2026-05-13 03:20:00
A man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone with hantavirus, catches it, gives it to his wife, and dies. His wife then infects 10 more people at his wake. Another guest at that same birthday party has no interaction with the index patient except to say “hello” as they cross paths, but that person gets sick too.
One index patient, 33 subsequent infections, 11 deaths, four waves of transmission.
This is from a meticulously documented hantavirus outbreak in Argentina in late 2018 and early 2019, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Nearly the exact same Andes strain of hantavirus caused the recent outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. Yet from the moment this latest outbreak hit the news last month, public-health officials have been claiming that this virus is spread through “prolonged close contact.” The evidence is not nearly so reassuring.
In any outbreak, the single most important question is: How does it spread? The answer informs the guidance for everything else, including how to stay safe, which protective measures to put in place, and who should be notified during contact tracing. Get it wrong and everything else breaks down.
[Read: ‘This is not going to be the next COVID’]
We made this mistake at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and the cost was high. Health officials thought the virus spread on surfaces (“fomite transmission”) and through large droplets that dissipate quickly and can’t travel six feet. That’s why we spent a full year cleaning elevator buttons and putting stickers on floors telling people where to stand. But these interventions did little to halt the spread of a disease that in fact traveled through small particles that lingered dangerously in poorly ventilated and enclosed spaces.
We’re now getting it wrong again. “This is not a respiratory disease,” Mike Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said about the hantavirus in an ABC News interview on Sunday, adding, “It’s very rare to see it transmitted between humans.” Transmission of the virus “requires close contact,” Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insisted last week. The CDC’s official communications have continued to emphasize that “prolonged, close contact” is necessary for transmission, as have other public-health officials outside the Trump administration.
As an expert in what we call “exposure science,” I have spent a career conducting forensic investigations to understand how diseases spread and what we should do about it. As a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, I chaired the Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel task force, and was an early proponent of the theory that COVID spreads through the air. There was evidence early on of airborne transmission, which my colleagues and I tried to draw attention to. We modeled the early-2020 outbreak of the disease on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and found that 90 percent of the spread was through aerosols, not contaminated surfaces, but the CDC didn’t update its guidance until late 2020. I am alarmed to see the same pattern playing out now.
Hantaviruses usually originate in rodent feces. Someone cleans a dusty area that has rodent droppings, inhales the particles, and gets sick. Only the Andes strain of hantavirus is known to be transmitted from human to human. In the outbreak documented in NEJM, the virus spreads without physical contact or prolonged exposure. One patient gets sick after simply crossing paths with someone who was ill. Two others are infected while seated at tables meters away. One person infected five others within 90 minutes at one party. The NEJM authors suggested that the virus spreads through the air.
Although the NEJM evidence is clear, officials have kept repeating “prolonged, close contact,” so I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. Last week I spoke with a physician who was on the MV Hondius as a passenger but who jumped in to help treat infected passengers after the ship’s official doctor got sick and was evacuated. He told me that the original treating doctor and staff were definitely in close contact with the first patient. But the others who got sick? They had merely shared space in the dining room and the lecture hall, and had not had close contact. We’re now at 10 confirmed cases from the ship, which aligns with the prior outbreak dynamics: one person infecting many, no close contact required.
Every outbreak investigation involves careful clinical workups, painstaking epidemiology, re-created time-activity patterns, and genomic sequencing—but almost every time, without fail, the investigators ignore the actual space where the outbreak took place. Was the cruise ship’s ventilation system working? What filters did it have, and were they running?
[Read: What happened on the hantavirus cruise, according to a doctor on board]
This matters because medical teams treating patients need to know how they might be exposed. When infected passengers go home to quarantine, their households need to understand the risk. As passengers fly back to their home countries, contact tracers need to know which exposures matter. The doctor who treated patients on the cruise said on CNN that he relied on goggles, a gown, and hand-washing to protect himself. But given that this virus spreads through the air, an N95 mask and a strong ventilation and filtration system would have served him better.
This outbreak is not likely to spark a pandemic, mostly because the hantavirus is less contagious than influenza, measles, and SARS-CoV-2. But given just how little experience we have with this virus, any certainty is hubris. Thankfully, despite the flawed messaging, the system is broadly working: Officials are investigating, passengers are quarantined, the seriously ill are getting treatment, and the risk to the general public is low. International and national public-health authorities are acting responsibly.
But what happens next depends on how well public-health officials communicate what precautions people should be taking. If people mistakenly believe transmission relies only on “prolonged close contact,” they may take risks they will soon regret.
Public-health officials have to be more honest and more humble about how this virus actually spreads. An essential lesson from COVID is that officials should be candid about communicating that we are often learning in real time, and we should shy away from making bold pronouncements that may prove dangerously misleading weeks or months later. When it comes to preventing an outbreak from becoming a pandemic, insisting on the wrong answer to that most central question—How does it spread?—may well be worse than not having an answer at all.
