2026-04-21 06:57:24
Last week, the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast shuttered Self, a women’s health publication that in recent years had turned to publishing service journalism on chronic health conditions that was both practical and normalized living with chronic illness. Amid a trend of unrealistic articles on longevity and ambiguously defined, MAHA-coded writing on “wellness,” Self was a breath of fresh air.
“SELF has played an important role in shaping conversations around health and wellness,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in a memo published last week. “However, as audience behaviors shift, we have not seen a path for SELF to continue in its current form as a digital publication.” Lynch’s memo said that health and wellness content would “be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour.” Self had already gone digital-only and ceased print publication in 2017.
I spoke to chronically ill women who had been dedicated readers of Self about what the magazine, and its closure, meant to them. Self may not have been a revenue driver for Condé, but its work was transformative for readers, quietly shifting away from the typical fare of women’s magazines in the 2000s and 2010s—like problematic weight-loss content—to a more progressive vision of women’s health and wellness.
Self‘s conversational style of writing about health topics made the publication more accessible, said Jaime Seltzer, scientific director of the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome nonprofit MEAction, who was interviewed by then–editor-in-chief Rachel Miller for a 2022 article that Seltzer said sparked more awareness around ME/CFS and Long Covid and had a major impact on people who were trying to figure out what is happening to their health.
“The more people who know they have a disease, the more they can get the clinical care that they need,” Seltzer said. “A really good article like this is a great way to show a friend or a relative what you’re going through.”
Beth Morton, a migraine care advocate said she appreciated Self‘s non-stigmatizing articles on the condition by people who lived with migraines themselves. Self “still had an impact,” Morton said, lamenting the decision to shutter the magazine.
Myisha Malone-King, a chronic illness advocate living with Crohn’s disease, said Self made her feel seen and supported when she struggled with getting medical care for an ovarian cyst. “I felt extremely lonely when I was diagnosed,” Malone-King said, calling the publication’s folding “a huge blow.”
Condé Nast hasn’t announced what will happen to Self‘s digital presence and archives, and representatives for the company did not respond to a query about whether the site would stay online—or whether it would follow other folded media outlets, like the feminist publication Bitch Media, which also engaged frequently with chronic illness and disability, into digital oblivion (though some articles from Bitch are being republished in The Flytrap).
Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a disabled and chronically ill professor of English at Dominican University of California, told me how much she valued Self’s ability to capture the social dimensions of chronic illness, as with a piece by its former staff writer Katie Camero on how to navigate friendships with people who don’t seem to get what life with a chronic illness is like.
Reporting in that vein, Delchamps Wolf said, “clearly comes from an authentic space and refuses to present chronic illness as pitiful.”
“It’s so important that journalists address issues like medical racism and other systemic barriers that worsen people’s experiences of chronic illness,” Delchamps Wolf said. “In addition to talking about medical concerns, we have to acknowledge chronic illness as a politically, culturally, and socially marginalized category to bring about substantive change.”
Now, there’s one fewer publication where that can happen.
2026-04-21 05:15:00
“If it works, it’s not great for the US. And if it doesn’t work, it’s also not great for the US.”
That’s what Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, told me last week about the US naval blockade on Iranian ports.
The Trump administration’s stated intention was to stop Iran from profiting off the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the time, Iran’s government only allowed its own ships, and those of some of its allies, safe transit in the waterway. Iran was also reportedly charging tolls for at least some other ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway in the Persian Gulf through which approximately 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flowed before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran starting in February. Much of that oil went to Asian countries, with China, India, and Japan as the primary importers.
The US military implemented the blockade last Monday in response, saying last Tuesday that global sea trade with Iran had “completely halted.” But as Colgan says, “there’s this kind of Catch-22”: the more effective the US military blockade is, “the more it ripples out to global energy markets and affects everybody,” including voters “who are not going to be pleased with higher prices.”
Since I spoke with Colgan on Wednesday, oil prices have risen even further. Despite the ceasefire between the US and Iran established earlier this month, few ships have been able to cross the strait. As I recently reported, Iran reportedly shot at two Indian-flagged ships on Saturday and Trump said on Sunday that Marines stormed and seized an Iranian cargo ship trying to run its blockade “by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”
On Friday, Trump said that the naval blockade would “remain in full force” until Iran agreed to a deal, while Iran has vowed to not open the strait until the US withdraws its blockade, which it argues violates the ceasefire agreement.
