2026-10-08 05:30:00
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Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are currently marking the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and triggered the war in Gaza.
Memorials for the victims of the attacks have been held at homes, on highways, and at the site of the Nova music festival. In Tel Aviv, a massive art installation at the Trumpeldor beach commemorated both the victims and the 251 hostages taken by Hamas three years ago.
Of those hostages, 166 have since returned alive, and the remains of the last deceased captive were released to Israel in January. But there’s no undoing the national trauma of the October 7 attacks — the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — or the brutal retaliatory campaign that Israel launched afterward.
Those events profoundly changed Israel, Gaza, the broader Middle East, and the United States, and they continue to shape global and domestic politics. So today, we’re taking a look at the very long shadow of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them.
Writing about the first anniversary of October 7 two years ago, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp warned that the “horrors” first triggered by the attacks would continue to unfold in tragic and unforeseeable ways. “Events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world,” he wrote, “in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting.”
That hurt has undeniably been most acute in the Gaza Strip, where three years of war have reduced entire cities to rubble. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians — since October 2023. Most of Gaza’s 2 million residents have also been displaced from their homes, crowded into makeshift shelters and refugee camps riddled with hunger and disease.
But the consequences of October 7 extended beyond Gaza. Settler violence against Palestinians intensified in the occupied West Bank. And the ensuing conflicts also weakened Iran and changed the balance of power across the Middle East.
That’s because Iran had long relied on its allies, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to project power and deter attacks by its longtime rival, Israel. After October 7, however, Israel significantly weakened both groups, leaving Iran vulnerable and setting the stage for the direct strikes on Iran that Israel and the US began last winter.
Both the war in Iran and the continued occupation of Gaza have badly hurt Israel’s international image. Across 36 countries surveyed by Pew last spring, a median of 67 percent of adults viewed Israel negatively. That disapproval has translated into diplomatic shifts, as well: 155 countries — including longtime allies of Israel, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — now officially recognize Palestinian statehood, up from 136 before the war. That doesn’t change much on the ground, but it represents a real rebuke to Israel.
In the US, meanwhile, Israel has become a huge flashpoint in domestic politics. While more than half of Americans had a favorable view of the country before October 7, sentiment deteriorated sharply in 2025 and 2026, particularly on the left.
The issue could help determine some key midterm races, like the Michigan Senate election, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for ending US military aid to Israel. That’s a policy nearly half of House Democrats and many potential presidential candidates have also endorsed.
Cutting off US aid to Israel isn’t likely to change the country’s stance toward Palestinians, however. (Israel is a wealthy country in its own right, and American aid represents just a small piece of its budget.) Instead, changing Israeli policy on Gaza and the West Bank would likely require far more aggressive pressure — pressure that, even in the current political environment, the US is unlikely to apply.
A single day may have kicked off a cascade of hurt and horrors. But putting an end to them will take far more time.
➨ Cultivate hope. It can feel difficult (not to mention: naive, pointless, and exhausting) to maintain optimism in the face of current events. So Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, suggests another tact: Do away with blind optimism and lean into hope — that belief that the future could turn out well, but requires real care and attention.
2026-10-07 22:45:00
What can an economist teach us about misery?
I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life.
That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read. But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive. It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.”
In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book. To him, understanding is its own reward. Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.
“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes. “It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes. They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances.
Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.”
Loewenstein puts this understanding into the language of modern psychology, speaking to a current of anxiety and unhappiness running through American life today. It also points to enduring questions about what the purpose of human progress and prosperity is, anyway.
Many of us could particularly benefit from the concept of negative “meta-emotions,” or the judgmental feelings we have about our negative feelings. “At the heart of so many of our miseries is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise,” he writes. That line immediately rang true to me — merely acknowledging to myself that it’s not a big deal if I feel terrible from work stress, or my cat’s deteriorating health, or whatever else happens to be weighing on me, helps to lighten the load. What if we really tried to wryly embrace the reality that it’s extremely normal for life to suck sometimes? The reward might not be happiness, exactly (an elusive and poorly understood state anyway, Loewenstein points out), but a little less misery.
I recently spoke with Loewenstein about his book — he had a gentle, faintly melancholic air, and took a surprisingly generous interest in some of the choices I was weighing in my own life. Part of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.
Americans seem pretty unhappy right now. There has been endless discourse about that. Do you think that your book adds something to that conversation?
I do — I was just an expert on the Meta case that recently settled. I was an expert on the side that was against Meta. I think one of the causes of declining mental health is, in fact, social media. It really exacerbates the types of social comparisons that lead to envy and loss of self-esteem. I would like to think that I provide some new insights into how these modern technologies help to exacerbate the mental health crisis.