2026-05-13 02:01:00
The model of an authoritarian leader that the 20th century instilled in the Western imagination is a master of lies. Big Brother commands a machinery of propaganda that bombards his subjects with relentless projections of strength, combined with savaging of enemies real or imagined.
Donald Trump resembles this archetype in many ways, both superficially (the obsession with building new monuments to his greatness or renaming existing structures after him) and substantively (pressuring media and business into capitulating, turning the power ministries into organs of vengeance). But he differs in one key aspect: The president is a recipient and victim of propaganda as much as he is an originator of it.
Trump’s strange, symbiotic relationship with the world of lies was in evidence last night, when he experienced one of his periodic social-media crashouts. From 10:15 to 10:53 p.m. EST, he shared more than two dozen posts on his Truth Social account alleging a blizzard of conspiracies. Roughly half of them centered on Barack Obama, whom the posts accused of having committed treason, having attempted a coup, having personally used Hillary Clinton’s email server under a pseudonym, and having personally collected $120 million from the Affordable Care Act.
[Vivian Salama: Trump has gone from unpredictable to unreliable]
The rest of the messages contained attacks on various targets—such as Mark Kelly, James Comey, Jack Smith, and Hillary Clinton—whom Trump wishes to be arrested, including demands that the Justice Department move more quickly to apprehend these or other targets, as well as a handful of random videos that appear to show Black people misbehaving in public.
These messages, collectively, do not alter our understanding of Trump’s mindset. His accusations against Obama, as is typical, seem like reflected confessions. Obama never ordered investigations of his rivals, tried to overturn an election, or used the presidency as a vehicle of profit (the ACA charge, which appears new, seems to originate from a satirical website). Trump has done all of these things.
Trump’s fixation on Black Americans as a source of crime is long-standing, though he may be growing more uninhibited about expressing his prejudices. His undisguised intention to target his enemies with prosecutions is also by now familiar. As he has said many times, including yesterday, “I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”
The subject matter of his posts also confirms Trump’s boredom with the Iran war. In recent weeks, he has used his social-media accounts to attempt to scare Iranians or reassure oil markets (while often having the reverse effect). Yet his overnight posting binge ignored the war that he is currently waging, the economic effects of which have turned into his party’s biggest political liability.
Only one message in this series of posts was written by Trump himself. The rest are reposts of messages written by apparent supporters.
[Tom Nichols: Trump’s latest meltdown]
These posts feed Trump’s paranoia and desire to criminalize his opponents. But he leaves it to others to fill in the daffy specifics. Trump has communicated the broad idea that his political rivals are all crooks and traitors, and these social-media accounts fill in the picture for him with imagined treason investigations, computer servers, sums of cash, and fake quotes. Trump then consumes the fan fiction and attempts to turn it into concrete policy by ordering his compliant staff to produce legal charges matching the claims, periodically firing them when they fail to make reality conform to his fantasies.
Given the importance that he has always placed on locking up his enemies, it is striking that he is so willing to abdicate the details to random social-media followers. Trump has cultivated a cadre of professional authoritarian legal warriors eager to corrupt the legal process on his behalf, yet he is outsourcing the work of ginning up charges to random social-media users such as @Shelley2021, @YouWishUwere4US, and @Real_RobN.
Trump is using social media not as Big Brother or Stalin would have employed this technology, but the way a depressed teenager would: as a source of fantasies that provide him with validation, comfort, and escape from the frightening realities of the outside world. He appears to be a lonely man with few true friends, compulsively scrolling the night away, not so much a social-media influencer as a social-media influencee.
2026-05-13 01:02:02
“You’re the eighth rheumatologist that I’ve seen,” the patient told me. She ticked off her symptoms—pain, fatigue, and what she described as a sense of brain fog—which she’d lived with for years. Some doctors had no answers for her; others had said that she likely had fibromyalgia, a poorly understood pain-processing condition, and that they could do little to help. She began to cry, and I began to sweat.
My medical training had prepared me for seemingly everything—diagnosing heart attacks, treating life-threatening infections—but not for this kind of problem. I knew the technical definition of fibromyalgia, but my confidence in making the diagnosis correctly was exceedingly low: The disease can cause the symptoms my patient described but cannot be proven by lab or imaging studies. And even if fibromyalgia was the cause of her suffering, I had few concrete solutions to offer her.
Modern medicine is excellent at delivering treatments that precisely target the biological cause of a disease and produce clear, measurable improvement. The promise of such magic bullets shapes both doctors’ training and patients’ expectations. But for some of the most disabling conditions physicians treat today, no magic bullet exists, and doctors often struggle to identify what it is, exactly, that they’re shooting at.