In short, although the US and Iran now appear set to continue peace negotiations in Islamabad, don’t count on significant advances anytime soon.
Many reports on the fight for control of Hormuz hinge on national governments’ claims about poorly documented conflict at sea; tracking individual ships in the region is overwhelming, and verifying the bulk of military statements is nearly impossible.
That’s partly the usual “fog of war,” Colgan says, but it’s exacerbated by what he calls the Trump administration’s “casual relationship with truth.”
Oil markets, ship transits, and other bellwethers of the ceasefire are fluctuating wildly. As a way of tracking what’s going on, Colgan says those types of assessments are doubtful at best.
But one measurement that remains palpable for American consumers is the gas pump. According to Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, Americans have spent $23.4 billion more on gasoline and dieselsince the start of the war on February 28. That comes out to $178.43 per household in the US, as the national average price of gasoline has increased by more than a third to $4.04 per gallon and diesel prices have risen by just over 50 percent.
2026-04-21 05:07:25
The Trump administration has officially begun the process of repaying up to $175 billion in illegally collected tariffs, following a February Supreme Court ruling. It’s the biggest such repayment program in history, and over 330,000 businesses stand to benefit. But American consumers—that is, the people who ended up shouldering higher prices thanks to these fees—likely won’t see the cash anytime soon.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told Mother Jones the tariffs—a vast set of taxes Trump imposed on imports—“haven’t achieved what they were meant to achieve.”
“They were meant to onshore manufacturing—it’s continued to shrink. They were meant to lead to new factories being built—that hasn’t happened. They were meant to lead to an increase in government revenue—but the government’s about to write a whole bunch of checks. They were meant to lead to the US having leverage and signing new trade deals. We have effectively done none of that. So at a minimum, it achieved nothing positive.”
The refunds, then, might seem like a step towards minimizing the economic damage of “Liberation Day.” But Wolfers said that’s not how he’d put it in his Economics 101 class. “Often in economics, what we’ll do is we’ll try to subsidize something that we want more of, or we’ll tax something that we want less of”—a basic incentive structure. These tariff refunds don’t incentivize much, because “they’re purely tied to what you did in the past, which means [companies] have no incentive to do anything.”
“This is more like when your grandma sends money for your birthday,” he said. Smaller companies that folded entirely after the onset of Trump’s tariffs—think women selling handmade earrings on Etsy from their living rooms—won’t be refunded. Consumers, too, will likely miss out.
In February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Economic Club of Dallas, “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see” the money. “My sense is this could be dragged out for weeks, months, years, so … we’ll see what happens there,” Bessent added.
“So, nothing here has helped American consumers,” Wolfers said. “If Costco raised the price of olive oil, I paid that higher price, and now I’m poorer. Costco, now, gets a refund. So what we did is, we took money out of the government coffers and gave it to Costco. Costco is not going to write me a check, it has no reason to. And now there’s less money in the government coffers, so eventually they’re going to tax me some more.” Theoretically, shoppers could benefit from lower prices after the tariffs—but the Budget Lab at Yale suggests that’s not the case, and that corporations haven’t stopped passing costs on to consumers.
One group of Costco-shoppers is attempting to sue the supermarket chain for collecting tariff prices from consumers, “while simultaneously seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government.” So, they’d be repaid by the government for costs that have already been passed on to shoppers.
“Costco stands to recover the same tariff payments twice” if the court doesn’t intervene, the customers wrote in their complaint. As of April 9th, over 56,000 importers had already completed the necessary steps to get an electronic refund—but they aren’t required to pass any of that money onto consumers.
2026-04-21 03:15:27
“I thought we’d be shut down last year,” Alex Jones marveled on-air in January. “I thought we’d be shut down last month,” he continued, exhorting his audience to consider buying one of the fundraiser items he was hawking to keep the lights on, which at the time included a $111 collectible coin and posters of Jones and Donald Trump.
“You guys have got us out of this over, and over, and over again,” Jones declared, as he once again asked his fans to give him money.
He struck the same note in March when, Jones, slurring his words, told right-wing streamer Tim Pool that his Infowars company was “getting shut down.”
