Archive: 2026

A quietly moving story shaped less by violent spectacle than by the deep-seated ache to be understood

“Once, long ago, I was in love. And I was loved.”

In The Era of Penumbra, the third title in Yona Katz’s The Rise of Penumbra series, certainty has begun to unravel for Asha, Yusra, Kadmiel, and Ranan. Faced with shifting alliances, looming war, and terrifying revelations, each is forced to confront something far more personal: love and the vulnerability that comes with it.

Taking place immediately after The Dark Mountain, Kadmiel is struggling with Ranan’s betrayal and his loyalty to Hosheh, the Dark Star, while Asha begins uncovering painful truths about the Stars and her own family. Though both understand that war between the Stars and Adama is approaching, neither truly understands what war demands. Unlike Asha and Kadmiel, Yusra understands that survival often leaves little room for innocence.

That understanding gives The Era of Penumbra a refreshingly introspective and vulnerable tone. While the previous books, The Valley of Stars and The Dark Mountain, leaned heavily into worldbuilding and conflict, Katz places relationships at the forefront here instead. Yusra’s realism grounds Asha’s idealism, while Ranan brings out an earnestness in Kadmiel that gives the novel emotional intimacy.

Of the relationships at the center of the novel, the one between Kadmiel and Ranan is easily the most complicated. Everything between them changed after Ranan left in The Dark Mountain, a betrayal that weighs on Kadmiel throughout much of the novel. Kadmiel wants the world to make sense in rigid certainties. Ranan continually complicates that. Kadmiel’s unresolved feelings leave him increasingly at odds with both Hosheh and himself, particularly as his discomfort with violence continues to grow. Though Ranan returns more wounded than before, he still finds Kadmiel easy to love.

For a series shaped by war and division, The Era of Penumbra is surprisingly gentle. That softness runs throughout the novel, from its LGBTQ relationships to the way Asha is slowly accepted within Mitkan despite representing everything its people were taught to fear. Even when characters remain divided by ideology, Katz still allows room for understanding and compassion. As a result, the novel never becomes emotionally cynical. The characters are still allowed to hope, and Katz treats that hope as something meaningful rather than naïve.

That same vulnerability reshapes Hosheh as well. In the earlier novels, the Dark Star often felt more like an idea than a person: distant, feared, and borderline overpowered. Here, Katz turns inward, focusing less on his power than the loneliness beneath it. The result is a villain who feels far more human than before, a successful turn in reader expectation.

The conclusion to The Rise of Penumbra series is more understated than one might expect given everything the fantasy series has built toward. Yet Katz’s focus remains firmly on the relationships at play, resulting in a surprising, satisfying twist. It’s one that feels impactful even if the ending arrives somewhat abruptly afterward.

And in a strange way, that quieter ending fits the series in a refreshing, meaningful way. The characters have matured, and so has the story itself. The Era of Penumbra is a moving final installment in an altogether successful fantasy series.

The post The Era of Penumbra (The Rise of Penumbra 3) by Yona Katz appeared first on Independent Book Review.

“Inborn” by Colleen Morrissey

My daughter was born gasping. Throughout the first 14 hours of my labor, Nora was in the ideal position for birth: upside down and facing backwards, towards my spine. But as she entered the birth canal, she corkscrewed. As though she wanted one last look around the only home she’d ever known, she turned her head and slowed everything down. The doctors kept telling me “one more push” for four hours. They hadn’t meant to lie to me, Nora just kept turning, rolling, delaying. But her own stubbornness worried her too. She released her meconium, her first bowel movement, while still in the birth canal. A stress response. She aspirated the sticky, green-brown waste while being born, and so when they put her in my arms, all gray-pink and big, much bigger than I expected, she was gasping and coughing, and they had to take her away after only a few minutes to give her oxygen.

The hospital room filled with people. Dazed, I pushed out the placenta and lay there while they stitched me up, my daughter somewhere beyond the wall of doctors at my feet. My mother took photos of what I couldn’t see: Nora on a warming pad as they measured her blood oxygen level, eyes closed and brows dark, not crying, passive. They brought her back to me with a thick, ribbed tube strapped to her nostrils and told me she would need to spend some time in the NICU to receive help breathing and ensure the meconium did not lead to a lung infection. Because I had asked her to beforehand, my doula took photos throughout my labor, delivery, and aftermath. There are photos of me, naked and sobbing as I hold my newborn daughter, bombarded with my first rush of maternal terror.

In my early 20s, I became anorexic without realizing it. Because I was not a teenager skipping meals, because I was eating organic and local and homemade, because I was lifting heavy weights and doing yoga, I did not think I had a disordered relationship with my body or with food. I failed to recognize it when a depression formed beneath my breastbone or when my period stopped for a year and a half. Even when I began binging, my starved system grasping for the things I was depriving it, I considered this shameful development a product of my weakness. I didn’t keep anything binge-worthy in the house. No sweets, of course, but no bread or cheese, either. But instead I binged on apples, almonds, Wheat Chex. It was only when I started doing undeniably absurd things, microwaving a coffee mug of flour and water to binge something approximating bread, that I began to wonder if I needed help.

I was eight years into recovery when I got pregnant, a planned and wanted child with my husband, Sean. I had been in therapy since I was 25. Before getting pregnant, I talked extensively with my therapist about what it might be like to gain the baby weight, to enlarge intentionally.

Some pregnant women, when they first begin to show, gain an obvious pooch in their lower abdomen which no one could mistake for fat. These women, usually petite to begin with, look like their normal selves with a round protuberance out front, like they’ve swallowed a beach ball. That was not me. Late in my first trimester, my bulge was not obviously from pregnancy. I joked, “joked”, that I wanted to tell every stranger I passed that I was “not fat, just pregnant.”

Once my second trimester ripened and it was clear I was pregnant (not fat, not fat), for the first time I could remember, I actually, improbably, genuinely liked how my body looked. I wore bodycon dresses, which I’d previously only dared to do when underweight. I gave into cravings for Dairy Queen with minimal guilt. I received more compliments on my appearance than at any time since my anorexic period, when I was almost universally lauded for my weight loss. You see, I was supposed to be big now; I was encouraged to grow. Despite being a decade into recovery, the validation was just as potent as when I was anorexic.

I felt prepared to protect Nora from the inevitable body shame that would come for a girl in 21st century America.

Though I had many other worries about the demands of motherhood, I felt prepared to protect Nora from the inevitable body shame that would come for a girl in 21st century America, having clawed out of the cold pit of an eating disorder myself. I imagined talking to her from the earliest possible age about valuing and nurturing her body, how it is her vehicle through life, how eating is one of the beauties of existence and food is pleasure as well as fuel. I knew what I would need to say, because it was what I had needed.

Then, during a routine prenatal visit late in my second trimester, my obstetrician found my fundal height, the measurement of my stomach bulge, a little low. For the second time in my life, I was too small. I scheduled an ultrasound to check Nora’s growth, where the OB told us Nora was in the 14th percentile for size, right above the danger line. In other words, Nora was fine, “just a petite little girl.”

Despite my relief, I was shaken by what should have been an obvious possibility: Nora might not look like me. Her body might not be like mine. I was born weighing nine pounds. Throughout my childhood, I was never one of those wispy little girls, all legs and elbows. I was stocky, solid. Chubby, yes, at times. Sean was also a chubby child before puberty reworked him into a slender colt, so we both expected a doughball daughter. I was aghast at the possibility that I might not be prepared for my daughter’s body woes after all. Instead of spending a lifetime trying to be smaller, she might be one of those girls I envied, the ones who couldn’t put on weight, who wished for bigger boobs or rounder hips. It was the first rebuke of my parental projection. I tried to learn from it.

At the hospital, the attending staff told me I could nurse once I was moved out of the delivery room. Sean spent the day of Nora’s birth wheeling me to and from the NICU so I could breastfeed her. Nora latched well despite the heartbreaking nest of tubes and wires attached to her, which tangled or dislodged as I negotiated her to my breast. A little cyborg baby. Still, I loved breastfeeding. Friends of mine recounted excruciating pain, but I was never uncomfortable. It was like having a superpower. If Nora cried, I had a foolproof answer. And while I envied Sean’s ability to sleep through his off-shifts while I had to pump, I pitied him for not having this built-in pacifier, let alone this primal-spiritual ability to feed our daughter from his own flesh. Plus, with breastfeeding, the pregnancy weight would surely melt off.

I “fed on demand” as I’d been instructed by the lactation consultants. They’d even praised the amount of colostrum, the earliest milk, that I’d produced. But at her first pediatrician appointment, the doctor expressed concern over how much weight Nora had lost since birth and advised supplementing breastfeeding with formula. It seemed I was no longer producing enough, and there was no discernible explanation. Only out of the haze of the doctor’s office did I realize I may have been to blame.

By nightfall of Nora’s first day, Sean and I were nearing almost three days straight without any sleep. The prospect of waking up multiple times that night to breastfeed was crippling. We opted to feed her on donor breast milk overnight, not realizing that since I also didn’t wake up to pump, I may have signaled to my body that there was no demand, stagnating my supply.

Or maybe not. I don’t actually know. My impulse is to blame my own choices rather than entertain in this new context the lesson that recovery taught me: the willfulness of the body, its refusal of transactionality. In the weeks following Nora’s birth, I did everything short of the pharmaceutical to increase my supply. I ate brewer’s yeast and flax seed, I drank Guinness, I pumped after every feeding, as often as five times a day and at least once overnight. I never pumped more than three ounces, from both breasts combined. I envied the women in my new-mom group who gathered that much from leakage alone. With perspective, I can look back at my post-labor exhaustion and see that my choice of sleep probably didn’t doom my milk supply, which should have increased with the demand that came mere hours later, when I resumed nursing Nora. Should have. But didn’t. My body, which had formed Nora’s perfect bones and flesh and hair, decided that that was enough.

In the early days of my recovery, as I haunted eating disorder support blogs, I’d come across a sentence that settled into me like a stone in the gut: You can’t fight your body because your body will fight back until you die.

The first time Nora refused to nurse, she was just under two months old. I knew she was hungry, but when I put her to my breast, she only cried harder and turned her head away. It was baffling; Nora was far too young for a “nursing strike.” When offered a bottle instead, she guzzled down the formula like she’d been starving.

My doula, who was aiding in postpartum care, told me it’s easier to drink from a bottle, they don’t have to suck as hard, so bottle-fed babies may refuse to nurse in favor of the easier option. I worried it was my low supply. Nora was getting bigger, and I just couldn’t keep up. I tried to suppress my irrational devastation, but Nora’s refusal to nurse felt like a repudiation.

Soon after, she began to periodically refuse bottles too. We were forewarned about “the witching hour,” the tendency for colic to worsen at sundown, and indeed, as each afternoon wore on, Nora cried and cried, and when we tried to feed her, she cried harder. She seemed to fight us, her back arching, her little limbs striking out. We would swaddle her tight to calm her, and then, sometimes, she’d eat with an air of exhausted submission. We warmed the bottle. We gently rubbed the nipple, flesh and silicone, over her mouth. We tried to put the nipple in her mouth, as we’d been shown by the hospital staff. Nora cried around it. One afternoon, as I held my sleeping daughter on the rocking chair in her darkened nursery, my phone in one hand, I did what I’d done so many times these past few weeks: I researched.

Prior to this point, I had been prone to attempting to research my way out of what was, essentially, normal newborn behavior, such as quizzing my doula and combing Reddit and baby-care blogs for tips to find out why Nora’s naps were short and erratic, not recognizing newborn naps usually are short and erratic, and all I could do was endure. But this was something different. I searched baby refusing to eat and found a term I’d never heard before: feeding aversion. One of the results was an e-book by an Australian nurse, Rowena Bennett, called Your Baby’s Bottle-Feeding Aversion. I read the sample chapter and realized no other explanation fit so well: “appears hungry but refuses to eat . . . becomes tense, cries or screams when a bib is placed around her neck . . . takes a few sips or a small portion of milk and pulls away or arches back and starts to cry . . . feeds only while in a drowsy state or asleep.” That last one really got me. Nora did only feed well at night. When she woke from sleeping and I breastfed her, she displayed absolutely no tension and drank long and eagerly. According to Bennett, the root cause of Nora’s aversion was a negative association with feeding, brought on initially by something like reflux or gas and reinforced by parental pressure to eat when she wasn’t hungry. Nora fed well while drowsy because her defenses were lowered; she was too sleepy to resist.

I bought the book, and as I read on, I sank into a disorienting mix of relief at having figured it out and utter, utter shame. I had pressured my tiny baby daughter to eat. I had created an aversion to food, to eating, the most basic of human activities, the very thing I was so staunchly determined to nurture. I was ready to shield her from all the negative cultural forces that would come for her young, too young. But I never imagined this could happen before she was able to hold up her own head. Feeding my baby was one of my only jobs as a new mother, and I’d fucked it up.

Nobody told us that, at a certain point, Nora would need to be the one to choose when and how much to eat.

I manically explained all this to Sean once Nora woke from her nap. He stood, grimly changing her diaper while I laid out the evidence. I said, “I actually feel better, having figured this out.” But as we reeled with understanding, we also grew angry. Feed on demand, we were told, and newborns demand a lot. Feed before naptime to prolong the nap. Feed every three hours, even if the baby is not cuing hunger or is sleeping. Place the nipple into her mouth. A lactation consultant all but shoved my breast into Nora’s face. “Is that too rough?” I asked. “No, she needs help finding it,” the consultant said. Nora’s previous tendency to calm as soon as I put her to my breast was smiled over at my new-mother’s group, agreed to be a universal panacea. Nobody told us that, at a certain point, Nora would need to be the one to choose when and how much to eat.

Treatment for a feeding aversion is painfully simple: When the baby refuses to eat, take the bottle away. All the things Sean and I had been advised to do before, we were to stop doing. Instead, when Nora exhibited hunger cues, we were to show her the bottle or breast. If she opened her mouth, we could place the nipple inside. But if she cried, turned her head, or arched her back, we were to remove the bottle or breast from her sight and wait at least half an hour before offering it again. If she refused a second time, we were to wait until the next feeding. Even if she cried, even if she exhibited all her hunger cues, if she refused to eat, we were to remove all pressure. Eventually, the infant will see that the negative association she’s formed with feeding, the parental pressure, is not being applied, and she will eat voluntarily.

One of the core tenets of eating disorder recovery is to get reconnected with the body’s “natural” hunger and satiety cues. Every therapist, every therapy group, every recovery-oriented book will at one point argue that we are born with the ability to know how much and how often to eat, along with what to eat. Then outside factors, a parent, a sibling, peers, pop culture, addictive processed food, begin to interfere with those biological signals. Many people with eating disorders lose touch with these cues to such a degree that they no longer feel them. When I was in the thick of my anorexia, I temporarily lost the sensation of hunger. Food knotted my stomach. I wasn’t otherwise sick, and the campus health center doctor didn’t see anything wrong with me. I didn’t realize at this point that I was anorexic, so I was disturbed by this strange vanishing of appetite. Though I’d severely restricted my diet, I still relished the foods I did allow myself. I had developed a Sunday-dinner ritual of making a large bowl of oatmeal with chunks of peach and strawberry (before I banished fruit for having too much sugar, then carbs for being carbs). The combination gave me an intense pleasure that I now chalk up to the extreme constraints I’d imposed on my palate. Losing my appetite for my limited safe foods shook me.

My satiety cues, on the other hand, were long since dampened. As many of us were, I was raised on the “you must eat X bites of your vegetables before you get dessert” model. Dessert foods, then, were placed into a covetous, rarefied category, enshrining them as high-value and making any consumption of cookies or ice cream before dinner feel thrillingly naughty. It’s not our parents’ faults. This thinking saturates American culture, this sense that, if given free reign, children will eat nothing but sweets all day and wither from nutrient deficiency. Their eating habits must therefore be regulated by adults. In childhood, we learn to calculate the social risks/benefits to eating certain foods (parental disapproval, peer judgment, etc.) at certain times (no desserts before dinner) and in certain quantities (clean your plate), with taste and degree of hunger as second-tier concerns. I had a brownie with lunch so I should just have a salad for dinner. We learn to distrust our bodies.