One analysis of that, based on what I’ve learned from your book, might be: We as humans are so guided by negative emotions, and often those emotions are relational in nature and have to do with how we compare to other people. Social media is then quite naturally going to tap into and amplifying negative emotions that we’re easily manipulated by.
That’s right. I think of it in two ways. One is there’s kind of a mismatch between the circumstances in which we evolved and the modern environment. And the other is that in the capitalist economy, there are, especially in the internet age, all these entities that are trying to exploit our evolutionary programming for their own good and not for our good.
The premise of the book, as you write, is that “misery is inescapable. It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system” — it’s like our default state. Can you unpack what that means?
I agree with everything you said until “default.” Different people have different set points, and there are some happy people around. I happen to be a glass-half-empty person. My natural state is a little bit below zero. But there are very few people who don’t experience some form of misery frequently and intensely.
The evolutionary function of most negative emotions is pretty obvious, whereas the evolutionary function of happiness is sort of murky. And misery is so dominant that all it takes is a little bit of misery, a little bit of negative emotion, to wipe out any positive emotion. You go out to a really nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with your significant other, and you say something thoughtless and they get offended or they say something thoughtless and you get offended. All of a sudden you can’t even taste the food or appreciate the beautiful surroundings.
Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania referred to this as the “roach effect”: If you drop a roach into a vat of fine French wine, you don’t want to drink the wine. But if you take a roach, you can add as much wine as you want to it and you’re not going to want to eat the roach.
One of the strongest positive emotions is relief — which is interesting and not a coincidence, because it’s relief from negative emotions. It’s telling that maybe the strongest positive emotion involves the elimination of negative emotions.
You can think of misery as a stick trying to get you to do things that evolution thought were good for you; the stick is very immediate, and you know exactly what it’s telling you. If you are hungry, it’s time to eat. If you’re in pain, you’re injured, you’ve got to do something about it. But the carrot is different. The carrot, which is positive emotions, you have to think ahead, Oh, if I did this, then I would experience this positive emotion. It requires a kind of second-order thinking, whereas misery is just immediate. Evolution figured out probably very rapidly, probably when we were single-cell protozoa or something, that sticks are a way better way to get an organism to do what it needs to do than carrots.
How confident are you that the evidence base we have about the psychology of negative emotions generalizes to humanity as a whole and that it’s not culturally biased?
“What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings.”
Emotion researchers have looked across cultures, and they tend to observe the same basic emotions in a very, very wide range of cultures. What does vary across cultures is what induces the emotions. For example, shame — something that we would be unashamed of, somebody in a different country might be very ashamed of, and vice versa. A lot of these emotions are self-conscious emotions. They have to do with how we interpret the world and whether we’re living up to some kind of standard. Often we get it from culture, from religion, things like that.
But I think the emotions themselves are not universal, but pretty close to universal. My guess is that all 12 negative emotions that I write about are manifested in pretty much all different cultures, from those that have very little connection to Western civilization to advanced economies.
Another timely thread that your book is in conversation with is this idea that American culture has become intolerant of ordinary negative emotions in a way that’s maladaptive. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent book The Age of Diagnosis, for example, covered our obsession with medical labels and how they might make us prone to thinking that feeling bad means that there’s something medically wrong with us. What do you think about that? Have we gotten bad at feeling bad?
It is striking to me how it seems like all the young people I meet talk about their therapist, and a lot of them talk about the drugs that they take. Young people also talk about anxiety and depression almost like one word, “anxiety-and-depression.” In my generation, anxiety and depression were two entirely different things.
I think it’s good that younger generations are more comfortable talking about these things and getting help. I do worry that it can be, to some degree, pathologizing. There’s an awful lot of self-focus there. And I kind of worry that if you are dealing with your mental health problems by taking drugs, that it reduces your motivation to figure out things like how to reorganize your life to feel better. But I don’t want to sound too much like a dinosaur.
There’s a contingent of people who might read your book and think, “Yes, isn’t it terrible that humans are built to be unhappy and our evolved instincts don’t serve us well anymore? And that’s why we should engineer humans in such a way that we don’t feel this way all the time.” Someone with a strong utilitarian philosophy might think that if your life sums up to more negative feelings than positive ones, then it’s not even worth living. But that’s not really the vibe that I get from you.
No, yeah. And one of the things I talk about in the book are what psychologists call meta-emotions. These are emotions that one experiences about emotions. I think the single best example is envy. If you envy your friend — almost everyone has friends that they envy, but they’re still your friends. But you might feel that you’re not supposed to envy your friend, and you feel guilty — the guilt is a meta-emotion. Or you can also have meta-emotions about a lack of emotion. So something bad happens to someone, or even somebody dies, and you don’t feel all that bad, and you feel guilty because you’re not grieving.
