau did not respond to questions about its sales or make leaders available for comment. An unattributed statement from the agency said it “remains dedicated to placing animals into good homes, protecting their welfare and upholding its statutory responsibilities on behalf of the American public."

About 73,000 wild horses roam federal public lands in the West, where they are protected from hunting or capture. For decades, in an attempt to keep the population sustainable, the bureau has rounded up 9,500 on average each year and offered them for adoption. But it finds adopters for only about half.

The rest go into a labyrinth of feedlots and pastures that the bureau calls “the holding system.” The system now stores 58,000 wild horses at an annual cost of \$100 million. Caring for them eats up most of the bureau’s \$142 million wild horse budget.

"The B.L.M. is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they're doing it in plain sight using a third party."

Over the years, bureau leaders have floated various lethal proposals for reducing the herds. But Congress — aware that the public wants mustangs protected — has barred the bureau from spending any money to kill healthy wild horses.

There are alternatives to the round-ups that have left so many horses in storage. For 20 years, the bureau has had access to inexpensive fertility-control drugs delivered by dart gun. They have been used effectively to control a few wild herds, and the government's own experts have repeatedly urged the bureau to use them more widely.

But because the bureau is spending so much on storage, it has little left to make the changes that would save it from storing more.

And because the bureau has been unable to stop horses from coming into the storage system, it is now focused on getting them out.

While the bureau can't kill wild horses, it can use a series of bureaucratic maneuvers and financial transactions to transform them on paper into domestic livestock, stripping their legal protections.

First, the bureau has to show that a wild horse can't be adopted. It does this by posting hundreds of horses at a time on its online adoption site. After a horse has three one-week listings with no takers, the law permits the government to designate it as unadoptable.

Then it can be put up for sale.

That's an important legal distinction because a wild horse that is adopted retains its federal protections. One that is sold loses those protections immediately.

A sold horse still can't be legally killed — at least not yet — because the buyer is required to sign a contract promising not to slaughter the horse or “knowingly” sell it to anyone who intends to resell it for slaughter.

But if the buyer resells to a middleman without asking questions, the buyer is safe from prosecution.

The middleman has not signed a contract with the bureau and is free to legally sell the mustang to slaughter.

Mr. Jones, 35, appeared out of nowhere in the wild horse world last spring and quickly became the bureau's biggest buyer, bureau records show.

He said he sold horses only two or three at a time to good owners. “I’m not dealing with traders,” he said. “I’m dealing with a farmer, come up the road, who wants to buy a horse.”

Shown photos and video of the trucks of horses that left his property at midnight — taken by a local wild horse lover and shared with the Times — he questioned whether it had happened.

“Could have been cattle,” he said.

To buy large numbers of mustangs, Mr. Jones had to get approval from top officials in the bureau. His application stood out. Nearly all of the other buyers who have qualified over the years have well-established mustang sanctuaries. Not Mr. Jones.

He had no ties to the wild horse world and no history of working with mustangs. The application asked what veterinarian would care for the horses. He listed an office an hour away from his land with a website that says it treats only small animals.

On Facebook, he is friends with a number of livestock dealers but no wild horse rescues.

For a year, his application sat at the bureau with no action. Then, in March 2025, a federal court ordered an end to one of the bureau's leading ways of offloading horses — the program that paid adopters \$1,000 per horse.

A few weeks later, Mr. Jones' application was approved.

He denied selling mustangs to the traders. He said it was wrong to see him as a bad guy. By reselling mustangs, he said, he had saved the government millions.

There are small clues to what may have happened to the wild horses sold to Mr. Jones. Four showed up late last fall at an auction in Tennessee frequented by slaughter buyers.

Mr. Jones said the horses in Tennessee were the result of just one bad sale to an irresponsible buyer.

Another clue emerged at the Canadian border.

The United States has no horse slaughter plants. The industry here was shut down in 2011, so horses are now exported to Canada.

Mr. Jones lives about an hour from the main Canadian horse export crossing.

Last summer, a few weeks after Mr. Jones received a load of 97 mares, export records show that one of the largest exporters of slaughter horses to Canada, an Ohio man named Fred Bauer, shipped two trucks of horses to Canada. Grainy photos of the trailers' interiors taken by border inspectors show some of the horses had distinctive serial numbers on their necks — government wild horse brands.

Mr. Jones denied that his horses went to Canada through the exporter, saying, "I'd never deal with Freddy Bauer. Me and Freddy Bauer don't get along."

Reached by phone, Mr. Bauer declined to say whether he had bought mustangs from Mr. Jones. When asked where Mr. Jones' horses were going, Mr. Bauer said it would be simple for authorities to track the horses.

"The government put Brandon Jones in charge of this whole wild horse situation," he said. "There's all kinds of records. So they ought to be able to find out what he's doing if they want to."

Steven Rich contributed research.

Ankle trackers increase Haitians' sense of dread

In Ohio, many are forced to wear the devices and fear detention may be next

BY MIRIAM JORDAN

Before dawn last Wednesday, Jonas Julien waited in the darkness of his Springfield, Ohio, home for his ride to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office about an hour away.

The 35-year-old Haitian immigrant had completed another grueling 12-hour shift at 3:30 a.m. After a quick bite and shower, he had stretched on the couch to avoid waking his wife and their 2-month-old daughter. But sleep never came.

"I don't know what awaits me, and I am just exhausted from the worry," Mr. Julien said after climbing into the back seat of a Toyota Corolla, clutching a folder of immigration documents that included an active asylum petition and a work permit valid until 2029.

By the time he returned to his wife and daughter about 10 hours later, a clunky black band with a blinking light would be clamped around his left ankle. He would have an order to report back to ICE in a few weeks. And he would be afraid for their future.

Mr. Julien is among hundreds of Haitians in Springfield who have been summoned to ICE offices, according to the Haitian Support Center, a local organization. The group estimates that more than 100 people have been fitted with ankle monitors.

A city of 60,000 between Dayton and Columbus, Springfield emerged in recent years as hub of Haitian immigration and its newcomers a target of attacks from President Trump.

Following the termination of a legal protection called Temporary Protected Status that allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States, his administration has launched an aggressive electronic monitoring campaign centered on the small city.

Springfield, home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians, has also seen a robust ICE presence and more than 20 arrests since Aug. 10.

Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent. The Department of Homeland Security has provided no official rationale for the electronic surveillance, which lawyers say the Trump administration had previously reserved mainly for immigrants released from detention.

The ankle monitors will make it far easier for federal authorities to locate the immigrants if full-scale deportations begin. In Springfield's Haitian communities, there is widespread fear that the monitors are a precursor to detention and forced return to Haiti, where the economy is in ruins and returnees are prime targets for extortion and kidnapping by armed gangs.

For now, removal flights to Haiti have occurred only once a month this year. The first since T.P.S. ended last month landed on Thursday in the northern city of Cap-Haitien with 170 people, according to the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a national advocacy organization, and the plane carried some former T.P.S. recipients.

In Springfield, the sense of dread has intensified this month as federal agents began detaining Haitians during daily roving patrols. On Thursday, a Haitian pastor was arrested at a gas station with two other people, according to local leaders, who said they might not be aware of all the detentions. More were detained on Friday.

The spate of arrests has prompted many Haitians to stay home, and even those who still have valid employment authorization tied to asylum cases are missing work.

“People are in extreme mental distress,” said Rose Thamar-Joseph, operations chief at the Haitian Support Center. “We are going to need professional help, social workers.”

In response to questions about the ankle monitors and ICE presence in Springfield, a D.H.S. statement said that the agency does not discuss ongoing or future operations.

“What we would say now is, it’s closing time, which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” the statement said.

During Mr. Julien's ride to the ICE office, Benjamin Louis, the driver, told him that he had been escorting Haitians to appointments in Cincinnati or Columbus since T.P.S. was rescinded.

Mr. Julien was likely to be presented with two options, Mr. Louis told him: Agree to a government payment of \$2,600 per family member to voluntarily leave the United States, or wear an ankle monitor to track his movements. If he chose the monitor, he would be told that he must stay within a 75-mile (120-kilometer) radius of his home.

Mr. Julien replied that returning to Haiti was not an option.

He was the sole provider for his family in Springfield and relatives in his homeland, he said. His wife had left her job at an Amazon warehouse near the city to care for their newborn, and his uncle, who also lives in Springfield, had lost his job when T.P.S. was revoked.

After that exchange with Mr. Louis, Mr. Julien grew somber.

His face lit up only when asked if he had pictures of his little girl, which he proudly pulled up on his phone.

About 10:30 a.m., Mr. Julien and Mr. Louis entered a nondescript building, devoid of federal insignia, in an industrial park across from an assisted-living facility in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati.

About 90 minutes later, Mr. Julien emerged visibly shaken, a monitor hugging his left ankle and a plastic bag containing a charger and power cables in his hand. It was past noon, but he said he had no appetite for lunch.

On the way back to Springfield, Mr. Julien gazed out the window, pensive beneath his leather cap. He rested his head in his hands and tried to nod off, to no avail.

Rose Thamar-Joseph, operations chief at the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, said that people are “in extreme mental distress.”

“It’s so humiliating,” he said softly. “I feel just awful.”

“I haven’t committed any crime,” he continued. “I have complied with the terms of my immigration case. I’ve worked hard.”

At a practical level, Mr. Julien worried whether the bulky device would fit into his work boots, mandatory on the job at a vehicle-parts manufacturer.

Once back in Springfield, Mr. Louis, a certified Haitian-Creole interpreter, drove directly to the Haitian Support Center, where he knew American volunteers were filling out requests for immigration judges to authorize the removal of ankle monitors from people with medical conditions and other issues.

"These things are huge," said Betsy Director, a volunteer who was assisting Mr. Julien. She described them as "not bracelets, more like shackles."

"It's difficult for people to put on their work gear," she said. "They're slapping them on the elderly. Yesterday I saw a grandma."

On the digital form, she typed that Mr. Julien had been an upstanding member of the Springfield community for three years and five months. He had a stable home, steady employment and a young family.

By the time he finally walked through the front door at home again, he had been awake for more than 24 hours.

He scooped up his baby girl and held her tight. A smile spread across his face. The aroma of beans and rice on the stove wafted from the kitchen.

For now, he could eat and rest.

For how, he could eat and rest. His next ICE appointment is Sept. 18.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jonas Julien at the Haitian Support Center after reporting to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office and getting fitted with an ankle monitor on Wednesday.

GLENN HARVEY

Business

An interceptor drone produced by the American company Powerus is launched from a waterborne platform made by a Ukrainian company off the coast of Ukraine.
BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A tool of war at a start-up pace

ISMAEEL NAAR/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Technicians at a small factory in the United Arab Emirates operated by Powerus working to create interceptors capable of knocking Iranian Shahed drones out of the sky.

WASHINGTON

U.S. company is trying to be a global supplier of low-cost defense weapons

BY FARAH STOCKMAN AND ISMAEEL NAAR

In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky.

The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.

The factory is the company's first for-ay into the Middle East and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or its contract manufacturer in the Emirates.

Achieving those numbers requires a complete shift in the way business is done in a defense industry known for being slow, bureaucratic and expensive. To meet the urgent demands of U.S.-allied countries that are under threat, Powerus has teamed up with local manufacturers in regions where the interceptors are needed. This allows the company to make them quickly in existing factories, rather than build new plants in the United States and export the weapons.

The Iran war has accelerated long-standing plans by the Emirates and other nations to make more weapons within their own borders. The civilian infrastructure of the Emirates was the most heavily targeted after the war started in February, as Iran sought to show its leverage over a symbol of global prosperity in the region. Now the need for more interceptors is critical, as American-made stockpiles dwindle. More than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,200 Iranian drones have been fired at targets in the Emirates. The attacks killed at least 15 people, injured hundreds, shut down an oil refinery and destroyed two Amazon data centers.

ISMAEEL NAAR/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Interceptors are like small missiles, designed to crash into and destroy airborne threats before they reach their targets. The interceptor that Powerus developed, called Guardian, costs about \$5,000 and is based on a Ukrainian design that was effective against Russian Shahed drones.

Powerus designed the Guardians to be relatively simple to assemble, as pieces snap together like Legos, and use off-the-shelf microchips and GPS location modules. They can't intercept ballistic missiles, as Lockheed Martin's PAC-3 interceptors can, but Shahed drones are the most common form of attack by Iran.

Powerus provided an Emirati contract manufacturer with the training, components and software needed to assemble interceptors for a customer in the Middle East, a setup designed for speed, said Michael Sinensky, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing for Powerus.

The factory's workers, who are mostly Filipino and Chinese, make roughly 30 interceptors a day, with a goal of ramping up to 100 soon.

The company said last week that it had signed a commercial contract worth \$22 million to protect oil and gas infrastructure in the Middle East. In addition, it has teamed up with a defense company near Mumbai to make interceptors in India.

As the Trump administration pressures suppliers to deliver weapons more quickly, even the largest defense companies are moving toward a model of coproduction and less complicated systems. Lockheed Martin, for example, which typically makes weapons in U.S. factories and ships them abroad to government-approved customers, said in July that it would produce a lower-cost interceptor in Europe with European partners. And while the weapon would cost about \$2 million — about half as much as the PAC-3, its best-known model — it isn't expected to be tested until 2028.

Brett Velicovich, chief operating officer of Powerus, said the whole industry was trending toward the company's business model.

"When the largest defense contractor in the world builds PAC-3 in partnership with European manufacturers, that's the industry acknowledging what the last four years demonstrated: You can-INTERCEPTORS, PAGE 8

For Gen Z, it's stocks instead of real estate

To accumulate wealth, they use investment apps and retirement accounts

BY SOPHIA JUNE

Kana Cummings got into personal finance in 2020, when “the world was kind of crumbling,” she said.

It was her junior year of college, and some students had organized a personal finance workshop to help quell anxieties during the coronavirus panic.

DANIEL LOZADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“It was such an inescapable time,” said Ms. Cummings, 26, who lives in Cleveland. “I think people were like, ‘We really need to be thinking about these things kind of early.’”

After taking the workshop, she opened a Roth individual retirement account and funded it with earnings from a summer internship. Since then, she's continued investing. When she got hired at a management consulting firm after graduating, she contributed to her company's 401(k) retirement savings plan and funded her Roth I.R.A. with her annual bonuses. She has an emergency fund that she keeps in money market funds and a separate, passive investment portfolio.

Eventually, she'd like to buy an apartment in a big city. But buying a home isn't something she is actively saving for, and she doesn't like the idea of spending money on rent, either. She was living with her parents before moving out to start business school.

Rising housing costs and high mortgage rates are making it less likely that owning a home is part of Gen Z's ticket to building generational wealth. According to a Pew Research Center survey published in June, 89 percent of adults under 40 say it is harder for young adults today to buy a home than it was for their parents' generation. The survey also showed that young adults are less likely than older ones to say buying a home is a "very good" investment.

Kana Cummings would like to buy an apartment, but saving for one is not a priority. Instead, she focuses on investing.

Instead, they see saving for retirement, trading on apps and contributing to high-yield savings accounts as their best ways to build wealth.

Though home-buying may feel out of reach, saving for retirement has become one of the biggest financial targets for

Gen Z. Research has shown that they are more flexible than millennials when pivoting to this form of wealth building. According to an analysis on retirement savings behavior published earlier this year by Fidelity, Gen Z contributions are increasing 65 percent year-over-year, more than double the rate of contributions made by millennials.

“Compared to before when people stayed in their careers longer and companies offered pensions and things like that, I think people have to fend for themselves a little bit more,” Ms. Cummings said.

Roberta Katz, a scholar at Stanford University in California who has conducted extensive research on Gen Z and jointly authored the book “Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age,” said that Gen Z is marked by uncertainty and malleability.