Regaining that trust is an essential part of eating disorder recovery. I had to shift my conception of my body from a bad child who must be controlled to a partner, or, as Mary Oliver put it, a soft animal to care for. The orthodoxy of recovery would argue that, in its pure state, our bodies want fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins because we are wired to crave what we need. But the bloated processed food industry has made billions counting on the opposite: our craving for sugar, fat, salt. Once the body gets rewired by whatever, social pressure, junk food, starvation, can it ever be trusted again? As a child, I sought opportunities to eat high-value foods in secret, where I wouldn’t be judged. I scarfed Gushers and Hot Pockets in the unsupervised hours after school. Somewhere along the way, merely eating unwatched and unjudged became enticing, no matter the food. I would binge baby carrots, not knowing why.

A NICU stay and “anxious parents” are two high-risk factors for the development of a feeding aversion in an infant. Nora was only in the NICU for three days. “Only” is a traitorous word. It was hell. I can’t bring myself to call us “lucky,” but at least we got to hold her, to feed her, albeit tangled in the webbing of wires and tubes. But the first time I saw my daughter after they took her away post-birth, she was under glass, mouth agape, nostrils intubated, and I sobbed all the way back to my recovery room, Sean pushing me in my wheelchair. Later, when recounting this to a friend, he referred to it as “trauma,” and I realized with blank surprise that, yes, that’s what it was.

The stoic Midwesterner in me urges me to qualify the statement, we saw so many parents who’d been in the NICU for weeks, who had it so much worse, but Sean and I were traumatized by our first and only child experiencing danger and precarity from the first moments of her life, and this, no doubt, made us more anxious than we would have otherwise been for her to eat, to grow, to thrive. It made us more insistent. It made us want control.

Somewhere along the way, merely eating unwatched and unjudged became enticing, no matter the food.

A cliché regarding the origin of mental disorders is that “environment pulls the trigger, but genetics loads the gun.” I don’t know of any blood relatives who had an eating disorder, but the reverberations of the Great Depression still ripple through my family, making us abhor waste, cherish possessions, and value self-denial. When the terms “ancestral trauma” and “scarcity mindset” entered my lexicon, suddenly the orderly hoarding of my grandmother and great-grandmother made sense. The Depression generation initiated the “clean your plate” rule because there weren’t just children starving in another part of the world, there were children starving here. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on something sweet that couldn’t be saved for later, you devoured it all, right then, because scarce opportunities must be seized. These were our great-grandparents, our grandparents, the ones who raised the ones who raised us. I’ve often wondered if the real scarcity they experienced mixes with the bone-deep deprivation-based genetics of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, sieving through the Anglo-American, Protestant work ethic and turning us into an unbearable contradiction: gluttonous ascetics, Puritan sugar fiends.

In the weeks before I made the call to a mental health center on the suspicion I might need professional help, my deprived body and brain pushed the pendulum the other way. I was binging almost daily on pasta, chocolates, ice cream, French fries, donuts. After entering recovery, my therapist instructed me to make a “reverse map” to trace and identify the actions and emotions that led to a binge so, ideally, I could subvert it next time. My risk factors included being at home, being alone, and feeling a need to relinquish my tightly-held self-image of competence and control, to let go.

At first, the idea of a newborn being emotionally susceptible to any kind of pressure seemed absurd. It sounded new-agey, eye-rollingly hippie-ish to say that my little baby, who sometimes couldn’t even locate my nipple while I was placing it into her mouth, could be put in charge of her own eating. While anticipating parenthood, I’d formed staunch ideas about enforcing future boundaries. I was one of those non-parents determined not to make a separate dinner of hot dogs and mac and cheese for my child.

Now, to treat her feeding aversion, I was supposed to defer to my newborn’s desires. But I was desperate and depressed. Pushed beyond the normal baby blues, my propensity toward anxiety compounded into a miserable fragility. I didn’t want to take Nora outside for fear of some calamity. Though chronically sleep-deprived, I couldn’t rest. Our house was littered with barely-drunk bottles of formula. I cried many times a day, more than I did when Nora was first born. I remember saying dully to Sean, “I’m not happy,” and registering that I was frightening him but being unable to conjure reassurance for my unfailingly compassionate husband, unable to support him as he was supporting me. We had to do something. If we followed the program, eventually the baby was supposed to learn that she will not be pressured to eat if she refuses. She will regain trust in her parents, and she will eat.

If I accepted this argument, I had to accept that by trying to control her eating, I had broken trust with my child who wasn’t yet three months old, that a newborn was capable of trust. That she had full, autonomous personhood even as she relied on me for everything. I, in turn, had to trust that Nora knew when and how much to eat, even at this minuscule age, even if it was less than I thought she did. When I brought Nora to her pediatrician to ensure there was no physical reason for her feeding aversion, the doctor assured me there was nothing wrong with Nora and to “follow her lead. She’s not going to starve herself.”

Once, years before Nora was born, my therapist asked me, “Colleen, do you trust that things are going to be okay?”

I thought about it, and I said, “No.”

It got worse before it got better. If Nora gave any negative reaction to being fed, we removed the bottle or breast, even if I knew she was hungry. Her conflicted behavior increased: She would eagerly suck for a few seconds, then pull off with an agitated cry.

It felt cruel. It was agonizing to hear Nora cry, to know I could alleviate her hunger, yet not to feed her because she had, in essence, said, No. The first day, Sean found me weeping in the nursery with our weeping baby in my arms. We’d planned to have two kids, but as Sean took Nora from me, I said, “I don’t think I can do this again.”

Before Nora was born, therapists suggested antidepressants to me, and I always demurred. I had nothing against them in theory. In fact, in considering myself a mental health advocate after defeating my eating disorder, I was vehemently anti-stigma. But I’d never felt I really needed them. The first six months or so of E.D. recovery were the lowest of my life to that point, yet they were also buoyed by profound flashes of hope. I was fighting an enemy I’d finally unmasked. I was allowing myself to feel all the emotions I didn’t realize I’d been repressing. It was like being a teenager again, with all the exhilarating highs as well as the deep lows, which themselves had a kind of sweetness because they felt like progress. Since then, I’d learned that eating disorders are actually anxiety disorders, and when I had amassed enough tools to close off one avenue, my anxiety found others. My heart began inexplicably racing, and I would be overwhelmed at random with a profound sense of wrongness. When my psychiatrist asked if I’d ever considered an SSRI, I told her I didn’t want to make a semi-permanent solution to a temporary problem.

In the throes of Nora’s feeding aversion, I went on an antidepressant for the first time. I didn’t have the time or the stamina to rely only on the painstaking work of talk therapy to conquer this specific iteration of my demon. I needed to get better now, for my daughter’s sake and mine. Fortunately, because my primary care physician is also my daughter’s pediatrician, she knew exactly how miserable I’d been and validated my suspicion that I was suffering from postpartum anxiety. She gave me a prescription for a low dose of sertraline to be filled the very day I asked for it. I was told it could take several weeks to kick in, but I began to feel better almost immediately. I’d worried that I wouldn’t feel like myself, that my emotions would be dampened, at the time, my emotions were so distressing that I was okay with that, but the medication made me feel more like myself than I had in months. I felt better.

And Nora began to get better too. After the miserable early days of the non-pressure method, Nora’s aversive behaviors mildened. Soon, she began to eat more, and her pattern began to regularize as she could go longer between feedings. Her mood markedly improved, and so did her colic. I was still anxious, reluctant to allow anyone else to feed her for fear they’d pressure her and trigger a regression. I would hover when my parents, my in-laws, and even my own husband fed her, monitoring and issuing meticulous instructions. I was afraid that if we didn’t do the program perfectly, if we accidentally pressured Nora or misjudged her cues, we’d ruin the whole thing and be careened back into the terrible times. But along with the medication, I resumed therapy and continued to work through my anxious instincts. There were setbacks caused by travel, teething, sleep interruptions, but Sean and I had already seen how effective the program was, and we stuck with it. It required of us no further products, trainings, or consultations. No acceptance of elaborate parenting philosophies. Just trust.

By the time Nora reached her sixth month, there were no traces of her feeding aversion.

My sense of normalcy returned when Nora began to sleep through the night. Only then, when I too was getting more than three interrupted hours of sleep per night, did I feel like I could write. One unseasonably temperate Sunday afternoon in February, I sat on the porch to make my first diary entry since the early days of Nora’s life. In recounting the feeding aversion saga, along with a muted reliving of the suffering of those days, a new emotion surfaced: pride.

“We figured this out,” I said to Sean, who was sitting with me in the breeze while Nora napped, “and we fixed it.”

While it was trusting Nora’s body that made the final difference, I can’t deny that it was my disorder-born knowledge that gave me the awareness and tools to locate the problem and address it. After I’d been in recovery long enough to fully reject my eating disorder’s unhealthy premises, I said to my therapy group that it felt like waking up from the Matrix while everyone else was still plugged in. Like Neo in the film, I’d been given the gift and curse of wising up to a malevolent, omnipresent force and suddenly thrown into a fight against its overwhelming strength. I began to see that U.S. food culture is founded on several disordered tenets which even the non-disordered perpetuate, believe, and practice. People talk of “burning off” sweets or fats as if exercise were penance for a sin. They banish entire food groups from their diets or practice “intermittent fasting.” How can you win when everyone around you serves the enemy?

I thought this cursed knowledge forearmed me to raise a daughter behind enemy lines, but it rendered us both vulnerable in a way I’d never anticipated. Yet if I had not already known of these weaknesses and dangers, how much longer would it have taken me to recognize them in this new form? How much more would I have stumbled while my daughter cried? I can never unlearn the fact that shrimp is the lowest-calorie animal protein and that a short sprint will burn more fat than a long jog. I can never turn off the alarm that chimes in my head when someone refers to eating as “being bad.” I will bring all this with me to the dinner table every time I sit with my family to eat. What knowledge hurts and what knowledge helps on any given day will always be in flux.

When we introduced solids to Nora, I took great comfort in her eager embrace of all kinds of foods. For a while, peas were among her favorites. Her daycare teachers told us that she was the “best eater” in the infant room. Now she is a bona fide toddler, and she has begun refusing fruits and vegetables, always preferring meats, carbs, and fats. Her first food word was “cheese.” She chugs her whole milk, scarfs a fistful of shredded cheddar, and before she’s even swallowed, asks, “More?” Yet some days she wants almost nothing, taking a few bites and then vigorously shaking her head when Sean and I offer her favorites. This is, of course, an almost universal toddler-parent problem, and our painful experience reins us in from counterproductive displays of disapproval or enforced “X number of bites” rules, but we can’t help ourselves, when she won’t even taste the generously buttered broccoli, when she says “all done” after two minutes, we still ask, Are you sure?

The post My Newborn Refusing to Eat Challenged Everything I Thought I Knew appeared first on Electric Literature.

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Secrets and Other Hobbies by Mary Hannah Terzino, which will be published on October 20, 2026 by Cornerstone Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

In this collection of stories exploring the experiences of women, and sometimes men, of all ages, at pivotal moments in their lives, a child spies two women kissing at her mother’s bridge club. A young girl unwittingly contributes to terrible loss as she tries to honor her friend’s deepest wishes. A late-night drowning at a high school graduation party is mired in secrets. An older woman compulsively attends the town’s funerals, believing her presence there to be God’s calling. A retired woman finally harvests insights and breaks old habits through revelations from her daughter’s experiences. The stories in Secrets and Other Hobbies are layered with purposeful deception and poignant, hidden yearnings that cause their characters to stumble before they rise, if they rise at all. Serious and darkly humorous, noble and morally ambiguous, achingly vulnerable and always memorable, Mary Hannah Terzino’s debut lays bare an indelible and realistic Midwest.

Here is the cover, designed by Abby Paulson, with artwork by Juli Balla:

Mary Hannah Terzino: I’m a character-driven writer, and I found inspiration for the characters in Secrets and Other Hobbies in both the people I grew up with in northwestern Indiana and folks I know as an adult living in the upper Midwest. We Midwesterners are polite, simple-appearing folks who often pulse with secrets, obsessions, or eccentricities below the surface. The people in my stories yearn for redemption from loss, disappointment, or their own imperfections and bad habits. These poignant yearnings cause them to stumble before they rise, if they rise at all. In many of the stories, life-changing secrets threaten to inhibit their redemption. This is true especially for the young women in “Bridge Club,” “Wept the River,” “Suitcase Twins,” and the anchor story, “Three Seasons of Judy Mitchell.” Some protagonists live in the present, while others navigate the cultural values of the mid-twentieth century. I write about the mid-century in part to dispel the notion that it was a golden era about which we should feel nostalgic. Those characters led messy lives, too! Their stories explore the effects of hidden sexual identities, abuse, or economic class divisions, dilemmas unresolved in contemporary times. Yet I’m a writer who cannot shed the need for humor to lighten our loads, and I’ve tried to include funny or absurd moments in everything I write, even the heavier stuff.

When I saw the striking photograph of this young woman with a shadowed hand over her mouth, I was struck instantly by how well she represented the notion of secrets as used in my stories. About a third of the stories in the collection feature young female protagonists, some from the 1960s or ‘70s and some from the present. The solemn look of the young woman in the photo, and her neutral attire, made her an ideal representative for these fictional women. I was excited to see what Abby Paulson, the cover designer, could come up with to amplify the sense of tension I perceived when I looked at her. The designer’s bold font and suggestion of orange for the title sealed the deal. Orange is the color of warning signs, a great amplifier of tension. It was like a shout set against the stillness of the photo.

Abby Paulson: Working with Mary on the cover was a process of vision. At Cornerstone Press, we work with our authors to develop covers that speak to them and their work, and Mary’s cover is no exception.

The image Mary wanted worked incredibly well for a cover, and by adding a splash of color with the orange palette, we were able to convey warmth and danger, light and dark, stark and complex.

Another important move was figuring out text placement, given the standalone strength of the image. Spreading the title out vertically pulls the eye from top to bottom, forcing them to confront the silencing of the woman on the cover.

Altogether, these elements make for a vibrant, atmospheric, and striking cover.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Secrets and Other Hobbies” by Mary Hannah Terzino appeared first on Electric Literature.

An understated yet powerful collection of poetry that highlights the importance of leaning on faith in God to get through hard times

Finding My Way: One Man’s Spiritual Quest for the Divine Presence is Marc A. Crowley’s deeply personal exploration of life lived amid faith and all the ups and downs along the way, with several standout poems that are timely far beyond Crowley’s own experience. Crowley is clearly a dedicated poet, and his work, although not the traditional rhyme or structure that might be expected, resonates with feeling, faith, and imagery reflecting the natural beauty of the America’s western states and shores.

Arranged into four sections, Crowley offers a brief introduction that sets the tone for each. The collection arches from possibility to finality. Along the way, Crowley welcomes readers into the most intimate areas of life, including marriage, parenthood, divorce, and death. He weaves in the value of spiritually traveling light, and the grace that forgiveness allows.

It’s not always heavy reading though. Imagining jeweled sunrises, cascading wildflowers and grasses, and wind-swept beaches is easy with Crowley’s vivid poetry. He also takes time to highlight the joys of good books, good wine, and good company and how they function as lifelines in good times and bad.

Thematically, the poems are arranged well and guide the reader along Crowley’s journey in a way that makes sense, chronologically and emotionally. Being able to identify the grace in everyday things is work, especially during times of struggle or hardship, and Crowley makes it look natural. Opening the book with a poem called “Silence” is an invitation to be present and open to what he calls its mercy, and it really is such a wonderful foundation for all the other poems in the collection. Several pieces include nods to other well-known works, from movies to books and writers, illuminating their influence and in effect honoring their work.

Among the highlights is “1. Notes from Another Realm,” which soothes like a balm in these fractured times. “Exodus” and “That Simple Thing to Do” deliver a strong emotional response with the gentlest of words, the kind that makes you want to share the poem with someone else. And “Look Beneath Things” is sure to become a favorite among devout readers for its joyful tone and reminder to see the pleasure outside but also inside a book. Many of Crowley’s works are positioned to be open to the widest interpretations, allowing readers to imprint their own meaning into these poems, a lifeline for stressed modern readers seeking a moment of peace and quiet to read a book that makes them genuinely feel something.

As a whole, Finding My Way offers an encouraging reflection for anyone looking at their life and wondering what comes next. His poems dip into interior everyday concerns as well as existential questions without getting mired in them. Crowley centers the role that quiet faith has in making it through good times and bad without being heavy-handed or preachy. A seamless addition to your TBR pile, poetry fans!

The post Finding My Way by Marc A. Crowley appeared first on Independent Book Review.

This summer, the American Library Association is auctioning off a rare cache of its iconic READ posters to commemorate the org’s 150th year of doing business.

Thanks to a partnership with Heritage Auctions, the largest collections auctioneer in the world, readers from all over can now own a piece of  literary history. The books (so to speak) are open, and the bets are on until July 10.