I think all the societal focus on happiness creates a kind of a meta-meta-emotion, which is that we think we’re supposed to be happy. And then we feel ashamed and guilty about the fact that we aren’t happy — we feel like we failed. That compounds and adds another level of depth to our misery. So I think it can be liberating at some level to understand that misery just is a constant in human existence.
I also think that my book is militantly anti-self-help. There’s no self-help in it whatsoever. But I don’t think it’s a depressing book to read, and it wasn’t particularly depressing to write, though some of the stories that I wrote about were a bit wrenching.
I asked Loewenstein whether all the social and economic progress humans have made over the last few centuries have made us better off psychology. He said: “I don’t think social progress makes us happier, but I do think that certain types of social progress can make us less miserable,” he said. He continued:
“A lot of people in this country are dealing with huge financial anxiety. They’re in debt, like credit card debt or student debt. Not only does that make people miserable day to day, but it destroys relationships and makes parenting much more difficult. And I think the societies that have the highest measures of happiness, which you can equally well interpret as the lowest levels of misery, are societies like the Scandinavian countries that have really robust safety nets.
“I think maybe the central focus of public policy should be to mitigate all sorts of different types of miseries. Living in one of the richest countries on earth, that should be in our power to do. … There are good ways to use your social wealth, and there are terrible ways. We tend to err on the terrible side.”
I like that — but what, then, ought people to do with the information that you’re presenting?
What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings. To me, insight is valuable in its own right.
The reason I read sad novels is not because they make me happy, but because I feel like I gained some kind of insight into people and into the world. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the saddest book you could ever imagine, but it’s very meaningful to read, and it definitely feels like you’re a different person after you read it. I love novels, but I have no skill as a fiction writer. So this book was almost like a surrogate for me. Instead of writing a novel, I wrote this book.
I think the lack of self-help drives some people crazy. I did a podcast where the podcaster kept asking me questions about how reading the book would improve somebody’s life. And I kept saying it’s not a self-help book.
I’m just very skeptical of self-help talks and books and things like that. And I know that there’s certain things you are supposed to do to feel good, like you’re supposed to wake up and think of three things that you should be thankful for. And maybe if I did that, maybe I would get happier, but I’ve never been able to actually get myself to do that.
But you do have some insights that people could apply in their lives, like the idea that striving intentionally for happiness or meaning doesn’t really work, and that meaning often comes to us in unforeseeable spontaneous moments. On one hand, that implies a kind of randomness, and maybe there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, I can predict that I’m more likely to feel a deep sense of meaning in some scenarios than others, and I can put myself into those situations more, like choosing to be social on a weeknight.
A lot of the time the good things in life are just surprising, and sometimes you have to get dragged kicking and screaming into things that ultimately end up being the most fulfilling things in your life. So much of parenting is trying to get your kids to do things that they don’t want to do that you are absolutely convinced that if they started to do them, they would end up loving.
You argue, drawing from economist and philosopher Adam Smith, that human beings are constantly striving to achieve the next thing because we imagine it’ll satisfy us, though it never does. That helpful delusion is what leads us to build cities and cure diseases and all the rest.
Adam Smith is best known for the invisible hand, which is the idea that each person single-mindedly pursuing their own well-being inadvertently promotes the public good. But if you read Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he didn’t believe at all that people pursue their own personal interest. He believed that people are driven by this illusion that the next raise, the next accomplishment, will bring happiness, and it never does. I love that contradiction between the conventional interpretation of the invisible hand and what Adam Smith really believed.
So civilization is powered by this dissatisfaction that never resolves itself. But I don’t think you would say the lesson we ought to take from the book is that we’ll always revert back to being miserable, so there’s no point in doing anything.
That’s absolutely not the point of the book. Misery evolved for good reasons, and the whole point of misery is that we’re supposed to take actions to lessen our miseries. That’s what we should be doing, because who wants to be miserable?
2026-10-07 18:00:00
If President Donald Trump had his way, the Republican Party would be top-to-bottom the party of AI — or, in his preferred branding, “super intelligence.”
But down in the very state where Trump has his “winter White House,” two Republicans have put forth a very different vision for the party’s future — and have been far more eager to take on the artificial intelligence industry.
Most notable is the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, who devoted much of his final year in office to a failed effort to pass an “AI bill of rights,” which would have imposed tougher restrictions regarding child safety and other topics. He’s warned that AI could “set off an age of darkness and deceit,” blasted “tech oligarchs” for putting people at risk, and called Anthropic “very creepy” for exploring whether AI could be conscious.
“He clearly understands what the risks are, and I find he’s also very good at calling bullshit on disingenuous arguments from the Silicon Valley lobby,” Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, an AI safety nonprofit, told me. (DeSantis hosted Tegmark at two events in Florida this year.)