“For Boomers, there was a sense that you have your home, that you build your wealth, that you could build an estate,” Dr. Katz said. “For Gen Z, when we did our study, they did not have any sense of that. One of the things our study found was a very high value for Gen Z on flexibility because there was a belief that the world they were going to know was a world of change.”

Jeff Sharp, 28, works part time as a bartender while attending flight school to become a pilot. He lives in Bend, Ore., where the median cost of a home has risen to \$700,000, nearly 75 percent more than 20 years ago.

"One of the things that my close friends and I talk about a lot is the difference between what the economy was like for our parents and what the buying power of the U.S. dollar used to be, and what we're looking at now," Mr. Sharp said. "There's still a fair amount of anxiety about how we're going to be able to reach our financial goals."

Mr. Sharp started investing in his early 20s, using Robinhood, a trading app, to buy individual stocks. After he learned more about personal finance and decided to follow the best practices of investing in index funds, he switched all his investments from Robinhood to Vanguard and set up automatic contributions for a Roth I.R.A. and a 529 college savings plan for his daughter.

There are now a wide variety of budgeting and investing apps available and Gen Z is eager to learn about their options. A Gallup study this month found that 81 percent of Gen Z adults seek personal finance guidance, with 75 percent finding information online.

Adam Benton, 23, works as head of operations at Titan Dynamics, a defense technology start-up. When he gets his paycheck, he moves a portion of the money into his retirement, brokerage and high-yield savings accounts, using the Charles Schwab app to invest in index funds. He monitors his progress using the net-worth tracker in an app called My Wallet, which shows a graph charting the growth of his wealth.

He saves as much as he can and wants to buy a house one day, but it's not a goal that feels achievable any time soon.

"It's so far away, it's like, what are the odds of ever getting there?" Mr. Benton said. "It is definitely not the same perspective that like my parents have where they say, 'You have to get into real estate to really build wealth.'"

Streaming giants team up on content

Following Amazon's lead, platforms want to be main entry point for viewers

BY JOHN KOBLIN

For years, Amazon has persuaded tens of millions of people to use its Prime Video app to subscribe to other services, like HBO Max or Apple TV, and to watch shows like “The Pitt” or “Ted Lasso” from within the retail giant’s digital walls.

Now, America's other streaming leaders are sprinting to catch up.

YouTube and Roku are racing to establish themselves as one-stop shops for all the content people watch on their televisions. People who pay for a commercial-free YouTube tier, for example, will soon have access to Peacock content like “The Traitors” and “Sunday Night Football” as part of a recent deal between the two companies.

Netflix executives, who for years have blanched at the idea of collaborating with direct competitors, suddenly appear open to it. In June, the company integrated a French broadcaster onto its platform, its first such move. And Netflix has had recent discussions about making other streaming services available as well, including Peacock and Fox One, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

The push underscores the competitive reality for the titans of streaming television. Companies that were once laser-focused on gaining new subscribers are now far more concerned with keeping those people watching as much as possible, and canceling as little as possible. The result is that the streaming wars of a few years ago have morphed into the bundling wars of today.

The biggest streaming firms are no longer content to just have the most subscribers. They also want to be the main entry point to everything streaming has to offer.

"The thing that matters is that when you turn on the TV, what app are you opening for the next three hours?" said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna, a subscription research firm.

Consumers are already showing enthusiasm for using one platform to manage their streaming subscriptions. Over the last three years, subscriptions made via third-party platforms like Amazon, Roku or YouTube have grown roughly 60 percent, according to Antenna. About a third of all new subscriptions are now purchased this way.

Amazon, which has been in this business for several years, remains the runaway leader. As of June, Amazon had at least 49 million subscriptions for other services through Prime Video, Antenna said.

Roku is also persuading viewers to subscribe to outside streaming services through its “channels” feature within the Roku interface. The number of new subscriptions sold through its channels business rose 19 percent in the second quarter of this year compared with last year, Antenna said.

Last month, YouTube struck a major, five-year deal to bring all of Peacock's content to YouTube's paid tier, called YouTube Premium. In the past, the service, which costs \$16 a month, was aimed at the site's power users. It offered a commercial-free experience and other perks, for music lovers in particular.

YouTube executives seem to believe that Peacock's content will broaden appeal to its subscribers. Peacock's programming includes Bravo reality series like the "Real Housewives" franchise and “Love Island,” as well as “Saturday Night Live,” “Today,” the Olympics, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. Peacock’s content will hit the premium tier early next year, and the price will remain \$16 a month.

This week, YouTube also unveiled its first ever consumer marketing campaign for the premium subscription. The ads will run on competitor streaming services — including Prime Video and HBO Max — and on popular podcasts like “Crime Junkie,” “Armchair Expert” and “The Daily,” which is produced by The New York Times.

YouTube is also selling subscriptions for other streaming services through its Primetime Channels business. People can subscribe to and watch HBO Max, Fox One and Paramount+, among others, through the YouTube interface.

Netflix's moves have been more subtle, but that could soon change. In June, the company began streaming a local broadcaster, TF1, in its French markets. That includes a live feed of TF1 networks and on-demand programs. Greg Peters, a co-chief executive at Netflix, described the early results of the TF1 pact as "very promising" in an earnings call last month.

He then strongly suggested that Netflix would be open to teaming up with others.

"If we see additional deals that similarly serve our members that work for our partner, that work for us, we'll certainly consider them," Mr. Peters said.

Even Netflix appears to be open to the idea of collaborating with direct competitors, in a departure from previous policy.

Netflix executives recently discussed bringing Peacock and Fox One to Netflix's streaming service with NBCUniversal and the Fox Corporation, the three people with knowledge of the discussions said. They added that there was no imminent deal to be announced, and that it was not yet clear whether Netflix would absorb the content into its own service, as in the YouTube-Peacock deal, or act more as a retailer in the mold of Amazon Prime Video.

But any move in that direction is a departure from what Netflix said just two years ago, when the company told shareholders that it “already operates as a go-to destination for entertainment.”

Not all companies are lining up to do business this way. Disney remains a holdout, selling a vast majority of its subscriptions directly to consumers. Paramount's looming merger with Warner Bros. Discovery could also change the distribution plans for Paramount+ and HBO Max; both currently distribute among third-party platforms.

There are significant trade-offs for companies that decide to distribute their content on platforms like Amazon or YouTube. Those platforms can take a big cut of subscription and advertising revenue. A media company also generally loses access to a direct relationship with the consumer, since in these cases, that would be controlled by the platform.

Still, making such a move can defray tens of millions of dollars in technological and marketing expenses. It can also increase views.

“You’re either going to be a platform, or you’re going to distribute everywhere,” said Mr. Carson, the Antenna executive. “The moves over the last few months are starting to clarify that.”

KENNY HOLSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Pentagon faces obstacles as A.I. race intensifies

A.I. RACE, FROM PAGE 1

Senior National Security Agency officials have argued that Anthropic's Mythos model was needed for the agency to find and fix vulnerabilities in the Pentagon's own systems.

parts, or the prospect that China may be months away from its own formidable and less expensive versions. That could supercharge China's ability to infiltrate American communications networks, water systems and power grids like those they successfully pierced during the Biden administration in two sweeping attacks called “Volt Typhoon” and “Salt Typhoon.”

"These are the kinds of things we were talking about and worrying about before A.I. became a daily headline," said Jen Easterly, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration. "What's different now, and what makes the problem more urgent, is the potential for A.I. to amplify those capabilities."

So far, the Trump administration has veered wildly in response, at first abandoning its hands-off approach to regulating the industry, then briefly shutting off access to Mythos for foreigners — including some of its inventors — then lifting that ban.

Earlier this month, the administration called in executives from the largest “frontier” creators, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and told them that new models would be reviewed by the government to ensure that they could not be used to make biological weapons or break into classified American systems or the communications networks that control nuclear weapons.

(The New York Times has sued Open-AI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

But the government review process exempts “open” models — including many of those now produced by Chinese firms — whose code can be customized by users.

One senior executive of a company briefed on the new policy said it made no sense, noting that the open models can be just as dangerous. Like many in the industry, the executive would not be quoted, for fear of angering administration officials.

Pentagon officials reject the idea they are not agile enough. They say the U.S. military has maintained immediate access to the world's most advanced A.I. systems, despite the Anthropic ban. An official, who discussed Pentagon policies on the condition of anonymity, said the Defense Department had recently integrated a version of a Google Gemini model within four days of its commercial release.

More than 1,300 A.I. workers have called for the United States to slow development. But others, including some people inside the Trump administration, have answered that call with a question: "What about China?" They fear losing the roughly six-month lead they believe the United States maintains.

That concern has touched off arguments about whether export controls on some of the most powerful chips made by Nvidia, the leading American maker, are effective in keeping the Chinese from developing the computing power they need to catch up. Controls could also prompt Chinese makers to obtain the chips on the black market or double down on development of their own.

It is easy to compare this moment in American national security to the early days of the Cold War, when the United States was the only nation to possess nuclear weapons, and it was struggling to delay the day when the Soviet Union would match the accomplishment. (The first Soviet bomb was tested in late August of 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

The C.I.A.'s director, John Ratcliffe, recently reached for that comparison, saying it would “not be misplaced” to refer to the capabilities of A.I. as “akin to digital nuclear weapons.”

But like most such historical analogies, this one has its limits. Nuclear weapons were solely in the hands of the state back then. And the fundamental technology of building and delivering them has changed little in 80 years.

A.I. is being built in the private sector, and it is available to all. Many of the most powerful models are updated weekly, their powers, and unpredictability, discovered along the way.

China is perhaps six months or less behind the United States in the development of the most advanced models, U.S. experts estimate, though probably years behind in making the advanced semiconductors needed to power A.I.'s development.

But already there is evidence that America's main technological and economic rival is unnerved by the powers being unleashed. Privately, some Chinese officials have already been talking about some forms of arms control, even if no one knows how that might work.

“They realize there is a gap in capability that may play to our strengths,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington and a former National Security Council official. “On nuclear arms control and on missile defense, we can’t get them to engage. But they appear more interested in the case of A.I.”

Mr. Trump has said that will be a topic of discussion, again, when he meets President Xi Jinping next month. The two men are scheduled to see each other again twice, later this year.

But when he talks about A.I., Mr. Trump has neither explained his objectives nor indicated any concerns in recent weeks that A.I. agents are finding ways to break out of their confines, or acting autonomously to break into outside companies or networks. When news came out that artificial intelligence was used to design a new virus not found in nature, the White House said nothing.

But one thing is clear: Many of the hypothetical scenarios that concerned the national security community a year ago have begun to arrive.

PUNISHING ANTHROPIC GOES ASTRAY Within the U.S. defense industry, the chaos kicked off by Mr. Hegseth and his aides over stripping Anthropic code has only deepened. A month after the Air Force told its contractors to expunge all Anthropic code, it sent another message, telling them to "stand by," for now.

Asked about the apparent about-face, a Pentagon official described the new guidance as temporary and said the mandate to purge Anthropic across the Department of Defense was absolute.

Publicly, the Pentagon has refused to relent. In interviews, Pentagon officials have suggested that the animosity between their department and Anthropic began when the Silicon Valley firm began making what the military regarded as ridiculous demands about how the Claude for Government model, a version of the popular, publicly available A.I. model, would be used. Senior officials said Anthropic presented them with 25 pages of restrictions.

It is easy to compare this moment in American national security to the nuclear arms race during the early days of the Cold War.

After several contentious months, those 25 pages were boiled down to two restrictions. In a February meeting at the Pentagon, Mr. Amodei told Mr. Hegseth that the company would not provide any products to the military unless he had assurances that they would not be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or to produce fully autonomous weapons that were not ultimately controlled by human oversight.

It was not enough. The defense secretary got his back up, noting that Raytheon doesn't dictate limits about how the missiles it produces can be employed against adversaries; those decisions, Mr. Hegseth said, were the realm of government officials, not corporate executives. When Mr. Amodei refused to relent, the Pentagon declared that the company was a “supply chain risk” — and it was banned for military use.

In May, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a Times reporter that Anthropic deserved what it got and that the Pentagon had made a mistake by overrelying on a single producer of A.I. programs — even one whose products seemed to be ahead of both competitors and China.

Asked whether there were anything the company could do to get back in the department's good graces, Mr. Michael said "not at the Department of War."

Pentagon officials say they have all but completed the removal of Anthropic from military computing systems. Close to 100 percent of military systems that once used “Claude for Government,” amended for use on classified networks, have now replaced Anthropic’s product with other frontier models, according to officials. In addition, the Pentagon has ceased all use of Anthropic tools in its Maven system, which helps analyze intelligence and suggests targets for airstrikes in the war with Iran.

The military contractors affected by the ban have been reluctant to discuss it, perhaps for fear of angering their biggest customer. In a statement, a Lockheed spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the letter it had received calling for Anthropic's expulsion from its systems, but said that "we follow the president's and the Department of War's direction." The spokeswoman added, without naming Anthropic, that it expected "minimal impacts" to its business because it does not rely on one large-language model for any portion of its work. But the Pentagon's break with the company is hardly clean.

Barely two months after the blowup between Mr. Amodei and Mr. Hegseth, Anthropic announced Mythos, an A.I. product uniquely suited to find, and exploit, vulnerabilities in software. For a brief period, in what now looks like an overreaction, the Trump administration barred all foreigners from touching the program — only to reverse itself.

That left the Pentagon in a fix: It had just barred itself from using what could be the most powerful new cyberweapon in history.

“Panic set in,” said a former official who recently left the administration.

While the Pentagon is not allowing Claude to be used for intelligence analysis or code writing, the N.S.A. has been allowed to use versions of Anthropic's advanced Mythos model on an “experimental” basis, officials said. It is both testing the U.S. military's computer network defenses and seeking out potential weaknesses in adversarial networks.

RETHINKING OPPOSITION

The inconsistency isn't limited to the Pentagon; there has been plenty at the Commerce and Treasury Departments and at the White House. As Mr. Trump's aides come and go and departments vie for larger roles, the administration's decisions on everything from export controls to national security reviews of A.I. models have been driven more by whim and influence than by an articulated set of principles.

During its first year, the administration's approach was hands-off, following the arguments made by David Sacks, a venture capitalist who, until he left the administration earlier this year, ran both artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency policy.

After publishing an A.I. Action Plan last year, the Trump administration slashed regulation and encouraged exports, hoping to make the world dependent on what Mr. Sacks called an “American tech stack.” In May, Mr. Trump scrapped a draft executive order requiring A.I. companies to submit their models to the government for a safety review, convinced by Mr. Sacks, among others, that the 90-day review requirement was too stringent and would give Chinese competitors an advantage.

But Mythos's powers spooked people inside the administration, officials and

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's C.E.O., has been locked in a feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Emil Michael said the Pentagon made a mistake by over-relying on a single producer of A.I. programs.

The chaos kicked off by Pete Hegseth over stripping Anthropic code has only become deeper.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia. President Trump reversed course on which A.I. chips Nvidia could sell to China.

David Sacks helped persuade President Trump to reconsider requirements for A.I. models.

others said. By June, the government had imposed the most heavy-handed controls ever in the A.I. industry, cutting off access to Anthropic's model for foreign citizens, including some of the engineers who developed it. Then, two weeks later, it lifted the ban on foreigners, without public explanation.

The Trump administration is now dealing with conflicting security and political currents. If it exercises too much control over A.I. pioneer labs, and threatens to cut off foreign access, it could drive the Europeans to Chinese models. If it under-regulates, it could invite disaster, especially if there are more incidents that make the public fear that the technology is racing out of control.

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Biden official, said that the Trump administration's posture on export controls had been “incoherent.”

The administration is now concerned about competition from open-source models from China, but it had walked back many measures that were preventing China's A.I. advancement, he said. And it was directing its harshest restrictions toward Anthropic, an American company, not a Chinese one.

“You’re loosening export controls on China, you’re leaving loopholes, and the first time you use export controls on A.I. is to blast an American company?” Mr. McGuire said.

