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Since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran, in late February, Pakistan’s government has emerged as a surprising broker of ceasefire negotiations. In addition to helping communicate some of Donald Trump’s demands to the Iranians, Pakistan has offered to host peace talks between the two countries, in Islamabad. It’s all part of the surprisingly warm relationship between Trump and Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Army chief, who, despite the veneer of “civilian supremacy,” is the most powerful man in the country. Munir has led the Pakistani state’s charm offensive, while cracking down on domestic dissent, and Trump has reacted positively. (The President’s relationship with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s biggest adversary, India, has cooled since Trump’s first term.) But can Pakistan really help broker peace, and what does its recent conflict with the Afghan Taliban, its onetime client, mean for the region?

I recently spoke by phone with Aqil Shah, the author of the book “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics In Pakistan,” a professor of political science at McDaniel College, and a visiting faculty member in the security-studies program at Georgetown University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Pakistan’s military won over Trump, how the military consolidated so much power in Pakistani politics, and what the collapse in relations between the Taliban and Pakistan’s military says about the country’s foreign policy.

How has the Pakistani military establishment been so successful at wooing the Trump Administration, and how has it inserted itself into negotiations to potentially end the war in Iran?

Historically, the Pakistani Army has been a fulcrum of U.S.-Pakistan relations. But the Pakistani-American relationship has waxed and waned over time. During the Biden Administration, Pakistan had become a virtual pariah in Washington, or had been reduced to a nonentity, as the United States left Afghanistan and saw India as a means of countering China. But I think it was really the Pakistan-India crisis in May of 2025, when Pakistan and India engaged in limited armed conflict, that changed things, because Pakistan openly embraced Trump’s mediation of the fight, whereas Narendra Modi and company bristled at it. India said there was no role for outside mediation because the Indian approach to the Pakistan-India conflict was that it was a bilateral issue. Whereas Pakistan, under Munir, cleverly tapped into Trump’s need for adulation and praise, and the Pakistanis called him a global peacemaker, and publicly nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has brought this up several times. He likes to say that Munir is the best field marshal, and he says that Munir told him that he saved millions of lives. So they basically, at the expense of India, have achieved something unexpected.

In terms of the conflict with Iran, Pakistan has always seen itself as a sort of leader of the Muslim world. And so it has used this opportunity, because of its relationship with Trump or privileged access to Trump, and the fact that it borders Iran and is also fifteen to twenty per-cent Shia, to try this balancing act. It has been done with deft diplomacy of some sort, but it’s really flattery as foreign policy.

The military has been the central power in Pakistan since the country was founded in 1947, but over the past few years it has imprisoned the former Prime Minister Imran Khan and taken an even more central and autocratic role. To what degree has that allowed the military to seize the initiative with Trump?

At the time of the India-Pakistan crisis, the military’s public reputation and legitimacy was quite low. There was an economic crisis, and there was naked repression. There had been a rigged election before that, and they had jailed Khan, Pakistan’s most popular leader. But the conflict last year was where Munir pitched himself or projected himself as the victor of that war. And that revived the Army’s, or at least Munir’s, legitimacy as the solid leader and national hero who had saved Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis think Pakistan won that war. So in that sense the crisis helped Munir consolidate his power. They were able to curb some of the dissent around Khan. They’d already crushed his party, but the criticism faded away, somewhat.

And I think the military has used that confidence that it gained from the war, both domestically, to further consolidate its power, and externally. After the crisis, Munir was promoted to field marshal, and he was then elevated to the new office of the Chief of Defense Forces, which basically gives him control over the entire military. And it was also that crisis in which they were able to really effectively endear themselves to Trump by anointing him as the global peacemaker.

Is there any danger for the Pakistani military in being seen as too close to a leader whose dealings with the Muslim world are probably not that popular in Pakistan, or has the distaste that Trump’s shown recently for India and Modi outweighed that?

I would say that, as far as domestic dissent is concerned, or the unpopularity of Trump is concerned, it seems like the military’s been able to mute much of the dissent. The India angle likely trumps that card, as does the idea of Pakistan as this indispensable power that is trying to help solve this U.S.-Iran war. The P.T.I., Khan’s party, has criticized Munir for cozying up to Trump, but at the end of the day foreign policy is the exclusive preserve of the military. And I think the military has really successfully pitched itself to the Pakistani public as this leader of the Muslim world—that it’s really Pakistan that’s the pivotal player in the region with the capacity, the willingness, and the power to punch above its weight at the expense of India.

One interesting aspect here is Pakistan’s relationship to Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and Saudi Arabia does not, Pakistan is a much poorer country and has, for a long time, looked to Saudi Arabia for financial assistance. How much do you think Pakistan’s relationship with Saudi Arabia dictates what Pakistan is trying to do here in terms of negotiations with Iran?

It’s crucial because, as you know, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement or defense pact, which, at least from what we know, establishes that if Saudi Arabia were attacked, primarily by Israel, Pakistan would defend it. And Pakistan has extended or will extend its nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia. So Pakistan is already in an awkward position because the Saudis are being attacked. And I think the worst nightmare would be for Pakistan to have to do something militarily for Saudi Arabia against Iran. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I think they want to avoid that and keep this relationship with the United States, but also try to make sure that this region is not unstable. They also don’t want to have to take sides in the Saudi-Iran conflict, in part, because of the population of Shia Muslims domestically.

Still, Pakistan is completely or largely dependent on Saudi largesse, and has been for the longest time. And so they are really trying to hedge and balance, to make sure that the economic benefits from Saudi Arabia continue.