Illnesses such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS) rarely reveal a single malfunctioning molecule or damaged organ. In such cases, the best medicine can offer is often a patchwork of modestly effective medications and nonpharmacological interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, and tai chi. The result is a quiet but profound mismatch between what modern medicine was built to do—identify targets and take aim at them—and the kinds of suffering many patients now bring into the exam room.
The concept of the “magic bullet” arrived at exactly the right moment. The German physician Paul Ehrlich first came up with the metaphor in the early 20th century, when infectious disease was the leading cause of death worldwide. Ehrlich imagined a medicine that could act like a perfectly aimed projectile, striking a disease-causing organism while leaving the rest of the body unharmed. Two years later, he demonstrated the idea experimentally, curing syphilis-infected rabbits with a chemical compound later named salvarsan, and within a few decades, the era of highly effective, modern antibiotics was under way. The success of the magic bullet helped establish a framework that shapes medicine to this day. Drug development focuses on discrete biological targets; medical training teaches physicians to think about disease in simplified terms, as a set of problems with clear mechanisms that can be addressed with specific interventions.
But not all diseases cooperate with this framework. Fibromyalgia, for instance, likely arises from abnormal pain processing in the nervous system rather than tissue damage; research studies have shown that, when exposed to the same stimuli, patients with fibromyalgia exhibit greater activation in brain regions associated with pain than healthy individuals. Many cases of IBS begin with an insult to the gut (such as an infection) that triggers persistent pain but over time also becomes a problem of the nervous system, which amplifies discomfort even in the absence of ongoing injury. “The brain is not the origin of the problem, but it is the organ that’s ultimately affected,” Braden Kuo, the chief of digestive and liver diseases at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, told me. Tests examining muscle response have shown that IBS patients experience pain when the rectum is stretched to levels that most people barely notice.
These tests, however, are not used in clinical practice, in part because of their high cost and the need for specialized expertise to interpret them. Efforts to identify biomarkers for these diseases in the blood have also been largely unsuccessful, and so biomarkers aren’t used to diagnose these conditions. According to Michael Kaplan, a rheumatologist at Mount Sinai whose research focuses on chronic pain, this poses a problem for patients trying to understand the root of their symptoms. “Patients come to the doctor expecting their suffering to be translated into the language of objectivity, but that’s just not possible for these conditions,” Kaplan told me. Instead, patients are left trying to understand how their symptoms can be so intense even though their lab and imaging results appear “normal.”
One reason that physicians aren’t pushing for more testing, according to several I spoke with, is the paucity of targeted therapies. When a doctor orders a test, they mostly want to know: Will the result change my management of this patient’s symptoms? For fibromyalgia and IBS, spending time and money on knowing exactly what’s wrong with a patient doesn’t help if the conversation still ends with “And there is not much we can do for you.” Physicians often dread these appointments not because they lack empathy, but because they have no magic bullet to offer the person sitting in front of them. “I say to patients, ‘If I had you on the perfect pharmacologic cocktail, it would only get us about one-third of the way to making you better,’” Kaplan said. Instead, managing chronic-pain syndromes in many cases requires long conversations about coping strategies, behavioral therapies, and lifestyle changes—precisely the kind of time-intensive care that modern medical systems are poorly designed to deliver.
For some conditions, a discrete biological target and its magic bullet may exist, even if no one has found it yet. For decades, obesity—a complex, multifactorial disease shaped by genetics, environment, and behavior—was regarded as a pharmacological lost cause. Then came GLP-1 agonists, which, though not a cure-all, have driven dramatic weight loss for millions of patients. Philip Mease, the director of rheumatology research at Swedish Health Services, in Seattle, told me he believes that a similar sea change could come for conditions such as fibromyalgia. The challenge, he argued, is clarifying what the disease is—and what it is not. Disorders such as long COVID share many overlapping symptoms with fibromyalgia, making misdiagnosis common. The result is a cascade of consequences: blurred disease boundaries, a grab bag of patients in clinical trials, stalled therapeutic progress.
Nortin Hadler, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, told me that the issue extends far beyond subtle distinctions. In his view, doctors must be willing to confront a more fundamental divide: the difference between illness and disease. Patients with fibromyalgia, he argues, clearly experience illness—real, often-debilitating symptoms that disrupt daily life. But Hadler does not believe that fibromyalgia should be classified as a disease in the traditional biomedical sense, because medicine has yet to identify a discrete, demonstrable pathophysiological process underlying it. The problem, as he sees it, is that the medical system reflexively applies the label of “disease” and then looks for a targeted biological fix, creating expectations that may be misplaced. “The endless search for a cure may actually increase disability, because patients are distracted from learning how to live with their symptoms,” Hadler said.