“We’ve beaten so many attacks,” he added. “But now we’re shutting down in the middle of next month.”
During Infowars’ years in bankruptcy, Jones still found opportunities to create chaos and raise funds.
At the time, Jones didn’t elaborate on what “shutting down” Infowars come April might mean. But on Monday, one version became clear when the satirical news site The Onion said it had reached a deal with the bankruptcy receiver overseeing Infowars to take over the site. The deal, which still has to be approved by a judge, would represent a serious and perhaps final blow to Jones’ time at the company. A leasing agreement would allow The Onion‘s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, to assume control of Infowars’ website and studio for the next six to twelve months and transform the site into a parody of itself. In a mockup shared by Onion CEO Ben Collins, parody ads blared over Infowars’ style-content: “TURN YOUR PISS INTO GOLD,” a particularly funny one read. “TURN YOUR GOLD INTO PISS,” another countered.
It’s been a long few years for Jones, the bilious figurehead of Infowars, the conspiracy website he founded in 1999. Over the last two decades, the site has grown beyond anyone’s wildest expectations in terms of money, reach, and infamy, making Jones something of a household name—certainly in households concerned with claims about black helicopters, FEMA camps, and chemicals that are “turning the frogs gay,” as Jones infamously put it.
But eventually the infamy caught up with him: Jones was sued in both Texas and Connecticut for claiming on-air that the 2012 murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults, were a “massive hoax” and a false flag. It’s been years since Jones lost three related defamation lawsuits by default and had more than $1 billion in judgments rendered against him and Infowars.
To many, the court losses appeared like an immediate death sentence for the company. But Jones and Infowars continued—and continued, and continued—in large part by using the judicial system to his advantage. Both Infowars and Jones personally filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 2022, setting the stage for an endless series of proceedings in a Texas bankruptcy court. Thus far, the Sandy Hook families have not seen a dime of what’s owed to them.
The proceedings were often almost bizarrely anticlimactic: in December 2024, for instance, bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. Lopez rejected the results of an auction that would have then sold Infowars outright to The Onion. In June of 2025, the federal bankruptcy trustee tasked with overseeing Infowars during the process accused Jones of going to “extraordinary lengths” to hide funds and make fraudulent transfers to his family to the tune of $5 million. It took until August for Texas district court judge Maya Guerra Gamble—who also oversaw the original Texas Sandy Hook lawsuits against Jones—to order that Infowars’ assets be turned over to a receiver, paving the way for them to be sold to pay what Jones owes. Since then, some of Jones’ personal property has been sold off: court records show that 14 watches, for instance, and a Ford Expedition together brought in $20,720 in October. A rental house with what court documents called “deferred maintenance issues” also sold for $332,770. The same month, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Jones’ appeal seeking to void the judgements against him, putting an end to one of Jones’ most loudly-expressed wishes.
During the roughly four years that Infowars was winding its way through the bankruptcy system, Jones still found time and opportunity to create chaos and raise funds, as he repeatedly vowed to stay on-air no matter what and railed against the process—even as it often worked in his favor. Over time, the agonizingly drawn-out proceedings led to split opinions among victims’ families and lawyers about the best way forward: some wanted to find a way to shut down Infowars immediately, while others favored letting the company continue operating in some form so that value remained to pay the judgments they are owed—essentially turning Jones into their employee.
“There was false comfort in the deplatforming.”
In late 2024, Jones began directing his viewers to visit a new website, Real Alex Jones, which sold his longstanding favored product category: boldly capitalized supplements, including a $250 “special offer” where a selection of pills come with a Faraday bag and a “trench tactical” knife. For years, Jones has made it clear that whenever the lights go off at Infowars, he intends to immediately start broadcasting at another new site, the Alex Jones Network, which for now just relays Infowars content.
“There was false comfort in the deplatforming and the trial judgements,” says Josh Owens, referring to both the lawsuits and the decisions made by major tech platforms—including Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and eventually Twitter—to ban Jones’ accounts. Owens is the author of The Madness of Believing, a new memoir detailing the four years he worked at Infowars before quitting in 2017. (Full disclosure: I read an advance copy of the book and wrote a blurb recommending it.)
