2026-04-19 04:56:19
President Trump signed an executive order on Saturday calling for the acceleration of research on certain psychedelic drugs as treatments for depression and other conditions. Podcaster Joe Rogan stood with him as he signed the order—and Trump indicated that Rogan was a major inspiration behind the push to fast-track legalizing ibogaine, which is used outside the United States to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rogan has championed ibogaine for years. A year ago, on his podcast, he said “Ibogaine, in particular, has helped a lot of people. It gives you, like, a review of your life, apparently.” Two weeks ago, he interviewed the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, who also stood by as Trump signed his order to ease access to the drug.
Rogan’s relationship with Trump has recently been strained, as the podcaster critiqued the president’s war on Iran. (Trump, in response, referred to Rogan as a “liberal,” a charge Rogan would likely deny.) But Rogan’s texts to Trump, he told reporters, were what brought this to fruition: “Sounds great, do you want FDA approval?” Rogan said Trump responded. “It was literally that quick.”
Rogan isn’t the only nationally prominent figure pushing psychedelics. The drugs’ path to legitimacy is fueled by early-stage investors hoping to stake their claim to a market many view as the next cannabis.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has spent the better part of the past decade investing heavily in psychedelic pharmaceutical companies. He’s a major backer of Compass Pathways, a British company seeking to commercialize psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, in particular for therapeutic use. He’s also invested in AtaiBeckley, a German company working on hallucinogens. On Thursday, the stocks of both companies spiked on news that Trump would likely be giving his stamp of approval to ibogaine this weekend.
Another financial beneficiary might be the state of Texas, which announced it would be conducting its own ibogaine clinical trials in late March, to the tune of $50 million. And then there’s the Mercer Family Foundation, a major conservative grantmaker that helped get Trump elected, which has donated over $1 million toward psychedelics-related treatment for PTSD in combat veterans.
At the White House Saturday, Trump didn’t talk much about the money behind all this. Instead, he asked if he could get some ibogaine.
“Can I have some, please?” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes…I don’t have time to be depressed. If you stay busy enough, maybe that’s what works too, that’s what I do.”
2026-04-19 03:31:09
The Department of Homeland Security just rolled out a new website for its city-occupying task forces that looks, more than anything, like a vibe-coded pitch deck. Launched on Friday, HSTF.gov was first announced on the FBI’s X account.
We don’t negotiate. We dismantle. The site’s slogan is displayed in the same sans-serif font stylings as direct-to-consumer deodorant companies and AI-powered lease abstraction platforms. The main page is largely consumed by a macho image, presumably AI-generated, of gas-masked officers with AR-15 style weapons advancing in formation through a cloud of tear gas.
Notably, it makes no mention of ICE, deportations, or even immigration. Instead, it frames the Homeland Security task forces as crusaders against foreign cartels, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. Yet the effort is inseparable from the multiagency task forces that have kidnapped and detained people across Minneapolis, Memphis, and Los Angeles. The connection isn’t evident if you look at HSTF.gov, but the FBI’s own website notes that DHS “formed Homeland Security Task Forces in response to Executive Order 14159.”
That’s an order signed by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office. It’s titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and it explicitly describes a plan for deportation, incarceration, and removal of unprecedented numbers of immigrants.
The brand new website describes the Homeland Security Task Force as a “permanent, interagency law enforcement task force created by executive order to combat transnational criminal organizations—including cartels, trafficking networks, and foreign terrorist organizations—across all 52 U.S. states and territories.” But it omits a key line from the HSTF objectives cited in Trump’s executive order: to use “all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.”
The new website’s creators are familiar characters: The head of the National Design Studio, a year-old agency created by executive decree, is Joe Gebbia, a former DOGE man, current billionaire, and member of the Airbnb and Tesla boards. Then there’s Nate Brown, creative director, who used to work with Kanye West and has pivoted to government tasks. Edward Coristine, the 20-year-old perhaps best known by his DOGE-era nickname, “Big Balls,” says he’s the engineering lead on the project.
In an interview earlier this month with far-right influencer Nick Shirley, Coristine outlined his mission as a federal vibecoder. “We’re actually setting Americans up for growth moving forward, and to believe in the capitalist system and, like, see how it can actually work for them.” He’s been working 14-hour days, he added, and “AI is super important, I use it every day.”