Debates over conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome and long COVID reveal how difficult it can be for modern medicine to balance the recognition of subjective—yet real—suffering with the quest for objective proof. The question of whether ME/CFS is a distinct biological disease or a psychosomatic problem has been contested for decades; the medical community’s interest in long COVID can depend, too, on whether it’s regarded as an illness or a disease. At a recent medical conference, I watched a speaker describe patients’ symptoms of brain fog to a relatively disengaged room of physicians—who suddenly sat at attention as he cited a study showing that, in people who died from COVID-19, viral genetic material persisted in multiple organs, including the brain, for up to 230 days after symptom onset. What changed in that moment was not the description of the patients’ suffering, but the possibility of a biological explanation linking subjective symptoms with an objective, see-for-yourself finding. Only then did the problem become legible to the room full of physicians.
But to meet the needs of patients with diseases such as fibromyalgia, IBS, chronic fatigue syndrome, and long COVID, medicine will need to loosen its reliance on the magic-bullet model. Not every illness will reveal a single molecular target, and not every treatment will come in the form of a pill or an injection. In many cases, the work of medicine will look less like marksmanship and more like navigation: helping patients experiment with therapies, manage symptoms, and rebuild a life shaped by chronic illness.
I found this to be the case with my patient. Over time, we used a combination of medications, exercise, and behavioral therapies to treat her symptoms, with some success. We never found one single, comprehensive solution, and at visits in which she described herself as really struggling, I wondered if I was providing any benefit to her care at all. But she kept coming back, and I kept trying. My medical training had taught me to search for the magic bullet—and to feel disappointed when I couldn’t find it. My patient showed me that medicine must move forward even without one.
2026-05-13 00:32:00
In 1876, an editorial in Princeton’s newly founded campus newspaper, The Princetonian, argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. Proctoring was “a means of bad moral education,” the author wrote. Treat students as presumptively dishonest, and some would become so; treat them as honorable, and they would learn to behave honorably. And so the editorial board suggested a different approach: “Let every man write at the end of his paper a pledge that he has neither given nor received help, and let professors and tutors address themselves to some better business than watching for fraud.”
That proposal was eventually embodied in Princeton’s famous Honor Code, adopted in 1893 and modified only lightly in the ensuing 133 years. When students take their final exams, professors leave the room. Students write down a pledge not to cheat. They are expected to report anyone who does. Any student accused of impropriety comes before a jury of their peers.
The Honor Code had a good run. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who enrolled at Princeton in 1913 but did not graduate) once wrote that violating it “simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook.” The code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again. Technically, the Honor Code is still in place. Students will still sign a pledge that they didn’t cheat. But now professors will be watching to make sure they’re telling the truth. The Honor Code can’t run on the honor system anymore.
[Rose Horowitch: What an Ivy League education really gets you]
Even at Princeton, obviously, some students have always cheated. Fitzgerald himself was scandalized when, during a campus visit a decade after his time at the university, a member of the football team told him that his roommate knew of unreported Honor Code violations. (Shortly thereafter, a fellow alumnus shared the same suspicion with the famous novelist.) “The implication was that these were many,” Fitzgerald wrote to the dean. Back then, however, academic dishonesty was constrained not only by codes of conduct but by the amount of effort it required. A student who wanted to cheat had to go to the trouble of finding someone who would let them copy their answers.
The internet and the shift to doing work on computers rather than by hand dramatically lowered the barriers to cheating. A study of thousands of students at Rutgers University found that, in 2017, a majority copied their homework answers from the internet. AI has taken that dynamic to new extremes. It can mimic any writing style, produce a unique essay, and add in typos to make it appear human-authored. The available detectors are not foolproof. Studies have consistently found that teachers are worse than they think at detecting AI usage. “It’s a temptation,” Anthony Grafton, a longtime Princeton history professor who retired last year, told me. “I can imagine the student with the devil over his or her left shoulder and the angel over his or her right shoulder.”
Since generative AI became widely available, in fall 2022, Princeton has seen rising academic dishonesty. The Committee on Discipline, which has jurisdiction over take-home assignments, found 82 students responsible for academic violations in the 2024–25 academic year, compared with 50 students in 2021–22. Those are just the students who manage to get caught; the real numbers are undoubtedly much higher. In the school newspaper’s survey of graduating seniors, which 501 students responded to, 30 percent said that they had cheated, 28 percent said that they had used ChatGPT on an assignment when it was not allowed, and 45 percent said that they knew of cheating by a peer and chose not to report it. Michael Laffan, a Princeton history professor, told me that he has sat in coffee shops near campus and watched as students copied responses from ChatGPT and passed them off as their own.