But I imagine the economic costs of the war continuing are only going to get more dire for Pakistan, right?

Oh, yeah. Pakistan is almost entirely dependent on oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. So that’s obviously an economic choke point. And Pakistan almost defaulted on its international debt obligations a few years ago. So they’re not out of the woods economically. And the war is obviously going to make, or has already made, things worse because they had to raise fuel prices, which obviously hurts the people on the street, the daily-wage earners, and much of Pakistan’s informal service economy. So Pakistan’s role in negotiations is strategic geopolitically, but also clearly economic.

One thing that you did not mention about Trump’s relationship with the Pakistani government is the degree to which the Pakistanis are paying off Trump or people close to him. This is a situation where the Pakistani military—because of its control over the country—can do things for Trump that the government of Sweden or even India probably cannot. How much is this a part of what’s going on?

I think in addition to the charm and flattery angle, Munir and the Army have tried to pitch Trump on having a partnership between the Pakistani state’s crypto venture, and the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Munir also literally had a case full of minerals that he showed to Trump at the White House. So Pakistan is pitching itself as a reservoir for all these critical minerals or rare-earth deposits, and even for oil and petroleum. And they have invested heavily in lobbying firms that are very close to Trump and his allies and partners. Steve Witkoff was actually able to negotiate a deal to redevelop the Roosevelt, a shuttered hotel in New York owned by Pakistan.

So obviously there is the angle of them trying to exploit the pay-to-play nature of the Trump Administration as much as they can. I don’t know how much this critical minerals stuff is actually going to pan out, but Trump has mentioned this, and there’s been some movement with the Pakistani military’s so-called Frontier Works Organization, which does engineering and construction work. And Pakistan has joined the Board of Peace, which has a fee of a billion dollars. So I think it’s both the charm of Munir and the military, but also, if there is anything Trump likes, it’s enriching himself and his buddies and his family.

And, aside from the economic angle or financial angle, Pakistan also quietly handed over an ISIS leader who was involved in an attack when the Americans were leaving Afghanistan and was detained by the Pakistani military last Spring. Trump mentioned that in an address to Congress. And Trump likes wins.

Can you talk about the role Pakistan’s military plays in the economy?

The Pakistani military has always had a commercial empire, but a few years ago it established what’s known as the Special Investment Facilitation Council. The idea behind it is that foreign investment in Pakistan is subject to too much red tape, and this allows the Army to take the front seat and say, “If you want to invest in Pakistan, we are your one-window operation.” So all foreign investments, whatever trickles into Pakistan, are in the hands of the military, and the military’s also taken over mining operations in Waziristan. So in addition to its own commercial ventures, the Army has recently institutionalized its role in how Pakistan conducts economic relations and investment, meaning the Army’s really in the position to make these decisions.

And the civilian government is just completely dependent on the military for its legitimacy after the rigged election. It no longer pretends that it’s actually a civilian government. It’s very happy with the fact that the military’s been able to suppress Imran Khan, who was a threat to the ruling party, the P.M.L.N. And the P.M.L.N. Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has always been a pragmatic, let’s-work-with-the-Army guy. He’s happy to be in the back seat and let Munir drive foreign policy, but also economic management.

You mentioned that the Biden Administration had lost interest in Pakistan. The main reason the U.S. was able to ignore Pakistan during that period was because America pulled out of Afghanistan, in 2021. For twenty years, up until that point, America had been working together with Pakistan, in a flawed way, to combat the Taliban. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happened with Pakistan-Afghanistan relations since then?

Once the Americans left, if you recall, Pakistan really became the global cheerleader for the Taliban, going around the world saying, “You must accept this regime. It’s going to be inclusive. It’s going to blah, blah, blah, blah.” The fundamental problem here is that the Pakistani Taliban (T.T.P.), which launched attacks against Pakistan, and the Afghan Taliban, which Pakistan supported, are primarily two sides of the same coin. They have the same ideology. Yes, they have different structures and leadership, but the T.T.P. is now firmly ensconced in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Taliban is doing to Pakistan what Pakistan did to the Americans by giving the T.T.P. sanctuary. So the relationship has gone from “the Taliban have liberated Afghanistan” to “Taliban are terrorists and this is an open war,” and even talk of regime change in Afghanistan. And the T.T.P. has now used this safe haven in Afghanistan to launch massive attacks on Pakistan, and not just in the north but also in major cities like Islamabad.

This is a nightmare scenario for Pakistan. Pakistan’s previous policy, which was called “strategic depth,” was the idea that having Afghanistan with a friendly Islamist government in Pakistan’s back yard would dampen the influence of India, and it has backfired majorly.

Yes, although domestic terrorist attacks against Pakistanis have been going on for a very long time.

Yeah.

And Pakistan would always say that it was the Pakistani Taliban that was doing this, and this branch of the Taliban was bad, while their Afghan Taliban allies were not bad, which annoyed the Americans. It is incredible that now they’ve flipped and recognized that the two branches of the Taliban are allied.