Any Millennial or Gen X-reader who preferred to spend recess in the library, and I’m assuming that’s you, if you’ve found yourself on literary hub dot com, will remember the classic READ poster, with its staged, surreal charm.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads.jpg" class="aligncenter wp-image-273789 size-full" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads.jpg" alt="Spike Lee reading Autobiography of Malcolm X" width="415" height="639" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads.jpg 415w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads-195x300.jpg 195w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads-39x60.jpg 39w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/spike-reads-32x50.jpg 32w" sizes="(max-width: 415px) 100vw, 415px" />

And to be sure, the fun of scouring this trove comes from revisiting those book/celeb pairings. Some more convincing than others. Who might have guessed, for instance, that the late Bernie Mac would be a Bible-thumper? Or that Kelly Ripa would ride for the Narnia series?

Other celebrity book picks made an implicit sense. Note the poster of the defector Mikhail Baryshnikov hawking Crime and Punishment. Or this one, where the mage Nic Cage totes Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads.jpg" class="aligncenter wp-image-273785 size-full" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads.jpg" alt="Actor Nicolas Cage reading Siddhartha " width="407" height="628" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads.jpg 407w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads-194x300.jpg 194w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads-39x60.jpg 39w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/nic-reads-32x50.jpg 32w" sizes="(max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" />

Other pairings are more uncanny, or at least invite further questions. Something ironic, perhaps, about the politically fickle Roseanne Barr’s claim to Dickens (The Tale of Two Cities; current bid $1). See also: this one of Rob Schneider, claiming to know how to read at all.

Whatever your druthers, irony or verisimilitude, there’s probably a poster for you among the 240+ for sale. But what are we looking at, price-wise, you ask? It’s a gamut.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads.jpg" class="wp-image-273786 size-full aligncenter" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads.jpg" alt="" width="377" height="578" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads.jpg 377w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads-196x300.jpg 196w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads-39x60.jpg 39w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/susie-reads-33x50.jpg 33w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 377px) 100vw, 377px" />

Susan Sarandon’s Poisonwood Bible poster is currently affordable, with a reigning bet of $50. But others are whipping up a frenzy. This one, featuring the Buffy cast, is currently going for $750.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance.jpg" class="aligncenter wp-image-273793 size-full" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance.jpg" alt="Buffy cast " width="472" height="731" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance.jpg 472w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance-194x300.jpg 194w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance-39x60.jpg 39w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slay-ignorance-32x50.jpg 32w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 472px) 100vw, 472px" />

If you’re looking for gifts, I’d bet my hat there’s a dad out there who could use this darling propaganda from Sir Patrick Stewart as a late Father’s Day present. Or this Chewy poster, which does not necessarily prove that Wookiees belong in the stacks.

Personally, I’ll be shopping for myself. This happy citizen of the People’s Republic of Mamdanistan has her eye on re-education.

If this poster of KRS-ONE repping Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa had made it to my high school library wall, we all could have saved a lot of time.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read.jpg" class="aligncenter wp-image-273787 size-full" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read.jpg" alt="KRS-ONE reading Walter Rodney book" width="409" height="629" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read.jpg 409w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read-195x300.jpg 195w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read-39x60.jpg 39w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/krs-one-read-33x50.jpg 33w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 409px) 100vw, 409px" />

Again, mileage will vary. But if you loved a celebrity in the 90s, there’s a good chance they have a READ poster that you can bet on today.

Here is an abbreviated list of other subjects with looks and books for sale: Dr. Ruth; Rupert Grint; Oprah; Tony Hawk; the cast of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Chef Emeril; R.E.M. (current bid: $410!); Shaq; Sting; Spike Lee: Coolio; Kristi Yamaguchi; Rosie O’Donnell; Michael Keaton; Barbie; Weird Al; the Indigo Girls; Keira Knightley; Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky; The Simpsons. And of course, Xena Warrior Princess.

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads.jpg" class="wp-image-273790 size-full aligncenter" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads.jpg" alt="" width="493" height="621" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads.jpg 493w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads-238x300.jpg 238w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads-48x60.jpg 48w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pat-stew-reads-40x50.jpg 40w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 493px) 100vw, 493px" />

It’s more than nostalgia you take home, too. It’s history! As Charles Epting, director of pop culture/historical consignments at Heritage Auctions told the ALA, “These posters are more than promotional materials, they’re cultural touchstones that have inspired generations of readers.”

Screenshot

" data-large-file="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read.jpg" class="aligncenter wp-image-273791 size-full" src="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read.jpg" alt="" width="955" height="619" srcset="https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read.jpg 955w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read-300x194.jpg 300w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read-768x498.jpg 768w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read-60x39.jpg 60w, https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lions-read-50x32.jpg 50w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 955px) 100vw, 955px" />

I’m with the lions. Hear, hear.

Images via

June 25, 2026View Online | Join All Access | Listen

️ It is a truth universally acknowledged that a classic book with a beloved adaptation must be in want of a remix. Jane Austen fans are in for a big fall, as a Pride and Prejudice series is due on Netflix (date TBA), and Sense and Sensibility hits the big screen on October 16. The trailer for the latter, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood, dropped this morning. Can she fill Emma Thompson’s dancing slippers?

Spread the word. Share this email with friends.

THE HEADLINE

Commonwealth Foundation clears writers accused of using AI

This one is a doozy. Three writers who were accused last month of using AI to create their Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize-winning pieces have been cleared.

Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation Razmi Farook said in a statement on the organization’s website: “We have spent the past month thoroughly investigating allegations of AI use.”

No AI tools were used in the investigation due to concerns “regarding artistic ownership and consent surrounding unpublished work.”

The investigation instead consisted of “detailed discussions” with all of the regional winners.

All five regional winners, not just the three who were accused of AI use, ”collaborated fully” in the review.

Asked to show their work, they provided “working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes.”

The verdict: “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.”

But the damage is already done, as Granta has ended its partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation and will no longer publish the winning stories in its literary magazine.

The winner of the 2026 Short Story Prize will be announced June 30, “alongside a film documenting the regional winners and the inspirations behind their work,” which should really be something given

️ Read the Commonwealth Foundation’s whole statement., RJS

READ WITH PRIDE

Smells like queer literary spirit

The fabled Greek storyteller Aesop is the inspiration behind the fragrance, skincare, and hair product company of the same name. While perfume may seem to have nothing to do with queer literature, for Aesop, it does.

In 2021, the company launched the Aesop Queer Library to celebrate Pride month.

Rather than changing their logo or incorporating rainbows into their marketing, they’ve partnered with local bookstores and organizations with pro-LGBTQIA+ philosophies to develop in-store takeovers and pop-up “Reading Room” libraries across the globe.

These libraries center books by queer authors, inviting guests to not only engage with those works in store but to also bring home a free copy for themselves.

This year’s Aesop Queer Library is teaming up with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The company has partnered with the ACLU for four years, noting their commitment to defending American rights, including and especially freedom of speech and expression.

The “Body of Work” theme for this year’s Queer Library aims to explore how “the queer body can challenge assumptions, give greater visibility to stories too often overlooked or ignored, and serve as an act of joyful resistance.”

Among the authors whose books will be featured are Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Torrey Peters, Seán Hewitt, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor, Pedro Lemebel, Alejandro Varela, and Kristin Arnett.

Aesop has also partnered with Penguin Random House. According to Alyssa Taylor, Director of Brand Marketing for Penguin Random House, “By featuring a wide range of LGBTQIA2S+ voices across genres and formats, we hope to invite more readers into the fullness, complexity, joy, and resilience of the queer experience.”

You can visit the Aesop Queer Library’s pop-up reading rooms this weekend, June 26 through June 28, at stores in Los Angeles (Aesop Abbot Kinney and Silver Lake), New York (Park Slope), San Francisco (Fillmore), Miami (Design District), Austin (Domain NORTHSIDE), Houston (Montrose), Dallas (NorthPark), DC (Georgetown), Chicago (Lincoln Park), Hoboken, Portland (NW 23rd), Seattle (Capitol Hill), and Philadelphia (Walnut Street).

“Main Branch” locations, where most Aesop store products will be swapped out with books, will be in Los Angeles (Larchmont) and New York (Nolita).

If you’re in Chicago this weekend for the American Library Association Conference, Lincoln Park is only a short cab or L ride away.

The Aesop Queer Library has distributed over 115,000 LGBTQIA2S+ books globally since its launch., KJ

TOGETHER WITH BRAIN GAMES BY NICOLE ALFRINE

High-heat medical romance

In Nicole Alfrine’s Brain Games, a lifelong academic rivalry turns combustible when two top medical graduates match into the same competitive neurosurgery residency.

Delilah Harper is determined to become a neurosurgeon at a top hospital, but her biggest obstacle is Bradly Gallow, her arrogant, brilliant longtime rival. When they match into the same elite residency, their competition escalates into the “Brain Games,” a battle for the best cases and first major surgery. But as the stakes rise, so does the tension, turning rivalry into something neither can control.

Perfect for fans of Chicago Med and Scrubs, this standalone romance blends fast-paced hospital drama with sharp banter and emotional stakes.

ON THE SYLLABUS

One thing the new college kids will all have in common

Common Reads, sometimes called One Book, One College or All Campus Reads, has been a popular project for U.S. colleges and universities for the last decade.

They invite incoming students to all read the same book and spend the first weeks, or even the full first year, talking about it.

It’s both a smart way to prepare students for higher education and a way to build community among new students.

At some institutions, the books rotate every few years, allowing all levels of students to connect over the same book. At others, the books change annually. Many times, students are even treated to events that bring the book’s author to campus.

This summer’s Common Reads at universities across the country offer an interesting mix of fiction and nonfiction. Among the featured titles:

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay, Boston University

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Saddleback College

HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience by Ayesha Rascoe, Norfolk State University

Solito by Javier Zamora, California State Polytechnic University in Pomona

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke, Binghamton University

1984 by George Orwell, Metropolitan Community College (Kansas City)

A Map Is Only One Story edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah DeMary, Mount Holyoke

A few colleges and universities save their Common Reads for the school year itself. Among the picks from the fall of 2025 and spring of 2026:

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, University of California, Santa Barbara

Diaries of War by Nora Krug, Yavapai College

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, Slippery Rock University

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine at Vassar College

It’s important to think about these selections in the context of our current political moment.

Higher education has been under siege by this administration from the beginning, and many schools have actively folded to demands, eliminating departments, courses, and programs that fall under the categories of diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”). Any selection is political, and while many institutions have committed to selecting titles that showcase America’s diversity, others have made safe choices or eliminated such programs altogether., KJ

LGBTQ

Welcome to a golden age of queer romance

Leyla Erkan is an editor for Harlequin. Below, she discusses the evolution of queer romance in publishing and its growing impact beyond the genre.

We’re living through an incredible period where romance is more popular than ever. Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry has taken the world by storm, ushering in excitement for all sorts of stories featuring queer love.

Already, I’m seeing the impact as an editor. I’m receiving more queer romance submissions than ever before, in every subgenre. And the queer writers I already work with, some of whom have been publishing in the space for years, are also seeing an influx of new readers discovering their books. It’s a great sign for the future ahead, one that I’m proud to be a part of.

I’m not surprised that our genre is at the forefront. Romance is seldom given the credit it deserves as a serious and culturally important genre. Instead, we’re often stigmatized and dismissed.

But in reality, romance is an inherently radical genre, one that believes every character deserves a happily ever after no matter who they are. And since queerness is wrapped up in who we love, romance books provide a particularly powerful tool for affirming queer identities.

A book can be the first piece of art where queer people see themselves represented fully and joyfully, in all of love’s layers and complexities. Like the queer love stories that have come before them, Heated Rivalry’s Shane and Ilya join a storied history of queer media, one that has been building to this cultural moment for generations. With this larger stage comes a larger impact, one that ushers in new readers who might create their own stories.

It’s a very exciting time to be impacting the next generation of talent. I can’t wait to see the even bigger and brighter stories that come from our next class of writers. What will we dare to imagine is possible next?

TOGETHER WITH THRIFTBOOKS

Welcome to the Kids Book Fair at Thriftbooks!

Fill your shelves with stories kids will love for less. For a limited time, buy 4 or more Kids Deal Books and use promo code KIDSARECOOL at checkout to get each qualifying book for just $2.99.

There’s no limit to how many times you can use this offer, so stock up on favorites, discover new adventures, and keep young readers turning pages.

AUDIOBOOKS

Queer Reads for Pride at Libro.fm

LGBTQ+ pride is all year round, but this month, Libro.fm is sharing some of their favorite new queer reads. Here are a few highlights.

☀️ Summer Official by Rebekah Weatherspoon, A grumpy/sunshine sapphic YA romance between a popular basketball player and an introverted skateboarder who reluctantly come together for a summer challenge.

️The Heirs by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, In this YA locked-room thriller, a billionaire has developed a protocol he claims creates prodigies. When he’s mysteriously murdered, his five adopted children, all viciously trained in his methods, are immediate suspects.

️ That Which Feeds Us by Keala Kendall, A Hawaiian gothic + supernatural thriller about a native Hawaiian teen who goes to a luxury island resort to find her missing twin and uncovers a mystery about the resort’s shocking past.

SWORDS AND SPACESHIPS

Writing a romantasy set in the world of D&D

photo credit: Mike Tan

C. L. Polk is the author of Even Though I Knew the End and The Midnight Bargain, among many others. Their newest book is The Feywild Job, out June 30th from Random House Worlds. Below, they discuss what it was like to write a romantasy set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons.

Sometimes you have wishes that you don’t really talk about because they are too outlandish. Writing a D&D story was mine. When I read the email asking me if I wanted to write a romantasy set in the Feywild, I learned what it was like to have a wish come true. I also had to figure out how to make game rules into the story I wanted to tell.

I knew I wanted a warlock with an Archfey patron. On paper, these warlocks can change how they look at will. They can make instant friends with a smile, so long as they exit the acquaintance within ten minutes. They can cast convenient little illusions all day long, but they can call down incredible power when the need strikes.

I thought, “How glamorous.” And then, “What’s the catch?”

And that’s when Saeldian showed up. They came to me as this stunning, mercurial them fatale who enjoys the power their Archfey patron gives them. Not only can they charm anyone they meet and change how they look to suit the moment, they can look right when it’s time to relax off the job. But Saeldian bargained for this power: in exchange, they could never lose themself to love. When they made that promise as a child, it was easy. So how could I test that, now that they can do so much?

And that’s when Kell showed up. The urchin they teamed up with, helped become a bard, and then betrayed. Kell never wanted to see Saeldian again. But to get back home to his adopted family in the Feywild, he has to work with the person he once trusted more than anyone else in Faerûn. He hates Saeldian. But he wants to understand one thing: Why did they leave him to die in Baldur’s Gate? Saeldian can’t tell him. But he’s determined to find out.

Inside the adventure of ex-friends and ex-partners getting back together for one last job is a story about loyalty, trust, and what happens when we hold on to something that hurts us.

TOGETHER WITH VIZ MEDIA

A breakthrough hit about the journey of love into adulthood

I’m No Angel is the book that broke Ai Yazawa, creator of Nana, a mainstream name.

Midori has had a crush on Akira ever since she saw him rescue an abandoned cat. She hopes to become closer to him now that they’re working together on the student council, but his heart may belong to someone else…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Eric Carle, born June 25, 1929

Did you know? The first version of the book that would become The Very Hungry Caterpillar was called A Week with Willi the Worm, but Carle’s editor, Ann Beneduce, thought a worm would make an unappealing protagonist and suggested a caterpillar.

CRITICAL LINKING

You are now free to roam about the internet

 Hone your library skills with the Check Your Shelf newsletter.

 Get the deets on the upcoming adaptation of The Everlasting.

邏 Lose yourself in immersive new historical fiction.

 Mark your calendar for Barnes & Noble’s biggest books of fall.

️‍ Be gay, do crime with these chaotic queer mysteries and thrillers.

END NOTES

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Kelly Jensen, Vanessa Diaz, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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Got a tip, question, comment, or story idea? Drop us a line: thenewsletter@bookriot.com.

This one is a doozy. Three writers who were accused last month of using AI to create their Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize-winning pieces have been cleared.

Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation Razmi Farook said in a statement on the organization’s website: “We have spent the past month thoroughly investigating allegations of AI use.”

No AI tools were used in the investigation due to concerns “regarding artistic ownership and consent surrounding unpublished work.”