The ease of AI-enabled cheating seems to be imparting a “bad moral education” of its own. Cheating has become more visible, Nadia Makuc, a senior at Princeton and former chair of the Honor Committee, told me. Students post about violating the Honor Code on Fizz, the campus’s anonymous social-media app. That makes students who play by the rules feel like suckers. “There’s an air of people cheating on take-homes and people just using ChatGPT,” Makuc said. “As long as people think there is more cheating, it encourages more cheating.”
[Ian Bogost: College students have already changed forever]
Princeton’s professors are finally trying to reset the system. Proctors are just one component. In the past year, the number of take-home exams at Princeton has declined by more than two-thirds. Next year, the economics department will require its majors to do an oral defense of their research projects, Smita Brunnermeier, the director of undergraduate studies, told me. David Bell, a history professor, has also added in oral exams and switched from short take-home papers to in-class writing in blue books. One of his colleagues in the history department forces students to write their papers in Google Docs so that he can review the stages of their composition.
In short, what the 1876 editorial called a “system of suspicion and surveillance” is making a comeback. “It does change something about the student-faculty relationship,” William Aepli, a graduating senior and the former chair of the group that represents students accused of violating the Honor Code, told me. “It’s one thing to have proctoring from the very beginning. It’s another thing to have this tradition of self-proctoring exams and trust that students abide by the Honor Code, and then to take that away.”
Bell told me that AI has made him more wary of his students, and that they can tell. When he changes his assignments to keep them from cheating, they understand that he doesn’t trust them. “Inevitably, all the solutions involve a greater degree of surveillance—that’s the one thing in common,” he said. “Maybe we’ll just have to get used to this new kind of police state of instruction. But I’m not eager to see where this leads.”
Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse.
2026-05-12 22:55:00
While driving around Los Angeles last month, I was shocked to find myself absent-mindedly humming a song from a viral campaign ad from an L.A. mayoral race. In Southern California, most of us seldom, if ever, think of the mayor of L.A., let alone the primary candidates. But this year’s election is different. Spencer Pratt, 42, gained notoriety in the late aughts on the MTV reality series The Hills. In January 2025, his house burned down in the Palisades Fire. And lately, his bid to unseat Mayor Karen Bass has been the talk of the Southland.
Pratt began the race as a long shot: He’s a registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and he has zero experience in government. Yet last week he was one of just three candidates to qualify for a televised debate––a debate that could hardly have gone better for him. While Bass and L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman spent much of their time highlighting each other’s failures to remedy the city’s problems, Pratt had the advantage of being the only option onstage for voters seeking change. And he stuck to his strategy of focusing on local issues, including fire preparedness, crime, homeless encampments, and misspent funds, never even broaching a subject unrelated to Los Angeles.
As the June 2 primary approaches, Pratt is leaning heavily into his image as an Everyman outsider—and online, lots of pro-populist people and groups have eagerly gotten behind him. To have any chance of winning, Pratt must tap into the populist energy that is propelling him. But like a drag racer with nitro, too much of this energy will make him crash and burn.
The pro-Pratt ad that’s been stuck in my head, “Spencer, Saca La Basura!,” is a salsa-inspired earworm by a group called Latinos por Pratt (which the Los Angeles Times reports seems to consist of one person, a Cuban American lawyer). The song’s title translates as “Spencer, Take Out the Trash!” “Mayor Karen took a trip way off the map while the hills caught fire,” the first verse begins, reminding voters that Bass was traveling in Ghana as her city burned. The seemingly AI-generated music video that accompanies the song goes on to depict pothole-filled streets lined with homeless encampments and trash. A muscled Pratt in a black T-shirt and jeans is portrayed rolling Bass out of town in a garbage bin; salsa dancing with his celebrity wife, Heidi Montag, as supporters with an American and a Mexican flag cheer them on; and using a broom to sweep away litter and tent cities. “Sweep that nonsense fast,” someone sings, “cause this clown show can’t last.”
The symbol of a populist outsider using a broom to sweep away the establishment’s mess has precedent in California: The most recent Republican to win any statewide office here, Arnold Schwarzenegger, campaigned with a broom of his own, promising to clean house in Sacramento and sweep out special interests. His 2003 bid for governor was the rare example of a populist-right campaign that achieved victory without demonizing immigrants or minorities. Instead, the villainous “others” were politicians and bureaucrats.
Schwarzenegger’s strategy energized Californians who wanted to punish incumbent Democrats, but avoided scaring too many of the state’s median voters. If Pratt wants a chance at victory, he’d do well to keep threading the same needle, critiquing the Democratic establishment with enough vigor to generate high turnout among Republicans and independents who’d normally sit out a Los Angeles mayoral primary, while taking care to avoid the sort of bigotry or tribalism that would alienate the majority of voters. Put another way, Pratt needs to avoid seeming like the populist right’s leader, Donald Trump—who is even more unpopular in L.A. than he is in America at large.