U.S. start-up is producing drone interceptors for Iran war

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

INTERCEPTORS, FROM PAGE 7

not supply a modern conflict from a single continent or facility," he said. "Production has to sit close to where it's needed."

Powerus isn't the only American company building interceptors in the Emirates. In October, Raytheon announced a partnership to build its Coyote interceptors there. The estimated cost is \$126,500 per interceptor, according to a report by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.

And Powerus will have additional competition on price. Neros, a start-up in Torrance, Calif., is developing an interceptor drone called Bandit, with the most basic model costing about \$5,000, a spokeswoman said.

Shortly after the Iran war began, Powerus announced an unusual merger with a publicly traded golf course operator, Aureus Greenway Holdings, in a deal brokered by an investment firm with ties to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, President Trump's two oldest sons.

The golf course operator would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Powerus, a company spokesman said. The deal was brokered by Dominari Securities, an investment firm owned by Dominari Holdings, which counts the two Trump brothers as shareholders and advisory board members.

"We don't care about politics — we want to save lives," Mr. Sinensky said. "We appreciate the investments that they made into a vehicle that invested into us."

Still, Powerus has issued a number of announcements involving the Trumps or their associates. Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served last year as the White House senior adviser to President Trump, joined the company's advisory board. In June, Unusual Machines, a Florida-based drone component maker that has Donald Trump Jr. on its advisory board, invested \$30 million. And this month, the company signed a contract worth up to \$90 million to provide interceptors to the Air Force.

The seeds of Powerus date back to

An interceptor drone produced by the American company Powerus, far left, mounted and ready for remote launching. Left, a Ukrainian technician loading a Powerus interceptor on a waterborne platform for a demonstration.

2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Mr. Sinensky, who owned WeShield, a company that gathered medical supplies globally during the Covid-19 pandemic, traveled to Ukraine to deliver medical kits with his business partner, Roman Vinfeld, who spoke the language. The two men had been friends since high school.

“We saw firsthand the start of the drone wars,” Mr. Sinensky said. “Our warehouse of humanitarian supplies got destroyed.”

While staying in a safe house in Lviv, the pair met Mr. Velicovich, an Army Special Operations veteran.

Mr. Sinensky began hosting American firms that sent their drones to Ukraine for testing. Mr. Velicovich vetted them and found them to be subpar, he said. The three formed Powerus alongside Andrew Fox, who is chief executive, and Ziv Marom to help Americans and their allies prepare for a new era of drone warfare.

Powerus sought out partners in Ukraine with battle-tested technology and licensed it. It also acquired other drone companies, including Tandem Defense, which designed modular drones that could be snapped together, and Kaizen Aerospace, which was founded by Mr. Marom and makes drones that can lift up to 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms) of cargo and fly autonomously.

Powerus began producing drones and Guardian interceptors in factories in North Carolina and California for the U.S. military. But Guardians only partly address munitions shortages, since they are designed for midsize drones, and countries will still need higher-end interceptors to take down missiles.

"They are complements, not substitutes, for the PAC-3," said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. She added that Iran was most likely rebuilding its stockpile of missiles and might soon get Geran-3s — jet-powered Shaheds designed by Russia that fly much faster than the original version.

“They will be moving toward the types of salvos that Russia is throwing at Ukraine,” Ms. Pettyjohn said of Iran. “That is what we have to plan to defend against.”

Nonetheless, Guardians are already being produced in the region. Mr. Velicovich demonstrated the Guardian's abilities to a buyer in Dubai weeks after the war started, and soon had a contract. At the time, the Emirates was using PAC-3 interceptors that cost millions of dollars each to destroy \$40,000 Shahed drones — an unsustainable strategy, said Albert Vidal, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who is based in the region.

“Goal No. 1 is to have a sovereign capability,” Mr. Vidal said. “The reaction in the U.A.E. is: ‘We’re going to continue buying as much as we can from the U.S., but we will also buy from other players and we are also going to produce stuff at home.’”

Farah Stockman reported from Washington, and Ismaeel Naar from the United Arab Emirates.

Opinion

Risky virus research needs a global referee

Alina Chan

We can't say for sure how the Covid pandemic began, but we can try to stop the next one.

In February of last year, the journal Cell published a study in which virologists in China screened nearly a thousand bat samples, gathered from five provinces and stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in search of new coronaviruses. The intended purpose of work like this is to give early warning: to learn which animal viruses are close to being able to infect people, so that virologists know what to watch for and have a chance to prepare.

They found that a handful of samples carried relatives of MERS, a deadly coronavirus. The researchers then showed that one of those viruses could enter human cells through the same cellular doorway as the viruses that cause SARS and Covid-19.

The scientists grew the virus in lab-made collections of human airway, nose and intestine cells, For Free Papers Check Sanet.st where it multiplied. They proposed testing it next in mice engineered with the same human cellular doorway. They also identified features that limited how efficiently the virus could infect human cells. More lab work could create a virus without those limitations, and members of this group did those kinds of experiments previously.

All of this was done outside high containment, two rungs short of the sort of precautions reserved for the deadliest pathogens. Leading virologists rang the alarm, saying that the level of safety was inadequate for a new virus potentially capable of infecting people through the air.

When Cell drew criticism for publishing the study, a spokesperson for the journal said that biosafety decisions like these rest with a study's lead scientist and its institution and that the researchers "did not break any rules or policies of the journal." Cell was right. In China and in the United States there are surprisingly few constraints on this type of research. Scientists can still gather novel coronaviruses, enhance them in the lab under relatively low biosafety conditions and even accidentally cause an outbreak — without breaking any rules.

Rules would not have prevented what happened a month later, when a worker at a Fort Detrick laboratory in Frederick, Md., found a large hole in an air-tight suit. About an hour's drive from Washington, Fort Detrick contains some of the country's maximum-containment laboratories, where scientists handle deadly pathogens, including Ebola and hantavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff members were interviewed.

Investigators concluded that the damage was deliberate, but they were unable to determine who was responsible. The investigation also turned up evidence of other serious violations of safety protocols — failures that had nothing to do with the apparent sabo-

tage and would probably not have come to light without it. The laboratory was shut down for nearly six months.

I have worked in a laboratory that engineers viruses (of the type that do not cause disease), and what strikes me about both of these episodes is how much rests on the judgment and the good behavior of individuals. Scientists are people. Mistakes, bad calls and moments of anger all happen, and pathogens escape from laboratories more often than you might think.

What is missing is a sufficiently scoped, binding standard for regulating pathogen research with catastrophic potential, set and enforced by someone other than the researchers doing the work and the agencies paying for it. No country has one. No international body has the power to establish one.

Action should start with the United States, the world's largest public funder of infectious disease research, which also supplies much of the world with the money, the materials and the scientific journals that drive the field. In July the Trump administration issued new rules for the risky pathogen research it pays for. The new rules are a potential improvement, but they are not enough.

FOR DECADES, ONLY A HANDFUL of countries ran BSL-4 facilities, laboratories built to handle the world's deadliest pathogens. Today at least 53 BSL-4 labs operate across 22 countries, with many in dense cities. Research with dangerous pathogens also occurs in lower-biosafety laboratories, which are far more numerous and difficult to track.

Lab leaks are not unusual. A 2024 review counted some 300 cases of lab workers becoming infected by the pathogens they were studying from 2000 to 2021. Because the review was based on voluntary reporting, the authors called that count “the tip of the iceberg.” Many of the infections counted in the review occurred in lower-containment settings, but lab-acquired infections happen even in high-containment facilities. SARS and SARS-like viruses have escaped from BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs repeatedly.

The laboratory infection that may matter most has not been definitively proven — the likely escape of the virus that causes Covid-19 from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in 2019. Scientists in Wuhan had spent years collecting novel coronaviruses, and in the year before the outbreak they joined an American-led proposal — rejected by the Defense Department — to create viruses with SARS-CoV-2's defining feature. (I laid out the evidence for why the pandemic most likely started in a lab in a 2024 essay for Times Opinion.)

Six years on, the official picture remains foggy. The intelligence services and scientific academies that have looked at the question disagree with one another. Several still consider natural spillover from an animal the better explanation, while the C.I.A. and the Energy Department have revised their positions toward a lab origin, and the

HÉLÈNE BLANC. GRAPHIC BELOW BY JEREMY ASHKENAS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

World Health Organization no longer rules out the possibility.

If the assessments pointing to a laboratory origin are correct, Covid-19 would be the most destructive accident in the history of science. By some measures, the virus killed more than 15 million people around the world, including more than a million Americans, and drained \$14 trillion from the U.S. economy.

It would be worth having, if such a thing were possible, an accounting of the whole of the pandemic: the death toll, for which we have rough estimates, and everything underneath it — the grandparents who died among strangers, the tumors found late because scanners sat idle, the college years spent in childhood bedrooms, the small businesses shuttered, the friendships that fell apart, the young people who started their careers on video calls, the tens of millions of people across Asia, Africa and Latin

America pushed back into poverty, the low tone of dread that settled over ordinary life and still has not entirely lifted.

MOST PATHOGEN RESEARCH is beneficial to society. The narrow slice of it that is capable of causing a pandemic has been the subject of a long-running debate in the scientific community. The term “gain of function” has been used to refer to a wide range of research. It can describe making a bacterium glow so that scientists can follow it under a microscope or building a virus that spreads more easily in a crowd. It is the experiments that can make a pathogen more lethal or contagious that require our attention.

Some scientists argue that such gain-of-function research could help us create medical countermeasures for viruses poised to infect humans. Others say that testing what a virus would need in order to spread can tell us which mutations to watch for in nature. Still others argue

that the work is necessary to keep pace with adversaries doing the same kinds of experiments. The pathogen-enhancing experiments at the center of this debate have produced scientific papers, but I am not aware of them being necessary for the development of a single vaccine or treatment in use today.

The incentives for risky virus research push in the wrong direction. In a 2011 Washington Post essay headlined "A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking," Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci — then the directors of the National Institutes of Health and its infectious-diseases institute — defended gain-of-function experiments that made a deadly bird flu more contagious in mammals.

When funders controlling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants endorse such experiments, scientists have a powerful reason to pursue them. CHAN, PAGE 10

The global spread of research on dangerous pathogens

Between 2000 and 2021 there were some 300 cases of lab workers becoming infected by the pathogens they were studying, many of them in laboratories a step or two below the maximum-containment facilities known as BSL-4 labs. SARS and SARS-like viruses have escaped from BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs repeatedly.

■ BSL-4 laboratory ✿ SARS or SARS-like virus escapes from BSL-3 or BSL-4

Beijing, 2004 Multiple SARS escapes traced to improperly inactivated samples from a BSL-3 lab, resulting in community transmission and one death.

Sources: Global Biolabs, with additional research by Alina Chan; Blacksell et al., Lancet Microbe (2024). Note: BSL-4 counts are lower-bound estimates because public reporting varies widely by country.

Changing assessments of the pandemic's origin

The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL EDITION

A.G. SULZBERGER Publisher JOSEPH KAHN Executive Editor MARC LACEY Managing Editor CAROLYN RYAN Managing Editor SUZANNE DALEY Associate Editor

KATHLEEN KINGSBURY Opinion Editor

MEREDITH KOPIT LEVIEN Chief Executive Officer MICHAEL GREENSPON Senior V.P. and General Manager HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS V.P., International Circulation HELENA PHUA Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific SUZANNE YVERNÈS International Chief Financial Officer

An old Sumerian solution to that \$40 trillion deficit

Paul Vigna

The U.S. federal debt has hit \$40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about \$77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about \$32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It's not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is \$350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It's like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it's creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with current debts in normal ways. The options open to America are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable. But that's just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you've probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down the U.S.

amargi. In Athens, the ruler Solon instituted a series of reforms around 594 B.C. that canceled debts. The changes were bitterly opposed by the ruling elite. Solon managed to make the reforms stick, but only after leaving town for a decade and making his people promise not to change the new laws in his absence. Three centuries later, a Spartan king wiped out debt by dragging all the city's records into the public square and burning them. The city's elite, aghast, had him arrested and hanged — along with his mother and grandmother. Another two centuries later, the Roman Gracchi brothers were both killed, largely in response to their proposed social reforms. After centuries of elite opposition, the amargi disappeared into obscurity.

In the ancient world, debt forgiveness was a regular tool to control the economy. Why have we forgotten it?

economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about the monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn't real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It's a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its

propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That's why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy about the

Governments can borrow to cover up other problems only for so long. Sometimes what comes next is a hyperinflationary spiral and economic collapse, as in Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. Sometimes it's a national default that rocks financial markets, such as in Egypt and Anatolia under the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. And sometimes it's just a steadily slipping quality of life as debt saps people's ability to build their own wealth.

Money represents resources, or at least access to resources. When so much of it is going to debt repayment, it means money that could be spent on goods or services is diverted. The federal government now spends over \$1 trillion a year on debt interest — money that could otherwise be spent on roads, schools or health care. Rising debts also result in investors demanding higher interest rates to buy that debt; higher government debt rates push up rates across credit markets, including for mortgages. Public debt financing contributes to inflationary pressure, too.

Widespread public debt forgiveness should be taken seriously, at least as a mechanism to reframe economic thinking. While its recent track record is patchy — including both failed debt relief for developing countries and the extremely positive debt relief for the defeated Axis powers — it is an important tool for policymakers to consider.

Our debts aren't going to just disappear. Absent a conscious effort, we are just waiting for an increasingly likely economic meltdown. The ancient world had a different understanding of the nature of money, which is why debt forgiveness became a standard feature of their cultures. We need to start seeing money and debt the way people saw it back then: As a system to distribute resources that, like any system, can be periodically reset.

PAUL VIGNA is the author of “The Almighty: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin” and the managing editor of American Banker.

ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

Trump came for Canada. We said no.

MARCHE, FROM PAGE 1 are the primary virtues. In Canada, the defining virtue is toughness, the capacity to endure.

The difference is subtle but profound. Margaret Atwood's work of literary criticism that defined 1970s Canadian nationalism is entitled “Survival.” The coureurs des bois, the great New French traders who went into the impossible North on canoes looking for pelts, measured themselves by their ability to survive on the bare minimum in the midst of a vast indifferent wilderness.

These deep-running values, rarely openly expressed, are the undercurrent of Canada's rejection of America last week. The offered deal, or at least the details that have emerged, veered significantly from purely economic matters. Apparently, one of the final sticking points was an American demand that Quebec undo its French language laws and French language cultural protections. French, in Canada, is not a business matter. Its place in our nation transcends absolutely any market-based consideration. It is not something that gets “put on the table.”

banker, but one of the leading bankers in the world, has stood up and said that there's more to life than a little bit of money. The power of that recognition alone, at this moment in history, cannot be overstated. Mr. Trump's world — a world of transaction and submission — is not the only world we all have to live in.

While the decision to tough it out is iconically Canadian, Mr. Carney's gesture will resonate far beyond Canada's border. A gray banker, and not just any

The economic impacts of Trump's tariff regime remain to be seen, especially given his history of reversing tariff policies on a whim. But we will suffer. America remains Canada's leading trading partner. Mr. Carney has chosen suffering, but he did what Canadians elected him to do: stand up for Canada. It's funny to wake up relieved that you're about to take a beating. We will not go along to get along.

The American president clearly did not know whom he was dealing with. He is following in the grand tradition of American leaders starting wars with people they don't understand, then wondering what went wrong. America today is at risk of becoming one big Epstein Island. Maybe that's all it ever was.

Canada has decided not to get on the plane.

ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES; PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS TANOUYE/REUTERS

STEPHEN MARCHE is host of the Gloves Off Podcast.

Risky virus research needs a global referee

CHAN, FROM PAGE 9

Researchers seeking publication, grants and promotions are often rewarded for speed and novelty rather than caution. Some cut corners and work under less stringent biosafety to save on costs and time. One virologist created what he called “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make” to prove a point to colleagues who doubted it could be done.