Those hours of AI-assisted labor have delivered (among other things) a shiny new website hailing the 8,500 DHS “agents and analysts” coming to a city near you. Among the goals listed is “dismantling cross-border trafficking and smuggling networks” with a “priority focus” on those involving children—although, in practice, Homeland Security agents have spent months invading cities far from the border and locking children in detention centers.
A year ago, when the National Design Studio was first announced, Paula Scher of the graphic design firm Pentagram told Fast Company that the group’s remit—to make America’s websites beautiful again—didn’t land well, given its work on behalf of a government dedicated to deprivation. “You can’t talk about people losing their Medicare and have a slick website,” Scher said at the time. “It just doesn’t go.”
According to official National Design Studio materials, though, that’s the goal: “To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.”
An Apple Store does not lock up and deport people, but maybe that’s beside the point.
2026-04-18 19:30:00
Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.
The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.
No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with the modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.
NASA has always relied on partnerships with private companies, but the number of unique contractors has dropped by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024 as contracts with SpaceX ballooned. According to a Washington Post investigation, Musk’s company has received nearly $15 billion from the agency all told, with contract values doubling at the inception of Artemis.
“Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches.”
“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Drier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”
But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Drier says.
The technologies that allowed SpaceX to leap ahead were developed using federal funds, yet Musk owns the rights to them. “Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches to space, something previously only the domain of national superpowers,” Drier says. “The government, by policy, concentrated immense power in the hands of a single individual.”
The value of the Artemis contracts have grown over the last year as NASA, like other federal scientific agencies, finds itself in a tricky position. Because Congress rejected the president’s proposed budget cuts, NASA has the funding to carry out its missions—a $24.4 billion annual budget, plus a bump of nearly $10 billion over the next six years from the One Big Beautiful Bill. But their staff took a large hit at the hands of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The agency lost about 20 percent of its workforce, including many senior and specialized employees trained to support highly technical missions like getting back to the moon. This scenario “almost certainly will increase reliance on contractors,” Drier says—though DOGE ended many NASA contracts as well.
In the name of efficiency, the Trump administration also eliminated NASA’s entire Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, whose economists analyzed and managed NASA’s relationship with the space technology market. This included assessing contracts, which typically cost taxpayers more than in-house work—especially when there’s no competition.
This doesn’t leave NASA many places to turn when the company of a billionaire who famously overpromises doesn’t deliver. An analysis from the NASA Office of the Inspector General expressed concerns that SpaceX would not even be able to meet the already extended deadlines for the moon lander, especially as there is “little margin for error in completing the remaining work.”
To keep the Artemis III mission on track for mid-2027, NASA is “exploring options for accelerating lander development,” per the IG report. So far, this has meant soliciting proposals from the only two companies with the capacity to work on such gear. One is SpaceX. The other is Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, which is already two years behind on its contracts for Artemis V.
2026-04-18 19:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Picture yourself in a windswept forest. Leaves are rustling and trunks are creaking as trees sway to and fro. This oscillation might seem precarious, but it’s actually an ancient adaptation: If pines and firs and all the others were perfectly stiff, a gust would snap them. So instead, they flex.
Now teleport yourself to the top floor of a skyscraper during the same windstorm, ever so slightly bending in the same way. A tree’s clever evolutionary trick, you see, has made the modern metropolis possible: As towers reached higher and higher in the early 20th century, architects used not wood but steel to create giants that would similarly flex in hurricane-force winds and as earthquakes rattled their foundations.
But as the world gets hotter and wildfires more intense, architects are turning back to trees for more than inspiration. Engineered materials like cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber, in which layers of wood are glued together, create beams that are tough and somewhat flexible, yet lightweight. They’re so strong, in fact, that designers are crafting wood structures that are 15, 20, even 25 stories high: In 2022, the 284-foot Ascent MKE Building opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, becoming the world’s tallest timber building.
It’s exactly because the world is getting hotter that architects are pushing the limits of how tall they can build with “mass timber,” as it’s known in the field: As trees grow, they capture planet-warming carbon, which is then permanently incorporated into the edifice. To that end, last month crews completed a 10-story building in Vancouver, called the Hive, which is now North America’s tallest brace-framed, seismic-force-resisting (meaning it shrugs off earthquakes) timber structure. “I think we’re going back to how we used to build, which was with more wood,” Lindsay Duthie, an architect at Dialog, the firm that designed the property.