So far, Pratt has managed to deploy sharp attacks while eschewing MAGA-style racism, sexism, and xenophobia. An ad that he posted on his X account Friday includes images of the pristine Los Angeles that he says he will bring about and features some of the diversity of the city’s residents. It’s not an ad that seems to be pandering to the white-nationalist wing of the populist right; rather, it sides with the attitudes toward diversity that prevail among Angelenos. In another ad, Pratt showed that he knows how to attack his opponents without seeming bigoted or unhinged. He stands outside an expensive-looking house and says, “This is where Mayor Bass lives. You notice something? Or here, where Nithya Raman’s $3 million mansion sits. They don’t have to live in the mess they’ve created, where you live.” The visuals cut to homeless encampments, graffiti, and fire. “This is where I live,” he continues, standing in front of an Airstream trailer where he relocated after the destruction of his own $2.5 million house. “They let my home burn down. I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.”
Still, all populist-right political hopefuls and their supporters have perverse incentives to fight the culture war rather than focus on running a campaign. Another viral pro-Pratt ad, not produced by Pratt’s own campaign, best illustrates the perils of populist-right energy. It begins with Mayor Bass depicted as the version of the Joker portrayed by Heath Ledger in the film The Dark Night: a psychopath bent on deliberately sowing anarchy and violence to unsettle and destroy a city. AI is apparently now superhuman in its ability to mix visual metaphors, because as the ad continues, Bass is not only the Joker; she is also a judge presiding over a scene meant to evoke a decadent court of nobles at Versailles. She is flanked by California Governor Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris––and they are served by masked thugs in black paramilitary outfits that say DSA. The masked thugs deposit a tearful middle-aged woman in front of Bass, Newsom, and Harris. The woman begs for help with homeless drug addicts. Everyone laughs. Newsom replies, “Look, if you were a transgender migrant I could get you a free pussy.”
Prior to 2015, that ad would have struck almost everyone as unthinkably crass and disturbing. Today, it didn’t merely go viral on social media; it was reposted by Pratt himself on X and celebrated as a notably excellent ad by many Republicans, including public figures such as Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz. “Maybe the best political ad of the year,” Jeb Bush said. The L.A.-based essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, a liberal who supports Pratt’s candidacy, had a more sensible reaction: “I understand that people around here enjoy these ads,” she wrote on X, “but they will be repellent to the undecided voters Pratt needs to catch, most of whom will think they’re coming directly from the campaign. Get smarter, guys.”
The Bass campaign is casting Pratt as a Trumplike figure; a spokesperson said that he was doing his “best Trump impression” in the ad where he stood outside her and Raman’s houses. Another outside ad, also celebrated by some Pratt fans online, puts new lyrics to “California Dreamin’,” with Trump playing the flute in front of California landmarks. Associating Pratt and the movement to elect him with Trump, among the most hated political figures in Los Angeles, can only damage his campaign, and Pratt himself seems to get this. “I don’t do national politics,” he told a recent interviewer. “I don’t do tribal politics. I don’t talk about other states. I’m localized.”
Democrats, for their part, are giving Pratt a clear opening. Bass herself acknowledges that the city of Los Angeles is badly governed. In last week’s debate, the moderators asked about billions of local and state dollars for homelessness that were allegedly misspent. Bass responded, “I don’t think it’s shocking that you do find corruption in big programs like this, and I think it is extremely important to hold them completely accountable.” Raman said, “There is no accountability in the city”––that “even as we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year,” there is no staff making sure that every dollar “is being spent appropriately,” because “the city has not invested in oversight.”
When a moderator in last week’s debate asked Pratt why he should be trusted to preside over a multibillion-dollar budget, given his inexperience, his answer was that advisers would help him with the accounting. “My job is to be, as crazy as this will sound––I’m the adult in the room here as Spencer Pratt,” he said in a moment of savvy self-awareness. “That’s what it’s come to.” Adult leadership isn’t especially exciting to influencers on the populist right who revel in waging culture wars. But whichever candidate can provide it will deliver what the city’s voters crave.
2026-05-12 22:36:01
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When the United States, Canada, and Mexico bid for the 2026 World Cup back in 2017, they promised free public transportation for ticket holders—just as prior host nations had provided. In 2023, recognizing the financial challenges of hosting, FIFA conceded that transit could be priced to cover the cost of providing it. Even so, FIFA was surprised when New Jersey announced plans to charge World Cup attendees $150 for the round-trip train ticket from Midtown Manhattan to MetLife Stadium, in East Rutherford, which will host eight matches this summer, including the final. The 20-minute journey usually costs $13. Fans complained of price gouging, one more black mark for a competition already infamous for hotel, parking, and ticket prices so high that even President Trump says he wouldn’t pay to go.