The other is DeSantis’s handpicked attorney general, James Uthmeier, a longtime close ally who is now trying to win the AG’s office in his own right — and who filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI in June. Last week, Uthmeier asked the judge in the case to block OpenAI from developing new models unless they had “independent third-party guardrails and approval.”
“The danger of these AI systems is real and growing,” Forrest Saunders, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, told me. “Florida and the nation have seen case after case of violence, child exploitation, and models that operate beyond their developer’s control.” He added that Uthmeier “welcomes innovation, but Floridians will not be the test subjects.”
With AI cresting as a national anxiety — or a national opportunity, depending who you talk to — both major parties are still finding their footing on the issue. And though Trump is clearly trying to get Republicans in lockstep behind the industry, a very strong current is pulling the other way, responding to populist concerns and parents’ complaints to stake out a much more skeptical position. Florida has emerged as a bellwether for what Republican policies might look like if conservative America turns decisively against AI, especially as Trump’s political clock runs out.
DeSantis and Uthmeier aren’t unique in the GOP for having concerns about AI — a handful of House members and senators want further action, and populist opposition to data centers has bubbled up in races around the country.
But the two have gone furthest in taking on the industry directly — and they’ve done so even though it puts them on the wrong side of Trump.
In recent days, I spoke to several Florida political observers and advocates on the AI issue. Most believe that DeSantis and Uthmeier are affirmatively trying to stake out what the GOP’s position on AI should be in a post-Trump future, and to better align with an electorate that’s turning sharply against the industry, despite what the president may say.
“He’s trying to skate where the puck is going,” Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator, told me. (DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Beyond the quest for political advantage, the stakes are very real. Will there actually be a significant and influential force on the right that takes the concerns about advanced AI’s harms seriously — and is willing to act to try and rein them in, before they do great damage?
DeSantis and Uthmeier are hoping the answer is yes — and that they will be the ones leading that charge.
In this case, the politics and the personal are intertwined. DeSantis occupies a unique place within the party at this particular moment that’s given him an incentive to buck the national consensus on the right, especially when it comes to Trump, and explore an independent approach.
In his first decade in politics, DeSantis had a charmed rise. In 2012, he embraced the Tea Party to win a seat in Congress; in 2017, he bear-hugged Trump to get his endorsement for governor. He then became a national conservative star for opposing pandemic-era public health restrictions and waging war on “wokeness,” winning his 2022 reelection in a nearly 20-point landslide.
“He is always out front, even ahead of other Republicans, on issues that he makes more important,” Peter Schorsch, editor of Florida Politics, told me. “I would joke with people that I didn’t know how to spell ESG or DEI before he brought these to the forefront.”
But what followed was a failed presidential primary campaign that put DeSantis on the wrong side of Trump and then sent him back to Florida with an uncertain political future.
Early last year, just weeks after a report that DeSantis’s wife Casey was considering running to succeed him as governor, Trump publicly urged Rep. Byron Donalds to enter the race, promising his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”
Also early last year, DeSantis, who had long run roughshod over Republican legislators, was faced with a new thorn in his side: an ambitious new state house speaker, Daniel Perez, who was more interested in cultivating the Trump White House than the governor. Perez took a far more assertive stance in shaping legislation and rejecting some of the governor’s demands than his predecessors; he also publicly blessed an investigation into a charity tied to Casey DeSantis. A bitterly personal feud between Perez and DeSantis ensued.
In the midst of all this, last summer, DeSantis got AI-pilled.
In July 2025, DeSantis announced that he was going to develop a state plan to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence. “We can’t just turn the reins over to a bunch of tech overlords,” he said. (DeSantis had long been a critic of major tech and social media companies on the grounds that they are too “woke” or politically hostile to conservatives and their ideas.)
At another event that month, DeSantis said: “I think this is, like, the biggest issue that’s facing our society.” He mentioned AI’s potential impacts on the economy, on jobs, on students, and on the spread of “false narratives” as troubling to him.
“I welcome technologies that will enhance the human experience. I do not welcome things that are going to supplant the human experience,” DeSantis said in September.
His interest in state action put him on the opposite side of the Trump administration, which was advocating for a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI — arguing that forcing the industry to abide by a patchwork of state regulations would slow its growth. (David Sacks, a key Trump adviser on AI, championed this argument.)
Last December, at the Florida mega-retirement community the Villages, DeSantis rolled out his proposed “AI bill of rights.” It did not focus on existential or civilizational risks, but instead more practical concerns around child safety. Megan Garcia, a Florida mother whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after conversing with a chatbot “companion,” appeared at the press conference.
As introduced in the Florida state senate, the bill would have required that parents consent to minors speaking to companion chatbots and forced companies to disclose when users weren’t speaking to a human, among other provisions. The state senate passed it in March.