Conversations about gain-of-function research have become so politicized that calls for greater oversight are painted as attacks on science itself. But nothing would cost science more than another pandemic traced to a laboratory or merely suspected of coming from one.

A public convinced that scientists had caused the disaster would be slower to accept the next vaccine and less willing to support pathogen research. After hard-earned lessons from meltdowns and close calls, work with nuclear materials is among the most heavily regulated activities on earth. No one considers that an insult to physicists.

Every administration since President Barack Obama's has tried to set up guardrails for high-risk pathogen re-

Intelligence services and scientific bodies still disagree about the pandemic's origin, but several have updated their positions.

bars them outright. It establishes an independent body to weigh the ambiguous cases, and it threatens institutions that fail to report such work with up to five years of ineligibility for federal funds.

What is missing is a binding standard for regulating pathogen research with catastrophic potential. No country has one. No international body has the power to establish one.

Discretion like that has already let risky proposals slip past the review they were supposed to get, sometimes because scientists and agency staff members simply disagree about which experiments are dangerous and which risks are worth taking and sometimes because a researcher might not have been forthcoming. A better design would screen every proposal against one standard when it is submitted and send anything flagged to the review body, regardless of whether the scientist or the funder agrees.

THREE IMPORTANT GAPS REMAIN. The first is private research. There have been four major attempts to restrict gain-of-function research since 2014, and all have applied only to government-funded research. Even under the new rules, institutions that take no federal money are only, in the policy's words, "strongly encouraged" to adopt equivalent procedures and warned that refusing could cost them future federal funding.

The third is scope. The hunt for new viruses in the wild — where the Cell study and the Wuhan bat coronavirus research began — is omitted by the policy from the category of dangerous research subject to independent review. American money has helped fund that hunt abroad for more than a decade,

search, undoing or rewriting policies that came before. The rules issued in July replaced a Biden-era policy that President Trump scrapped the day before it would have taken effect.

That approach may work on universities with federal grant portfolios, but it does not bind privately funded groups, as the policy itself acknowledges. Mr. Trump's 2025 executive order requested a legislative proposal to address this gap within 180 days, but that deadline has been blown, and the policy now delegates this task to a future working group.

under the reasonable theory that emerging pathogens do not respect borders. But U.S. funders have little access to and no control over what foreign scientists do with the viruses they find, including dangerous gain-of-function experiments at low biosafety levels.

The second gap is authority. Much of the regulatory machinery has yet to be established, with the policy leaving it up to the funding agencies to create implementation guidance as well as the new independent review body.

In several important ways, the new policy is more rigorous on paper than what it replaced. Whereas the Biden administration's policy would have sent the most dangerous experiments for review, this one

Even under the new policy, nothing requires an agency to systematically look back through the grants it has already made, and the review body is allowed to audit only a small fraction of the proposals that have not been flagged as dangerous gain-of-function work. The National Institutes of Health spends nearly \$8 billion a year on infectious disease research and has no dedicated resources to systematically identify all of the risks in its own portfolio. In 2024 an inspector general found that the U.S. Defense Department did not track funding in sufficient detail to determine

The policy cannot require agencies to follow the review body's recommendations, which are meant to "inform the funding agency's decisions." Scientists and their institutions will still decide for themselves whether their work needs review, and the agencies must catch what falls through the cracks and decide whether to take the body's advice. It is like asking the big banks to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and then letting them overrule it.

Virus infectiousness vs. deadliness

Each of these gaps exists because no government entity has been made responsible for closing it and because none of these policies are durable. The July policy rests on an executive order, meaning that a new administration could easily revoke it, as happened with the rules that preceded it.

how much it had given to Chinese laboratories for pathogen-enhancing research.

These viruses spread readily but rarely kill. In the pandemic's first year, SARS-CoV-2 was more dangerous because there was no pre-existing immunity.

Note: These comparisons are approximate. Transmissibility varies by context, and fatality estimates depend on which infections are detected and whether vaccines or treatments are available. GRAPHICS BY JEREMY ASHKENAS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Only Congress can give that authority to an independent body. The most promising option on the table is a bill called the Risky Research Review Act, which would establish an independent agency with \$30 million a year in funding. The bill cleared the Senate Homeland Security Committee with bipartisan support in an 11-to-2 vote more than a year ago, but no full Senate vote has been scheduled. The bill's lead sponsor, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, has spent years in conflict with Dr. Fauci, and the legislation has become entangled in that fight. I think it should instead be judged on what it would do.

The bill would be a start. But like the July policy, its authority would stop where federal money does. What high-risk research needs is a regulator, and Congress should create one, as experts have urged for years. Modeled on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, its primary mandate would be safety. It would know what each laboratory is working on, who pays for it, what its safety record is and how many people live nearby. It would collect data needed for effective policymaking and provide training and resources to the labs it oversees.

CONGRESS HAS CREATED DOZENS of regulatory agencies, addressing risks to the public from food and drugs, consumer products, workplaces, financial institutions and nuclear power. There is no reason a similar agency could not be created to regulate research capable of harming billions of people.

While such an entity is being established, several steps could be taken now. Congress should fund a systematic sweep of research anywhere in the world that could ignite a pandemic. (This goal is related to the mission of a nonprofit I founded, which aims to track pathogen research.)

One risk is that tougher American rules could push dangerous work into countries with weaker oversight. The National Institutes of Health and other arms of the federal government can use their considerable leverage over the institutions that international pathogen research depends on — the journals that publish it, the commercial suppliers that sell essential materials and equipment and the private funders who pay for it — to tighten screening of risky research wherever the work occurs.

None of this argument depends on where Covid-19 came from. If the virus emerged from an animal market, all of the hazards described here remain in play in pathogen research labs, in more countries than ever before. If it came out of a laboratory, we already know the price. Either way, unless this research is brought under real supervision, I do not expect the rest of the 21st century to pass without a catastrophic lab leak.

What no one will be able to say next time is that we had no warning. We know that dangerous gain-of-function pathogen research continues, and we know what can happen when it goes wrong. Whether we do anything about it is a decision we can make. For now, we are leaving that decision in the hands of the people who want to run the experiments.

ALINA CHAN is a molecular biologist, an author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” and the founder of a nonprofit that tracks pathogen research.

Have Harry and Meghan learned their lesson?

talented performer, so this move could be a homecoming for both of them.

TOLGA AKMEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Roxane Gay Contributing Writer

I enjoy celebrity gossip as much as the next person. At first, the story of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, was a charming one: two people from very different worlds finding each other and forging a path forward. I enjoyed the sweet notes of their courtship and commitment to each other. And I understood that, however much we wanted to frame their relationship as a fairy tale, it would not be one, at least not one of the more sanitized versions.

For a time, though, we did imagine a remarkable change in the largely obdurate institution of the monarchy. Their relationship made the monarchy seem more accessible, more connected to the real world beyond the high walls of Buckingham Palace. Meghan and Harry's wedding ceremony, which included a gospel choir as well as the black bishop Michael Bruce Curry offering a sermon about the power of love, gave the impression that a shift, however subtle, was on the horizon. In his sermon, Bishop Curry referenced Martin Luther King Jr., and how, with love, we can “make of this old world a new world.”

I'm sure the couple thought that's exactly what they were doing.

As endearing as Meghan and Harry's story was, reality was never far behind. The biggest crisis, of course, was that a woman of color was infiltrating the royal family and, more important, the royal bloodline, however diluted it may be at this point. What should have been merely fraught, but manageable, quickly became untenable.

There was nothing Meghan could do that would have ever been good enough and, as she has detailed in the years since, the pressures from within and outside the royal family had a detrimental effect on her mental health. It's kind of miraculous that their relationship has, to this point, endured.

And now, they have announced their imminent return to the U.K. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons prompting such a seemingly unexpected move, including, according to conflicting accounts, the potential for Meghan to return to her acting career. She's a

But given their past, what does a future in England hold for them?

In January 2020, 20 months after their wedding, Harry and Meghan announced that they would no longer serve as senior royals, but would take on less demanding positions as they split their time between the U.S. and the U.K. They were seeking a break, not a formal rupture, from the demands of royalty. Alas. A mere 10 days later, Queen Elizabeth II made a statement that the couple would no longer be His or Her Royal Highness and they wouldn't be working for the family business in any capacity. It was kind of astonishing to see how quickly the royal family clarified their opinion of the Sussexes' decision.

Relations between Harry and his family only worsened and, amid this deep public rift, they came to the states, eventually making their home

Given their past, what does a future in England hold for them?

in Montecito, Calif. They were trying, perhaps, to rewrite their fairy tale and figure out their place in their radically changed world. They occasionally took international trips that would, in other

circumstances, be official overseas visits. The royal family moved on with their lives, leaking to the press versions of their side of the story. Charles became king and William took his father's long-inhabited role of next in line.

The story was dramatic and en- thralling and imbued with so much loss

— of position, of family, of self — in service of a once-in-a-lifetime love. For the most part, people don't voluntarily step away from power and privilege.

The Sussexes set about the business of raising their young family. They also settled some scores in a rather scorched-earth set of moves. There was “Harry & Meghan,” a Netflix documentary series that offered viewers a very curated look at their lives. It was all very bland, not particularly revealing, but somehow watchable. The couple also sat down with Oprah Winfrey, a consummate interviewer, and bared, if not all, then quite a lot.

In that 2021 prime-time special, they both detailed the blatant racism, double standards and naked indifference, even cruelty, of the royal family. As

Meghan, in particular, shared her story, you couldn't help but wonder how she withstood it all. Theirs was a compelling performance, a closing argument in the matter of what precipitated such a drastic move toward respite and reinvention.

In 2023, Harry published “Spare,” a lengthy memoir about growing up as the boy who always knew he would never be king. The prose was utilitarian and occasionally funny. Early in the memoir, he has a line about Prince William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” that makes me laugh every time I think of it. But mostly, Harry’s was a hollow story of knowing your place in life and being unduly constrained by it.

In their new fairy tale, the Sussexes launched, with varying degrees of success, business endeavors and media partnerships. They tried to demonstrate that they could not only survive but thrive without the support of the royal family. Prior to marriage, Meghan made her own way in the world. She did it once and she could do it again. Harry, on the other hand, had never known a civilian life where he truly had to prove himself, where he wasn't lavishly celebrated by birth-right.

Little came of Harry's attempts at media work. Most of the podcast ideas he proposed, for instance, were silly at best, and nothing happened with his one good idea — a series about fatherhood. Harry and Meghan must have both hoped that distance and time would help him find his footing, but the most successful endeavors he had stateside were all connected to the very thing he was trying to escape, his royal lineage. He had to learn that when people aren't by custom ex-

pected to like or pretend to like you, you have to bring something substantive to the table, and when you don't, the opportunities disappear. Making of this old world a new world remained elusive.

There was also the challenge of public opinion, which was mixed. In some corners, Harry and Meghan were lauded for fighting for gilded independence (because Harry holds an amount of privilege from which he can never truly escape). Others said they were abandoning the royal family, being selfish, especially when the palace announced more than two years ago that King Charles had cancer. A lot of people blamed Meghan for being too much of a diva, too difficult to work with, too American and, of course, too Black.

No matter what you think about Harry and Meghan, race is the proverbial elephant in the room. The British monarchy has long been littered with deeply flawed people: Henry VIII married women who caught his eye — two of whom he later beheaded — and killed political advisers and adversaries; before abdicating the throne, Edward VIII sought to marry a divorcée who shared his sympathy for Adolf Hitler; Charles, of course, treated Diana terribly. Prince Andrew is alleged to be a sexual predator and was friends with the prolific sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, even after Mr. Epstein was convicted in 2010.

This is the power of bigotry — the monarchy has tolerated a breathtaking range of despicable behavior from assorted royals, but what they could not abide is a Black woman. People can attribute all of this royal family tension to ego or pettiness or a would-be king asserting his will over the never-will-be king, but that won't change the painful reality that the king wears the heavy crown of racism and most of those in the current line of succession will, too.

Given this state of affairs, it was quite surprising when news broke that Harry, Meghan and their two children are returning to live in the U.K. They know better, this time around, about what to expect and how to navigate it. But they also have to, once more, figure out who they are, without the position or the power to which they were once adjacent.

They will have to endure the notoriously cruel British press that has hounded them incessantly. They will have to figure out if they can, finally, make a home for themselves, one where they are welcomed and embraced without having to contort themselves into the shape the monarchy prefers. They will have to see if their relationship can continue to endure.

In this next chapter of their not quite fairy tale, the Sussexes are caught between two complicated worlds, neither of which is particularly hospitable to their unique circumstances. In the New Yorker essay “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin asks, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin asks that question in a very different context, but I suspect it is nonetheless one Harry and Meghan have been trying to answer for years.

ROXANE GAY is the editor of "The Portable Feminist Reader."

Natalie's magnificent obsession

Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON I've spent my career watching officials maneuver and scheme, often in absurd ways, to get closer to presidents. But I'd never seen anything like the photo of Natalie Harp dashing after President Trump's golf cart in Scotland three years ago. I'd also never heard of a staffer jumping into the trunk of an S.U.V., as Harp did, when she was denied a seat in the motorcade.

The hit horror movie “Obsession,” about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it, is playing out on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Like others, I winced when I first heard Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat, refer to how Trump liked to “travel with Natalie.” Was he gratuitously turning a salacious spotlight onto a White House aide?

But as it turns out, with three little words, Ossoff pulled a string and unraveled something really dark and deranged at the innermost circle of Trump's White House.

The president's proclivity for surrounding himself with sycophants — and attractive young blondes — is well known. But this relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence: cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror.

The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor. As one of his social media facilitators, she is with him most of the day and often evenings, and she never takes a day off. The Times's Maggie Haberman calls Harp the "binky" of the man-child president.

Harp is nicknamed — and refers to herself as — “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer to provide him with paper copies of any positive stories or tweets. (When The Mirror published the picture on Friday of Harp dashing after the golf cart at Turnberry in Scotland, the story’s author dubbed Harp “the human sprinter.”) Haberman said foreign leaders also try to use Harp as a conduit to reach Trump.

As Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their blockbuster, “Regime Change,” Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. “She’ll never

leave me," he would tell other staffers.

This human printer runs — but not out of ink.

Harp first came to his attention in 2019 when she spoke on Fox News about how Trump had helped save her life with the

Right to Try Act, which she said had allowed her to get experimental treatment for bone cancer.

Before she began to work on Trump's restoration in 2022, Harp was an anchor at the far-right OAN and spread the gospel that the election was stolen. This winter, she was the one who posted the sickening video depicting Trump as the king of the jungle and the Obamas as apes.

The Harp saga reflects a truly weird fact about Trump. The 80-year-old president got elected, governs, provokes and seeks revenge using social media, and he was surrounded by bootlicking tech titans at his inaugural. But he still needs someone young and online to sit beside him and type his posts. Their online symbiosis raises the question of whether all those strange capitalizations are his or hers.

Ossoff impaled Trump with his Natalie Harp-oon recently during a speech in

KEN CEDENO/REUTERS

Atlanta. The senator was lambasting the commander in chief for his erratic, pathetic handling of the Iran war: "While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar."

But it was the MAGA megaphone that did in Natalie. The White House was clearly rattled by the allusion to the close relationship between Trump and his 35-year-old, \$150,000-a-year social media helper. Melania even made a rare appearance to show the conjugal flag.

Harp made headlines earlier when the president chose her and a few other close aides to accompany him when he sneaked into a catering truck and switched planes to fly back from Turkey to the District, after a threat of an Iranian assassination attack. Shockingly, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent and the media were left on the other plane as decoys.

The vitriolic MAGA response to Ossoff, the usual risible caricature of macho bullying, had a suspicious “doth protest too much” aroma. The White House called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid” and Trump mocked him as Pee-wee Herman (showing that he has lost his touch for nasty but effective nicknames).