For thousands of years, humans were stuck with natural building materials: wood, adobe, granite. The industrial revolution unlocked the power of steel, but at an environmental cost, as its production has spewed heaps of carbon. Laminated timber, on the other hand, is not only more environmentally friendly, but also perfectly safe for structures much larger than your house.
Because this resource is engineered, it can come from small- and medium-sized trees. That is, instead of having to form single beams from huge old-growth behemoths, bits can be sliced, layered, and glued together. This harvesting can help improve forest health, as agencies like the US Forest Service remove some stands to prevent overcrowding and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. (A long modern history of suppressing fires has nixed the ecosystem’s natural way of thinning itself. Lightning strikes, for instance, would ignite blazes that cleared out some vegetation while leaving the forest intact. This spurred new growth and attracted grazing animals like deer, boosting biodiversity.)
While it takes a lot of work to mine and process the iron needed to make steel—a process that scars the landscape—wood structures use material from ecosystems that, if managed properly, can keep growing more cross-laminated timber for more construction.
The Hive, though, can’t resist seismic forces with wood alone. It’s equipped with Tectonus dampers, which are essentially giant shock absorbers that dissipate energy and recenter the building after an earthquake. Elsewhere, on a large shake table at the University of California, San Diego, researchers deployed a different technique in a 10-story timber structure. At the building’s core sat a large piece of mass timber, called a rocking wall, anchored to the foundation with high-strength steel rods. The researchers simulated 88 earthquakes, and the timber building survived them all with no damage. “It performed phenomenally,” said Shiling Pei, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
That structural integrity is not only important for keeping occupants safe, but for sustaining the sustainability of a mass timber structure. If an earthquake damages a building, repairing it will result in CO2 emissions. Worse, you may have to demolish the structure and start from scratch. A properly designed timber building can capture carbon in its wood—and keep it there for years and years. “You build not only a sustainable structure, but also a resilient structure,” said Alessandro Palermo, a structural engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who studies mass timber.
Which is all not to say that one of these wooden buildings is fully devoid of steel. The timber beams are attached with metal brackets, for instance. And timber buildings still sit on sturdy foundations of concrete, the production of which releases enormous amounts of carbon, though engineers are working to make it more environmentally friendly.
But isn’t building a giant structure out of wood just asking for it to go up in flames? No, because building regulators in British Columbia or anywhere else wouldn’t approve these plans if they were excessively flammable. And laminated timber is designed to form a protective char layer if it catches on fire, insulating the structural integrity of a beam from the flames. “If you have a campfire, you end up at the end of the night with black logs,” Duthie said. “That’s the char layer that actually acts as a protective coating that prevents it from burning further.”
And compared to the sterility of exposed steel and concrete in a building’s interior spaces, wood has a fundamentally different feel for the occupants. “It has a tactile quality about it that people sort of want to interact with,” said Katie Mesia, firmwide design resilience co-leader at the architecture company Gensler. “I think that is just part of who we are as humans. That desire to be close to nature has always been there.”
One day soon, then, you might find yourself safely in a mass timber building—the evolutionary brilliance of a forest repackaged with human ingenuity.
2026-04-18 15:00:00
In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.
The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.
The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.
This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025.
2026-04-18 06:24:11
Hasan Piker’s name is everywhere. Not because he won an election or passed legislation. Not because he’s a big sports star or an astronaut. It’s because he won’t stop yapping—and scores of people won’t stop listening. Depending on who you ask, he’s either one of the most dangerous voices in American politics—or one of the most honest.
Piker, an avowed Marxist, is among the loudest voices on the American left. His megaphone is a Twitch stream where he spends roughly eight hours a day, seven days a week, breaking down political news to an audience that skews young and male. He’s blunt, frequently crass, and deeply influential. There seems to be a profile of him every other day. (One such New York Times headline: “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’”.) Time named him on its Top 100 Creators list. All of this is why certain factions of the Democratic Party have spent the last several weeks trying to make him a liability for the candidates he supports, pointing to off-color, if not offensive, comments he’s made over the years as evidence that he’s too toxic to touch.
So I sat down with him.
We talked about why Fox News can’t stop covering him—and why he thinks that’s a gift. We talked about the ideological fault lines inside the Democratic Party, what he actually believes about Israel and Zionism, and why people can’t stop talking about him. “We’re on the fourth week now,” he jokes. “Like, why are you still talking about me? I’m irrelevant.” We don’t think so, Hasan.