But it was dead on arrival in the Florida House of Representatives — where Perez had aligned himself closely with the White House. “We do believe that the federal government should take care of AI, and whatever legislation or policy has to pass on a national level,” Perez said.
Brendan Steinhauser, who heads the AI safety advocacy group Alliance for Secure AI, told me that he saw Perez at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser around this time, and asked him about safety risks. “He leaned to me and whispered, ‘We’re with you, but the president has made it clear not to move forward on this stuff,’” Steinhauser said. “So, the White House basically put the kibosh on that effort.”
DeSantis complained publicly that Perez was pursuing a “personal agenda” and thwarting badly needed legislation. It was to no avail — the bill didn’t move. But Perez did — Trump nominated him as ambassador to Brazil in June, and he was confirmed in August. (A request for comment from Perez, submitted to the State Department, received no response.)
Though DeSantis hit a wall in the legislature, his attorney general was soon waging his own battle against OpenAI in court.
The attorney general is an elected position in Florida, but when Marco Rubio vacated his Senate seat to become secretary of state, DeSantis filled the seat with the state AG, Ashley Moody.
Then, to fill the newly vacant AG job, DeSantis chose one of his closest aides, who had served as his general counsel, chief of staff, presidential campaign manager, and chief of staff again — Uthmeier.
Uthmeier is a Florida native who had worked in Rubio’s Senate office; he graduated from Georgetown Law School in 2014. After that he joined the firm Jones Day and worked with Don McGahn; when McGahn was named White House counsel in Trump’s first term, Uthmeier went with him to the new administration, ending up at the Commerce Department. Then, in 2019, he headed back to his home state to work for the new governor, DeSantis, and has been close by his side ever since.
Now, though, DeSantis is term-limited, and Uthmeier is trying to get Florida voters to elect him for a full term as AG on his own. (Trump’s allies had reportedly urged then-Speaker Perez to challenge Uthmeier in the GOP primary, hoping to supplant a DeSantis ally; Perez demurred, and Uthmeier won the nomination unopposed.)
To make his mark, Uthmeier has filed several high-profile and politically charged lawsuits — for instance, he sued Starbucks over its corporate diversity politics (the company recently settled), and Pfizer about the safety of its Covid-19 vaccine. He’s also subpoenaed the NFL over its “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for top coaching and operations jobs.
He’s also become the face of the administration’s challenge to the AI industry. In April, Uthmeier stood in front of a podium with an “Investigating OpenAI” sign, announcing he’d opened a criminal investigation into the company.
The impetus was a shooting at Florida State University last year that killed two people and injured six others; the accused shooter had consulted ChatGPT about various topics related to his plans hours before the attack.
“If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder,” Uthmeier said then. “This criminal investigation will determine whether OpenAI bears criminal responsibility for ChatGPT’s actions.”
There have been no criminal charges yet. But in June, Uthmeier filed a wide-ranging civil lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging deceptive business practices, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation, and other legal violations, because the company marketed ChatGPT as safe when they knew it could be quite dangerous. The suit also named OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally as a defendant. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)
Like DeSantis’s AI bill of rights, Uthmeier’s lawsuit originally focused on practical concerns and real-world harms that have already occurred, like the shooting. “Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has advised teenagers on how to kill themselves, mix unsafe combinations of drugs, become anorexic, helped plan one mass shooting and one multiple homicide in Florida alone,” one filing in the lawsuit reads.
But after the summer’s ominous parade of AI headlines — such as OpenAI agents autonomously hacking the company Hugging Face, and new statements from current and former AI lab employees warning the technology could cause human extinction — Uthmeier turned up the heat, asking the judge in the suit for an injunction blocking OpenAI from developing new models without independent third-party safety evaluation.
“Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast” he wrote in a filing last week. “Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.”
“Though a reasonable person would say there is no amount of money worth a 10% chance of the extinction of the human race, Defendants see it differently. They are intent on growing their $1 trillion valuation,” the filing continues. “It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid — yet.”
OpenAI has not yet filed a response on the merits in this suit, but a company spokesperson has previously said that, in the case of the Florida State University shooter, ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”
Uthmeier, age 38, is viewed in the state as a potential rising star with a talent for getting headlines, who could well have a long career in state GOP politics — if he wins in November, that is.
While DeSantis has been credited for changing Florida from a swing state to a solidly Republican one, some recent polls have raised the possibility it might swing back. A September survey by St. Pete Polls found Uthmeier ahead of his Democratic challenger, Miami attorney and former state Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, by just a single-point margin.
And though DeSantis and Uthmeier have become major AI critics, the Floridian topping this year’s GOP ticket, Rep. Byron Donalds, is currently being hammered with attacks about his statement last year that the state needs to “embrace” data centers. He’s been nicknamed “Data Center Donalds” by his Democratic opponent, former Rep. David Jolly, who has also been close in some recent polls.