After Kristen Holmes, the CNN White House correspondent, asked Trump about Ossoff's critique, the White House tweeted a creepy warning: "Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It's quite troubling."

But the troubling thing was the tone of Harp's adoring letters to the man she addresses as "Mr. President," released by The Daily Beast, in which she talks about her fragile emotional state — forgetting to eat or sleep and getting hurt by others' critical remarks.

“I want things to always be right between us,” she writes, adding, “I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

She frets in another that she works so hard for him that she looks like “a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up.” She pleads, “We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!” and pines to “hear every conversation” he has.

Harp quotes a line from “Pride and Prejudice” to say that it would have been hard to lose her father if she had not had someone so “worthy” to turn to in Trump. “And, I will add,” she signs off, “it is I who is unworthy.”

It's a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he's amazing. And he agrees.

The New York Times

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V.V. Steele "Spilled Steele"

Clare Delish "Dish It With Clare Delish"

VIA INCEPTION POINT AI

VIA INCEPTION POINT AI

Fake personas win real fans

GENERATED BY A.I.

PATRICK WOO
Top, Seraphinne Vallora, an A.I. marketing agency, used A.I. models for a recent resort wear campaign for the European brand Desislava Gilberte. Above, the A.I.-powered pop star TaTa Taktumi, created by Stage Zero Entertainment. The availability of virtual talent has unsettled many human performers, and A.I. was a major issue in the Hollywood labor disputes of 2023.

Creative studios use A.I. to generate virtual stars, alarming human talent

BY REGGIE UGWU

In a bright, modernist conference room in Midtown Manhattan this spring, a small group of employees at an artificial intelligence start-up convened to review candidates for a new position.

“OK: Rhea Patel, Canadian woman of Indian descent,” began Josh Taylor, the chief production officer, reading from his laptop in the seen-it-all monotone of a public defense attorney. “Her expertise is van life. She grew up in Vancouver. Her father is an I.T. guy at a big insurance company. Mother is a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia.”

At the far corner of a long blond wood table, wearing an artfully knotted fringe scarf and oversize aviator glasses, Katie Brown, the chief content officer, listened skeptically.

“She became interested in wildlife photography at an early age, turned on by David Attenborough documentaries,” Taylor continued. “Tragically, while she was studying during her senior year at the University of Toronto, her twin brother died in a climbing accident.”

Brown straightened up.

“Oh wow!” she said. “I didn’t see that one comin’!”

Taylor went on, unspooling Patel's tale of hardship and transformation, which had the vague shape of a classic hero's journey. Though peppered with convincing details (who hasn't been moved by Attenborough?), Patel's life story was, in fact, entirely fictional.

Rhea Patel — along with fellow candidates Maria Lockwood, a comics and manga enthusiast; and Caspian Rowe, a budget-minded filmmaking guru — was a prospective addition to a roster of virtual influencers being developed by the company, Inception Point AI. The candidate receiving the most votes from the four people at the meeting would be granted the gift of artificial life, joining a cohort of more than 100 A.I. personas, each with its own market-friendly niche, that could be deployed to host podcasts, star in YouTube videos, converse with followers and — in the company's loftiest vision — one day navigate the physical world in a robotic body.

Inception Point is just one of several companies in the media, fashion, film and music industries aiming to build the synthetic superstars of tomorrow. The advent of advanced A.I. imaging tools has given any would-be Geppetto with a modest budget and a sliver of vision his or her own magic wishing star, with the power to generate lifelike, photorealistic characters of any description.

"If it's a more cost-effective way for businesses to get attention, clicks and engagement, then that's what they will promote."

But infinite choice is a terrible burden, as any artist who has faced a blank canvas knows. What do people want in an artificial idol? In whose image should such creatures be made? And are their creators threatening human-made culture or extending it?

On TikTok, in magazines, on music charts and beyond, A.I. avatars have invaded popular culture. A few, like Tilly Norwood, an A.I. actress who recently appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine; Xania Monet, an A.I. R&B singer with tens of millions of streams on Spotify; and Aitana Lopez, an A.I. fitness model with more than 400,000 Instagram followers, already enjoy something like mainstream recognition. Countless others regularly go viral on social media, captivating viewers who may not detect their unreality.

The availability of virtual talent — capable of tackling many jobs on command, while requiring neither empathy nor health insurance — has unsettled many communities of human performers. A.I. was a major issue in the Hollywood labor disputes of 2023, as film and television actors found themselves negotiating against the specter of their digital replacements. SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, helped pass a law in New York State last year that requires advertisements to disclose the use of A.I. personas.

"I don't think A.I. influencers will replace human influencers fully, but as these tools become more and more realistic, I do think we'll see more of it," said Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey who studies labor and the creator economy. "And if it's a more cost-effective way for businesses to get attention, clicks and engagement, then that's what they will promote."

At Inception Point, Jeanine Wright, the chief executive, said her company is offering consumers greater choice. Its fleet of A.I. personas, including Nigel Thistledown, a British gardening expert, and Clare Delish, a Latina cooking influencer (each with about 8,000 Instagram followers), are designed to fill gaps in the marketplace, Wright said.

Wright and her co-founders — William Corbin, the chief technology officer; Brown; and Taylor — started Inception Point in 2023. The company's ambitions are platform agnostic; it envisions a swarm of autonomous personalities producing across media. But it made headlines last fall for its flood-the-zone podcast strategy, which involved maintaining more than 5,000 shows and posting thousands of predominantly A.I.-generated episodes per week.

Inception Point's proprietary software uses commercially available A.I. chatbots and voice generators to produce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sensitive content, most of the podcast scripts are not closely checked by humans.) Because of relatively negligible labor and overhead costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit from advertisements.

The first A.I. fashion model to appear in Vogue was a pouty-lipped blonde named Vivienne. A genie's mash-up of Denise Richards and Kate Upton, it was remarkable for just how unremarkable it seemed, how easily it slid onto a durable fashion industry assembly line of ruthless female beauty standards. In a pair of fully A.I.-generated portraits for a two-page Guess ad last summer, Vivienne posed as an effortlessly glamorous vacationer.

Vivienne was created by Andreea Petrescu and Valentina Gonzalez, the founders of a London-based A.I. marketing agency, Seraphinne Vallora, in partnership with Guess. (The agency's involvement, and the use of A.I., were disclosed in fine print.) Petrescu and Gonzalez, who met in architecture school, are former jewelry designers who first created A.I. models to promote their own products.

Soon, fashion clients came calling, and they have worked with New York Fashion Week, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and high-profile apparel and accessory businesses, which they declined to name because of nondisclosure agreements.

In addition to Guess, several fashion brands, including Levi's, Mango and J. Crew, have used A.I. models in their promotional images. Petrescu said that Seraphinne Vallora's clients request its services to save money — the company charges from five to mid-six figures a campaign, potentially less than one-tenth the cost of a high-end location shoot — and because they want models they can own and control.

“With real models, the problem is they are the face of so many different brands, and anything that they do can affect your brand," Petrescu said. "With A.I., it's like a clean slate: You can design it the way you want, she can be as gorgeous as you want, and she's all yours."

For a recent resort wear campaign for the European brand Desislava Gilberte, the designer requested a “vampire-type beauty.”

“We type in whatever we’re trying to achieve as the vibe,” Petrescu said.

Some industry watchers have warned that fashion companies could use A.I. models to reinforce the status quo, or to nudge beauty standards toward ever more unrealistic extremes.

"If A.I. is used to create sanitized, idealized people who don't actually exist, we risk narrowing our definition of beauty instead of broadening it," said Sara Ziff, a former model and the founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a labor rights group.

At the Inception Point pitch meeting in Midtown, Rhea Patel, Josh Taylor's van life prospect, hit a roadblock. The company already had a character catering to van enthusiasts. Taylor suggested that Patel could pivot.

“Maybe we could make it more of a backpacking, nature thing,” he said. “There’s gotta be more space for someone like that.”

Most of Inception Point's personas bear the fingerprints of their creators. Many combine scraps of personal history (Taylor spent a chunk of the early '90s following the Grateful Dead) with elements of figures from popular culture. V.V. Steele, a smirking celebrity gossip commentator, gets its looks from Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian and Veronica from Archie comics, among other influences.

Staff members use A.I. chatbots to help conjure the interior lives of characters whose backgrounds differ from their own.

"There is a sense of building a utopian society where we can be in other people and other cultures without the barriers," Taylor said.

VIA SERAPHINNE VALLORA

Working with chatbots, designers create 15-to-30-page “bibles” describing the persona’s appearance, voice, personality, biography and worldview. Guiding questions include: “What is your cultural background and how is that reflected in your voice?” and “Because of your cultural background, what kind of obstacles have you had to overcome?”

The characters are often given personal struggles — like Rhea Patel's dead brother — to make them seem relatable.

Zayd Portillo, a founder of Stage Zero Entertainment — the creator of the A.I.-powered pop star TaTa Taktumi — said the company starts its design process by identifying a hardship in the persona's back story.

“That’s the stuff that pulls on people’s heartstrings,” he said.

Portillo and his co-founders — the music super producer Timbaland and the film producer Rocky Mudaliar — unveiled TaTa last October and is developing new characters for film, music and live entertainment.

A.I. music avatars from other companies and creators, including Monet, the country singer Breaking Rust and the gospel persona Solomon Ray, have cracked several Billboard music charts and garnered hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Not all music services require rights owners to identify A.I.-generated content; recently, however, Spotify announced it will begin affixing “AI Persona” labels on profiles it deems to be A.I. generated.

While independent companies like Stage Zero have embraced A.I. avatars, major record labels have generally been more circumspect. In 2022, Capitol Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, signed a record deal with the virtual rapper FN Meka only to cancel it weeks later after a public outcry.

Katie Brown, Inception Point's chief content officer, had grown fond of Caspian Rowe, the prospective A.I. persona focused on filmmaking techniques. A 30-something white male character with tousled brown hair, it was created by Chris Valentino, a content producer at the company.

“That’s not an angle that we have, and he would be fun to work on,” Brown said.

The room unanimously agreed that Rowe, out of the candidates that had been considered, should advance, and that Taylor would reposition Rhea Patel.

Brown asked Valentino to check in on a few existing characters. On a large monitor appeared Ryan Cole, an acerbic tech analyst with a graying beard, and Oly Bennet, a blue-eyed sports correspondent with glistening biceps.

Everyone paused to admire Lila Walker, a new knitting- and craft-focused persona, created by Brown, who had a chunky wool sweater, long, wavy tresses of red hair, cream-colored skin and a spray of freckles.

Brown originally conceived of Walker as an idealized version of her younger self. In the late 1990s and the 2000s, she hosted instructional home cooking and decorating shows, including “Next Door With Katie Brown,” on Lifetime, and “Katie Brown’s Workshop,” on PBS. Inception Point’s focus on telegenic subject matter gurus reflects her conviction that people crave authority figures who are simultaneously approachable and just out of reach.

Approaching the screen, Brown traced a circle around an image of Walker staring directly into the camera, with a loose ponytail pulled to one side and eyes squinted in a cheerful smile.

"There, that's my girl," she said. "I want more of her."

Above, a small group of Inception Point AI's stable of more than 100 content creators, each character with its own market-friendly niche but none of them real. Below, personal introductions to some of the virtual idols.

VIA INCEPTION POINT AI
Nigel Thistledown "Nigel Thistledown's Whimsical Garden" A white British persona focused on gardening and horticulture. Its character bible describes Thistledown as a "mischievous countryside eccentric" with a "warm, witty, slightly posh" vocal style.

VIA INCEPTION POINT AI

An American Latina persona specializing in home cooking. Its personality document says that Delish “would rather you learn from her disasters than your own” and has a voice that is “approachable, with a hint of edge.”

VIA INCEPTION POINT AI

“Crafting for the Soul With Lila Walker” A white American persona focused on crafting and D.I.Y. Its character bible says that Walker “believes nothing is too small to be made delightful” and has a “cozy, gently philosophical” vocal style.

A white American persona specializing in celebrity culture and gossip. Its personality document describes Steele as “your boldest friend, dramatic to a fault” with a vocal style defined by “playful sarcasm laced with authority.”

For more games: www.nytimes.com/games KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. Copyright © 2024 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

Top pitchers are searching for an extra gear

Hitting 100 miles an hour is a major milestone. But what is the next frontier?

BY JOHNNY FLORES JR. THE ATHLETIC

Mason Miller was fresh off the Major League Baseball draft, a newly minted third-round pick for the Athletics. Aroldis Chapman was still an unherald-ed teenager who had yet to defect from Cuba. Seth Hernandez was a rising high school senior in California. And Jacob Misiorowski was pitching in the Junior College World Series.

Individually, they were at different points in their lives. Collectively in these moments, though, they all shared the same experience: their first time reaching 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour) on a pitching mound. "Whoa," Hernandez recalled thinking, as triple digits flashed across the board.

Reaching the 100-m.p.h. marker is no simple feat. It is a test of what the human body is capable of — arms rearing back then whipping forward, more than 60 feet (18 meters) from home plate. These days, though, modern pitchers continue to hit milestones that few before could ever achieve. They are throwing harder and harder, and what was once a rarity has become commonplace.

That first taste of 100 m.p.h. was merely a precursor, as each of them has continued to test his own limits, raising the question: Is there an undiscovered next level, a hidden third gear?

In 2008, the average velocity of a four-seam fastball sat at 91.9 m.p.h. By 2022, that figure was up a full two miles to 93.9. In the first half of 2026, it was 94.6 m.p.h., the highest it has been in the pitch-tracking era, which began in 2008.

In all of the 2025 season, 726 pitches of at least 100 m.p.h. were thrown by a starter. In just the first half of this season, there were 1,018.

“You can feel a nice little whiff,” Misiorowski, the Milwaukee Brewers ace, said when asked what it’s like to throw 100 m.p.h. “You can hear it. It kind of zings a little bit.”

The subject of velocity and its importance has gained traction recently, particularly as Paul Skenes, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, has seen his own flame-throwing capabilities diminish. What was once a 98.8 mph fastball on average has dipped to 96.8. In his most recent start, in $41 \frac{1}{3}$ innings against the Detroit Tigers last Wednesday, Skenes topped out at 97.9.

For his part, Skenes believes that velocity isn't the be-all and end-all.

"I don't think velocity is something I need to pitch well," Skenes said at the All-Star media day last month. "I think it's probably the first time in my career the velo has kind of dipped. It's not something that I'm stressed over at all.

I'm healthy. I'm feeling good and still pitching at a high level."

The results don't speak of someone pitching at a high level, though. Since July 1, Skenes has a 5.67 earned run average in nine starts.

In 2010, when Chapman, then a member of the Cincinnati Reds, hit 105.8 m.p.h. in a blowout relief appearance against the Pittsburgh Pirates, relievers were averaging just under 93 m.p.h. on their four-seam fastballs.

His feat was meant to represent a one-off kind of rarity. Instead, it foreshadowed the modern pitching experience.

"In that time, there weren't that many, like there are now," Chapman said of his fellow hurlers. "You need to be blessed with a good arm to do that."

Consider the 82 pitchers who topped 100 m.p.h. last year among those who have been blessed.

Chief among them is Misiorowski, the towering right-hander for the Brewers, who led the league in the first half of this year with 670 pitches faster than 100 m.p.h., and whose own feat of 105.5 m.p.h. came 15 seasons after Chapman first turned heads.

“I think I slipped a little bit on that pitch,” Misiorowski told reporters in June, as he contemplated the potential of a hidden third gear that would allow man to exceed 106 m.p.h.

If there is, it probably will not come from the arm of Misiorowski, the favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award in his first full season in the majors. “Honestly, I think that’s it,” Misiorowski said. “I think that’s right about where I’m sitting. If that’s all I get, that’s all I get.”

Perhaps, then, Hernandez, whom the Pirates made the No. 6 pick in last year's draft, can find it. A right-hander, Hernandez just turned 20 in June.