The good/bad thing Pakistan was doing with the Taliban has completely collapsed, and now they’re saying that the Afghan Taliban regime, which they had supported, is a terrorist regime, and of course they have to say, “Well, it’s supported by India.” And India has cozied up to Afghanistan. But this is a mess made by Pakistan. You can’t burn your neighbor’s house or bomb your neighbor’s house and think nothing will happen to you. The T.T.P. has been fighting for some kind of Islamic Emirate in Pakistan and against the Pakistani Army for a long time, but after a school attack in Peshawar in 2014 things calmed down after the military cracked down. The real comeback for the T.T.P. came after the Americans left Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban came to power. That is when you saw a real spike in the level of terrorist attacks on civilians and soldiers within Pakistan. This recent spike, which is, I think, Pakistan’s main national-security threat right now, in addition to India, and is really about this relationship Pakistan cultivated with the Afghan Taliban that has basically backfired, with the Afghan Taliban now in no mood to give up its strategic allies for several reasons. The Afghan Taliban says to Pakistan, “Well, that’s your problem. We can facilitate the talks, but the T.T.P.’s not here. We don’t harbor them.” Again, it is the same thing that Pakistan used to say to the Americans.

This has also had a horrific human cost, correct? How many Afghan immigrants has Pakistan deported in the last couple of years?

About two million since 2023. Some of them don’t even know Afghanistan. They’ve been in Pakistan for almost two generations. Their children were born here, they had lives here, and you just tell them tomorrow morning you have to pack up and leave. So, yeah, the humanitarian cost is horrendous. The Pakistani government says that all these terrorist attacks are happening because of these refugees, like they are some sort of Trojan horse, and they’re Afghans, not real Pakistanis. So it’s punishing the refugees, the people who have been here for over two decades or three decades, to put pressure on the Taliban.

Do you sense anything in Pakistan’s current posture toward the United States or Afghanistan that suggests they’ve changed their mind about what Pakistan’s role should be in the world, or does this seem like just more of the same?

I don’t think this is a serious rethink of anything. Pakistan’s turn on the Afghan Taliban is a reckoning that didn’t come because of some deep internal strategic reassessment or something like that. The policies have been completely disastrous, and, because the Pakistan military is never held accountable for taking the country down the drain, it keeps repeating itself, right? It has really, really ruined Pakistan over the long haul in terms of its economy, in terms of its internal political stability, in terms of radicalizing parts of the population. And in terms of Trump they are smart enough to see the opportunity and grab it, but I don’t think this is really some sort of strategic pivot from what Pakistan is. ♦

More than a year ago, in February, 2025, Kanye West, who is now known as Ye, gave an interview in which he said that the title of his next album was inspired by one of his children. “My son was playing with some kid, and then he kicked him,” Ye told the interviewer, Justin Laboy. “I asked my son, like, ‘Why you do that?’ He said, ‘ ’Cause he weak.’ And I was, like, ‘This man is really a bully.’ ” Ye said that the new record would be called “Bully,” and told fans to expect it in June.

Of course, Ye’s fans have been taught not to get too attached to their expectations, though many of them have a tendency to forget the lesson. Ye is probably the most contentious figure in all of popular music: a hip-hop revolutionary who has changed the genre’s sound several times over, while reinventing himself more times than that. Last March, about a month after the Laboy interview was posted, Ye seemed to announce another shift, writing on X, “My new sound called antisemitic.” Not long afterward, he released an ugly and transfixing track called “Heil Hitler,” which overshadowed the promised “Bully” album—and which, to some listeners, might overshadow everything else in Ye’s discography. But he kept tinkering with “Bully,” teasing and releasing different versions of the record’s songs. Then, in the early morning hours of March 28th, an eighteen-track collection named “Bully” finally appeared on Spotify and Apple Music, marking the official release, at long last, of Ye’s twelfth solo studio album.

Despite its title, “Bully” is in some ways a conciliatory offering. For years, Ye had been obsessed with notions of Jewish villainy, while also identifying himself with Adolf Hitler and Nazis. In 2022, he told Alex Jones, on InfoWars, “I like Hitler,” adding, “The Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that, and Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” But this past January he published a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in which he apologized for just about everything, writing that a 2002 car accident (which was the inspiration for his breakthrough single, “Through the Wire”) had injured his brain in ways that contributed to his bipolar disorder, which in turn has led to “poor judgment and reckless behavior.” He said that he was recovering, “through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise and clean living.” And he asked for forgiveness. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.” You can hear both contrition and defiance in “King,” the first track on “Bully,” which has a fuzzy, buzzing bass line and lyrics that suggest that, sometimes, pride goeth not just before destruction but after it, too:

This that feeling we need more of

The hating just brought me more love

Guarantee my vices different than yours was

Drunk off power and I was pouring up

Often, over the past quarter century, the thrill of listening to Ye has been the thrill of listening to someone trying to figure himself out. On his 2004 début album, “The College Dropout,” he sounded like an excited young man whose considerable (and justifiable) confidence only barely outstripped his insecurity, crowing, “Hold up, hold fast, we make more cash / Now tell my mama I belong in that slow class.” By the time he released “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” in 2010, he had entered his imperial phase, and his rhymes reflected the luxurious but sometimes lonely life of a hip-hop star who had mastered his art, and was now trying to master himself: “I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / Got treasures in my mind, but couldn’t open up my own vault.” In the past decade, his more scattershot discography has similarly seemed to reflect his troubled state of mind. His last official album, “Donda 2,” from early 2022, began with a track that appeared to refer to the children he shares with his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian: “When I pick ’em up, I feel like they borrowed / When I gotta return them, scan ’em like a bar code.” It is just about impossible to follow Ye’s music without following his life, too, and without thinking about the permeable membrane that separates them.