As for DeSantis, few expect the 48-year old to go quietly into retirement. When asked over the spring whether he’d run for president in 2028, he told reporters, “You never know.”
Brandes, the former Florida state senator, told me that he thinks DeSantis’s AI push is about “looking for wedge issues where he can have a different opinion from Trump’s successors as he prepares for whatever future ’28 or ’32 provides for him.”
That is: The Republican Party of 2026 might still be too influenced by Trump to go fully anti-AI. But if Trump’s influence ebbs, if the populist backlash against AI spreads further, and especially if there are more worrying AI-related reports or incidents with real-world harms, perhaps there could be an opening on the right for a leader who’s taken the problem seriously, even when it meant going against powerful figures in his party.
2026-10-07 17:34:00
This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
When I was a kid, my family would occasionally go fishing on small row boats on the lakes of Montgomery County, Maryland. The point wasn’t to catch fish to eat — we always released them — but rather to spend time together in nature. And for a while, I looked back on those times fondly. But as I’ve learned more about fish and their apparent capacity to feel pain, I now wonder: Was I just stabbing a bunch of fish in the mouth and throwing them back in the water, injured and vulnerable?
Ted Kerasote, a nature writer and lifelong hunter and angler, asked himself some version of this question decades ago after fighting to reel in a silver salmon in Alaska — the last he ever released. He still occasionally catches trout for dinner, but said that his decision to stop catch and release fishing that day in Alaska came down to looking at the situation critically: “Seeing this fish struggle for its life, for what end? I wasn’t going to eat it. Catch and release regulations were in place there. And so it was simply for my pleasure to fight this fish.”
Each year, tens of millions of people take to America’s lakes, rivers, streams, and coastal waters to catch billions of fish. Many of these fish only exist because US governmental agencies put them there; each year, over 1 billion fish are bred in hatcheries and stocked in water bodies primarily for anglers. And although firm estimates are hard to come by, it’s clear that the majority of fish caught are not kept for dinner, but tossed back in. Many fishing grounds actually require fish to be released (more on that later).
While anglers report being primarily motivated to get on the water to commune with nature, spend time with friends and family, and relax, the whole endeavor is anything but pleasant for the fishes themselves. After the steel hook pierces their oral tissue — and sometimes their eyes, gills, or esophagus — they’re often yanked around to the point of exhaustion before being reeled in. Then they’re exposed to air while the hook is removed from their body (and sometimes also for a photo opportunity), before the angler puts them back into the water. There, the fish reenters an often-treacherous ecosystem while fatigued and injured. Sometimes, the hook can’t even be removed and likely remains in their mouths for hours or days.
Estimates on what percent of released fish die vary widely. One 2005 literature review landed the average at 18 percent, while a 2026 review put it at 11 percent. But these are by no means definitive, as they each pooled together data from dozens of studies with different methodologies and time observed after catch and release, which limits our understanding of fishes’ survival from these encounters.
A different 2026 study, though also imperfect, took a more cleanly experimental approach. Researchers line-caught 489 Chinook salmon and then placed them in holding tanks for observation. Eight percent died within two hours of hooking, and about 25 percent died within 10 days. It’s reasonable to assume that the mortality rate would be higher if the fish were placed back into their local waters, with predators and other natural threats lurking.
Even when fish are caught by scientists like in this case, the operation is by no means surgical. In the Chinook study, 90 percent of the fish experienced moderate to severe fin damage, around 45 percent had moderate to severe hook wounds, and 8 percent suffered severe eye damage.
“No fish is better off because we’ve caught it,” Steven Cooke, a biologist and fisheries scientist at Carleton University in Canada — and an avid angler himself — told me. “It is impossible to catch a fish without causing, one, some level of injury, and two, physiological disturbance.”
In other words, recreational catch and release fishing injures billions of animals (a vast number of whom were bred for this fate) and condemns many of them to a premature death, and likely a more unpleasant one than if they had simply been killed humanely immediately after catch. Which means that what is often portrayed as a peaceful — even benevolent — pastime is, in another light, a more torturous activity. Especially if you think fish might experience pain.
For much of recent history, it’s been thought that fish — far from us on the evolutionary tree, living in ecosystems largely foreign to us — don’t feel pain. But in the early 2000s, a group of scientists in the United Kingdom began to conduct experiments on fish that slowly undermined this belief.
A seminal study, published in 2003, found that fish have nociceptors — sensory neurons that identify and respond to threatening stimuli, like predators or, well, metal hooks jabbed in their mouths. But it wasn’t necessarily evidence that fish feel pain in a similar sense to how we and other animals might; for that, a scientist would need to demonstrate that fish are not just reflexively reacting to noxious stimuli but also that their brains perceive it as pain.