The fare has since been lowered to $105, thanks to some unnamed corporate donors. But New Jersey isn’t poised to come out ahead when those tickets go on sale tomorrow. The unhappy truth of international soccer is that the World Cup generates lots of money—for FIFA. The Zurich-based group will take in $13 billion from the tickets, parking, merchandise, on-site concessions, sponsorships, and television rights. Meanwhile, the cities and states that host are responsible for the costs: stadium retrofits, security, transportation, administration, public “fan zones” for everyone who does not have a ticket. Not only does FIFA not share tournament revenue; local organizers say the federation’s infamously controlling contracts have left hosts with no plausible way to recoup expenses. Those hundred-dollar train tickets are not the product of a state looking to make a buck off of the World Cup, but of one trying to salvage an investment in a system that makes FIFA rich while taxpayers foot the bill.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill defended the decision on those grounds, saying on X that the agreement with FIFA “will cost NJ TRANSIT at least $48 million, while FIFA is positioned to make $11 billion during the World Cup. As I have said repeatedly, FIFA should cover the cost of transporting its fans. If it won’t, we will not be subsidizing World Cup ticket holders on the backs of New Jerseyans who rely on NJ TRANSIT every day.” FIFA was not pleased: “We are quite surprised by the NJ governor’s approach on fan transportation,” the organization said in a statement.
After two tournaments in autocratic countries (Russia and Qatar), where FIFA could order up stadiums à la carte, the coming 2026 iteration has required the messy work of dealmaking in democratic societies. The exchange has worked out splendidly for FIFA, which, as Governor Sherrill observed, has been crowing about the financial blockbuster of the expanded, 48-team competition. Managing a constellation of local partners across three nations, including dozens of cities, states, transportation agencies, stadium authorities, host committees, and satellite stadium towns such as Santa Clara, California, and Foxborough, Massachusetts, seems to have been a blessing in disguise for FIFA. If any host had complained about the terms, their games could have been relocated to a more compliant jurisdiction. (Some red-state hosts, such as Houston, Dallas, and Kansas City, are receiving tens of millions in public funding from state sports grants, and so have faced fewer funding challenges.)
[Franklin Foer: The quintessential Trumpian sport]
Professional-sports organizations always promise that events like these will generate billions in visitor spending and associated taxes. But a huge surge in economic activity rarely comes to pass, in part because of the substitution effect: Sporting tourists take the place of other visitors, and tend not to replicate their habits. A group of English soccer fans dropping thousands of dollars on World Cup tickets probably won’t be taking in a Broadway show or shopping at Bloomingdale’s.
The benefits are speculative, but the costs are certain. Most of the American host cities spent the winter in a state of apprehension over $625 million in federal funding promised for local police but held up by a partially shut-down Department of Homeland Security. In March, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft had to front $8 million for World Cup “security” measures including a new SWAT truck to persuade the town of Foxborough to issue FIFA’s permit. The federal money was finally disbursed later that month, but state and local governments are still spending tens of millions of their own cash to accommodate the tournament, all the way down to the grow lights nurturing fresh grass to FIFA’s specified root depth. Most U.S. cities had pegged the cost of hosting at around $200 million. North of the border, Toronto and Vancouver now say they will spend $380 million and $624 million Canadian dollars, respectively. NorthJersey.com estimates the state has spent more than $300 million. Figuring out who pays for what among the different local players has been like finishing a big meal at a bar: The bill comes, and everyone has to go to the bathroom.
FIFA’s bespoke preparations are only making things tougher for the hosts. American football stadiums deal with crowds this size all the time. But many of those fans have cars. FIFA has put a dent in each stadium’s parking supply by demanding extra-large security cordons around the stadiums, to create space for VIP tents, jersey sales, photo ops, and so forth. At MetLife, in New Jersey, there will be no general parking at all.
What parking remains is going to be a major moneymaker—again, for FIFA: Parking for the Democratic Republic of Congo match against Uzbekistan, in Atlanta, will cost $100; parking in Kansas City, to see Ecuador play Curaçao, will cost $125, which may be the highest parking fee ever recorded in that town. Dallas game parking also starts at $125, and it’s nearly a mile walk to the stadium. In Boston, parking to see Haiti versus Scotland is $175. All that cash is for FIFA. (FIFA does pay a rental fee for use of the stadiums.)
Those parking restrictions, plus the challenge of getting tens of thousands of beer-fueled foreigners into rental cars, have required special attention to mass transit. AT&T Stadium, in Arlington, Texas, is not served by the Dallas region’s train network, so the host committee is funding a shuttle system to make up for the four parking areas FIFA has repurposed. Kansas City’s host committee has hired hundreds of buses. In Boston, the regional transit authority MBTA says Gillette Stadium has lost 75 percent of its parking to FIFA’s “safety perimeter,” and MBTA has spent tens of millions rebuilding the local train station. To try to make up for that, it will charge $80 to the estimated 20,000 fans who planners believe will take the train to each game.