The investigation instead consisted of “detailed discussions” with all of the regional winners.

All five regional winners, not just the three who were accused of AI use, ”collaborated fully” in the review.

Asked to show their work, they provided “working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes.”

The verdict: “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.”

But the damage is already done, as Granta has ended its partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation and will no longer publish the winning stories in its literary magazine.

The winner of the 2026 Short Story Prize will be announced June 30, “alongside a film documenting the regional winners and the inspirations behind their work,” which should really be something given

Read the Commonwealth Foundation’s whole statement.

Every week for the Tuesday edition of Our Queerest Shelves, I put together a list of the most exciting new LGBTQ books out that week. Since I first started keeping track of upcoming LGBTQ new releases, this list has grown and grown. I follow a ton of different queer book blogs as well as Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube accounts, noting any upcoming queer books they mention. I also search for upcoming LGBTQ releases on Amazon the week before, I have to sort through a lot of irrelevant books, but I also always find some I wasn’t aware of before that.

Even outside of that, I’m constantly hearing about upcoming queer books: from my fellow Book Rioters, from authors, from Netgalley and Edelweiss listings. And despite the resurgence of book bans and the anti-queer, anti-trans backlash in recent years, we’re living in the golden age of queer lit: there are more new LGBTQ books coming out every month than ever before. All of that adds up to a sprawling spreadsheet with hundreds and hundreds of new queer books in every conceivable genre.

So, now that we’re at the halfway point of the year, I thought this was the perfect time to share as bonus content for All Access members my list of the LGBTQ books that came out from January through June. Unbelievably, there are more than 650 titles out just in the first half of 2026! This isn’t a complete list; I try to make note of all the biggest traditionally published releases, but there’s always a chance that I missed some, especially when the queer representation is not mentioned in the description. Self-published books are harder: there are so many out every day that it’s impossible to include them all, so I tend to just include ones where I recognize the author…or I really like the cover. All that is to say that there have actually been far more than 600 LGBTQ books published so far this year, but this is a selection.

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Last week, I was tagged on Instagram by Jennifer Givhan, an author whose work I love and like to scream about. I checked the post and saw a giveaway for her book, The Sleeping Sisters, but also a call to action. Givhan asked those of us on her unofficial street team (of which I was called La Reina, talk to me nice) if we might consider spreading the word about the importance of preorders, requesting books from libraries, etc, which of course I am happy to do. The bummer here is that this isn’t just a general PSA in Givhan’s case, but a plea for help.

Despite her work garnering countless awards and all sorts of rave reviews, Givhan’s publisher says her numbers aren’t high enough. This isn’t an unfamiliar story. Do sales matter? Absolutely. But the world of publishing is deeply imbalanced when it comes to which stories continue to get the big marketing budgets, who gets more chances, whose books always get greenlit, and which stories are considered worth telling. Givhan is one of at least four writers in my feeds, all from marginalized backgrounds, who have come to social media platforms in the last week to report similar messaging from their publishers, or to tell readers that Barnes & Noble won’t be carrying their books nationally, or at all.

So here I am with a gentle reminder to support the work of authors you want to keep writing.

Here’s a primer on ways to support books and authors, including free ones like placing holds at your library or writing a review.

If it’s within your means, preordering books is a great way to tell publishers that there is interest and enthusiasm for books.

At the time of this writing, ThriftBook’s Hot Summer Bonus Days are on, which means you’ll earn 2X the points on every order. Amazon’s Prime sale is also happening. Not an Amazon shopper? Bookshop.org is hosting its Anti-Prime sale with free shipping on orders. Barnes & Noble’s preorder sale is on, where upcoming books are 25% off. All of these sales and offers are valid through 6/26.

Need help deciding which books to preorder? Oh look, a list!

The Summer of the Serpent by Cecilia Eudave, translated by Robin Myers (July 7)

This one comes out soon, but there is still time to preorder! Over a sweltering summer in late 1970s Guadalajara, Mexico, children are witnessing things they can’t unsee, and the adults appear not to notice. This read is told through colliding POVs from adults and children, the haunted and the haunting, the living and the nearly invisible. It’s pitched to fans of Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and Brenda Lozano, which tells me the kind of horror ride we’re in for!

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 14)

I’d read a book on tax code if SMG wrote it, but lucky for me, she’s written a noir tale of desire, greed, and seduction. In 1940s Mexico, a handsome grifter charms women into giving him their money through letters. Intent on securing a bigger, more reliable bag when the letter scheme runs its course, he sets his sights on the owner of a boardinghouse in a small town in Veracruz. There are two flaws in this plan: his intended victim’s niece clocks him right away and wants in on the scheme as a means to escape this small town, and his victim is not quite the gullible mark he thinks she is…

Mutual Discord by Liana de la Rosa (August 18)

Liana de la Rosa is one of my romance faves. She has an entire backlog of fantastic historical romance, including the Luna Sisters series I’ve recommended numerous times before. Mutual Discord is her contemporary debut about an influencer who, unbeknownst to her friends and family, is the secret brains behind a popular video series about forgotten women in history. What starts as casual convo with an anonymous follower turns into private video chats with the guy, who turns out to be a total hottie. Problem: she soon discovers said hottie is her bestie’s boyfriend. What to do, what to do….

Old Flames by Nadine Gonzalez (August 18)

A horror writer and a fantasy writer check into a B&B for a writing retreat, only to find out the place is haunted by a couple of star-crossed lovers sending messages from the beyond. We get a haunting, writer MCs, fated lovers, and a tropical Key West setting. This sounds like the perfect summer read.

The Sleeping Sisters by Jennifer Givhan (August 18)

More people should know the name of Mexican American and Indigenous novelist and poet Jennifer Givhan. Period. Her last two releases were absolute bangers (see Salt Bones, River Woman, River Demon), and her latest centers the fight for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous and Latina girls and women. Inspired by actual events (the West Mesa Murders in Albuquerque), the story introduces us to Fortuna, a mother who moves her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande in hopes of outrunning a violent family curse, and Jeanette is a detective who’s spent decades chasing the ghosts of her murdered cousins. Fortuna and Jeanette’s paths collide when a body is found in this Chicanified remix of the legend of the headless woman. If you like your horror layered, feminist, a lil’ witchy, and imbued with Latine culture, you need to be reading this author.

An Immaculate Deception by Isabella Livino (September 1)

Give me all the Gothic horror. Make it Latine, and I’ll take two! This one is set in 1870s Brazil, where a young pregnant woman raised in a deeply religious household has just been issued an ultimatum by her mother: she can either marry the baby daddy or surrender the child. She is sure the guy will do right by her, but a violent storm sends the carriage they’re traveling in off the road before she can break the news. When she awakens, she is in his sprawling family home, where something just… isn’t right. I do love a creepy house in gothic lit, that’s all I really need to know!

Cemetery Boys: Espíritu by Aiden Thomas (September 8)

It’s been almost six years since Aiden Thomas first introduced us to Yadriel and Julian (and my fave Maritza, a real one). In September, we’ll head back to the graveyard in Espíritu, where Julian is navigating life post-sacrificial ritual. Things are mostly pretty sweet, except for the part where he sees shadows in his eyes, glowing eyes in the dark, and these ominous dark spots on people that no one can explain. There’s also a mysterious new nonbinary bruje in the mix, one who Julian is drawn to but Yadriel is looking at with some side eye for their cutthroat approach to brujeria.

The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas (September 29)

Isabel Cañas has been on a roll: first we got The Hacienda, then The Vampires of El Norte, then The Possession of Alba Diaz. This is her YA debut about a self-described coward who flees her abusive father and poverty for a cushy gig as a maid to a wealthy widow. When political violence breaks out, she and the widow retreat to a gothic mansion high above the capital city to wait out the slaughter of the deposed fascist viceroy’s enemies. At la Casa de las Gardenias, she meets the staff and the cruel members of the Del Valle family. But this is a gothic story, so the living residents of the mansion are the least of anyone’s worries.

Catch up on recent Latine releases, and for even more Latine books, check out our Latine Lit archives.

An artist's impression of the black hole in the M87 galaxy and its powerful jet. S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF), CC BY-NC-SA

Nearly every massive galaxy observed hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that some of these supermassive black holes may even be too big for the galaxy they’re found in, challenging astronomers’ understanding of these objects and prompting questions about their growth in the early universe. Astronomers are still investigating many key questions about these mysterious and powerful objects, and studying them can help researchers understand how galaxies form and grow.

I’m an astronomer who studies supermassive black holes in other galaxies. These fascinating astronomical objects can tell researchers about how matter gets consumed or expelled from the center of the galaxy and how that may affect other processes in the galaxy.

Black holes are numerous in the universe, but scientists still have many unanswered questions about how they work.

What are supermassive black holes?

Supermassive black holes are the largest class of black holes.

Black holes are regions in space in which gravity has become such a predominant force that nothing, not even light, can escape. These black holes range from hundreds of thousands to millions or billions of times more massive than our Sun.

Studies suggest that nearly every massive galaxy astronomers have observed has a supermassive black hole at the center. However, galaxies are so large that these black holes occupy only a small part, and they’re outweighed by gas, dust and stars.

A supermassive black hole is enclosed by its event horizon, or the point of no return. Any object that crosses the horizon would have to be traveling faster than the speed of light to escape the black hole, which is not physically possible.

If you were to place the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A*, where the Sun would be, its event horizon and surrounding gas would fit within the orbit of Mercury. However, for a more massive supermassive black hole, such as M87*, the entirety of the solar system would fit within the event horizon.

The only two images taken of black holes as of 2026, captured in millimeter wavelengths. On the left is the supermassive black hole M87*, located at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, with a drawing overlaying the orbit of Pluto and the location of the Voyager 1 probe, which is off in interstellar space. On the right is the supermassive black hole located at the center of the Milky Way as an inset of the left, with a drawing overlaying the location of Mercury’s orbit, and the Sun’s diameter. Credit: EHT collaboration (acknowledgment: Lia Medeiros, xkcd)., CC BY

How do scientists study supermassive black holes?

Observationally, supermassive black holes are hard to catch.

Even though many are millions of times larger than our Sun, they occupy only a small part of a galaxy, which can be further enshrouded by stars and dust. To date, only two “images” have been taken of supermassive black holes, both by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Because it is very difficult to take pictures directly, astronomers have to use indirect methods to learn about supermassive black holes and their properties.

To figure out the mass of a supermassive black hole, astronomers can look at its surrounding host galaxy and calculate the mass needed to exert that gravitational force on the components of the galaxy. Supermassive black holes that are consuming matter are categorized as active, whereas supermassive black holes that do not consume matter are known as inactive or quiescent.

For galaxies with a quiescent supermassive black hole, astronomers measure how quickly the stars tightly packed near the center of the galaxy are traveling. They take the average of all these speeds and use a relation known as the M-sigma relation to get a mass that matches with the average measured speed.

For galaxies with an active supermassive black hole, astronomers look at the light the gas around the event horizon emits. If scientists make the assumption that the gas is moving in an orbit around the supermassive black hole, the width of the surrounding gas corresponds to the central mass, and that can provide another way to estimate mass.

Astronomers can also get a sense of how much mass is falling into an active black hole by measuring the luminosity, or observed power, of the gas before it crosses the event horizon.

What don’t we know about these objects

Astronomers are also interested in figuring out how supermassive black holes form. While they already know how smaller black holes, called stellar mass black holes, form, supermassive black holes are too big to form in the same way.

Stellar mass black holes form when a massive star runs out of fuel. Gravity causes its core to collapse, which sends out a shock wave that destroys the star and can leave behind a black hole. However, the stars that form these stellar mass black holes are not large enough to form supermassive black holes.

Scientists have two hypotheses for the formation of supermassive black hole seeds. The seeds are the initial black holes that gain mass over time until they turn into the supermassive black holes that we observe today.

One hypothesis is that they are the results of massive, young stars in the early universe, known as Population III stars, dying. The other hypothesis theorizes supermassive black hole seeds came from a large gas cloud collapsing, due to its large mass and strong gravity, into a black hole.

Neither hypothesis currently has direct observational evidence supporting it, but results from the James Webb Space Telescope hope to answer these questions.

Active black holes are surrounded by accretion discs. These rotating discs are made up of superheated gas and dust. ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser/N. Bartmann, CC BY-NC

Another major question that has not been answered is when these supermassive black holes form.

This question becomes a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem: Did the supermassive black hole seeds form first, then gradually attract the matter that eventually formed the galaxy around it? Or did a galaxy start to coalesce first, and stars and gas clouds inside it collapsed into the supermassive black hole seeds?

Preliminary results and observations suggest the former is more likely, but if that’s the case, it raises the question: How could the rest of the galaxy form and evolve with the supermassive black hole inside it?

Why is it important to study them?

Supermassive black holes affect their host galaxies. As the supermassive black hole grows, astronomers see an increase in the speed of the stars located in the central cluster of the galaxy. This pattern suggests a link between the supermassive black hole and the other components of the galaxy, such as stars, gas and dust.

Often, scientists observe matter falling inward, toward the black hole. But before it’s sucked in, some of it gets blown back by winds created by the black hole’s intense pressure and friction. This matter blown away from the vicinity of the supermassive black hole may either heat up gas and prevent stars from forming or compress gas and cause shock waves within the galaxy.

Though a supermassive black hole can affect its host galaxy, Earth is in no danger of being sucked up or taken into the black hole at the Milky Way’s center. In most galaxies, the supermassive black hole simply acts as a gravitational force that keeps objects in the galaxy in orbit.

However, it is important for scientists to understand how supermassive black holes affect their host galaxies, and how they can shape our observations of the universe.

Mary Ogborn receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. She is currently a member of the American Astronomical Society.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious U.S. universities for more than 30 years. Their support has helped amplify the work of scientists who promote the idea that we can stop the climate crisis without breaking our dependence on oil, gas and coal.

The research produced by those schools in turn shaped global climate models, as well as the policy and technology solutions adopted by governments around the world.

Ultimately, it fostered a misperception that climate change could be solved without dramatically curtailing fossil fuels, a notion that has delayed emissions cuts by decades.

Corporate funders sponsored entire centers, paid the salaries of researchers, kept offices on campus and in some cases had veto power over projects.

Companies maintain they are supporting innovation and needed science. Universities say that with safeguards, sponsorship enhances research programs while preserving academic independence.

Still, the impact of funding constitutes a pattern that Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford, called the “colonization of academia.”

The post Carbon Captured appeared first on ProPublica.

A giraffe at the Houston Zoo. | Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

In mid-June, a giraffe named Gracie escaped from a ranch in Texas located about 100 miles west of San Antonio. An intensive search, including helicopters and drones, is still underway in Texas Hill Country, and a $5,000 award awaits whoever finds her.

Like many charismatic animals who’ve escaped their confines, Gracie has gone viral. But the attention paid to her escape is largely lighthearted. Social media users are sharing AI-generated images about what Gracie might be doing on her “vacation” from the ranch (eating pizza, visiting downtown San Antonio), while local and national news outlets are publishing frequent updates on the search, sometimes in whimsical, quirky language.

I get it. A giraffe. On the run. In Texas? It’s a captivating story. But if you look a little closer at the life from which Gracie escaped, the story becomes less lighthearted.

Much the same can be said for other viral animal moments in recent memory, like Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo, and Punch the monkey. Both are adorably cute animals, yet they live in small, unnatural enclosures, an uncomfortable fact that the internet has been all too eager to collectively set aside for a moment of entertainment. Gracie’s story isn’t so different.

Where Gracie came from

Gracie is a reticulated giraffe, an endangered African species, who otherwise lives at Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, Texas. It isn’t a ranch in the traditional sense, but, rather, an exotic animal breeding operation. Cedar Hollow breeds giraffes, as well as a variety of other ungulates, hooved animals, native to Africa and Asia, like the barasingha (a deer species), Bongos (an antelope species), and Aoudads (a type of sheep), several of which are endangered, threatened, or vulnerable in the wild.

When I asked Cedar Hollow’s manager Vick Jones why they breed giraffes, he said that they sell them to people who “enjoy having wildlife” (of which there are a huge number in Texas alone. Some 5,000 ranches or large landholders there have exotic animals). They have also sold giraffes to zoos. Jones didn’t say which ones, but there are a number of small exotic zoos in the area that allow visitors to hand-feed giraffes and interact directly with various other wild animals.

In other words, these wild species are captively bred for lives far from their native ecosystems and sold for vast sums of money, upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be kept essentially as wild pets or as entertainment in zoos, which confine animals in enclosures a tiny fraction of their natural range and which are poorly regulated.