Since then, researchers have poked and prodded fish to see if something more is going on than mere threat avoidance. They have, for example, injected acid and bee venom into the lips of rainbow trout, whose respiration rates nearly doubled and who proceeded to rub their lips against rocks or the tank walls — seemingly in an attempt to soothe the injury.
In another experiment, scientists trained fish to feed in a certain part of their tank, and then subjected them to electric shocks in that area. The fish were less likely to seek out food as the shock intensity increased.
But Cooke, the angler and fisheries scientist, isn’t convinced. He wants fellow anglers to treat fish better insofar as he wants fish to reproduce, grow, and have a good life, but says he’s a “fish pain skeptic.”
“The evidence base around fish pain is meager and generally low quality, extremely biased, and unable to tell us whether or not fish have the capacity to feel pain or not,” Cooke told me. (Cooke, for his part, says he is biased too, and has received funding from pro-fishing interests.)
The core of the skeptics’ argument boils down to the idea that fishes’ brains don’t possess the necessary equipment to experience pain — namely, the neocortex, which plays a major role in our and other mammals’ processing of pain.
Culum Brown, a professor and fish welfare researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, vehemently disagrees. “All [the information] we have to date suggests the behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses [in fish] mimic humans,” Brown told me. “Whatever way you look at it there are far more similarities than differences, which is not surprising given how important pain perception is from an evolutionary standpoint.” (Brown, I should note, has received some funding from animal welfare and ocean protection foundations.)
We know that various species of fish can use tools, recognize themselves in a mirror, build artistic nests, form complex social relationships, distinguish between human faces, and maintain long-term memories, among other abilities. Is it such a stretch, then, to extend them the capacity for pain?
Ultimately, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written, the fish pain debate is partly a scientific one and partly a philosophical one. “The question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively,” she wrote. One must be conscious to feel pain, and consciousness remains a mystery. With this uncertainty, we can continue to act as if they don’t feel pain, or we could give them the benefit of the doubt.
Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, is, like Cooke, not quite convinced fish feel pain. But she argues that we ought to take a precautionary approach and act as if fish can experience pain until proven otherwise.
With that in mind, should we be fishing for fun at all?
For his part, even as a fish pain skeptic and angler, Cooke is keen to reduce harm to fish. And the most important way to do that, he says, is to keep fish wet. He’s even on the board of a nonprofit called Keep Fish Wet.
Why? “Most fish do not do well when exposed to air,” Cooke said. Their gills collapse and/or stick together, making it hard for them to get the oxygen they need.
“A fish should always be dripping wet,” and only out of the water for 10 seconds or less (the average time anglers kept fish in the air, in one study, was 29 seconds). The group Cooke works with also suggests anglers minimize handling time. And Cooke said fish will experience more stress if they’re caught in warm waters, as it holds less of the oxygen they need.
Brown had a lot more to say. Anglers should avoid “playing” with the fish and bring them in as quickly as possible; use barbless hooks, which makes for an easier release; and when deepsea fishing, bring the fish up slowly to prevent barotrauma. And for those who kill, rather than release the fish they catch, do so quickly, rather than letting fish slowly suffocate or bleed out.
As Kerasote, the nature writer and hunter and angler, pointed out, catch and release as a widespread hobby is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in recent decades have state wildlife agencies made it a rule in many water bodies, in an effort to prevent fish depletion so as to ensure there is enough for wildlife to eat — and also so that there are always plenty of fish for anglers to catch.
Before this, Kerasote said, “you went out there, you caught your limit and you were done.” But with catch and release, “there was no limit anymore, and that’s what became embedded in the fishing culture.”
It’s worth noting that many anglers argue that recreational fishing funds conservation efforts — pointing to the fact that revenue from fishing licenses and taxes on fishing equipment help to fund state wildlife agencies. On its face, there’s merit to this — some of the money funds habitat protection and restoration. However, federal and state regulators are clear that the primary purpose is to maintain the infrastructure of sportfishing. And sportfishing, as previously mentioned, causes conservation problems of its own that some of the money is then used to fix.
To account for this shift, Kerasote wants to see states limit access to fishing in the same way that they hold lotteries to hunt certain mammals, like elk and Bighorn sheep.
Some fish scientists question the practice of catch and release altogether. While addressing an audience full of anglers at a conference, zoologist Eugene K. Balon bravely — or perhaps foolishly — shared a provocative thought experiment to prove his point.
Imagine there is a recreational activity called “sportbirding,” Balon proposed, in which participants take fishing rods, put earthworms on the hooks, and cast them out into the forest. Then they wait until a bird — a Robin, in his example — falls for the bait and bites down on the hook.