Providing those services carries opportunity costs, too. The MBTA in Boston will reduce service on other lines to add World Cup trains. NJ Transit plans to bar its own commuters from using Penn Station during the hours around games. The stadiums are also missing out: By FIFA decree, none have any other events scheduled from now until the July 19 final. In May, when the K-pop supergroup BTS comes to Silicon Valley, they will play at Stanford Stadium instead of the larger, newer Levi’s Stadium, in Santa Clara, which is closed until Qatar plays Switzerland on June 13. Thousands of public servants have been redirected from their usual responsibilities to World Cup duty. In at least three contracts, FIFA even restricts major “cultural events” such as concerts at other venues in the host cities around match days unless given prior FIFA approval. Those missed opportunities represent, in miniature, the situation for mega-event hosts at large, as sports tourism crowds out other economic activity.
“Current politicians are realizing what their predecessors agreed to a long time ago,” Robert Sroka, a sports-management professor at Towson University who has written about the hosting agreements, told me. “Those obligations have some costly implications in the present, and they’ll be receiving none of the revenues. Host cities are entitled to nothing.” Their peers that decided not to participate, such as Chicago and Montreal, have not regretted sitting out.
To help manage the logistics and cover the costs of this decentralized tournament, FIFA proposed a new system of local host committees. These groups were authorized to raise money from corporate sponsors to fund transportation, stadium retrofits, and viewing parties. But FIFA also placed extreme restrictions on their ability to do so. Local sponsors brought on by the host committee were limited in how they could market their association with the tournament. They did not get tickets or suites to games, unless the local host committee purchased them full freight from FIFA.
Additionally, the pool of potential new sponsors was small because FIFA prohibits host committees from forming partnerships with companies that compete with existing FIFA sponsors. Boston couldn’t work with Boston-based New Balance, because FIFA has a deal with Adidas. Seattle couldn’t hit up Seattle-based Starbucks, because the FIFA sponsor Coca-Cola owns a coffee brand in the United Kingdom. “It was ridiculous to think the categories left open would in any way, shape, or form generate the money,” one person who was part of these discussions but not authorized to speak to the press, told me. “Aftermarket auto parts. Prepackaged meat. Luggage.”
The assumption may have been that the tournament’s main commercial partners, such as Visa and McDonald’s, would also strike deals with local cities. But with a few exceptions (Airbnb is paying for some train service in Philadelphia), that did not materialize. A member of a different committee, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told me: “All those companies said, Why on earth would we pay again? We pay FIFA for this right—why are we double paying?” After $100 million for the main event, why drop another $48 million on 16 host cities?
As a result, local-sponsor lists have a bit of an outfield-wall quality to them, featuring law, real-estate, and health-care firms instead of recognizable consumer brands. Few local host committees have signed up the FIFA-approved maximum of 10 sponsors. With a month to go, Miami has engaged only three: Royal Caribbean, a host committee board member’s entertainment company, and the host committee’s outside legal counsel. No surprise that many committee budgets have come in way under expectations. Public officials resent having to pick up the slack.
The most visible loss from these fundraising woes might be the “fan zones” that FIFA holds up as a democratic counterpoint to high ticket prices. FIFA wanted these spaces to show every match, free of charge, in partnership with FIFA sponsors, with room for at least 15,000 people. Many cities have had trouble hitting that bar, and FIFA eventually acquiesced to format changes. Boston’s City Hall fan zone will last only through the group stages. Los Angeles will have admission fees at many of its watch parties. The official New York–New Jersey zone, on Jersey City’s Hudson River waterfront, was canceled in February in favor of a network of smaller events; San Francisco and Seattle have opted for similar strategies. In February, FIFA partner McDonald’s decided they didn’t want to be the official food vendor at the events.
As bad as these deals are, local officials do want to be seen as stewards of a successful mega-event. Most of the ugliness happens under the radar. The contracts between FIFA and the host committees or cities are secret; the politicians who signed or supervised them are gone; the local pro-sports elite who populate the host committees and brought the games to town are behind the scenes. Today’s mayors and governors will not reap substantial political benefit from a seamless tournament. But they will be the ones humiliated if a match does not start on time or England fans tear down the lampposts.
In that spirit, two weeks after Sherrill called out FIFA, her counterpart across the Hudson, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, stepped in with $20 million in public money to make sure that New York’s fan zones—built around giant TV screens in each of the five boroughs—are free to enter this summer. To most local soccer fans, that probably seems only fair, given that the cheapest available tickets for the group-stage match between Senegal and France are north of $1,000 (not including that train fare). But though entrance to the fan zone will be free, New Yorkers will be paying one way or another.