So who is Ye now? Listening to “Bully,” it can be hard to tell. Some of the tracks seem designed to remind listeners of his older, less incendiary incarnations. “Punch Drunk,” which lasts less than two minutes, is built on a sped-up sample of the Clark Sisters, and it sounds like a throwback to Ye’s early years, when he made his living by turning old records into new beats that he could sell to fellow-rappers. And “All the Love” evokes the grandeur of the “Twisted Fantasy” era, thanks in part to the contributions of André Troutman, who plays the talk box, a robotic voice-morphing instrument that was also used to great effect by his cousin Roger, from the early-eighties funk band Zapp. The talk box was a precursor to Auto-Tune, which Ye used to create the moaning, melancholy sound of his 2008 landmark, “808s & Heartbreak”; rappers have been leaning heavily on software-enhanced singing ever since. But the new version of Ye that emerges on “Bully” is much less funny than the old version, in addition to being less bilious than the recent version. “I brought a white queen to the altar / Couldn’t happen without Martin Luther,” he declares in one couplet that contains neither a rhyme nor, really, a punch line. Many of the tracks resemble fragments or sketches, with bits of singing and rapping that sound unusually tentative, as if Ye isn’t quite sure how, or how much, to give his listeners what they want.

Over the years, Ye has amassed perhaps the most obsessive fan base in all of hip-hop, and some of them have carefully charted the evolution of the tracks on “Bully.” During that Laboy interview, Ye enthused about a new technology that was allowing him to make music in a different way: artificial intelligence. Ye has often used writers to help compose his music; now, using A.I., he showed Laboy how he could take a recording of someone else rapping and render it in his own voice. A year ago, Ye released a half-hour-long video accompanied by several “Bully” tracks, and many fans thought that they heard evidence of his newfound interest in A.I. Was he really delivering lyrics in Spanish, on a track called “Last Breath,” or had he merely reprogrammed a Spanish-language singer to sound like him? In a post on X last week, he seemed to announce that the new version of “Bully” would contain none of this sort of manipulation. “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI,” he promised.

Did he deliver? Listeners have been trying to figure that out. A streamer known as ImStillDontai filmed an hour-long reaction to the album that earned about a quarter of a million views in its first twenty-four hours. He enthused about the record’s downcast finale, “This One Here,” but also voiced his doubts. “I hate A.I.,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to be thinking about this, bro. I should be able to just listen to him and be, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s killing this.’ But now I’m, like, ‘Is he? Or is the fucking machine killing it?’ ” There seems to be a widespread perception that musicians who use artificial intelligence are engaged in a form of cheating. It is a familiar concern, because it evokes earlier arguments against sampling, and also against Auto-Tune, both of which were commonly described as a way for lazy musicians to make low-effort music. “People are, like, ‘Stay away from A.I.’—it’s a more negative reaction than Auto-Tune,” Ye told Laboy. It should be said, though, that the Auto-Tune backlash was once plenty negative; in 2009, Jay-Z released a track called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” which suggested, memorably though not accurately, that the era of processed vocals was just about over.

The arguments over Ye’s use of artificial intelligence seem to have something to do with a desire for connection: fans want to be sure that the voice they hear is really his, even as new technology makes it harder to reliably distinguish between pure and impure recordings. This is a particularly vexed question in the case of Ye, who so often changes his mind and his persona, and whose discography is full of leaks and revisions and contradictions that leave listeners scrambling to figure out which releases are the “real” ones—and, for that matter, which Ye is the real one. Is the March 28th version of “Bully” the final one? Did Ye really write, or at least authorize, that contrite statement in the Wall Street Journal? Can we even be sure that that was him on Alex Jones’s show, with his entire head concealed underneath a black hood? The English musician James Blake was credited as a producer on “This One Here,” but, after the album arrived on streaming services, Blake announced that he had asked to be removed from the credits, saying that the final version didn’t reflect the “spirit” of the track he had worked on. In fact, many listeners may find that the rather spare and wobbly version of the song that appeared last year is more affecting than the plusher version on the new album, just as they may find themselves missing Ye’s slightly uncanny Spanish-language delivery on the second verse of “Last Breath.” Throughout his career, Ye has often communicated in a jittery voice that sounds overwhelmed with emotion, but on “Bully” he is uncharacteristically subdued, and it is hard not to think about a different transformative technology: the program of “medication” that he mentioned in the Journal. “Bully” is perhaps the first major album of the artificial-intelligence era—the first, that is, to be evaluated primarily in terms of how much it does or doesn’t use A.I. Not coincidentally, it’s an album that forces fans to think anew about what, precisely, might make music sound “artificial.” It is not, by any stretch, a great album. But it might nevertheless be a landmark. ♦

Carlos Eduardo Espina woke up on January 3rd to a cellphone flooded with notifications. President Donald Trump had announced on Truth Social, at 3:21 A.M. Houston time, where Espina lives, and that the United States had captured the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro. Seven hours had passed, and his TikTok feed was filled with impatient messages in Spanish:

“Carlos, wake up, bro.”

“Please tell us what is happening in Venezuela.”

“Carlos, what do you know about Venezuela? . . . Are these rumors? Or is it true?”

A meme showed him sound asleep, hugging a teddy bear.

“7:43 and he is still sleeping.”

“God, it’s 8. Wake up.”

“It’s 10 A.M. and Carlos hasn’t shown up.”

Espina proceeded to post a flurry of brief videos on social media. In the first one, twenty-four seconds long, he humorously admitted that he was embarrassed to have overslept on such a big news day—“Breaking news, mi gente! I can’t believe it.” In the videos that followed, none much longer than a minute, he celebrated the fall of Maduro, who, he said, had “done so much harm to the Venezuelan people.” But, he warned, “I’m a bit worried about what will happen in Venezuela, because we know it’s not as simple as Maduro falling and everything changing. There are other people behind him.” As thousands of Venezuelans in exile around the world celebrated what they saw as regime change (it wasn’t), Espina’s videos received millions of views.