In this “current phase” of legal proceedings, Owens adds, “there’s false comfort he’ll go away.” In the unlikely event Jones actually does, according to Owens, any sense of relief would be undermined by the reach Jones and people like him have already achieved: “His ideas and what he built are so ubiquitous now. It’s been in the White House for two terms. You have all these young people picking up the torch. It’s getting far worse. The damage is done”
“There’s a reality here, which is that the legal system works slowly,” says Chris Mattei, one of the attorneys who sued Jones in Connecticut. “And when you have a corrupt and bad-faith litigant like Jones, he’s inevitably going to take advantage of the pace.” After initially securing their judgments for the Sandy Hook families, attorneys in both Texas and Connecticut sought to defend their clients’ interests where they could, seeking sanctions and protective orders against Jones and Infowars. But that took time, he says, and Jones was able to “exploit those delays to gain more attention and essentially fund his defense.”
To be clear, Mattei argues that “this hasn’t been a positive experience for Alex Jones. It’s been overwhelmingly negative and devastating for him.”
“Anybody who has watched this has seen that from the day we filed our lawsuit until the day Infowars shuts down, Jones has been on a desperate downward trajectory,” Mattei says, pointing to Jones’ “public statements about the litigation, his increasing lashing out, the fact that he’s had to spend hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars on legal defense.”
”For years,” Mattei explains, Jones “has not controlled Infowars, has not controlled personnel decisions, hasn’t had access to Infowars cash, and has had his personal belongings and one, or maybe two, houses have to be sold. He’s now on the verge of losing all the IP that he spent 20 years building up. That’s not just the Infowars logo: that’s the video inventory, all of his customer data. All of that has been under the control of the bankruptcy trustee, and now the receiver, for years.”
“Every bit of personal income he generates for the rest of his life,” Mattei adds, “is going to go towards paying off this debt” thanks to a Texas bankruptcy court’s holding “that his debts are nondischargeable because he acted with such intent and malice towards our clients.”
While the legal process wound on and Jones kept blustering on air, Lenny Pozner did the same thing he does every day: woke up and set to work removing vicious lies about his dead son.
Pozner and his former wife Veronique De La Rosa are the parents of Noah, a six-year old boy who was the youngest victim at Sandy Hook. The two also faced some of the most vicious and direct harassment from deniers of the shooting, who have claimed that Noah was an actor who has gone on to “die” in other disasters around the world. Pozner has been hounded for years with demands to exhume Noah’s body, claims that he wasn’t really Noah’s father, and accusations that Noah never even existed.
In response, Pozner has been involved in an ongoing crusade against the people he calls “hoaxers.” Pozner has successfully sued the co-authors of a book claiming that no one died at Sandy Hook for defamation, and has founded the HONR Network, which works to protect survivors and victims’ family members from online harassment and abuse—not just those scarred by Sandy Hook, but the endlessly multiplying number of people affected by mass shootings and other major acts of violence. A primary tool is using copyright takedown requests to remove false or harassing material that makes unauthorized use of his photos of Noah, or of other families’ photos of their murdered relatives.
“Jones has benefited from the whole process.”
The work is ongoing; like noxious weeds, hoaxer content can sprout again, even years later. Pozner says “the massive media attention” generated by the trials and the bankruptcy process “has made the hoax topic worse. Just look at Twitter—people who had forgotten or never knew about this are suddenly aware again. There’s a clear resurgence of attention”
“Just today,” Pozner told me recently, “I took down six or seven images of Noah that said ‘victim dies again,’ this time supposedly in Pakistan or Iraq. It’s spreading across every country in the Middle East.”
Pozner and De La Rosa’s own Texas court case against Jones remains open. While Jones, as he did with the two larger plaintiffs’ groups, lost the case by default, he and Infowars filed for bankruptcy protection before it went to trial and damages could be determined; the bankruptcy process must conclude before it can be argued. It’s unclear when or if their suit will ever be heard and provide Pozner and De La Rosa a forum to describe how he and other Sandy Hook deniers affected their lives.
“I believe Jones has benefited from the whole process,” says Pozner. “It’s approaching eight years since this all began, and that’s a lot of time for him to keep getting attention.”
Pozner also believes Jones when he says any ban or shutdown will prompt him to simply leave the Infowars studio and immediately start over. “Picture Jones walking out of one door with cameras rolling—background reading ‘Infowars’—straight into another door labeled ‘Alex Jones Wars’ or something similar,” he says. “If he’s already announcing he has another studio ready to go, what does being ‘shut down’ actually mean?”