“What Misiorowski is doing is special,” Hernandez said. “I’m still pretty young, so hopefully, as I grow into my body, get a little more physical, maybe there’s more velo in the tank.”

A year and a half after first touching 100 m.p.h., Hernandez reached 102.4 m.p.h. in a spring training game against the Tigers.

“It was quite a while ago, so I almost forgot the feeling of it a little bit,” Hernandez said last month. “You could feel the hum off your fingers a little bit.”

A little over an hour after making those comments, Hernandez, pitching in the M.L.B. Futures Game, hit triple digits three times and topped out at 101 m.p.h., the feeling of elite velocity returning, even if for a moment.

One flamethrower who most likely will not challenge for the velocity crown is Cincinnati's Chase Burns, a righty who hit 102 m.p.h. as a 20-year-old sophomore for the University of Tennessee.

"I think that might be the top for me," Burns admitted. "As I get older and maybe get stronger and push the limits on my body, I might be able to get more.

KAYLA WOLF/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Top, Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski in action against the Atlanta Braves. He is the favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award. Above, the Pittsburgh Pirates' Paul Skenes pitching against the Detroit Tigers. His average speed has dropped.
GENE J. PUSKAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

But it's kind of hard when you throw so many innings in a year, so many pitches. I think right now, though, that's the top for me."

As a rookie last year, Burns averaged 98.7 m.p.h. on his heater, and this season, it sits at 97.6, right around what Cam Schlittler, Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki all average. He has reached 101 as a big leaguer and has exceeded 100 m.p.h. at different points this campaign.

It's not just the innings that players have to account for, particularly starters such as Burns, Misiorowski and Hernandez. It's also how their bodies respond. "I think those guys, they're so in tune with their body and their mechanics that it's easier," Burns said. "You definitely feel it the next day."

Just because something is physically possible does not mean it is free of pain, and what is physically possible also does not necessarily lend itself easily to repetition, arguably the most difficult aspect of being able to maintain elite levels of velocity.

“Flexibility,” said Misiorowski when asked what it takes to throw 100-plus consistently. “A motion that you can repeat day in and day out, and just being strong.”

Modern pitchers continue to hit milestones that few before could ever achieve. They are throwing harder and harder.

That is why players like Chapman put a high emphasis on strength and conditioning.

“Consistency, consistency and all the things that everybody doesn’t get to see,” Miller said. “Weight room, training room, everything that prepares you to be able to go out and compete at your best each night.”

Therein lies the biggest obstacle: No matter how much work it does, the human body is only capable of so much.

Misiorowski missed his final start of the first half of the season with what the Brewers classified as arm fatigue. He skipped the All-Star Game, then Milwaukee's first series of the second half, finally returning for an abbreviated four-inning start on July 20. Last Friday, he pitched six shutout innings against Atlanta.

Other big guns, including Edwin Díaz, Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, Hunter Brown, Hunter Greene and Brandon Woodruff, have spent time on the injured list for some variation of an arm concern.

Yet, so long as the radar is functional, there will never be a shortage of those attempting to challenge its capabilities, trying to find another gear on the mound. “I’ve set my highest velo every single year so far,” Miller said. “Hopefully I got another couple of ticks in there, but we’ll see.”

The Mini Crossword

BY IAN LIVENGOOD EDITED BY JOEL FAGLIANO
8/25/2026

ACROSS

1 Cohort born between 1965 and 1980, for short

5 Shipping giant with a purple-and-orange logo

6 Section at the end of a textbook 7 Dry, as the desert

8 “____ it high and let it fly” (golfer's mantra)

DOWN

1 Pop, rock or jazz
2 Comedian Murphy
3 Requirement
4 Winning line in tic-tac-toe
5 Italy's largest automaker

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

nytimes.com/subscribeinternational

Two Not Touch

Put two stars in each row, column and region of the grid. No two stars may touch, not even diagonally. Copyright © 2024 www.krazydad.com

Cryptogram

POYYETP V IFXTO ZVWPUY ET V YFOO LVHT'Y KB HYWJEIOHY KXQO OQOF, BOY EY LVH WJ YUOFO.

PUZZLE BY BEN BASS

YESTERDAY'S ANSWER Newspaper names (Tribune, Globe, News, Sun, Post, Star, Press, Ledger, World)

KenKen

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.

4	3	2	1
1	4	3	2
3	2	1	4
2	1	4	3

Crossword | Edited by Will Shortz

ACROSS 1 Sharpened point of a quill pen 4 One-named Senegalese American singer with the #1 hits "I Wanna Love You" and "Don't Matter" 8 South Asian royals 13 Actress Longoria 14 Free-spirited style, informally 15 *6th 16 Summer meteor shower named for a mythological hero 18 Paradise 19 Musical flutter 20 Billion years, astronomically 22 ____ skirt 23 "Miracle on Ice" foe, for short 24 Smart set 26 To, informally 27 "____ it!" (shout in a game of tag) 28 *2nd 30 Arouses, as an appetite 32 Captivate 34 *1st 36 Settled on the ground, say

38 Something told with two hands? 39 Bluish-silver Christmas trees, maybe 42 Hosp. recovery area 46 Great divide 47 Moon believed to have a subsurface ocean 49 Gamer's "off-line" 50 Kool-Aid competitor 51 *3rd 53 McEntire of country music 54 Some Monopoly properties: Abbr. 56 Drink in a sippy cup, to a toddler 57 Commence 58 Mexican beer brand 60 "I'd love to go" 62 *7th 63 Bygone Russian leader 64 Pad 65 Baker's glassware brand 66 "Thing with feathers that perches in the soul," per Emily Dickinson 67 "Y"-sounding pair of letters, in Spanish

PUZZLE BY BRYAN KAPROTH-GERECHT

DOWN 1 *8th 2 Allen who was the 2001 N.B.A. M.V.P. 3 One known for the morning grind? 4 Second-born son in the Bible 5 ____ pond 6 "Wowza!" 7 Tiny biting insect 8 Creature sometimes trained for bomb detection 9 Focus of some physicists 10 *5th 11 Desert quality 12 Epitomes of slowness 15 Symbols of fair weather

17 Mirror-and-prism camera, for short 21 Arrival of symptoms 25 "Man, that's hardly fair!" 28 Fullness, in hairstyling 29 "The Little Mermaid" prince 31 Shades 33 *4th 35 Kelly of morning TV 37 Neon ____ (aquarium fish) 39 Like someone emerging from freezing cold water, typically 40 Raceway speed setter 41 Mull over

Play all of our games plus over 10,000 past puzzles for Wordle, Spelling Bee, The Crossword and more online at http://nytimes.com/games. For puzzle talk, visit http://nytimes.com/wordplay.

43 Reason to go into penalty kicks
44 Like the paths of 45-Down, as visually depicted in this puzzle
45 Celestial "wanderers" ... or what this puzzle's circled letters represent
46 Flirt with, in a way
48 "Are you sure?"
52 Spellbinds
53 Sunburned, perhaps
55 Reasonable
57 Reveal
59 Black-and-white wedding rental
61 Gullible sort

RISCHGITZ/GETTY IMAGES

A tale of gold claimed by many

Three nations are fighting over artifacts from the likely site of Homer's Troy

BY GRAHAM BOWLEY

During a lecture at Ankara University in Turkey, when Zeynep Boz's professor evoked the fate of the storied gold of ancient Troy, Boz first felt the full painful loss of her country's treasures that had been transported abroad.

Known as Priam's Treasure, the jewelry, vessels and other precious objects were dug up in the 1870s by the German entrepreneur and pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann from the site of the city described by Homer.

After being taken to Germany, the gold was spirited to Moscow at the end of World War II by Soviet troops. Boz's professor recounted traveling to Russia to see the gold but facing frustration.

"He was denied access to his own cultural heritage," said Boz, whose job is now to reclaim Turkey's ancient treasures, as head of the country's Department for Combating Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property.

The 4,500-year-old artifacts still sit in Moscow, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. With claims by Russia, Germany and Turkey, they are frozen in a bitter three-way international dispute unlikely to be resolved soon.

Turkey hopes — with an optimism unmatched by many experts — the gold will be like a reverse Odysseus, whose long journey back from Troy is told by Homer in “The Odyssey.”

Like the wandering Odysseus, who is played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan's new film, the Turkish government is fixated on a journey home. It wants to reunite the trove with the place it was separated from — perhaps even in a museum that opened near the archaeological site in 2018.

"The Odyssey' begins at Troy and is ultimately a story about the longing to return home," Boz said. "It would be fitting if the extraordinary journey of these objects ended not with another transfer between distant custodians, but with their reunion with the city that gives them meaning."

Schliemann, a wealthy merchant and showman, had long pursued the legend of “windy Troy.” His announcement of the discovery of the ancient city in northern Anatolia, on the Aegean coast at the mouth of the Dardanelles, made headlines worldwide.

Artifacts found by Schliemann at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey and wrongly identified as belonging to the Trojan king Priam. They actually came from a pre-Homeric site.

In antiquity, the location was linked to the Troy of Homer's epics and was a place of pilgrimage for Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. But over the centuries, its location became a mystery, its reality even doubted.

Schliemann wasn't the first to identify the mound of Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey as the likely site of Troy, and he was not the first to excavate there. His rushed, indiscriminate methods are condemned by archaeologists.

Nevertheless, the subsequent scholarly consensus has supported his identification.

"He uncovered a lot of material very quickly that suggests it was a major Bronze Age city and the site of many battles, and so seems to verify that Troy was an important place that likely inspired Homer," said Rachel Kousser, a professor of classics and art history at the City University of New York.

The discoveries at Troy confirmed that it was far more than a place of myth. They suggested that the stories of Homer about the war between the Trojans and the ancient Greeks might have their roots in historic events.

ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Above, an undated photo of workers at the site Heinrich Schliemann excavated in an area linked to the city of Troy described in Homer's epics. Left, gold from Schliemann's discovery, now on display in a Moscow museum. Below from left, Schliemann's wife, Sophia, posing with some of the jewelry he found, and Schliemann in 1860.
EKATERINA KRIMINSKAYA/ALAMY

“It cemented the historicity of Troy with the physical remains of a majestic city,” said Susan Heuck Allen, a visiting scholar in the classics department at Brown University and author of “Finding the Walls of Troy.”

“They showed the world that there existed contemporary civilizations that were related and they fought and they were destroyed, and Homer told a story celebrating these memories in poetry,” she said.

The soil of Anatolia also yielded treasure. After digging a large trench through the heart of the mound at Hisarlik, Schliemann discovered gold pendants, ritual axes, shields, brooches, rings, bracelets and more. He declared them to be Priam's Treasure, after the legendary king in Homer's "The Iliad." (The abduction of Helen by the king's son began the Trojan War.)

Among the most impressive hauls in archaeological history, it included jewelry that Schliemann, with his skill for self-promotion, proclaimed might have belonged to Helen of Troy. In one famous photograph, he had his wife, Sophia, pose as Helen wearing some of the jewels.

In fact, Schliemann had burrowed right past the layer of Homer's Troy to find the gold from an earlier Bronze Age settlement, dating to around 2450 B.C., more than a thousand years before the accounts described in the epics.

Turkey says the treasures were excavated on territory that is now Turkey and smuggled by Schliemann to Athens without permission from the Ottoman authorities who governed the region.

At the time, Ottoman officials sued Schliemann in a Greek court and Schliemann paid a large settlement. Turkey now says the payment in no way amounts to a purchase of the gold or a transfer of ownership.

Turkey also argues that the site at Troy is the only place that can show the gold in its historic context.

"The question is not simply one of ownership or monetary value," said Rustem Aslan, who directs the excavation at Troy on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. "It concerns the right of a country and a local community to preserve, study and present the cultural heritage originating from its territory."

In 1881, Schliemann donated the artifacts to Germany, but they disappeared from storage in an antiaircraft bunker in Berlin during the final days of World War II.

Many feared Priam's Treasure had been destroyed. In the 1990s, however, Russia acknowledged that Soviet troops had taken the bounty as spoils of war. The revelation — followed by an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum — immediately inflamed tensions over the collection's ownership.

TROJANISCHER ALTERHUMER, LEIPZIG, 1874

Russia, insisting the gold is proper compensation for Nazi acts, says it has no intention of returning it.

Germany maintains its claim of ownership but concedes that talks with Russia are going nowhere.

“Since the beginning of the war of aggression against Ukraine, all discussions on the subject of looted art have come to a complete standstill,” said Gesche Rintelen, a spokeswoman for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin museums.

Russia's actions violate international law, said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues and an emeritus professor at DePaul University College of Law, but its government is unlikely to surrender the treasures.

“They should return it to Germany, and let Germany and Turkey sit down and work something out,” she said. Turkey’s case, she said, will require Turkey to demonstrate that it made efforts to get the collection back from Germany before World War II. It will also require a clear understanding of events surrounding Schliemann’s excavation and export.

"It's unlikely we are ever going to know for sure what happened," Dr. Gerstenblith said.

DR. ERNST MEYER

Several experts think the standoff will continue despite Turkey's dreams. "I feel they ought to have it back," Kousser said. "Are they likely to succeed? No."

There is, however, a precedent for returns. Artifacts from Troy are scattered in other museums around the world, including in Berlin and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

In 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology made an indefinite term loan to Turkey of 24 gold jewelry pieces after testing showed they had probably originated in Troy or nearby. In return, Turkey committed to lending artifacts to the museum.

It's a loan procedure that experts think could one day help Priam's Treasure get back to Turkey.

Such a return, Boz said, would “affirm that the passage of time, the consequences of war and repeated transfers between states or institutions cannot erase the circumstances in which objects were originally removed or extinguish a claim maintained from the beginning.”

National Symphony to be far from Kennedy Center

Gianandrea Noseda, the National Symphony Orchestra's music director.
CAROLINE GUTMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The orchestra has dates set in several states as the venue plans to renovate

BY ADAM NAGOURNEY

The National Symphony Orchestra has provided the answer to the question that had clouded its future for months: where it would perform as its home, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, moved to shut down for a two-year renovation.

The orchestra will perform 60 concerts in six halls across the Washington area. And it will embark on its first national tour in years, taking in seven cities in five states.

"It's not been an easy time," Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra's music director, said last week. He said he was hopeful the new plan would work for the two years the Kennedy Center board said it would need to complete the \$250 million renovation demanded by President Trump.

“We will be a touring orchestra in the area,” he said. “Being at home, sleeping on our own beds. But a touring orchestra.”

The announcement came after the center's board, dominated by Trump appointees, voted the previous week to proceed with a shutdown that had been temporarily blocked by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the Federal District Court in Washington. Judge Cooper ruled in May that the board was “derelict” in its deliberations before it originally voted to shut down the hall.

That judge also barred the board from renaming the center — built as a memorial to John F. Kennedy — to include Mr. Trump's name. As part of its recent vote, the board approved a workaround plan that would add, under the center's official name, "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump."

The board's actions will almost certainly need to be approved by Judge Cooper. But the orchestra could not wait. Its first performance — the season-opening gala, to be held at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md. — is Sept. 26. As it is, the orchestra is extraordinarily late in announcing its season, a delay that has frozen ticket sales and marketing while leaving artists and guest conductors in limbo. The season's programming would typically have been announced in February.

“We are starting super late,” said Mr. Noseda, who will conduct the opening concert, which includes works by Tchaikovsky and Respighi.

Leonard Slatkin, a former music director of the National Symphony who is scheduled to appear during the season as a guest conductor, said it had been “unclear whether there would be performances.”

“Most of us have been holding dates for at least a year,” he said. “I never intended to withdraw as I am devoted to my former orchestra.”

Mr. Trump's efforts to remake the center, including by naming himself chair, have drawn a fierce backlash.

Many artists said they would boycott the center because of Mr. Trump's actions, including the composer Philip Glass, who withdrew a symphony about Abraham Lincoln that the orchestra was to have debuted. The Washington National Opera announced it was cutting its ties with the center completely.