At twenty-seven, Espina bears a slight resemblance to Gael García Bernal and likes to wear embroidered Mexican guayaberas. The minute-long commentaries, in Spanish, on breaking news are his trademark broadcasts, and he has posted as many as sixty a day. In tight closeup, he practically shouts his messages to his audience, whom he addresses as “mi gente,” in the manner of old-style radio bulletins. With nearly twenty-two and a half million followers—a figure that represents roughly a third of the American Latino population—across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Espina has become one of the most recognizable faces of the news-influencer phenomenon in Spanish or English, and a rare progressive voice in a space dominated by right-wing provocateurs.

Last year, the Pew Research Center asked adults in the U.S. to name the influencers whom they regularly turn to for news; Espina ranked in the top five, alongside Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. According to another Pew survey, one in five adults in the U.S. regularly get their news from news influencers; the figure rises to nearly four in ten for those aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Among them, according to Espina, are millions of Spanish-speaking Latinos—to the tune of 7.2 billion views and thirty-three million comments a year on TikTok alone—who turn to him. A typical broadcast was one that he posted on March 6th, in response to Trump’s decision to bomb Iran:

Donald Trump made a big mistake, and now we’re screwed. He thought the Iranians would be like the Venezuelans—-that after the first bombings they would all give up and hand over the country. But he is quickly realizing that this is not the case, and now we are all going to pay the price.

Espina’s emergence has coincided with a nationwide debate over rampant disinformation in Spanish-language communities—and with the departure of Jorge Ramos from Univision, the largest provider of Spanish-language content in the U.S. (During Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he had Ramos ejected from a news conference after he criticized his immigration policy, including his plan to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants and to deny their children birthright citizenship.) Ramos considers Espina “the leader of a new phenomenon” and someone who is “filling a void in political and media representation.”

Espina is the son of migrants, and their ordeal shaped his views on immigration policy. His father, Eduardo, a Uruguayan poet and essayist, arrived in Kansas in 1983 on a Rotary Fellowship and later earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 1987, he has taught at Texas A. & M., in College Station. In 1994, at a literary conference in Mexico, Eduardo met Adriana Barrios, who was working at the National Institute of Fine Arts. They married that year, and she moved to Texas on a tourist visa. Their first son, Diego, was born in 1996; Adriana was deported soon after his first birthday. She moved with Diego to a place near Eduardo’s parents in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Eduardo commuted back and forth during his academic breaks. Espina was born in Uruguay in 1998, and his father, who had just completed his naturalization process, registered him as a U.S. citizen. It took five years for the family to reunite in Texas, and Adriana didn’t become a citizen until 2013. “It was hell,” Eduardo told me over the phone. “Only someone brave, with goals and ambition, is capable of doing what millions have done. And not only that but also coming to this country and enduring what one has to endure in order to get ahead here,” Espina said in an interview early this year.

His childhood dream was to become a professional soccer player. He was a junior in high school and the captain of the varsity soccer team, in the autumn of 2015. A wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America had arrived at the southern border. Nearly two hundred of them ended up in College Station, and many of them at his school, bringing a potential infusion of talent to the team. But, in order to join, students needed to be in good academic standing, and since those students did not yet speak English that was a challenge. The team’s coach suggested that Espina tutor them during lunch hours.

When Trump launched his first Presidential campaign, he painted Latin American migrants as criminals and rapists. Espina hadn’t previously given politics much thought, but when it came to Trump, he said, “I saw he was a horrible person. I’d see him on television, and what he was saying wasn’t a real reflection of who our people are.” Espina became a Bernie Sanders supporter and got involved with voter-registration groups; too young to register people himself, he served as an interpreter assisting other volunteers when they knocked on doors. He also spent time with an immigrant-rights group, the Brazos Interfaith Immigration Network, helping migrants prepare for the U.S. citizenship test by explaining the hundred potential questions on the study guide and teaching memorization techniques. Espina graduated in May, 2017, and that fall he enrolled at Vassar, majoring in political science. While he was there, a friend from Belize was detained by ICE agents, and Espina began corresponding with dozens of other detainees, sending some of them money so that they could call their families. He later received a full scholarship to attend the William S. Boyd School of Law, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and graduated in 2024.

Espina had intended to become an immigration lawyer, but he never took the bar exam, because by then he had realized that he could be more effective on social media. He had graduated from Vassar at the start of the COVID pandemic, when job hunting was practically impossible, and was living at home, in College Station, when the Brazos network asked him to conduct his citizenship-test classes online. He started on Facebook. When he ran out of questions to explain, he began to share details of what he had learned from his correspondence with detained migrants, and to respond to comments on his time line. Some followers suggested that he also post his videos on TikTok, a relatively new platform at the time which had just become the most downloaded app in the world.

Espina wasn’t impressed by the content that he saw there. “I thought it was kind of a silly app,” he remembered. But he posted a few videos about the citizenship test, and they took off. He soon realized that there was no one offering relevant, useful information in Spanish for a U.S. audience—Latino content creators were mostly second-generation immigrants who posted in English. “There was no one producing content in Spanish for Latinos that wasn’t entertainment. I grew quickly, without competition,” he said.