“My only purpose is to protect Noah’s memory as best I can,” Pozner says. “I’m not interested in promoting myself or tying my name to Jones any further.”
Pozner still hopes, somehow, that he’ll get his day in court, seeing it as a crucial step to moving on. “The lack of any real conclusion or closure has been deeply unpleasant,” he says.
2026-04-21 01:26:40
Infowars could finally have a new owner: Global Tetrahedron, the Chicago-based company that owns the satirical news outlet The Onion. The news was first reported by journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre, and also announced by Onion CEO Ben Collins, who wrote on Bluesky, “With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars.” Collins also said on Bluesky that Infowars’ new creative director will be comedian Tim Heidecker.
This is the Onion’s second attempt to acquire Infowars.
Collins also posted a link to a statement purportedly put out by Global Tetrahedron’s fake owner, Bryce P. Tetraeder. “Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars,” the statement read. “With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.”
According to the New York Times, the Onion has reached a deal with the bankruptcy receiver overseeing Infowars, Gregory S. Milligan, to license the website from Milligan. Despite The Onion’s description of the deal, its bid must still be approved by Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in a Texas district court.
This is The Onion’s second attempt to acquire Infowars. While Global Tetrahedron won a 2024 bankruptcy auction to buy the company while promising to turn the site into a parody of itself, a bankruptcy judge voided the results, saying that he wasn’t convinced the company’s bid had more value than one offered by allies of Jones. The announcement is the latest installment in an endless series of legal skirmishes that began in 2018, when the families of people killed during the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School sued Jones for defamation. Jones repeatedly claimed on-air that the shootings were a hoax; he lost all the lawsuits filed against him in Texas and Connecticut by default after failing to meaningfully participate in discovery.
If the past is any guide, Jones’ public response will likely involve a good deal of shouting and a vow to remain on-air, no matter what. During a live broadcast on Monday, after a viewer called to ask about the news, Jones said a “new thing” would soon be in place. Since 2024, Jones has been directing his viewers to buy supplements and donate money at a new site, the Alex Jones Store, which is currently hawking a “last-stand super sale” of Infowars products, billed as a “fundraiser” to keep the company alive. Jones has also said that if Infowars is shut down, he’ll immediately begin broadcasting from the Alex Jones Network, a website which currently broadcasts a mirror of Infowars content.
“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Jones added. “The media is going to run around and call this a victory. They already are. It’s all going to blow up in their face.”
The Onion’s CEO Ben Collins did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
2026-04-20 23:30:10
On Sunday afternoon, Palantir, the defense-tech company that sells software to clients like ICE, the US military, and the Israeli military, decided to give us all a piece of their mind. The company’s official X account published a list of excerpts from co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic.
The book frames Silicon Valley’s move into military technology as the righteous repayment of a “moral debt” owed to the country that built the tech billionaire class. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”
If you read past the post and dig into the book itself, you’ll find that this sentence continues: “the engineering elite must also, Karp said, participate in “the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.”
That is to say: Men like Karp should decide what this country is.
“If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software,” Palantir’s Bill-Ackman-esque digression continued. It asserts that the future of American military dominance will not depend on nuclear deterrence, but on AI weaponry—possibly like the Palantir AI product that is reportedly used to help generate ‘kill lists’ for the Israeli military in Gaza.
Then, after arguing for the primacy of its own products—called “spy tech” by Palantir’s critics—Karp suggests the remilitarization of the Axis Powers. “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” Karp’s company account asserted. “The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.”
That would make those countries massive defense markets, which means more money for Palantir. Right now, about half of their earnings come from their contracts with various governments. A further militarized Japan and Germany could see that share expand further.
The rest of the manifesto is also, essentially, a sales pitch for corporate capture: “hard power in this century will be built on software,” Palantir says, meaning that if America doesn’t buy that software, someone else will. The company has had a banner year profiting on Trump’s ICE crackdowns, and currently holds $970 million in US government contracts, but is eager for more.
As Palantir pitches an increasingly militarized United States, ideologically determined by Silicon-valley tastes—at one point in the post, they suggest bringing back the draft—they’re suggesting a country in which they get all the power.