The orchestra decided to stay at the center, but faced a sharp decline in attendance and revenues. Mr. Noseda said he was hopeful that patrons who were avoiding the Kennedy Center would be willing to hear the orchestra at other halls.

“We can really bring out a new audience and bring the music where people are,” he said. “I hope to reach new people and get back some of the audience that had stopped coming.”

The orchestra's announcement gave credit to Mr. Trump for this new chapter. "Both N.S.O. and Kennedy Center leadership are thrilled to expand the orchestra's reach under the strategic direction of Chairman of the Center, President Donald J. Trump," the announcement said. Asked if Mr. Trump was a fan of classical music, Mr. Noseda responded: "I don't know. I don't have any evidence of that. I don't think so."

The orchestra's concerts in the Washington region next season will be at Strathmore; the Center for the Arts at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.; Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University; Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center at Northern Virginia Community College; the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland; and the Lincoln Theater in Washington.

And it will embark on a national tour, with performances in Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, California and Nevada. In a sign that the orchestra is setting its sights beyond the Potomac River, Mr. Noseda led it this month in its Hollywood Bowl debut.

Next year's 60 concerts in the Washington region are about as many as the orchestra played at the Kennedy Center in a typical year. But it will be reaching fewer people: The center's Concert Hall has 2,465 seats, significantly more than the halls where it will perform.

Mr. Slatkin said he was glad that there was at least a resolution about the orchestra's immediate future. Still, he said there were longer-term risks in taking the orchestra to the suburbs. "If suburban patrons get used to the orchestra in their neighborhoods," he said, "they may be less inclined to travel downtown."

When the artist is part of the pavilion

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK VENICE

Above, Miet Warlop's installation at the Venice Biennale's Belgian pavilion. Right, "Transforming Energy," an exhibition by Marina Abramovic at the Gallerie dell'Academia running alongside the Biennale. Below right, Ei Arakawa-Nash's "Grass Babies, Moon Babies" at the Japanese pavilion, which turns visitors into performers. Below, Florentina Holzinger's "Seaworld Venice," which includes a large bell.
CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MATTEO DE FINA

MATTEO DE MAYDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At the Venice Biennale, working with live bodies brings extra challenges

BY LAURA CAPPELLE

There are only so many ways for a national pavilion to stand out here at the Venice Biennale. This year, a group of countries found an effective way to cut through — by putting performers in the room and theater-makers in charge.

And more than three months after the Biennale opened, the presence of those artists remains a draw. On a recent Saturday, a long line formed in front of Dries Verhoeven's first show of the day at the Dutch pavilion. Waves of visitors gravitated to Austria's contribution, Florentina Holzinger's "Sea-world Venice," to watch a naked performer float in a water tank and to help by "donating" their urine. (Two on-site toilets are connected to a filtration system that feeds the tank.)

Holzinger and Verhoeven, along with Belgium's Miet Warlop and Japan's Ei Arakawa-Nash, have appeared on many lists of must-see Venice exhibitions. All hail from the field of live performance, and in a sea of material artworks, they offer something increasingly valuable: the promise of an event, an experience, that means you have to be there.

Some of the most talked-about exhibitions at this year's event, running through Nov. 22, feature theatrical performances.

Unlike painting, sculpture or installations, however, which can easily stay on show over long periods of time, performance requires an artist's physical presence. That makes the sheer length of an event like the Venice Biennale — which opened on May 9 and runs through Nov. 22 — daunting.

The practical questions quickly pile up: How many hours a day, or a week, can performers reasonably sustain? And who pays for their time and expenses, when visual exhibitions typically require only attendants to run?

Bodies have long found their way into visual art spaces, starting with avant-garde experiments in the early 20th century. Performance art, as a genre, has also blurred the line between live shows and exhibitions. One of its best-known exponents, the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic, even won the Golden Lion, the Venice Biennale's top prize, for her performance “Balkan Baroque” in 1997.

For that, she spent hours scrubbing blood off a pile of 1,500 cow bones, in a macabre memorial to the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Yet even Abramovic, who is known for her mental endurance, staged “Balkan Baroque” for only four days.

Running the Dutch pavilion — six performances a day, five days a week — requires three rotating teams, and “a doctor on board,” Verhoeven said in a group interview with the art magazine Frieze. Belgium couldn’t afford daily shows: “It Never Ssst,” Warlop’s offering, features performers on only a select number of dates each month. (Four scheduled in July were canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances.”) “It’s difficult to convince people to fund fees for bodies rather than something they can hang on the wall,” Warlop said in the Frieze group interview.

And an empty performance space can leave visitors feeling short-changed. Looking at the hundreds of white tablets stacked in the Belgian pavilion, all embossed with words in a range of languages, I found myself

imagining what Warlop — a fearless director with a large dance and theater following — had devised with them. (During the performances, the tablets get thrown and smashed in a riotous fashion.)

For the shows with more regular schedules, their presence at the international art world's most important event is a huge opportunity to reach new audiences. Verhoeven's “The

Fortress" traps visitors for 25 minutes inside the darkened Dutch pavilion, where a performer growls death-metal vocals. Ironically, they are sappy appeals for self-acceptance. "Love yourself," the woman I saw roared, perched on a stool. "You are great." The diverse group of visitors around me looked puzzled. As we exited, it felt as if we'd all shared an absurd, and faintly hilarious, moment.

Holzinger, from Austria, certainly found new fans — and detractors — with her toilet stunt. In early August, she was still on duty with colleagues at “Seaworld Venice.” Yet there was a slight sense of tiredness to their spiel as they encouraged visitors to “make a pee-pee.” And the returns seemed slight compared with an evening-length show: A floating performer assuming poses in a tank, or a naked

woman spinning around a small pool on a jet ski, doesn't exactly make for durable theater.

Japan found a neat solution to performer fatigue — by turning visitors themselves into participants. At the entrance of Arakawa-Nash's “Grass Babies, Moon Babies,” attendants handed us baby dolls to carry throughout. (Changing their diaper along the way earns you a poem via a QR code.)

JACOPO SALVI/LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
Dries Verhoeven's "The Fortress," which traps visitors for 25 minutes inside the darkened Dutch pavilion, where a performer growls death-metal vocals.

Over three days in late August and early September, the Japanese and Korean pavilions will also collaborate on special performances of a 20-minute participatory opera. That's the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of many performances at the Biennale.

Some performance artists invited by their national pavilions declined to provide live elements, like Bugarin + Castle, the duo representing Scotland. Instead of their usual performances, they created an installation, “Shame Parade,” inspired by carnivalesque processions through history. Watching it, I longed to see the artists, both drag performers, in live action.

That could have happened as part of Venice's Theater or Dance Biennales, two events under the same umbrella as the contemporary art juggernaut — but there seems to be limited appetite for programming crossovers. I also wondered how some works in the Dance Biennale, which concluded on Aug. 1, would have looked in exhibition spaces, like Molissa Fenley's graphic, minimalist "Bardo," a potent Keith Haring tribute performed by the 71-year-old Fenley herself.

What cannot satisfyingly replace human presence, however, is a digital stand-in. This year, alongside the Biennale, Abramovic is being honored in a major exhibition at Venice's venerable Gallerie dell'Accademia, a museum dedicated to pre-19th-century Venetian paintings. Yet her show, “Transforming Energy,” features no regular live performance: Abramovic appears instead as a digital avatar, described in publicity materials as “enabling a performative presence.”

The reality was baffling. In a recent series known as “Transitory Objects,” Abramovic has turned to crystals as a source of inspiration, building interactive structures — arches, beds — embedded with the stones. At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, she appeared on screens to explain to visitors how to partake in the experience. In one video, her avatar, dressed in a blue-gray jumpsuit, glided under a crystal arch, opening her palms outward as if to welcome invisible energy, then glided off, expressionless.

I didn't feel like much of a performer as I imitated her, and from an artist who once spent over 700 hours holding museum-goers' gazes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for “The Artist Is Present,” it seemed like an evasion. (Even the pile of bones arranged in one room as a tribute to “Balkan Baroque” had more presence than the avatar.) Whether in a museum, a pavilion or someplace else, there is no performance without the performers — and no way around the cost of keeping them there.

Government for the people, but not by people

BOOK REVIEW

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State By Jill Lepore. Liveright. 316 pp. \$29.99.

BY JENNIFER SZALAI

You might wonder how a liberal democracy run by fallible humans turns into an automated regime ruled by robot overlords. In her preface to “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” the historian Jill Lepore describes her new book as an “inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine and replacement by artificial intelligence.”

“Rule by automation” sounds like the stuff of political nightmares — of surveillance and dragnets and mechanized tyranny. Citing Hannah Arendt’s warnings about the connection between totalitarianism and automation, Lepore vigorously condemns the Artificial State, which she defines as “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.” It is “some-

thing inhuman" that undermines nearly every element of democratic life.

But our current predicament isn't just a matter of tech billionaires conspiring to generate profits by making us beholden to their technologies. Lepore, a historian at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, traces an origin story for the Artificial State that is at once more surprising and more tragic. It initially emerged out of the “perfectly sensible” desire to make government run more smoothly and efficiently. She charts the story of how we went from counting humans in a census, to registering them with identification numbers, to treating them as annoying impediments to the next data center that will power the A.I. that will take their jobs.

The experience of living in the Artificial State might feel new, but Lepore says that the dynamics are in fact extremely old. She helpfully draws a “very schematic” connection between different forms of the state and forms of knowledge. A monarchy or theocracy revolves around religion and mystery; a republic revolves around secular discernment and facts. The Artificial State is oriented around data and prediction. By devaluing and degrading human wisdom, it slides toward authoritarianism.

In this way, the Artificial State doesn't so much progress from its predecessors as come full circle. Instead of the divine right of kings, we get the divine rule by machines, “because in the age of data, not gods but machines know what humans cannot.” Yet again, power is maintained by “mystification,” she writes, in the form of rule by algorithms and corporations. Consider the right-wing programmer-turned-blogger Curtis Yarvin, who has long promoted techno-monarchy as America's salvation. At Tesla, Elon Musk gave himself the title Technoking.

It should be obvious by now that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are Lep- ore's ultimate villains. As a historian, she is justifiably offended by their contempt for the past, as well as what she deems their defective reading comprehension skills. She indicts them for “taking science fiction rather too literally” and “reading cautionary tales as instruction manuals.” While the first half of her book provides a history of the Artificial State’s rise, the second half uses science fiction to explore the Artificial State’s future — including its doom, which she believes is inevitable, largely because the billionaires understand only half of what they're doing.

TAYLOR GLASCOCK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The architects of the Artificial State no longer knew, as humans, how to search for meaning in a text," she writes. "They took more than a century of warnings about building a particular set of tools and instead of heeding those warnings, they decided to build those tools." Her literary examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel "We" and Isaac Asimov's anthology "I, Robot." She offers a close reading of Musk's complete misreading of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Musk has called it the book that influenced him most, somehow unable to register that it is, in Lepore's words, "an eviscerating indictment of imperialism, the uber-rich and unregulated capitalism."

Or maybe Musk simply doesn't care. Lepore laments “the diminishment of the prestige and influence of the humanities, year by year, decade by decade,” and attributes Silicon Valley’s “myopia” to the “abandonment of the humanities in the age of data.” These guys, in other words, don’t know how to read. I’m as appalled as anyone by the devaluation of a humanities education. But would better close reading skills really save them — and therefore us — from the abyss?

Lepore, to be clear, doesn't say anything so crude. But even as she elegantly conveys the nightmare of the Artificial State, her wistful treatment of what it's replacing can verge on sentimental: "The liberal nation-state re-

quires the consent of the governed, the voice vote, quavering; the raised hand, sweating; the signature, wavering; the heart, pulsing." In a country of 350 million people, this sounds pretty far removed from the experiences of the vast majority of Americans. The busy citizen working a poorly paid job and rushing to the polls before they close probably isn't thinking about the quavering voice or the sweaty hand.

But perhaps such harried disen- chantment is part of the problem. Throughout her book, Lepore threads a bravura discussion of the relationship between the rise of the Artificial State and the destruction of the environ- ronment. We replaced animals by machines, and now we can imagine robots doing the same to us.

"The scarcer and farther away animals became, the more passionately humans would long for them," she writes. The same might be said for a functioning liberal democracy, seemingly scarcer and farther away than ever. Parts of "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" read like an elegy for a vanishing world. But Lepore says it isn't too late. We humans know how to make a mess of things; we also know how to imagine a different future.

Chasing waves and more in the Cornish light

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANE STOCKDALE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A vacation in England is filled with surf sessions, picnics and artist studios

BY JULIE SATOW

A weeklong stay in the English countryside conjures up visions of drinking a pint next to a warm hearth, or a stroll along a windswept heath.

Yet here, in the town of St. Ives, nestled into the steep cliffs of Cornwall and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, my children were riding the waves in wet suits each morning while I practiced yoga in a converted theater, sounds of the crashing swells drifting through the open windows. A branch of the Tate Museum stood so close to the beach that it cast a shadow on the sunbathers.

Dating from the Middle Ages, St. Ives is a labyrinth of cobbled alleyways lined with 19th-century stone fishermen cottages, working artist studios and galleries, and shops selling Cornish pasties and ice cream.

The town was once the domain of fishermen and tin and copper miners, but in 1877 the railroad arrived, bringing visitors, and particularly artists, who were drawn to its seascape, the craggy green nature walks and the famously clear light. Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the railroad, as well as the 100th anniversary of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," which was inspired by the Godrevy Lighthouse in St. Ives Bay, where she spent her summers as a child.

St. Ives has roughly 11,000 full-time residents, but in July and August, the population swells as tourists swarm Downalong, the oldest quarter and once home to the town's many fishermen. Clustered on the neck of land between Porthmeor Beach and St. Ives Harbor, Downalong's narrow one-way streets become so thick with pedestrian traffic as to make driving a car down them a feat of derring-do. Upalong is the neighborhood higher on the hills and farther inland, where the miners once lived.

In June, just as the summer crush was picking up, my family arrived for a weeklong visit. Like many tourists, we opted to stay at one of the fishing cottages in Downalong that have been converted into vacation rentals. (Like many popular tourist towns, St. Ives has been contending with issues of over-tourism. In particular, the lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue.)

Our cottage dated to the 1800s and was once was home to Alfred Wallis, a fisherman and mariner who took up painting later in life. Wallis, who had no training and little money, began painting in his 70s, after the death of his wife, using discarded marine paints to create works on found objects, like the backs of train schedules or grocery boxes. He was discovered in 1928, when he was spotted by the modernist painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood while painting at his kitchen table.

The Tate St. Ives, which opened in 1993 in a former gasworks building, its striking white rotunda stretching out over Porthmeor Beach, celebrates Wallis as well as Nicholson, Wood and other artists who lived in the area in the mid-20th century and are known as the St. Ives School. A key member was the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and there is a museum and garden dedicated to her work.

While many of the town's galleries focus on modernism, the St. Ives Museum looks further back. "St. Ives became internationally famous for the practice of landscape and marine painting long before the modernists arrived," said David Tovey, an art historian, who noted that artists were drawn to the town's mild climate, as well as that famed light. The light, Mr. Tovey explained, is in part the result of St. Ives's position facing north on a peninsula, placing the sun behind the town for most of the day, its rays glinting off the water and its sandy beaches, as well as the stunningly clear and reflective St. Ives Bay.

MORNINGS ON THE WAVES Our mornings began at the St. Ives Surf School on Porthmeor Beach, where our kids took their first ever surf lessons. The calm water and smallish waves are a good starting point for beginners, and the lessons are popular and can fill up quickly.

After an hour paddling their surf-boards through the freezing water — it is still England — the kids were fam- ished, and we typically met for lunch at the nearby Porthmeor Beach Cafe. The restaurant offers a deck overlooking the water with a menu of Cornish crab sandwich and halloumi Caesar salad, as well as a boardwalk cafe with more casual fare; our kids, sandy in their bathing suits, typically went for a basket of fish and chips at the picnic tables.