His core audience was, and remains, migrants working in construction, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other sectors considered essential. As his reach grew, he began posting more about his own life—a birthday message for his mother, a puppy he adopted, a soccer game he watched at a friend’s house—and he started receiving requests for more information about the immigration system and policy. Espina gathered that information from a variety of sources, he told me, including immigration lawyers with whom he engages in online groups; government websites; and traditional news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. Influencers “rely heavily on traditional media,” he said at the International Symposium on Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last year. He himself does not corroborate the information independently. “If something is very relevant and those outlets have verified it, I consider it credible,” he told me.

Jorge Ramos has also become an independent content creator—he is now on Substack, TikTok, and YouTube, and also hosts a podcast with his daughter, Paola. He was an anchor at Univision for nearly forty years, but, he said, “audiences were falling year after year, as if the Martians had abducted them.” He added, “They were, of course, migrating from television to digital media. The credibility and trust that the big media outlets once had were also fading. Now people place their trust in individuals.” (Many traditional news outlets, in turn, are now offering more content in the form of short videos, in which writers speak directly to audiences.) He sees this trend as a tremendous opportunity for Spanish-language journalists who have been pushed out of traditional media—Univision essentially dissolved what remained of its once ambitious U.S. digital-news operation earlier this year—and for those just beginning their careers. “When I started, everyone wanted to be an anchor. Today, trying to do that would be a very serious mistake. You have to be a surfer, navigating content across different platforms,” Ramos said. “Carlos does it better than anyone else in Spanish.”

Another factor that may explain Espina’s popularity is a stark departure from traditional media conventions: if members of his audience are in trouble, he may help them financially. Recently, he bought a van for a follower who has two children with disabilities; paid for a prosthetic leg for a young man; and covered a three-thousand-dollar bond for a migrant detained by ICE whose mother is blind, then picked him up from the detention center and drove him home. Espina has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct aid while also contributing significant sums to a nonprofit he has started, which aims to support both migrants and the wider community. He is also planning to one day buy land in Houston to build a community center that will serve local needs.

Espina’s earnings, he says, are considerable—and he shares that information with his followers. In January, 2025, he uploaded a video titled “Am I a Millionaire?” in which he broke down his earnings from the previous year: he made $2.79 million, more than a third of which came from selling products such as citizenship-test study cards in the TikTok Shop, another third from brand collaborations, including with Sendwave, a popular money-transfer app among migrants, and the rest from views across platforms. He said he donated around four hundred thousand dollars and transferred a million to his own nonprofit. Espina said that he made more than $3 million last year, though he didn’t disclose the breakdown in the same type of annual report—and told me that he expects to make around three million this year.

Espina is also open about his personal political leanings—and his personal ambitions. During the recent Texas Senate primary, he endorsed State Representative James Talarico over U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, posting several videos and even appearing in an ad for Talarico. In June, 2024, he recorded a video with President Joe Biden at the White House, in which he broke down in tears thanking Biden for an executive action allowing long-term undocumented immigrants to apply to stay with their families, work legally, and pursue permanent status—something that would have benefitted his own mother. “God love you, son,” Biden said, before apologizing for not speaking Spanish—“I’m trying.” Two months later, Espina spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who had helped bring Espina closer to the Biden White House, as part of its effort to court content creators—the 2024 convention issued press credentials to them for the first time—told the Times that Espina has “a unique capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff . . . and to explain things in ways that are accessible to people.”

Espina has said that he aspires to be President himself one day, but when I asked him about it he told me that his true ambition is to be a major advocate for Latinos. “In the next two years, I want anyone on the Democratic side—and Republicans, too, if they seek me out—who is thinking about running for President to feel that it’s important to talk with me, and to hear what the community needs and expects them to implement. I’ve already met many of the potential candidates for the 2028 Presidency, and I plan to continue building those relationships.”

Liz Kelly Nelson, the founder of Project C, an initiative supporting independent news creators, noted that Espina’s political ambitions “raise the question of whether the trust audiences place in creators is transferable, and what it means when a journalist-creator sees that trust as a political asset rather than just an editorial one. That’s genuinely new territory. But we’re seeing it elsewhere, too, like with Kat Abughazaleh, the wildly popular TikToker who is running for Congress in Illinois’s Ninth District.” (Abughazaleh came in second in the Democratic primary earlier this month, losing to Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston.)

“Our work in Spanish-language media always went far beyond simply delivering the news,” Ramos told me. In the absence of political representation, journalists often had to “speak up for other Latinos and immigrants. Some English-language anchors disagreed with that approach, but for us this was a fundamental social role.” Ramos, though, does not call Espina a journalist, and Espina himself acknowledges that what he does is not journalism—at least not in the traditional sense. “I’m a content creator, a law-school graduate, a community organizer, a nonprofit director. I’m many things. As I’ve learned in social media, you can be all those things and more at once,” he told me.

He added, “You don’t see traditional news anchors paying their followers’ immigration bonds. We are working in very different realms.” Yet he does admit that his influence carries obligations that look a lot like those of a journalist. “If people see me that way, then in many respects I have the responsibility to do everything that traditional journalism would do, which is to fact-check and make sure I’m not spreading outright misinformation.” ♦

Around lunchtime one recent Friday, the chef Kia Damon stood in front of a produce display at a Publix grocery store in St. Cloud, Florida, bobbing her head like a d.j. “Yeah! Yeah! Take a shower!” she said, holding a finger in the air as a sprinkler system released fine sprays of mist onto neat rows of cabbage and kale. “Me next!” Damon, who wore loose denim overalls with a baggy T-shirt and a vintage Orlando Magic hat, was eager to cool off: we’d just spent several hours on an airboat tour of the marshes of Lake Tohopekaliga, scanning the waters for gators and herons under the high glare of the sun.