But Cedar Hollow’s giraffes may be the relatively lucky ones. Of the ungulates bred there, many are destined for other ranches, not as high-price pets, but as hunted game. According to a report from Wildlife Partners, a company that works with ranchers on exotic wildlife breeding, Texas has some 500 ranches open to the public to hunt exotic animals, and approximately 2,500 additional private ranches where at least some exotic hunting is done. And all of those animals have to come from somewhere.

It’s legal and actually somewhat straightforward to breed and sell non-native, “exotic livestock” in Texas, like giraffes and other ungulates, even some that are endangered in the wild. And it’s a big business in the state, with more than two million exotic animals across 135 species, valued at $1.5 billion annually.

When I asked Jones if the other animals at Cedar Hollow, the exotic antelopes, deer, and sheep, are raised for hunting, he said, “No, we don’t raise any for hunting. … If they go someplace ,and they wind up in that situation, that’s not on us.” However, Cedar Hollow’s owner said, in 2018, that these animals are bred for collectors and for hunting ranches.

Inside the US canned hunting industry

A hunting ranch may sound somewhat quaint, but they operate a particularly cruel type of hunt called a captive or “canned hunt.”

“The canned hunting experience allows people to basically get a guaranteed kill,” Devan Schowe, a campaigns manager at the wildlife protection nonprofit Born Free USA, explained to me. “They lure the animals to these feeding stations that they feed them at every day for their whole lives, and it’s enclosed, so the humans on the hunt and the animals are all in a fenced-in area.”

These fenced-in areas can be large, Schowe said, so, sometimes, there is a chase element. But, “the animals cannot escape, so they’re being hunted in their own enclosures.”

Customers pay thousands of dollars to go on these hunts and take home a “trophy” body part, like antlers and horns. One famous Texas ranch, which has been described as the “Disneyland for exotic game hunters,” lets you shoot a zebra for $6,500 or an emu for $1,000. While many of its clients go on “safari” style hunts, traversing large ranches with a guide, they can also hang out in air-conditioned “blinds”, small towers, drinking and playing cards until a surveillance system sets off an alarm to let them know an animal is nearby for them to shoot.

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Texas dominates the US canned hunting industry, and its roots can be found in the middle of the 20th century, when ranch owners began buying up “excess” exotic animals from zoos. While canned hunt opportunities aren’t hard to find in other states, from Pennsylvania, to Florida, to Ohio, around 26 states have fully or partially banned them. A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with the practice, though; a recent hunting industry survey found that 50 percent disapprove of canned hunts and only 30 percent approve.

While endangered and threatened species like some of these ungulates are protected by the Endangered Species Act, a loophole in federal law that was created by a Texas lawmaker exempts three commonly hunted endangered species, allowing them to be legally hunted. In Texas, it’s illegal to hunt exotic animals considered to be dangerous, like lions and tigers, but there are no limits on how exotic animals deemed non-dangerous are killed, or how many, so long as they’re killed on private property; you just need a hunting license and the landowner’s permission.

The conservation question

Cedar Hollow Ranch says its breeding work contributes to the greater good of conservation.

“How else are you going to help save a species, help preserve a species, if we don’t have ranches in Texas and ranches in other parts of the United States now that have room and people to protect these animals?” Jones proposed to me.

It’s a pervasive argument in the exotic breeding and canned hunting industry, and there are a handful of examples of exotic animals bred in Texas that have been shipped off to their native lands in an effort to rebound their wild populations. But animal advocates suggest that the conservation message is used to shield their true motive: profit.

Indeed, it is hard to follow how raising endangered, exotic species to be kept as pets, shot in enclosed areas, or offered up in pens to zoo visitors constitutes “protecting” them, or how it meaningfully helps vulnerable populations in Africa and Asia, where their threats are largely habitat loss for agriculture (especially cattle grazing), poaching, and climate change.

Instead, animal advocates argued, these activities normalize the idea that we can do what we want to animals.

I asked Jones whether the company asks its buyers why they’re purchasing these wild animals, and he said he doesn’t. “Why should I?” he asked me. “They have a right to own those animals. And once they’re their animals, sir, they have a right to whatever.”

The story of Gracie the giraffe is a reminder that there’s often a darker side to the viral animal moment of the month, one that those who stand to profit from that darkness would rather not have come to light. That much was evident when I called Cedar Hollow Ranch. Jones repeatedly said I was being disrespectful by asking questions about its breeding practices, and who it sells its animals to, and what they’re used for.

“You’re the only person that has had this kind of questioning,” Jones said about the many journalists whose calls he’s answered while Gracie has been on the run. “I’m sorry I answered your phone call.”

The POTUS speech to kickoff the "state fair" in honor of America's 250th year was all about how the country is great because of him. Meanwhile, Hegseth is continuing to purge the Pentagon of some of our best warfighters for political and cowardly reasons. Plus, Bill Cassidy caved to Trump yet again, another son-in-law is following in Jared's footsteps and angling to get in on the family's hustle, some love for George Washington, and the administration's levels of corruption are so epic it's like Watergate every day.

Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller.

show notes

Tom on making the 250th "small"

Tom on the capitulation to Iran

Netflix's "The American Experiment"

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At the end of the first week of the 60-day ceasefire enacted by the memorandum of understanding, the Trump administration has gained some wins and taken some losses while continuing to negotiate with the Iranian delegation. Both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio play important, though different, roles in the process.

President Donald Trump initially tapped Vance to lead the American envoy to Switzerland, even joking on June 17 that “this way, if it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.”

For the first few days of the peace talks, Vance headed the American diplomats while hoping to put on an air of composure and patience that would be a breath of fresh air when compared to Trump’s bombastic personality and snap decisions. This moment, briefly, was meant to define the future of Vance’s career, including his prospects of a successful 2028 presidential run.

Quickly, though, the diplomacy team realized that Vance was tailored to be the media-tamer and chief negotiator with the Iranians, but Rubio was the man to actually secure the backing behind many of the promises secured by the deal.

In his last press conference at Lake Lucerne on Monday, Vance touted the American diplomatic team’s success in setting up a pathway for continued talks in the region if fighting breaks out and negotiating for nuclear inspections in Iran.

“The way that I think about it is very simple: we laid a very good foundation for a successful final deal,” Vance said. “The final deal is the house. We set the foundation, we haven’t built the house. But we’ve laid a successful foundation to get to a good place for the American people.”

Vance’s words are smooth and assuring. He listed out the four points that were agreed upon by the negotiators with concision and political tact. If Trump were talking to the media about the deal reached in the first weekend of talks, he likely would have used at least two to three more expletives, to say the least. Vance earned his keep by playing nice, while firmly drumming up support for the deal.

The one thing Vance is missing is the Middle East support to back up his negotiations.

Most of the peace deal rests on the neighbors of Iran stepping in to reinvest in the country and ensure that the radical Muslim theocracy does not begin imposing tolls at the Strait of Hormuz.

One of Iran’s strongest advantages, the ability to close or impose tolls at the strait, can only be mitigated if Oman, Iran’s southern neighbor, which controls the other side of the strait, enforces the agreement. If Iran and Oman come to an agreement separately to impose tolls at the strait, no international law can stop them. Those two Gulf States have been favorably discussing the topic during this week, according to Reuters.

On top of the issue of tolls at the Strait of Hormuz, one of the largest pills for the diplomatic envoy to sell to the public is the reported $300 billion investment package offered to Iran. Satirical websites such as the Babylon Bee immediately ran headlines like “Iran Wins $300 Billion Cash Prize For Placing Second In War,” showing how difficult it will be to spin the deal as beneficial to Americans.

Vance jumped to the task and began denouncing false reports that the money is coming from taxpayers. Instead, he praised the agreement as a “classic Trump deal” in which the other Gulf States step in to build infrastructure and inroads with the Iranian Islamic government. America won’t pay a dime, Vance said, but all the money would come from the other Islamic countries in the region.

Behind the scenes of this talking point, Rubio has been working quietly and tirelessly to meet with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council over the last week to secure support for it. In a statement Thursday after meeting with Rubio, the GCC “stressed the need to maintain momentum and unity as negotiations proceed toward a more permanent end to hostilities and the shared objective of preventing Iran from ever developing or otherwise acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

Because Oman is a member of the GCC, this statement also stands in for the country’s desire to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and toll-free.

While there is a big difference in the roles that Rubio and Vance play, it is clear that they are both using their strengths and skill sets to secure the best possible deal.

When asked how big the divide is between himself and Vance, Rubio said Thursday that, “When it comes to foreign policy and national security, we have no drama. We have no games. We have a group of people that work very well together and closely to execute on the president’s directives.”

Rubio’s position at the State Department lets him excel at interacting with foreign states, but Vance’s experience as a politician and stand-in for Trump lets him excel at the policy and image of the deal.

“I think JD is able to explain this stuff, not as some betrayal of ‘America First’ like some Republicans are trying to spin it, but as illustrating the reality that there is no ‘MAGA orthodoxy,’” a senior White House official told the Washington Examiner about Vance’s role in the peace talks.

SUPREME COURT MUST REFORM IMMIGRATION SYSTEM AFTER LANDMARK RULING

“Trump isn’t just going to do the same s*** that’s gotten us nowhere in the past,” the official continued. “He’s going to try new stuff because he’s really fighting for America, not to make the political elites talking heads, who think they’re the reason he’s in the White House, by the way, feel puffed up and important and right.”

President Theodore Roosevelt famously coined the saying, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” In the case of the Iran talks, Vance and Rubio fulfill those requirements.

(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

If you ain’t first, you’re last

POLITICS USED TO BE A LOT SIMPLER. You’d get elected to local office, then a lower-tier state-level office, and then, after that, maybe you could win an election to serve in the U.S. House. If you were fortunate enough to get that far, doors would open for you to pursue major state-wide offices, like a governorship or a seat in the United States Senate. But a rotten tree has lately fallen across that pathway: the terrible reputation of the House, which outgoing members have discovered to be an unexpected obstruction to their larger political careers.

Previous editions of Press Pass have touched on the high number of House Republicans retiring or seeking statewide positions back home after years of frustration under the historically ineffective speakership of Rep. Mike Johnson (R, La.). Unfortunately for the candidates looking to move on up from the federal kiddie table, voters seem unimpressed by their claims to be ready for a seat among the adults.

Of the 21 House Republicans running for statewide office this cycle, eight have lost or abandoned their primaries.1 Just four have won their respective races, several of whom ran in non-competitive primaries or received a hefty assist from President Donald Trump.2 While eight more are still outstanding, there will be at least one more loss as Reps. David Schweikert and Andy Biggs are competing against one another for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s gubernatorial race.

What gives? Well, for starters, the stench of currently being in office. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), who made the leap from House to Senate in 2024, told me, “It’s a tough climate” this year, noting that Utah has lost “a lot of incumbent mayors in non-partisan races.”

“I think it always has been [toxic],” Curtis said of incumbency in Republican primaries. “I mean, it has its advantages, obviously. But people love the new, shiny things.”

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New York Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman said he went too far by comparing Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander, who is Jewish, to a concentration camp guard.

“Brad Lander, he’s a disgrace,” Blakeman said in a Newsmax interview on Wednesday. “He’s anti-American. He’s antisemitic, even though he’s Jewish. This guy would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could. He’s a disaster.”

After the interview gained traction, Blakeman told the Washington Examiner that he went too far but still believed the sentiment of his statement.

“Maybe camp guard was too strong, but certainly collaborator as Brad Lander turned his back on the Jewish community when he locked arms with the extremists who want to wipe Israel off the map, send pro-Israel Americans to concentration camps, and refuse to condemn the slaughter of women and babies on Oct. 7,” Blakeman said on Thursday.

Lander, who is open about his Jewish faith and political advocacy with leftist Jewish groups, secured the Democratic nomination in New York’s 10th Congressional District this week with the endorsement of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. His successful primary ouster of incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) has drawn mass media attention as part of a sweep of socialist victories throughout the Big Apple.

Blakeman, who is also Jewish, secured the Republican nomination to take on Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) in the general election on Tuesday as well. His comment from Wednesday has begun receiving backlash online, with longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) calling Blakeman’s words a “grotesque desecration” of the memory of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

“For Bruce Blakeman to invoke the Holocaust to smear a fellow Jewish man is beyond the pale, it is a grotesque desecration of the memory of six million Jews,” Nadler said in a statement to Semafor. “These comments are disqualifying, and they show exactly why Bruce Blakeman must never be Governor of New York.”

In the congressional primary between Lander and Goldman, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became a central debate. Lander calls himself a “liberal Zionist,” while Goldman positioned himself as “unabashedly pro-Israel.”

MAMDANI-BACKED NEW YORK CANDIDATE NAMES HER HOT TAKE: ‘NATIONALIZE THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY’

In an election-night speech, Lander said he would “stand up for Palestinian human rights” in Congress, while also committing to “stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews,” according to the New York Times. Lander also committed during the primary to never take money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while hitting Goldman hard for doing so.

The Washington Examiner has reached out to Lander for comment.

Four years ago this month, our nation took a historic step when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the so-called “right” to end a baby’s life in the United States and returned the authority to regulate abortion to the people.

Since then, the abortion industry has intensified its efforts to convince women that pregnancy is inherently dangerous and harmful to their health. While pregnancy can involve complications, those cases are the exception, not the rule. Yet these exceptions are often used to justify abortion at every stage throughout pregnancy, including the growing number of at-home abortions using mail-ordered mifepristone without direct physician oversight.

While we cannot stress enough how important it is to correct misinformation about abortion drugs, we want to flip the entire script of the abortion industry by highlighting something too often overlooked: the remarkable benefits of pregnancy for women.

DEMOCRATS ATTACK TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FOR REFERRING WOMEN TO PREGNANCY RESOURCE CENTERS

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists has partnered with EveryLife, to launch the ReThink Pregnancy campaign, an effort to educate women about the extraordinary design and capabilities of the maternal body.

When you consider everything that must fall into place perfectly to conceive, sustain, and deliver a healthy child, pregnancy is nothing short of remarkable. While the process can feel overwhelming, women’s bodies are uniquely equipped for this life-giving role. Modern science is also revealing many of the long-term physical and neurological benefits of pregnancy for women.

First, let’s tackle the obvious: a woman’s body is forever changed by pregnancy, and these changes are overwhelmingly for the best. From the long-term benefits of “pregnancy brain” to the protective effects of breastfeeding, these changes offer life-sustaining gifts.

One of the most noticeable changes is the phenomenon often called “pregnancy brain.” Often treated as a joke or an annoyance, it reflects real neurological adaptations. During pregnancy, hormonal changes reshape the brain through a process called neuroplasticity. These changes can enhance empathy and strengthen the bond between mother and child. They may also improve a mother’s ability to manage multiple responsibilities, one reason many studies suggest mothers often excel in leadership and management roles.

Pregnancy can also provide lasting health benefits. Women who carry pregnancies to term and breastfeed have lower rates of certain cancers. Breastfeeding, for example, is associated with a reduced risk of breast cancer. It turns out that the annoying breast tenderness felt during early pregnancy is actually your body multiplying its breast tissue in order to breastfeed, and that tissue becomes very cancer-resistant in the third trimester. In fact, studies show that we see an 80% reduced risk for breast cancer after a woman has three children and breastfeeds for at least 12 months. With ovarian and uterine cancers, we see a reduced risk for women after just a single pregnancy, with up to a 50% risk reduction after multiple pregnancies. These benefits deserve greater attention as part of a broader understanding of women’s health and should factor into how women are counseled as they contemplate pregnancy.

Motherhood can also inspire healthier habits and a stronger commitment to long-term well-being. Research suggests that women who have children later in life often live longer. And while pregnancies after age 35 can involve additional risks, women who maintain the health necessary to sustain a pregnancy may also benefit from the long-term physical and emotional advantages that come along with becoming a mother.

SUPREME COURT GETS IT RIGHT: HARASSED PREGNANCY CENTER DESERVES ITS DAY IN FEDERAL COURT

Pregnancy is often described as a marathon, and for good reason. A woman’s cardiovascular strength expands when her pregnancy is carried to full term, and her risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke is significantly reduced later in life. Pregnancy permanently reshapes her pelvic structure and builds up the foundations for her muscle mass, providing a stabilizing effect to prepare her for birth and motherhood.