“The shrieking and flopping bird is proudly wheeled toward the hide, the hook removed and the bird drowned in the water,” Balon said to the crowd (the water, in this case, is a parallel to fish exposed to air). “Would any one of you support such recreational activity? How does it differ from the sportfishing you support?”
“Sportbirding” would surely be considered barbaric to many — even many anglers, I imagine — and yet sportfishing enjoys widespread social acceptance, perhaps because of the persisting belief among many that fish don’t experience pain.
Recreational fishing also has far-ranging impacts on species beyond its direct targets. For example, a study of over 2,500 pelicans taken into wildlife rehabilitation centers in Florida near the longest fishing pier in the world found that more than half of the birds had been injured by fishing hooks and lines — the leading cause of injury. Stocking nonnative fish to local water bodies can also upset natural food chains and ecosystems. And some of the live baitfish used by anglers spread disease to wild fish populations.
There is also the issue of these “bait” animals themselves. Billions and billions of smaller fish — like minnows and shiners — are reared and sold each year in the US only to themselves be stabbed through with a fishing barb and intentionally kept alive and thrashing to entice a larger fish to chomp down on them. This is an additional, yet largely hidden, layer of suffering in the recreational fishing industry.
“I think fishing is worse than hunting,” Brown told me. “At least you know what you are targeting when hunting. And hunters pride themselves on a clean kill. It is a very different ethic,” than fishing, he said. That’s evident particularly in the world of competitive sportfishing, where marathon “fights” to reel in enormous fish are glorified.
For Cooke, many survey respondents, and even for me years ago, fishing is often about spending time with family outdoors, away from technology, while marveling at fish. But couldn’t that all be more or less achieved by taking a hike in the woods, snorkeling, boating, scuba diving, catching fish in nets, or even “hookless” fishing, which is practiced by a tiny contingent of anglers?
Not necessarily. Anglers, he said, are also motivated by the “thrill of the chase.” The uncertainty of what type of fish they will catch, and whether they catch any fish at all, keeps drawing anglers back to the water. Cooke said plenty of people who fish might also be driven by the “human domination of nature.”
Humans, like all creatures, are hardwired for survival. And for the vast majority of our history, that entailed catching and killing fish for sustenance. But now, most fishing is done for fun, or for those other pursuits: relaxation, thrills, the domination of nature. But the fun comes with an enormous moral cost that most anglers, it appears, would rather not confront. Because as our understanding of fish and their capacities evolves, our ideas about fishing might need to evolve, too.
2026-10-07 06:00:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to fix the diesel crisis he caused.
What’s happening? On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order intended to lower diesel prices by temporarily expanding access to red-dye diesel.
What’s red-dye diesel? A kind of diesel usually reserved for farm and construction equipment and other off-road uses — and marked with a little bit of red dye to distinguish it from other diesel sold for use in on-road vehicles. Ordinarily, it’s tax-exempt and not available to on-road vehicles, but Trump is expanding access in a bid to bring down the overall cost of fuel ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump’s order defers payment on — but does not actually suspend — the federal tax on red-dye diesel for on-road vehicles through the end of the year, while also directing his Cabinet “to explore pathways to eliminate the obligation to pay the deferred taxes.”
What’s the context? Diesel prices are way, way up because of the Iran war. Currently, the national average price per gallon is $6.32, compared to $3.68/gallon one year ago.
Will this do anything to lower prices? Not very much, in all likelihood, for a whole slew of reasons ably explained here — including that the order can’t change the underlying reality of a global diesel shortage.
Why does the price of diesel matter? Most people don’t use diesel to fill up their tank, but semitrucks shipping food and other goods around the country rely on it. That means that when diesel gets more expensive, nearly everything else does too, sooner or later.
Why does Trump care? This is best explained by the fact that Trump signed the executive order while on the campaign trail in Nebraska — ordinarily a comfortably Republican state that instead looks potentially in play for independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn.
High diesel prices have hit hard in Nebraska and other agriculture-heavy states like Iowa and Kansas, jeopardizing Republican Senate seats in all three.
Here’s a story worth clicking for the cover photo alone: Scientists have discovered two new challengers for the title of world’s loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. Both can top out at more than 120 decibels — louder than a jackhammer, according to 404 Media.
If you’re curious, there are videos of both bird calls in the article, though I have not played them out of respect for the sleeping dachshund on my lap.
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
2026-10-07 04:30:00
With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency.
If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration.
Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.
To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?
The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”
They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House.
[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.
You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?
You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.
Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints.
There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].
You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority.
I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.
Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?
From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.
That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries.
Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.
I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president?
To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that.
But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him.
Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases?
These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term.
I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?
Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues.
Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.
No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice.
All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.