Like Wawa, in Pennsylvania, and H-E-B, in Texas, Publix—founded in 1930 by a former Piggly Wiggly manager in Winter Haven, Florida—is a regional chain that commands an almost religious devotion. “There was a summer that I spent living with my mom when my mind was really clouded, my heart was really clouded,” Damon, who is thirty-two and grew up in Orlando, told me. “My brain was, like, Just need to go to Publix.” After perusing some locally made products—including Falling Iguana hot sauce, named for the stunned reptiles that drop from trees during cold snaps in South Florida—we got in line for Pub Subs, as the chain’s beloved sandwiches are known. For the past few years, Damon’s order has been jerk turkey with spinach and creamy Havarti on a multigrain hoagie roll; for a first-timer, she recommended a sub with chicken tenders, which get chopped up to insure optimal distribution. “I don’t trust other people’s delis,” Damon said, watching an employee behind the counter wrestle butcher paper around a heaping foot-long sub. “I trust what’s happening here.”

Publix is one of the many Florida fixtures that Damon takes very seriously. In her early twenties, after a few years of cooking in Tallahassee, she moved to New York, where she was briefly the executive chef at a California-inspired, Mexican-ish restaurant called Lalito, and then the culinary director of the women-in-food magazine Cherry Bombe. Almost immediately, she determined that being a Floridian was a liability: “They’re, like, ‘Oh, so is it true that y’all eat gator? Is it true that everyone over there is a redneck?’ ” She dreaded being stereotyped as “trashy” and “backwards,” but she also resented the assumption that she looked down on where she’d come from. “ ‘You’re just running away to the North from Florida because you hate it,’ ” she recalled people saying.

Her initial instinct was to clam up about the place she still considered home. Over time, she began to see the potential in doing exactly the opposite. As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved on Florida plantations, she felt that the state was underappreciated as part of the American South’s Black history, including its Black culinary history. Like many Southerners, Damon grew up eating barbecue, gumbo, and hush puppies; she also adored foods more specific to Florida, such as stone crab and datil peppers—a fruity, spicy variety cultivated in St. Augustine, where a free settlement for escaped slaves was established in the eighteenth century, and where Damon’s mother and grandmother were born. In 2022, she organized the Florida Water Tour, a series of dinners at restaurants in New York and other cities, featuring dishes that evoked classic Southern cooking and Florida’s sticky, tropical climate: root-beer-braised turkey necks, green beans cooked in coconut milk, roast chicken bronzed with earthy, bright-orange achiote, also known as annatto.

Online, Damon has cheekily adopted the label of Florida Woman—an epithet more likely to evoke antics of the “Tiger King” variety than those of an earnest Black millennial—and sells nineties-style “Floridacore” T-shirts in homage to such institutions as Publix and Waffle House. The recipes that she develops for her social-media accounts and for the Times and Southern Living magazine deftly combine her worldly palate and her reverence for tradition. In the caption for an Instagram post about fermenting boiled peanuts into miso, she joked, “I’m living George Washington Carver’s wildest dreams.”

The marsh tour and the Pub Subs were part of a meticulously planned itinerary that Damon had deemed a Big Florida Weekend—a primer for the uninitiated, and also a research trip for her forthcoming début cookbook, “Cooking with Florida Water: Recipes, Stories, & History of the Unsung South.” Currently, she lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she works as the culinary-operations manager for Grey Spaces, the restaurant group co-founded by the chef Mashama Bailey. On her days off, Damon steeps herself in Floridiana, studying vintage cookbooks like “Florida Fixin’s,” from 1992, and “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” a pirate-themed volume, published in 1961 by the Junior League of Tampa, that includes recipes for Cuban shrimp creole and grapefruit-aspic salad.

As an aspiring “stewardess of Floridian history,” Damon is as enthusiastic about the state’s most polarizing dishes as she is about its obvious crowd-pleasers, aiming to conjure an image of Florida beyond the loud luxury of Miami and the kitsch of the Keys. Her book will include an adaptation of the Orange Crunch Cake served at the Bubble Room, a campy restaurant on Captiva Island, and a recipe for crab chilau, the unofficial dish of Tampa, a spicy Sicilian-Afro-Cuban seafood stew. But there will also be a fried-gator po’boy and backwoods deep cuts like raccoon with sweet potatoes. “I had to make a decision. I was, like, Either it’s possum, it’s raccoon, or it’s squirrel,” Damon told me. “I don’t think I could fit all three in there.”

From Publix, we drove to Crystal River, in Citrus County, where, after an appropriately chaotic central-Florida afternoon—I briefly lost my rental-car keys in a wildlife refuge, stranding us until Damon persuaded an indifferent park ranger to help rescue them—we ended our day on the patio of a waterfront restaurant called the Crab Plant. As the sun set, and no-see-ums and mosquitoes began to feast on our bare skin, we split half a pound of steamed stone-crab claws, forking the slippery, tender meat from their shells; a pile of plump, cornmeal-crusted fried frog legs, which tasted like chicken with the texture of a firm-fleshed white fish; and a slick, snappy sausage made from gator cut with pork. Damon was especially interested in a creamy smoked-mullet dip, which was served in a small deli container with a side of crackers. Despite its reputation as a bait or “trash” fish (in the sixties, Florida’s conservation board tried to rebrand it as “Lisa”), the oily, strong-tasting mullet is so central to the state’s cuisine that Damon is considering having one tattooed around her left kneecap.