The resilience and strength demonstrated through pregnancy and childbirth are remarkable. Our bodies were seemingly designed to push past limits and then keep on going. And as we continue to build a life-affirming society in this post-Dobbs era, let’s champion the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of pregnancy and motherhood.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) chairs the Senate Pro-Life Caucus. Dr. Christina Francis, M.D., is CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

President Donald Trump boasted that at least 45,000 people attended his kickoff celebration for the Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, one of many events put on by his Freedom 250 group to mark America’s 250th birthday.

“The Crowd was incredible last night, packed to the brim, At least 45,000 people were there, with a huge Television and online audience,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I wish we were able to have an even larger area, which we will be able to do on July 4th when I’ll be speaking again. The airplane flyovers and music were fantastic. Everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America.”

Neither Freedom 250 nor the National Park Service provided the Washington Examiner with their own crowd size estimates.

After his meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, @potus caps this day with a Freedom 250 rally. pic.twitter.com/DGrsJCpiBL

, Naomi Lim (@naomitlim) June 25, 2026

Trump asked Freedom 250 to put on the event after multiple musical acts, who said they didn’t know Freedom 250 was aligned with Trump, pulled out of a separate planned concert series.

Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan are the only original artists who remain committed to the concert series after the departure of the likes of Bret Michaels and Martina McBride.

“As the visionary behind the Great American State Fair, we are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24 in an opening ceremony celebrating America’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez told the Washington Examiner earlier this month. “This has never been about performers or celebrities. The spotlight belongs to the United States of America and not to any individual artist.”

Crowd size has always been a sore spot for Trump after his 2017 inauguration crowd size was compared unfavorably to that of former President Barack Obama‘s in 2009.

TRUMP BATS DOWN COMPROMISE ON THE SAVE AMERICA ACT

During his speech Wednesday, Trump also encouraged people to attend his July 4 Salute to America rally next week, another Freedom 250 event.

“July 4 we will have the greatest show of all on the National Mall,” he said. “Your favorite president will be speaking, so please show up. If we have to empty seats, the fake news will say, he didn’t fill out the arena. I will be proudly speaking as we ring in our 250th year with the largest fireworks display in world history, 10 times larger than any that we’ve ever done in Washington or in the United States.”

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos Shutterstock

1. Ethnography

My best friend and I have a long-running dialogue about what The People want, and the nice part of this conversation is that we’re both right. Let me explain.

When Sarah and I talk about “The People” we’re using shorthand for a subset of Trump voters that number in the tens of millions. Not the super-online edge lords. Not the captains of industry. Not the professional partisans. We’re talking about the folks who don’t have politics as part of their central identity. We’re talking about the “normal” people, out there in Red America, just living their lives and voting for Donald Trump.

Cards on the table: I do not have a lot of sympathy for these folks. My thesis, especially since 2024, has been that they respond to Trump not in spite of his illiberalism, but because of it. My thesis is that they want the strongman stuff and everything else Trump offers them is beside the point.

Sarah’s thesis is roughly the opposite.

And as I said: We’re both right. If we’re talking about a group of, say, 40 million Americans (give or take), millions of them will be as I see them, and millions will be as Sarah sees them.

But still, it can be useful to understand some of the currents of this group’s thought, even as we allow that there is no single, correct answer.

Today we have something amazing: A big study in which researchers hunkered down with The People and had detailed conversations with them, over long periods of time.

The study, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute and published in May, is here. Researchers embedded with folks in super-red counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. Here’s how they describe their methodology:

This study relies on ethnographic research sustained immersion in people’s homes, lives, and communities through extensive interviews, observations, participation, and relationship-building. Where much democracy research documents what people say they believe, ethnography examines how and why political worldviews take shape within the full context of daily experiences, relationships, and social environments. . . .

The ethnographic stance requires sustained curiosity and a commitment to deeply understanding people on their own terms. Our role as researchers is one of translation: to convey how independent and what some might see as “competing” beliefs make sense within the context of people’s lives.

Pretty amazing, right? Now let me hit you with the big takeaway:

14 out of 21 participants in this study had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy.

As a wise man once said: They are who we thought they were.

I want to go deep on this question because the people in the study describe a remarkable consistency about why they dislike democracy. It’s not that they’re misled, or mistaken. They have a coherent worldview.

It’s just not very nice.

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Senate Republicans are trying to turn the page on a heated lunch with President Donald Trump that brought weeks of tensions to a new high-water mark.

In a symbolic gesture, Senate Republicans took another vote on the Iran war Wednesday night, flipping two senators Trump singled out at the lunch for siding with Democrats. The move does not erase a vote senators took a couple of days earlier that passed. That legislation passed both the House and Senate with a handful of GOP defections.

But it did allow Republicans to say they were giving the president space to negotiate a peace deal, and they went to great pains to be sure he noticed.

The Senate’s top two Republicans, John Thune (R-SD) and John Barrasso (R-WY), called the president after the vote, joined by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH).

Trump then posted a surprised “Wow!” on Truth Social to express satisfaction with the about-face.

Earlier in the day, Trump got into a yelling match with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), one of the senators who ultimately changed his vote, and spent much of the lunch fuming over his sense that Republicans were undermining his negotiations with Iran.

INSIDE TRUMP’S EXPLOSIVE MEETING WITH SENATE REPUBLICANS

The vent session was part of a larger rift with congressional Republicans over his second-term priorities. On top of Iran, Trump has been lashing out over the Senate’s inaction on the SAVE America Act, a sweeping election bill that has stalled out due to the filibuster.

The appointment of Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist, as acting intelligence chief has also become a stumbling block, and Republicans want him out of the job and replaced by his expected successor, Jay Clayton.

For now, a bipartisan housing bill and the renewal of a key spy program have become casualties of those standoffs, and their fate was in limbo as Senate Republicans left for the July 4 recess.

The Iran war vote, the final one taken as senators departed Washington, amounts to a ramp-down in those tensions and was accompanied by three conversations in total Wednesday between Trump and Thune, two of them over the phone and one in person after the lunch.

A source familiar with the conversations described them as “positive,” and it appeared the White House, too, wanted to smooth things over afterward.

Barrasso’s whip operation on the war powers vote was aided by Vice President JD Vance, the top peace negotiator for Iran. Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff hosted Cassidy in the White House Situation Room for a briefing on Iran and held a dinner with GOP senators that evening. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) flipped his vote to “present” afterward, while Cassidy joined Republicans in voting “no.”

Trump, for his part, did not let the blow-up add to speculation that his relationship with Thune is fraying, but he did take a parting shot at Cassidy and others who have broken with him on the Senate floor.

Cassidy, in particular, has drawn the president’s ire for his 2021 impeachment vote, and Trump ran a successful primary challenge against him over it.

“We like our leader,” Trump said as he left the lunch. “We like everybody, really, in the room, I don’t like a few people, but that’s OK. I think you know who they are.”

Thune told the Washington Examiner the meeting at the Capitol was “important” insofar as it allowed Trump to air out his grievances.

“In that respect, it sort of accomplished the objective,” he said.

But left unaddressed was Senate Republicans’ own frustration with how the rough patch has been derailing their legislative agenda. Cassidy got an Iran briefing, but so far, lawmakers writ large have not. And Trump, holding up the housing bill over the SAVE America Act, canceled a signing ceremony for its passage Wednesday.

To some extent, Senate Republicans are at odds over those same issues. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the lead sponsor of the SAVE America Act, called Trump’s decision to delay the ceremony “bold” and voiced support for a presidential veto, if the president felt it was appropriate.

“If he’s got concerns with it, why not?” Lee said.

In terms of the spy program, Senate Republicans can’t get the votes to reauthorize it until Clayton, viewed as a more bipartisan choice for intelligence chief, is appointed, but there are, as of now, no plans to reschedule a confirmation hearing after Trump torpedoed the one already on the books last week.

“My partner Tom Cotton is anxious, and I’m anxious,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But as we’ve seen again today, the president’s unpredictable.”

THUNE URGES TRUMP NOT TO VETO BIPARTISAN HOUSING BILL: ‘HOPE HE DOESN’T GO THERE’

Over in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has proposed that Republicans get on the same page by passing elements of the SAVE America Act, namely block grants for ID and other voting requirements, through reconciliation. He traveled to the White House on Thursday to pitch Trump on that filibuster-skirting budget process.

Still, Trump appears cool to that idea and told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that he did not want to settle for a “compromise” bill. Finding an off-ramp is increasingly becoming necessary for GOP leadership as House rebels threaten to shut down the floor in the absence of a path forward.

With America’s 250th anniversary approaching, Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha said Democrats are busy sulking while the country prepares to celebrate the nation’s history and achievements.

“There’s one party it seems that is patriotic, even jingoistic, about the United States of America, and then there is another party that is as angry as Rosie O’Donnell and George Conway,” Concha said Wednesday on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime.

Democrats “are downright miserable about the country, if not themselves,” Concha said.

Concha argued that the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is creating a divisive split in the nation. He cited an NBC News poll that found 12% of Kamala Harris voters said they are extremely proud of the U.S. He compared that to those who voted for President Donald Trump, which Concha said was 90%.

“It really is two countries now at this point,” Concha said.

Concha highlighted what he called a “communist takeover” in major American cities as part of the problem with anti-American rhetoric.

“Do you want to be the party that hates this country, that wants to tear it all down because some people just want to watch the world burn?” Concha said. “Or do you want to be the party that embraces what makes this country so awesome? Amazon, Apple, White Castle, Topgolf, the Jersey Shore, Savannah Bananas, Sydney Sweeney.

“So forget policy, we’re an awesome country, and if you don’t embrace it, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

Concha emphasized events in Washington celebrating America 250. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump opened the Great American State Fair, complete with an exhibition for each state, live performances, vendors, fighter jet flyovers, and even a rodeo.

Concha said Democrats support “big government and communism” and Republicans are for “common sense and capitalism.”

FREEDOM 250’S GREAT AMERICAN STATE FAIR KICKS OFF 16-DAY FESTIVAL ON NATIONAL MALL: ‘AMERICA COME TO LIFE’

He pointed out Republicans’ happiness and joy surrounding America 250.

“Do you want to sit on your phones and stay in your basement, or in your apartment somewhere, talking about how miserable you are,” Concha said, “instead of getting out there, touching grass and saying, ‘You know what, maybe I should enjoy myself and actually talk to other human beings,’ instead of going online and talking about how horrible this country is?”

AVERY COUNTY, N.C., If there is such a thing as the classic Appalachian success story, the rise in popularity of the outside-the-box band Cigarettes at Sunset would be that story.

But nothing comes easy in Appalachia.

The five-member band, which includes Garrett Dellinger, Ryland Bagbey, Sarah Vann, Wells Whitman, and Ethan Moore, was born in the winter of 2022, practicing their music in the cold, unheated seats of the Edge of the World Snowboard Shop in Banner Elk.

Four years later, they have amassed over 225,000 monthly Spotify listeners with a unique sound that blends lyrics about small-town grit with an irresistible, undefinable beat that band members call “Possum Rock.”

Dellinger, the lead vocalist, explains that they were playing at a bar one night when a drunk patron walked up to their merchandise table. “He said, ‘Do y’all play possum rock?’ I just kind of shrugged and thought, I’ll go with that, and the label stuck,” he said.

Bagbey jokes that he hopes the very drunk guy doesn’t come back looking for royalties.

As for the unique name of the band, Dellinger admits it was pretty impulsive: “I was enjoying a smoke at sunset on the mountain and thought it would make a great name for a band.”

The story began in the rugged Blue Ridge Mountains, where childhood friends Dellinger and Bagbey started writing music in 2021. Moore and Whitman soon joined, but their unique sound wasn’t solidified until classically trained violinist Vann joined the mix.

Vann says her introduction to the group was supposed to be a one-off favor when they asked her to add a fiddle to a cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.”

That single performance changed everything.

“When Garrett lets me go with it, I like to layer and loop, and make it sound orchestral,” Vann explains. “I think it’s a nice juxtaposition.”

It is that exact intersection, Vann’s intricate, sweeping classical sensibilities weaving through Dellinger’s gravelly vocals and heavy indie-rock riffs, that gives the band its identity. They are young people who shared the same ridgeline, grew up navigating the same cultural independence, and brought those shared roots onto the stage.

To understand the music of Cigarettes at Sunset, you have to understand the lines that blur across the ridges of Western North Carolina. It is a place where towns bleed into one another, connected not by superhighways, but by two-lane roads, shared hardships, and the quiet resilience and defiance that defines modern Appalachia.

The band effectively captures this in their lyrics, using a bluesy, mountain-rock beat to convey both the beauty of the vast, quiet space of mountain life and the isolation and pride that come with it. This is exactly where the music hits you.

Their story is one repeated across the generations in the hills and hollers of the region. When there is less to do, you create. You pick up an instrument. You find others who feel the same pull and are looking for an outlet for their creativity, and you form a community.

Their March 2026 debut EP, Possum Rock, released under Lost Highway Records, isn’t a polished Top 40 country product. It is an unruly, riff-heavy, and fiercely independent collision of indie-rock, gritty blues, and traditional mountain fiddle runs. Tracks like “Pavement,” which has eclipsed four million streams, capture love, addiction, and small-town restlessness. The record sounds exactly like Boone: local bar venues, gravel driveways, and open mountain fields.

For Cigarettes at Sunset, Appalachia isn’t a marketing gimmick; it is a worldview forged by both the beauty and the brutality of the region. When Hurricane Helene tore through their home region of Boone in late 2024, it altered everything. However, the devastation didn’t break the community, it brought people together.

For the band, living through that recovery underscored a deep commitment to making music that endures, serving as a reminder of the rugged resilience baked into the mountain DNA. It is why their music balances deep sorrow with an absolute refusal to break.

The breakout success of Cigarettes at Sunset, who went from playing tiny bars around Western North Carolina to logging nearly a hundred shows a year and packing rooms on a multi-city national tour, signals a much larger cultural shift.

FOUNDRY FOR THE FUTURE: THE SILICON VALLEY OF APPALACHIA

America is currently experiencing a profound awakening to its Appalachian roots. For decades, coastal media dismissed this region as an afterthought, an isolated pocket of the past. But today, everyday Americans are hungry for something real.

In a world filled with manufactured internet trends and artificial perfection, the raw, unfiltered honesty of “Y’allternative” and Appalachian music is striking a massive chord. Listeners from Texas to London are singing these songs back to the band word-for-word at their shows. They are looking to the hills and finding comfort in the storytelling, the community, and the timeless truth that the best things in life are grown right from the land they call home.

Some members of the Democratic Party establishment are bemoaning that the party is being taken over by people who hate it. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Jaime Harrison, who was the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2021 to 2025, is one of those establishment figures lamenting that Democrat-hating socialist candidates co-opted the party in New York City’s elections. Harrison posted on X, telling socialist candidates that “if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.”

I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination.

Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your…

, Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) June 23, 2026

OVER 30 SOCIALISTS HAVE WON PRIMARIES THIS YEAR

Considering Harrison ran the DNC during the Biden administration, he is likely speaking for more than just himself here. These socialist candidates do have contempt for the Democratic Party as it exists. As New York City Democratic Socialists of America Co-Chairman Gustavo Gordillo has said, “We don’t agree with the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus.” Gordillo specifically referred in his comments to Democrats being funded by “billionaire donors” while trying to represent the working class.

This is the DSA co-chair. Let me summarize what he says in this video:

We’re using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it’s useful,… pic.twitter.com/zYwsv4J8Bt

, The Undercurrent (@NotTheirScript) June 24, 2026

The Democratic Party establishment is being conquered because it talked the talk to the impressionable radicals in its base without walking the walk. Democrats rant and rave that the wealthy are destroying the country and stealing from the working class, for example, while relying on megadonors (such as George and Alex Soros) or promoting wealthy elites as their top candidates (such as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL). How can you villainize the wealthy when one of the leading figures in your party establishment is stock market “savant” Nancy Pelosi? (And yes, the socialist activists are wild hypocrites on this issue, as evidenced by their top figure being wealthy elitist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani).

This isn’t limited to class warfare either. For years, Democrats have repeatedly called every Republican a Nazi and a fascist, calling the party and its leading figures a “threat to democracy.” Most of that ire has been directed toward President Donald Trump, but we have seen countless examples of Democrats prepping their “worse than Trump” arguments for every Republican who poses a threat to the Democratic Party’s grip on power.

IDENTITY POLITICS AND TRUMP HATE LOSE TO ISLAMIST COMMUNISM IN NYC

But Democrats, despite their rhetorical extremism, continue to treat politics as business as usual. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will talk about Republicans like they are the scourge of the Earth, and then he will work with them or negotiate with them, no different than any politician would do on occasion with the opposition party.