Other local spots we frequented included St. Ives Bakery, where a line of tourists often stood waiting for pasties and then found themselves guarding their lunch from trolling sea gulls, who brazenly steal from unsuspecting hands — something my son had to learn the hard way. Yellow Canary Cafe, which had excellent sandwiches, was another favorite.

Among the town's many shops, one

Above, the beach at the St. Ives, England, harbor. Top row from left: the gardens of the modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth; dishes at Porthmeor Beach Cafe; and the Tate St. Ives, which is in a former gasworks building. The gentle surf, left, at the coastal town is good for beginners.

of the standouts was Sisters, a clothing boutique run by Elizabeth Gould and her sister Susie Nagle in a building that has been in their family since 1895. The space now sells clothes from small designers, including a line of colorful cardigans featuring fanciful patterns like tennis rackets and grapefruits, and a collection of bags and jackets that Ms. Nagle sews from found textiles, like tapestries and embroidery.

LONG WALKS BY THE SEA

At dinnertime, we often found ourselves at St. Eia, a wine bar featuring small plates of fresh fish and produce. Named for the town's patron saint, a fifth-century Irish princess, St. Eia is owned by Eleanor Vening and her husband, Mark Quick, who grew up in St. Ives. The pair, who spent a decade working in restaurants in London before opening St. Eia in 2021, met when Eleanor's family purchased a

vacation home there two decades ago.

Most restaurants line Fore Street, a quick walk from Porthmeor Beach, and Wharf Road, which faces St. Ives Harbor. Wharf Road is clogged with pedestrians in the summer, many drinking pints in front of the Sloop Inn, believed to date from 1312. Still, the town's harbor can make for a scenic stroll, particularly at low tide, when the water almost completely recedes, enabling long walks.

One day we left early with ambitious plans to hike along the South West Coastal Path to Zennor, a beautiful village with a Norman church and the former home of the writer D.H. Lawrence, who finished writing “Women in Love” while living there. We began the walk energetically enough, delighted to discover fields of wildflowers and a shepherd and his dog wrangling a flock of wayward sheep.

But soon we were navigating narrow, rocky paths that clung to the high cliffs, precariously close to the roaring ocean below, our sneakers no match for the tough terrain. By the time we made it into the picturesque town, we collapsed at a picnic table at the 700-year-old Tinners Arms, grateful for bowls of chili and a helpful bartender who gave us the name of a taxi driver to take us home.

How to keep a travel journal that future you will want to read

BY JENNA SCHNUER

There's no one perfect way — or reason — to keep a travel journal. But no matter how or why you do it, future you will probably be happy you did. Writing things down gets the synapses firing on several fronts, including memory and engagement with your surroundings.

Even bad days can be good journal fodder, making for terrific dinner party stories, or just serving as a reminder of why it's best never to take that train from Point A to B again.

And imagine the joy of looking up at your bookshelf in a decade: thick notebooks barely contained by their elastic bands, with tickets and other ephemera spilling out. Inside, you can revisit details of days exploring Tokyo neighborhoods, a birding life list, maybe a messy inventory of the best burger spots recommended by that bartender in Boston.

So, before setting out on your next trip, consider these tips for maintaining a travel journal you'll page through for years to come.

KEEP IT LIGHT

Choose a notebook that fits in the bag you're carrying or the pocket of the coat you're wearing most often. If you prefer softcover notebooks, pop a pencil board inside so you'll have a hard surface on the go. Refillable notebooks like those from Paper Republic make it easy to add organizer inserts so you won't lose important papers.

Bringing too many pens and colored pencils could leave you overwhelmed when it comes time to write or draw. "Simplifying as much as possible decreases the barrier to entry," said the artist Kristin Link, author of "Discover the Art of Field Sketching." Keep your tools together in a small kit so you won't waste time searching for your pen. Pack intentionally, Ms. Link added. She fills the slots of a small case for art supplies with a pencil, two or three pens, measuring tools and a portable watercolor palette.

BE CONSISTENT. STAY ORGANIZED.

Overcome the fear of the blank page and get organized by starting every journal entry with some metadata, including the date, time, weather and location. (A note about your mood can help you later recall context for your mind-set.) The practice is a cornerstone of scientific field journaling. Once you finish an entry, consider adding page numbers to an index on the first two pages as well as the location and keywords.

SET TIME ASIDE TO WRITE While out on the town (or mountain or beach), write quick notes under the metadata as you go about your day. Take note of sounds and scents you might forget. If you really want to relive a place once you're back at home, put your phone's recording app to work. "The sounds of a fish market, a crowded bus or a city sidewalk can often evoke a place even more vividly than a photograph," said the photographer Rob*

PHILIP LINDEMAN

Stephenson, who writes “The Neighborhoods,” a Substack newsletter about New York City’s boroughs.

Save your recap of the full day's experience for a 15-minute block each night. Set a timer. Write freely until it goes off. You'll be surprised how much writing you can do in such a short time.

GET COLORFUL

Use each trip as a chance to practice a new art skill. “Adding visuals to a journal helps me remember things in a specific way that writing might not,” Ms. Link said. Try sketching with just a few colored pencils, or draw the view outside your hotel window every morning.

But if the thought of creating art is too much pressure, Ms. Link suggested adding diagrams and maps instead, or maybe a tiny landscape sketch. "Keep your drawing really simple, but carefully observe the shape of things. Add a little bit of color and some notes. Sometimes calling a drawing a diagram takes some of the pressure off," she said.

MAKE A PHOTO-ONLY BOOK

For a photo-only journal, think about the trip more thematically or snap photos capturing the small things that make a place special. “Rather than documenting specific monuments or events, I usually focus on everyday details that I find more effective at capturing the feeling of a place,” Mr. Stephenson said.

Mark the best photos as favorites in your phone. Back home, print those shots and tape them into a blank notebook or order a photo book online, Mr. Stephenson suggested. Keep a running record of your daily itinerary so you can add that information. And remember, don't be shy. You never have to show anybody else your journal. It's just for you.

制度与权力批判深度研判：The New York Times International (2026-08-25)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有国际政治、经济、社会与文化报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在制度结构、权力技术与法理合法性层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【美国军方对 AI 供应商的禁令】 [F3_6 🔍]（版面：主报深度版面）

   • 事件简述：美国空军警告军工承包商，必须在 9 月 1 日前将其武器和控制系统中的 Anthropic 公司 AI 产品全部清除，否则将面临终止所有业务的风险。
   • 制度批判切入点：分析国家安全逻辑与私有技术基础设施之间的冲突，探讨主权权力在面对高度依赖的私有 AI 能力时，如何通过极端的行政禁令尝试重新夺回规训权。

2. 【梅洛尼的政治身份演变与制度化】 [F5_10, F6_11, F6_12]（版面：专业栏目）

   • 事件简述：梅洛尼在 15 岁时选择了具有墨索里尼根源的右翼，而今被讨论是否已转型为“民主温和派领导人”。
   • 制度批判切入点：研究极右翼政治话语如何通过时间与制度的兼容性实现合法性重构，分析权力如何利用民主程序的包容性，将威权主义遗产转化为现代治理的资本。

3. 【外交手段中的“非正式权力”运作】 [F10_20, F12_23, F12_24]（版面：专业栏目）

   • 事件简述：美国特使约翰·科尔在与白俄罗斯领导人卢卡申科会面时，采用“开怀大笑”和非正式外交手段，试图促使对方释放政治犯。
   • 制度批判切入点：探讨正式外交制度之外的“情感权力”与“心理操纵”，分析在强人政治环境下，非正式的个人关系如何成为突破制度僵局的权力工具。

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▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：技术主权的焦虑：五角大楼 AI 禁令中的规训尝试

美国空军近期要求军工承包商在极短时间内清除 Anthropic 公司 AI 产品的指令 [F3_6 🔍]，揭示了当代国家机器在面对私有技术霸权时的深层焦虑。从制度现实来看，这并非简单的软件更换，而是一次典型的主权权力试图通过行政强制手段重建技术主权的尝试。

在这种权力运作中，五角大楼陷入了结构性矛盾：一方面，国防逻辑要求武器控制系统必须处于绝对的行政控制之下，以消除对外部私有公司的依赖；另一方面，AI 能力的快速迭代使得国家机器在研发速度上难以与资本驱动的初创公司同步。通过发出带有最后期限的警告信 [F3_6 🔍]，美国军方试图利用其作为最大采购方的经济权力（威胁终止所有业务），强行将私有技术纳入其规训体系。

援引福柯的权力-知识 (Power-Knowledge) 理论，我们可以发现，这里的冲突在于“知识中心”的转移。当 AI 供应商定义了算法的边界和安全标准时，传统的行政权力被反向俘获。五角大楼的禁令实际上是对这种“技术俘获”的应激反应。这种通过行政命令强行切断技术依赖的行为，揭示了在算法治理时代，国家主权在面对私有接口时所感受到的脆弱性：它拥有法律上的最高权力，但在技术事实面前，其权力运作显得极其迟钝且具有破坏性。

专题二：生物政治与身份的重构：从法西斯根源到民主温和派

关于梅洛尼从 15 岁时选择具有墨索里尼根源的右翼 [F6_11 🔍]，到如今被讨论是否成为“民主温和派领导人” [F5_10 🔍] 的演变，构成了一个关于政治合法性洗白与制度化的绝佳样本。

这种转型并非简单的个人观念转变，而是一种精巧的权力话语策略。梅洛尼在早年对米亚诺布洛（Mianoblo）等政治人物的评价 [F5_10 🔍] 以及她对自身被“愤怒奶油化”的解释 [F6_12 🔍]，显示了其权力逻辑的连续性。然而，当这种逻辑进入现代民主制度的框架后，它通过“务实”和“温和”的修辞，将其原有的威权主义内核包裹在民主程序的合法性外壳之中。

从施密特的“政治”定义来看，梅洛尼成功地将“敌我区分”的极右翼逻辑转化为一种能够被制度吸收的“保守主义”治理术。这种演变揭示了现代民主制度的一种悖论：制度的兼容性在提供稳定性的同时，也为极右翼话语提供了合法化的通道。权力不再需要通过推翻制度来获取控制，而是通过在制度内部进行“身份重构”，将曾经的边缘激进主义转化为主流治理的合法资本。这种“制度化”过程，实际上是权力在不同历史阶段对合法性来源的灵活切换。

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▌ 面向学者的制度研究开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【关于技术依赖的法理研究】：当国家安全的核心能力高度依赖于具有独立伦理准则的私有 AI 公司时，传统的“国家安全审查”制度是否已失效？如何构建一种能够兼容私有创新与主权控制的新型“公私共治”法理框架？
2. 【关于右翼制度化的比较研究】：对比梅洛尼在意大利的转型路径 [F5_10, F6_11]，探讨在当代欧洲，极右翼政治如何通过“民主温和化”的修辞实现从街头政治到制度权力的平稳过渡？

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The New York Times International (2026-08-25)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在个体生命体验、权力运作与生活世界层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【海上活动人士的肉身受难】 [F4_8, F16_31]（生活领域：战争与身体）

   • 事件简述：试图突破加沙封锁的海上活动组织者宣布，被拘留者在以色列军队实施的拘留期间，遭受了包括身体虐待、性羞辱及贬低性对待在内的多起侵害。
   • 情感政治切入点：权力如何通过对肉体的极端贬低（如性羞辱）来摧毁个体的尊严，将政治抗争者的身体转化为权力展示的“痛感剧场”。

2. 【意大利右翼领导人的身份张力】 [F2_4, F5_10, F6_11]（生活领域：政治与认同）

   • 事件简述：梅洛尼在访谈中强调其原则是“永远不会说我不相信的话” [F2_4 🔍]，但其政治轨迹揭示了从15岁选择带有墨索里尼根源的右翼 [F6_11 🔍] 到被质疑是否成为“民主温和派” [F5_10 🔍] 的复杂演变。
   • 情感政治切入点：个体政治认同在“原则性”的自我叙事与历史根源（法西斯主义残余）之间的张力，揭示了右翼政治如何通过个人信念的“纯洁性”来掩盖意识形态的连续性。

3. 【外交手段中的情感操纵】 [F10_20, F12_23]（生活领域：国际关系与心理）

   • 事件简述：美国特使约翰·科尔在与白俄罗斯领导人卢卡申科会面时，采取“开怀大笑”的策略，基于一种认为“如果你能让对方笑起来，你就成功了一半”的心理逻辑 [F12_23 🔍]。
   • 情感政治切入点：将人类情感（笑声）工具化为一种“巨型武器” [F12_23 🔍]，揭示了外交理性如何将对方的心理防御机制简化为可操纵的开关，从而实现政治目标的达成。

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▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：肉身贬低与权力逻辑：海上活动人士受虐事件中的 Logos 与 Pathos 辩证

在国家安全与边境管控的系统理性（Systemic Logos）中，拘留活动人士被定义为一种维护主权与安全边界的必要行政手段。然而，当这种理性在执行端转化为具体的肉身对待时，它演变成了极端的现象学痛感（Phenomenological Pathos）。根据 [F16_31 🔍] 的记录，被拘留者遭受的并非仅是物理上的禁锢，而是包含“性羞辱”和“贬低性对待”在内的系统性虐待。

这里存在着深刻的辩证摩擦：权力机构的 Logos 旨在通过拘留来消除“威胁”，但其采取的 Pathos 手段——即通过性羞辱摧毁个体的心理防线——实际上是将政治冲突转化为一种肉体上的权力等级确认。这种虐待不再是为了获取情报或维持秩序，而是一种通过剥夺对方尊严来确认自身绝对支配地位的仪式。当个体的身体被转化为“被贬低”的对象时，政治抗争的理性诉求被肉身的极端痛苦所覆盖。这种从“法律拘留”到“肉身羞辱”的滑坡，揭示了在极端权力不对等的情况下，系统理性如何掩盖其对人类基本尊严的践踏，将肉体转化为权力宣示的媒介。

专题二：工具化情感与外交理性：卢卡申科会谈中的情感操纵逻辑

在传统的外交理性中，谈判被视为基于利益交换、条约约束和战略博弈的 Logos 过程。然而，约翰·科尔在与卢卡申科的互动中，实践了一种将情感作为战略工具的“情感理性”。其核心逻辑在于：将人类的情感反应（如笑声）视为一种能够降低对方防御机制的“武器” [F12_23 🔍]。

这种辩证关系体现为：情感（Pathos）在这里不再是理性的对立面，而是被理性（Logos）所捕获并工具化的手段。通过“开怀大笑” [F10_20 🔍] 这种看似非正式、非理性的行为，外交官实际上在执行一套极其精密的心理操纵计划——通过制造一种“不构成威胁”的假象，从而在心理层面达成某种程度的“成功” [F12_23 🔍]。

然而，这种工具化情感的逻辑也隐含着风险：它将复杂的人格简化为可预测的反应模式。当外交被简化为“用伏特加和黄段子进行外交” [F9_18 🔍] 时，深层的政治分歧与结构性矛盾被掩盖在表层的愉悦感之下。这种“情感武器化”揭示了当代地缘政治中一种危险的倾向：即认为可以通过操纵个体的心理弱点来替代实质性的政治协商。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【权力运作中的肉身贬低机制研究】：在国际冲突的拘留实践中，性羞辱与贬低性对待如何作为一种非物理摧毁的心理武器被系统性地运用？这种行为如何影响国际法中关于“非人道待遇”的定义边界？
2. 【情感工具化与外交伦理的冲突研究】：当外交策略将人类情感（如笑声、友谊）完全工具化为达成政治目标的“武器”时，这种操纵逻辑如何影响国际关系的长期信任构建？是否存在一种能够兼容战略目标与人格尊严的“非操纵性”外交伦理？