Damon knows that few of her readers are likely to try her recipes for mullet or raccoon or gator, even if she includes tips on where to order each frozen online. For her, that’s no reason not to publish them. She showed me an unedited headnote from the book, a defense of chitlins, or stewed pig intestines, a dish that she studiously avoided every New Year’s Eve for the first twenty years of her life. “There’s a joke amongst Black southerners that goes ‘We don’t gotta eat chitlins anymore because we’re free,’ ” she writes. “Why eat slave food? . . . But there’s more to it than that. At least to me. The value in chitlins is how enduring the recipe is. We’re talking centuries of true farm to table, whole animal eating.”

The next morning, we stopped at a gas station near Damon’s mom’s house for breakfast: fried chicken gizzards, fried fish, and cheesy grits pooled in butter, served in Styrofoam containers. We were on our way to the Florida Strawberry Festival, an annual event in a place called Plant City, the sort of extremely on-the-nose name that is common in Florida. (Damon was beside herself to learn, during one of our drives, that Orlando is situated in what was once known as Mosquito County.) It was at her first strawberry festival, Damon told me, that she became conscious of her state pride. “We’re driving into Plant City, and, the closer you get, you start to see all the strawberries everywhere, and the place looks like Candy Land,” she said, describing a uniquely Floridian mix of agricultural splendor and theme-park excess. As we made our way through an exhaustive list of everything she wanted to eat, including a buttermilk corn dog and a strawberry-crunch funnel cake that she’d seen on TikTok, a man about her age stopped her and asked how he knew her. It turned out that they’d worked together, in high school, in concessions at Universal Studios—a rite of passage for Orlando teens—serving Butterbeer at a Harry Potter-themed pub.

The last and most important item on Damon’s list was the strawberry shortcake from St. Clement Catholic Church, which runs a make-your-own station every year. (A sign advertised the parish as “Trinity Centered, Discipleship Driven. . . . . . & Shortcake Emphatic!”) Women wearing green aprons, with white doilies pinned to their heads, presided over comically huge metal mixing bowls of freshly whipped cream and locally grown berries, which we spooned onto small rounds of cake. “Over time, folks have been, like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care for the St. Clement shortcake, it’s just O.K.,’ ” Damon said. “But for whatever reason it’s always a ten out of ten to me. It’s never not delicious.”

To some, the Plant City fairground, pungent with the scent of livestock and swarming with people in strawberry-themed clothing, might have verged on nightmarish. It was hard to find shade; each car on an enormous Ferris wheel was emblazoned with the face of a different U.S. President. When the heat began to break, late in the afternoon, a welcome breeze turned sinister as it kicked up dirt, covering our sunscreened arms and faces in a thin layer of grime. But Damon was in her element, bounding around in a “Dirty South” jersey, a cowboy hat fitted atop the bandanna she had tied around her head. “This is it,” she had told me the day before, as we got into the car with our Pub Subs. “This is Florida. You’re hot. You’re overstimulated. The A.C. isn’t going on fast enough.” Still, she said, “I wouldn’t bother being from anywhere else.” ♦

I Climbed Mt. Whitney and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt
But I also had an amazing trip up the mountain. I was with my sister. We’ve been estranged for a while. And we were connecting as much as we were climbing. It’s funny—putting yourself in a difficult physical situation (continues on back of shirt) can have a positive effect on your emotional well-being. I sometimes wonder if depression and convenience are more insidiously linked than we like to think.

I’m With Stupid
But I’m using the experience to try to learn from Stupid. Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” Although, to be frank, it’s hard to think of Stupid as my master because he insists on repeating the same paranoid conspiracy theories. And I’ve tried (continues on back of shirt) to tell him that Finland is a real country, but Stupid keeps saying, “Show me a map! Show me a map!” And then, when I show Stupid the map with Finland on it, he just says, “But who made that map?,” and kind of raises his eyebrows like he’s caught me in a trap. And so I tell him, “Rand McNally,” and then Stupid’s all, like, “Does anyone actually know this ‘Rand McNally’ guy?,” and I want to answer him, but by this point it feels moot.

Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee
And, even then, maybe don’t talk to me. We’re just sitting across from each other on the G train—why do we need to talk? And before you accuse me of perpetuating an individualist culture where we’re all “buried in our phones” (continues on back of shirt) and can’t muster any kind of real human connection, you should know that I have actually read Jonathan Haidt and impose strict phone curfews in my house. I just don’t want to talk to you until I’ve had coffee because I know I wouldn’t be my best self, and excuse me if I want to make a good impression.

New York Fuckin’ City
is what my father says whenever we talk about his retirement. He spent the past twenty years living like a monk in Hoboken and saving his cash so that he can finally retire to a modest studio apartment in the city. But, as he was responsibly planning his future, New York City turned into what he calls “a cesspool of bankers and trust-fund kids and Russian oligarchs buying ghost (continues on back of shirt) apartments while the rest of us are pushed to the outer boroughs, schlepping in every day to make their lattes and pick up their snotty kids, who will one day grow up to be the bosses of our kids as New York gets dragged to the final circle of Hell.”

Eat Sleep Spin Repeat
This is what my life has become. I am reduced to four activities, and the last one is just a demand to perform the first three again. What happened to my life? I used to be interested in (continues on back of shirt) culture. Julie and I used to go to St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, and the Met. Now all I do is eat and sleep and spin. I don’t even like the spinning. It hurts my calves, and the teacher always singles me out.

Rosé All Day
(continues on back of shirt) I have a drinking problem. ♦