The voters flocking to socialist candidates who hate the Democratic Party notice this. You can’t spend years calling your opponents authoritarians who must be defeated while still treating them as a typical opposition party. Socialist candidates and voters see that and assume the Democratic Party is ineffective and worthy of scorn, and so they take it over while despising leaders such as Harrison and the establishment figures who have talked the talk without truly walking the walk. Harrison and his fellow Democratic leaders have fueled this hatred among socialist candidates. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Yesterday was an enormous day for earthquakes. Seismic activity rocked Japan and Northern California, but nowhere was hit harder than Venezuela, which suffered a devastating pair of quakes that leveled buildings and struck terror throughout the capital of Caracas and beyond. At least 164 people died in the quake, acting President Delcy Rodríguez said, and at least 971 more were injured.

In a grim way, Venezuela has one thing to be thankful for: After seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last year and handing power over to Rodríguez, President Donald Trump has moved Venezuela from his “enemies” to his “friends” list, and he is therefore in a giving mood. “The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly. We will be there for our new and great friends.” Happy Thursday.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

Trump Shoots Another Legislative Hostage

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump has been flogging it for only about six months, but the Save America Act already has a chance to go down in history as the most consequential piece of legislation never passed. Faced with the cold reality that Senate Republicans just don’t have the votes for his elections wishlist bill, Trump has responded the only way he knows how: by squeezing harder.

Threatening to primary senators who won’t do what he wants is his go-to move, but lately he’s been doing even more, taking important bills hostage until the Save America Act reaches his desk.

As of yesterday, however, the president isn’t just blocking bills Congress wants passed. He’s even targeting bills that, at least on paper, are his own legislative priorities.

We’ve written a few times this year about the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that took a number of reasonable steps toward addressing America’s ongoing acute housing shortage through a combination of incentives and deregulation for builders, along with a basically pointless but extremely popular provision restricting big financial firms from speculating in the real-estate market. It’s a good bill that had wide bipartisan buy-in and the blessing of the White House. Moreover, it only improved as it was moving through the legislative sausage-making process. Republicans wanted to show they were taking steps on affordability. Democrats wanted to show that, despite their relative lack of power in the minority, they were scoring wins to rein in big corporations. Everybody wins!

Politics used to be, well, not this bad. We think it can be again. That’s why we built the best pro-democracy community on the internet. Join Bulwark+ to be a part of it.

Until yesterday, that is. That’s when Trump suddenly announced he was derailing the bill his administration had helped build and shepherd through Congress just minutes before the ceremony at which he was to sign it into law. The chairs and podium were already set up in Statuary Hall and lawmakers were already starting to assemble for the victory party when Trump fired up Truth Social: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Don’t say the guy’s lost his flair for the dramatic. The scene was almost Shakespearean: a sudden, shocking betrayal at the very last moment, leaving lawmakers aghast and ashen-faced. Some made hopeful noises that Trump would reconsider once he was reminded how many of his own legislative priorities were in the bill. Others started brainstorming about whether they might be able to carve a piece or two out of the Save America Act that could pass the Senate and, in theory, placate the president.

In fact, if you’d followed the president’s housing statements closely, you might have been a bit less surprised. Although the White House had been heavily involved with creating the ROAD to Housing Act, Trump himself wasn’t so sure he wanted to see housing affordability improve. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,” Trump said at a cabinet meeting in January. “And they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen.”

The only part of the bill Trump really liked, funnily enough, was its slopulist ban on institutional investors buying single-family homes. Other legislators had seen that provision as the candy coating to make their otherwise boring but useful pro-housing bill easier to pitch. Trump wanted nothing but the candy coating. And ultimately, he didn’t want it so much that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice it on the altar of the Save America Act.

Trump’s sudden reversal is yet another self-inflicted wound, the latest demonstration of his inability to form a useful theory of mind for the electorate: He simply cannot get it through his head that voters really care more about their cost of living than they do about his grasping attempts to avoid losing an election at all costs. And he’s robbing the Republicans, who, unlike him, actually need to win an election this year, of one of their most potent affordability arguments as a result.

For these lawmakers, Trump couldn’t be making it plainer: If you’re not ready to burn down everything in service of what he tells you to do, he’s not interested in working with you on anything, period. It’s the “bomb the bridges and power plants” strategy applied to Congress: If you make people hurt enough, Trump is pretty sure, eventually they’ll do what you want. That theory didn’t work on Iran. How far it will work on Senate Republicans remains to be seen.

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Trump Wants Only One Thing: To Control Our Elections

by William Kristol

A couple of days ago, I wrote that “we’re entering a period of maximum authoritarian threat, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play. And we’ll be in that era of threat for the next two and a half years.”

Today I just want to add a pretty obvious point: November 3, 2026 is key. It’s likely to be the crucial moment, the potential inflection point, in shaping the course of these next two and a half years. If Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress, or even of one, there’s at least a decent chance of success in checking to some degree Trump’s assault on our civil and political liberties.

The good news is that the public is holding firm in its disapproval of Trump and its desire to check him. Democrats are very likely to do well in free and fair elections this fall.

But Trump knows that. And he and his henchmen know how damaging a loss in November would be. Just yesterday, we had several reminders of the lengths to which the administration may go to try to prevent such a defeat.

The first data point was Trump’s dramatic refusal, described by Andrew above, to sign a bipartisan housing bill in an attempt to pressure Republican senators to advance his federal voter suppression agenda. Trump said he wouldn’t sign the legislation “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”

Trump’s willingness to take any hostage available to pressure recalcitrant Republican senators to help subvert the 2026 elections is striking. It seems for now that Republican senators will continue to resist this part of Trump’s authoritarian agenda. But might they bow to this pressure, as they have in so many other areas?

And what if they don’t? Trump’s invocation yesterday of a “national emergency” was ominous. He and his apparatchiks have used the language of “emergency” to claim unprecedented executive powers in a variety of areas. If his election subversion legislation can’t pass in the Senate, are we confident Trump won’t try to implement it on his own?

I’m not.

Another data point: In testimony yesterday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Trump’s postmaster general, David Steiner, defended a new rule proposed by the administration under which the Postal Service can refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t turn over their voting lists to the federal executive branch. Courts around the nation have found this federal demand for state lists unjustified by any law or the Constitution. But the Trump administration intends to try to move ahead using its executive authority.

The Trump administration is all-in on tilting the playing field so as not to lose this November.

Will other players step up to save the day? Will judges allow themselves to see the broader implications of the Trump administration’s acts, abandoning a presumption of regularity by the executive branch and approaching cases with a presumption of suspicion? Will senior officials cashiered from the military speak out about what’s happening at Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department? Will public servants still in government do what they can, peacefully and lawfully, to challenge and impede their political masters’ authoritarian schemes? Will activists continue and even redouble their admirable efforts at mobilizing public resistance around the nation? Above all, will Democrats in Congress fight over the next months in every way and on every front, including fighting every funding increase, to stop the Trump administration from amassing even more power?

Trump claims it’s an emergency. But the true emergency is that his authoritarian project is in his full swing. Can the defenders of democracy rise to the occasion?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

What Happens When the Country Loses a General… It takes a long time to build up a leader, observes MARK HERTLING.

Elon Musk’s Race War Hobby… He doesn’t like brown people and he isn’t trying to hide it, writes CATHY YOUNG.

The Reflecting Pool Is a Symbol of Trump’s Failure… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to unpack Trump’s claimed Iran “win,” the new revelations about JD Vance in Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman’s book, Trump’s habit of comparing himself to history’s worst tyrants, and a DOJ legal theory that could weaken Americans’ right to sue polluters.

Hope and Determination on Ukraine’s Front Lines… The war isn’t won. It may not be won. But these soldiers won’t stop fighting, reports FRANCIS FARRELL of the Kyiv Independent.

The Democratic Tea Party Isn’t Here, Yet… Maybe keep the fine china in storage for now, says PETER ROTHPLETZ.

‘Supergirl’ Is a Tremendous Slog of a Film… SONNY BUNCH has the review.

Quick Hits

THE CONSTITUTION SAYS I CAN DO WHAT I WANT: Donald Trump’s first executive order about elections last year included language attempting to require people to prove their citizenship to vote. Lacking the power to change federal election law by fiat, the administration had tried instead to strong-arm states to comply with a host of standards not present in law by threatening to cut off federal money to any that refused. A federal judge temporarily blocked that order last year, and this week she made her decision permanent, ruling that the order would have unconstitutionally usurped congressional powers.

“While the Constitution vests the President with ‘executive power’ and commands him to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” Judge Denise Casper wrote, “it does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

It wasn’t the president’s only legal setback on elections yesterday. The courts have consistently stymied Trump’s efforts to seize various swing states’ voter rolls, and on Wednesday, a three-judge panel gave the president another L on that front, affirming the dismissal of a Justice Department lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

GENERAL DOWN: Another day, another top general apparently purged by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Washington Post reports:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stonewalled a behind-the-scenes effort within the Army and on Capitol Hill to extend the career of an influential general, people familiar with the matter said, leading to that officer submitting retirement paperwork and preparing to step down.

Gen. Christopher Donahue, head of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, will leave his role on July 2 after an unusually brief 18-month tenure, these people said, some speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. Hegseth’s move has exasperated some Army officials, considering Donahue’s background as a highly regarded Special Operations commander and the secretary’s stated focus on making the military more lethal.

“He’s singularly our best warfighter at every level,” one retired senior Army officer said of Donahue.

Read the whole thing. Mark Hertling, who once held the command Donahue is now leaving, described how valuable an officer Donahue is on “Command Post” yesterday, and has an article on the homepage today about how much it hurts the military and the country when accomplished leaders are forced out.

WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME BIG OIL: Donald Trump took a page out of Joe Biden’s inflation-survival playbook this week, fuming in a Truth Social post late Tuesday night that gasoline prices remained elevated despite the cost of oil falling amid his peace negotiations with Iran.

“Customers are being ‘gouged,’” Trump wrote. “I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”

It was a twist on a move more often practiced by Democrats: Be mad at the corporations, not at us. But of course it was also uniquely Trumpian: Biden’s attempts to blame price-gouging corporations for bad economic conditions never included vague and ominous threats of criminal investigation. And they also rarely came on the back of months of presidential cheerleading over how much money the greedy corporations were making: Throughout the Hormuz crisis, Trump routinely argued that the energy shock was good for America, since so much of the rest of the world was forced to import so much American oil.

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Saul Levin joins Paris Marx to discuss how rising opposition to data center construction is uniting people across party lines.

The post Data Center Opposition Is Uniting Communities, With Saul Levin appeared first on The Nation.

The Ockenden report tells a terrible story of neglect. It’s a story that I, and far too many women I know, recognise

The findings of Donna Ockenden’s report on maternity services at Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust (NUH) are horrifying. Such is the scale of suffering on the part of mothers, babies and their loved ones that it is almost beyond contemplation. Harrowing details, a room filled with the smell of infection after a woman who was told to labour at home for six days was finally granted surgery; a student doctor being allowed to perform an emergency hysterectomy on a woman, and accidentally removing her bladder; a baby’s remains being disposed of as clinical waste, haunt you long after you finish reading. And then there are all those babies, who should now be exuberant, lovely children, who died because of poor care and neglect.

The victims and survivors, who campaigned long and hard for this review, don’t have the luxury of absorbing this information at their own pace, as I had to on Wednesday. They have lived with the brutal reality of it for many long years as they have fought for justice and accountability. These “mad grieving parents”, Sarah Hawkins’ description of how they were made to feel after the death of their daughter Harriet, did not give up in their quest for answers, and though they have been vindicated, I imagine there is a bitter aftertaste. Shamefully, nearly half of the senior members of staff at NUH refused to speak to Ockenden’s review.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Our schools are a dated mix of single glazing, dodgy pipes and atriums like Kew hothouses. They urgently need retrofitting for a changing climate

This week’s soaring summer temperatures have put a spotlight on our schools and their ability to cope, with one in Hertfordshire telling me that it recorded temperatures of more than 40C. So why are our schools struggling?

Modern schools often have too much glass, and not enough shading or ventilation to keep out the sun’s heat. During the 1950s, the focus on public health (after the creation of the NHS in 1948) meant that schools were designed to bring in more natural light. Windows often have built-in restrictors that stop them being opened too far, or at all, because of student safety concerns. Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse.

Harry Paticas is an architect and the founder of Retrofit Action for Tomorrow

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Families are right to be angry about devastating care failures in Nottingham. Ministers must respond fast

The painful familiarity of key themes in Donna Ockenden’s review of maternity care failures must not detract from the urgency around this issue. The 400-page report published on Wednesday is a shocking catalogue of what went wrong at Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust. Its contents range from a excruciating case study of the errors leading to the death of baby Harriet Hawkins in 2016, and the cover-up that followed, to trust-wide problems with staffing, culture and leadership. It also highlights flaws in the wider NHS, citing the finding of the 2022 Messenger review that political pressure can lead bosses “to look upwards to furnish the needs of the hierarchy rather than downwards to the needs of the service-user”.

Given its around 100 action points, implementation is a daunting prospect. Next week, Valerie Amos will add to these, and the more than 700 recommendations of earlier reports, with her own investigation of maternity care in England. Wes Streeting had pledged to chair a new taskforce and his resignation as health secretary alarmed campaigners. Whoever ends up in charge, a commitment to maternity care improvement must be non-negotiable, and firmly grounded in practicalities. The review points to a damaging split between strategy and operations in Nottingham. NHS England must avoid replicating this.

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Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Available as MacOS app or CLI. Fully free/local and OSS (https://github.com/inkeep/open-knowledge).We built this because we wanted a “Google docs” like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true “what you see is what you get” UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first usersOSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/treesOn the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675435

Points: 41

# Comments: 12

Google Finance is not a new product, it has been around for 20 years, long enough that it initially relied on Flash to display charts and graphs. The website has gotten a few major updates over the years, but it has never had a mobile app until now. Google has released the first standalone app for Google Finance, which is currently exclusive to Android, with iOS planned for later this year.

The app is available globally in the Play Store, but that's not the only update to Google's financial tracker. The AI-powered makeover for the Finance website is also leaving beta, making Google's chatbot a core part of the experience. Naturally, the mobile app includes a heaping helping of generative AI that aims to make sense of irrational financial markets.

If you've checked out the new Finance web experience, you'll see a lot of familiar features in the app. You can create watchlists, monitor real-time market data, and keep up with financial news in one place. While perusing graphs of stock performance, Finance will use AI to generate "key moments" that can explain why the numbers changed. This feature initially launched in the Finance web interface in May.

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Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets.

Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on “AI and the American Dream.” In the letter, Anthropic shared “new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities we have ever measured.”

The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when “operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab” allegedly generated “more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign “targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks.”

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The International Maritime Organization on Thursday paused an effort to evacuate ships stuck in the Persian Gulf after a vessel was attacked crossing the Strait of Hormuz.

The new attack threatens the fragile ceasefire signed by Iran and the U.S. last week, which requires Iran to restore normal shipping operations through the Strait of Hormuz. Ship traffic through the waterway has steadily increased since the agreement was signed, though it remains well below pre-war levels.

IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez said in a statement that he had paused the evacuation effort after the attack on the vessel, which was not transiting under the United Nations-chartered organization’s framework.

“I have decided to temporarily pause its implementation in order to reconfirm that the necessary safety guarantees continue to be in place for the ships on our evacuation list and all those in the region,” Dominguez said.

The UK Maritime Trade Operations Center said Thursday it had received a report from a vessel traveling close to the Omani coast that it was struck by an “unknown projectile.” The attack caused damage to the bridge, but there were no casualties.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran was behind the attack. Tehran had warned earlier Thursday that ships must use its designated corridors through the strait, rather than the more southerly route backed by the U.S.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack or IMO’s decision to suspend the evacuation. The U.S. benchmark crude price, which has been steadily falling since the agreement, jumped more than 2 percent Thursday afternoon.

Nearly 50 vessels transited the waterway Wednesday, the highest single day since the conflict began, according to maritime intelligence firm Windward. It reported, however, that at least five vessels traversing the southern corridor had turned back as of Thursday morning after Iran issued the new threat.

Dominguez had announced the IMO campaign Tuesday, aiming to end “months of hardship and distress” for more than 11,000 seafarers who have been stuck in the strait since the war began. It said the effort was backed by the U.S., Iran, Oman and other Gulf countries.

Jurors in the federal trial of a man accused of starting the deadly 2025 Palisades Fire in California told a judge on Thursday that the panel was deadlocked, shortly after previously stating they had reached a verdict.

The announcement came on the second day of deliberations in the trial against Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, following a 10-day federal trial over the blaze. The conflagration stands as the most destructive in Los Angeles County's history and claimed at least a dozen lives.

A note sent by the jury foreman to the judge initially stated that the panel had reached a verdict. However, a second note sent just minutes later claimed the opposite.

"We have people on both sides that are dead-set. Unwavering. We are at a standstill. We are unsure how to proceed," the note read.

DANIEL PENNY JURORS TELL JUDGE THEY CAN'T AGREE ON TOP CHARGE IN SUBWAY CHOKEHOLD CASE

In response, the judge asked the jury what the court could do to assist them.

"For example, would an additional instruction or the re-reading of any testimony help the jury in their deliberations?" the judge asked.

"There is nothing the court can do to assist the jury in their deliberations. Additional instructions or rereading the testimony would not help in deliberations. Unfortunately, we cannot reach a unanimous verdict," the jury replied.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN RAPE TRIAL ENDS IN MISTRIAL AFTER JURY DEADLOCKED

Both the prosecution and defense agreed they needed more time to research legal options after the jury's latest update. The judge eventually instructed the jurors to return and resume deliberations at 9 a.m. Friday.

A deadlocked jury could ultimately result in the judge declaring a mistrial. Federal prosecutors would then have to decide whether to re-try Rinderknecht, who is charged with destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and timber set afire. He has pleaded not guilty.

Federal prosecutors maintain that Rinderknecht was driven by anger, loneliness, and a thirst for revenge against the wealthy when he allegedly started what would become the Palisades Fire.

PALISADES FIRE SUSPECT WAS ALLEGEDLY 'FIXATED' ON LUIGI MANGIONE AND HELD 'RESENTMENT OF THE RICH': COURT DOCS

The fire originally started shortly after midnight on Jan. 1, 2025, in a remote, brush-heavy area in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. That initial blaze was dubbed the Lachman Fire.

Firefighters responded to the scene on New Year's Day and believed they had successfully extinguished the blaze. However, investigators later determined that the fire never fully went out and instead continued to smolder underground.

On Jan. 7, 2025, powerful Santa Ana winds fanned the underground embers and caused the fire to resurface above ground. Driven by the strong winds and severe drought, the blaze exploded into the Palisades Fire, eventually burning over 23,000 acres and destroying roughly 6,800 structures, many of them homes.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danbee Kim told jurors during closing arguments on Tuesday that the affluent Palisades area represented a wealth disparity across the country to Rinderknecht, noting that the defendant "had a deeply entrenched belief that the wealthy were destroying the world."

Defense attorney Steven Haney argued that no physical evidence linked Rinderknecht to the destruction and contended that the Lachman and Palisades fires were entirely separate events that had nothing to do with his client, FOX Los Angeles reported.

When considering the 1960s sitcoms Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which featured women with supernatural powers navigating life with mortals, most people wouldn’t connect them with pursuing an engineering career. But Karen Panetta did. The sitcoms’ main characters, Samantha Stevens, a witch; and Jeannie, a genie, were “strong, empowered female leads using magic,” Panetta says, and they inspired her to become an engineer, as it was like sorcery to her.

Panetta, an IEEE Fellow, is dean of graduate education at the Tufts University engineering school, in Medford, Mass., outside of Boston.

Karen Panetta

Employer

Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.

Title

Dean of the engineering school’s graduate education

Member grade

IEEE Fellow

Alma maters

Boston University and Northeastern University in Boston

Like Samantha and Jeannie, Panetta has made magic happen, such as when she helped to invent the first CPU digital-twin simulator. Digital twins are computer simulation programs that track and adjust the operations of a physical device in detail. Her simulator has been adapted for several industrial uses, including by NASA to help design spacecraft.

Panetta also mentors young women to encourage them to pursue a STEM career through the Nerd Girls program she launched at Tufts in 2000. Engineering undergraduate students work on technology for socially conscious projects such as environmental cleanup, renewable energy, and the development of assistive devices to improve mobility for people with disabilities.

Panetta received this year’s IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal for “contributions to computer vision and simulation algorithms, and for leadership in developing programs to promote STEM careers.” The award, sponsored by Google, was presented at the IEEE Honors Ceremony on 24 April in New York City.

Receiving the medal is particularly special to Panetta, she says, because she knew its namesake: Mildred Dresselhaus, an IEEE Life Fellow who pioneered the study of carbon nanostructures at a time when researching physical and material properties of commonplace atoms was unpopular. She was a MIT professor of physics and electrical engineering, and died in 2017.

Panetta nominated Dresselhaus for the IEEE Medal of Honor, which she received in 2015.

“Millie was a rock star,” Panetta says. “I can’t think of another medal that really encapsulates her spirit and what I’ve dedicated my life to.”

Finding a creative outlet in engineering

As a child growing up in Boston, Panetta built trapdoors and other features in her treehouse, she says.

“I also explored fashion and sewed my own clothes,” she adds. “I wasn’t very successful, but I was very creative.”

She was a top performer in math and science classes in high school, so her father encouraged her to pursue civil engineering.

“I didn’t know what an engineer was, and my father, who was a mechanic working on heavy construction equipment, only knew about civil engineers,” Panetta says. “I started taking computer programming classes at school, but knowing how to type on a keyboard and make a software program wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to know what was inside the box.”

Her thirst for knowledge inspired her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at Boston University.

“My father was very disappointed that I didn’t pick civil engineering,” she says, laughing.

She commuted to school, and she struggled to find study groups for her classes, so she joined IEEE to connect with peers.

She became active in the university’s student branch, organizing events including the IEEE Student Professional Awareness Conference, which helps students learn practical career skills including résumé building, interviewing, and networking. She organized a SPAC for her branch, and IEEE Life Senior Member Jim Watson volunteered to speak at the event. It changed her life, she says.

Watson was the director of commercial and industrial marketing at Ohio Edison in Akron, where he worked for 36 years.

“He flew to Boston to speak at our event, but fewer than 20 students attended. I was embarrassed,” Panetta says. But Watson told her the important lesson was that she showed up and organized the event.

“He said I would be successful because of that,” she says. “He didn’t care about the attendees’ grade point averages, only that we were professional enough to organize the talk.

“That encouragement was the first time anyone outside of my family ever told me that I would succeed, so it was reaffirming. To this day, I still use some of the techniques that I learned in his presentation in my own classroom to teach students.”

Panetta graduated in 1986. Her IEEE membership helped her get hired for her first dream job: a diagnostic engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.

While attending the IEEE Computer Society’s annual symposium on very large-scale integration in Boston, she handed her résumé to a DEC representative, who hired her to work in Hudson, Mass.

While working full time, Panetta attended Northeastern University, in Boston, as a part-time graduate student. She earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1988.

Developing the first CPU digital twin

In the early 1990s, Panetta was assigned to work with Ernst Ulrich, one of DEC’s most respected consulting engineers, she says. He was developing a new CPU using millions of CMOS transistors.

“I thought, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity,’” she says, “not realizing they assigned it to me because no one else wanted to work with him, as he set rigorous standards, expecting those who worked with him to think outside of the box and hold their own to bullet-proof new concepts.”

Panetta and Ulrich wanted the ability to test the CPU while still designing the hardware and software. That way, both would be ready to use at the same time. Typically, the hardware was developed before the software was written.

“We decided that we were going to simulate the machine to see how it was going to run, which was unheard of,” she says.

During a meeting with the company’s top engineers, Panetta shared her idea for an algorithm that could accomplish the team’s goal. She was met with silence.

“It’s going to be the engineers who better society because we know how to work together. We’ve proven that IEEE members know how to work across geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and gender boundaries. And that’s a good model for the world.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Did I just say something stupid?’” she says. “But then, the top engineer looked at me and said, ‘I have been doing this for 50 years, and you, a kid just out of school, comes up with this [solution] like it’s obvious.’”

Her idea became the basis for the digital twin simulator. It used behavioral models to run software on a CPU simulation. The software passes information through the system, she says, just like it would pass information through wires or interconnects.

“We did successfully have a complete model of millions of transistors,” Panetta says. “I efficiently simulated hundreds of thousands of experiments and ran the software on this simulated model so that we knew exactly how it was going to perform on the real machine. That had never been done before.”

Her groundbreaking work led to a promotion: from computer analyst to principal software engineer.

When she began managing a team and hiring staff members, Panetta noticed the younger employees knew the theory but didn’t have the technical skills to hit the ground running, she says.

“It took the company two years to train somebody before they could really contribute technically to a team,” she says. She decided she wanted to help prepare students for jobs in industry.

In 1995 she was accepted into DEC’s Engineers and Education program, in which full-time employees who wanted to teach could take a leave of absence to complete a degree while still being paid. Participants were then placed in academic institutions for two-year stints to help students bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world problem-solving.

After earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northeastern in 1994, Panetta began her teaching assignment at Tufts. After one year, she left her job at DEC to join the university as its first female electrical engineering professor. At the time, the department had only one female undergraduate EE student.

“I showed up to work dressed in an all-pink suit,” she says, laughing. “Other professors looked at me like I didn’t belong there because I looked different.”

She didn’t let that stand in the way of reaching her goals: preparing the next generation of students for jobs and mentoring young women who were interested in becoming engineers but who felt they wouldn’t be accepted and therefore couldn’t pursue a career in the field.

Launching the Nerd Girls program

When Panetta began teaching, she noticed that students weren’t getting any hands-on engineering experience, so in 1996 she created an internship program. It was the precursor to Nerd Girls.

At the time, she was consulting for NASA’s data visualization and animation lab in Langley, Va., translating complex information into a user-friendly animated form. The programs visualized Earth’s atmosphere and identified pollutants, their origins, and their effects on people and the environment.

Panetta needed a larger team to help conduct the research, so she asked her undergraduate students if they wanted to participate.

“Female students flocked to me because they could relate to the work I was doing, loved how their skills could benefit humanity, and didn’t see me as the classic nerd professor with no life,” Panetta said in a 2008 interview with The Institute about the program. “Eventually, the girls outnumbered the boys.”

“The research project ended up winning awards,” she added. “Tufts couldn’t believe that undergrads had a hand in it. That’s when things really turned around.”

Nerd Girls officially launched at Tufts in 2000 as a class where students work closely with industry on engineering projects. Examples have included building a solar-powered car, developing a battery for the last functioning twin lighthouse in the United States, and creating devices to help people train service animals.

“Everyone who has participated in the program graduated with a bachelor’s degree,” Panetta says. “I’m also very proud that 98 percent of participants pursue a graduate degree within three years of earning their bachelor’s.”

The program is open to all students, regardless of gender.

Creating a community at IEEE

Panetta became an active IEEE volunteer in 2004 after meeting Arthur Winston, the IEEE president at the time. Winston, an IEEE Life Fellow, was an electrical engineering professor at Tufts. He helped found the Gordon Institute, a leadership-focused engineering school at the university.

“I sat next to him on a bus, and he invited me to attend the IEEE Boston Section meetings,” she says.

Panetta eventually was elected by the section as a member-at-large, which allowed her to attend conferences and other events.

To help spread the word about the Nerd Girls program throughout IEEE, Winston connected Panetta to Mary Ellen Randall, who was chair of IEEE Women in Engineering at the time. Randall is the current IEEE president and CEO. Panetta joined IEEE WIE and was elected as its 2007, 2009 chair.

In that position, she worked with Randall and Leah Jamieson, the 2007 IEEE president, to hire more staff to support the program and launch its magazine.

“At that time, we didn’t have any way to connect to members or tell the stories of women in technology,” Panetta says. “I wanted people to read the stories of women from around the globe and how they overcame adversity. So I launched the IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine in 2007.”

Panetta serves as the award-winning publication’s editor in chief, and she is a member of several other IEEE societies and committees.

IEEE is helping to change the world for the better, she says.

“It’s going to be the engineers who better society,” she says, “because we know how to work together.

“We’ve proven that IEEE members know how to work across geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and gender boundaries. And that’s a good model for the world.”

What could you do if you could make a circuit trace by just bending a piece of paper? How about bridging modern technologies and traditional handicrafts while providing opportunities for learning skills in both.

As part of our interdisciplinary research into digital craftsmanship at the MEI Lab at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, we came across research that demonstrated how to impregnate paperlike material (technically a “nonwoven textile”) with the kind of liquid metal used to make conductive ink. Initially, the impregnated material is nonconductive because an insulating oxide layer forms that encapsulates microscopic droplets of the liquid metal. However, applying pressure via shaped molds will crack open the insulating layer, allowing neighboring particles to merge, and thus creating conducting regions in the shape of the mold.

Both of us were introduced as children to origami and kirigami (similar to origami, except that cutting is allowed in addition to folding). We, along with our colleagues, decided to see if those traditional techniques could be used on the new material to eliminate the need for molds. Our goal was to allow crafters to make hybrid papercraft creations that contained easily integrated elements such as LEDs and motors.

In particular, we were interested in the possibility of combining the separate stages of creating a papercraft object and adding electrical conductors. Previous approaches to creating electrified papercraft objects relied on adding a separate flexible conductor, such as adhesive copper tape, to the paper. This increases the effort required and runs the risk of creating open circuits as the conductive material conforms to the object’s shape.

Isopropanol and a gallium-indium liquid material are used to impregnate a paperlike material that is 55 percent polyester and 45 percent cellulose. Electronic components such as LEDs and motors are held in place with masking tape. James Provost

Our first step was to see if the pressures involved in bending and cutting alone would be sufficient to create conductive traces. We became frequent visitors to our university’s materials science and engineering department to fabricate samples and then to borrow equipment to characterize their behavior.

We soon confirmed that the pressures involved in folding and cutting, ranging from 2.5 to 100 megapascals, were enough to create conductive traces. We also confirmed that normal handling of the paper didn’t accidentally create conductive paths.

We made a number of changes to the original method for creating the impregnated paper. For example, instead of immersing the paper in a mixture of isopropanol and liquid metal, we used an airbrush to spray the mixture onto the paper. That allowed us to vary how much was deposited on the paper and to use cardboard stencils to mask some areas from being impregnated, allowing folding and cutting in those regions without creating unwanted conductive traces. We also experimented with the ratios of isopropanol and liquid metal.

We became frequent visitors to our university’s materials science and engineering department.

After optimizing the mixing ratios and amount applied via airbrush, we were left with a material that reliably conducts with a resistance of 23.18 ohms per centimeter for cut edges and 4.4 Ω/cm for folded edges. The folded edges retain their conductivity even if later flattened out, and the conductivity is the same on either side of the paper. We estimate the combined cost of the paper and liquid metal (available from many online vendors) is about US $1.80 to make a 10- by 10-cm piece.

The next step was attaching electronic components to the traces. To make the connections more flexible, we cut down the rigid leads of LEDs and attached conductive thread to the stumps. We then held the threads in place using masking tape. Similarly, we connected conductive thread to the terminals of a power supply.

As our goal was to use this material educationally, we now needed to make it easy for a beginner, whether in papercraft or electronics, to try it out. We created a toolkit, dubbed LiqMetCraft. This consists of all the required materials, plus a browser-based software tool that lets the user select or create designs and then gives guidance on physical construction.

We created three versions of LiqMetCraft. The first is based on Chinese papercraft in which a piece of paper is folded into a fanlike segment and then cut to create a radially symmetric design. We provided circles of paper with a doughnot-shape impregnated region, with an untreated region that created a gap in the donut. We attached positive and negative terminals to either side of the gap. The user could specify in the software how many times they wanted to fold the disk and then draw potential cuts, receiving immediate feedback on what the unfolded disk would look like, as well as guidance on how to place LEDs.

To make our paper sample, isopropanol and liquid metal are mixed in specific ratios while being cooled by an ice bath. Sonic waves are used to ensure the liquid metal breaks up into microscopic droplets. The mixture is then applied via airbrush, while stencils prevent some areas being covered for different papercraft templates. James Provost

The second version of LiqMetCraft was based on origami. We supplied rectangular pieces of paper with two conductive regions separated by a border down the middle. The software tool provided templates for 12 origami designs, with step-by-step instructions for folding them. Once the project was completed, the user could add components, such as a motor, by taping them to the folds.

The final version supported 3D paper model making. In this case, the initial paper supplied was a rectangle with an untreated rectangular central area. By cutting this paper in half and then further cutting the halves into patterns separated by a spacer, the user could make various self-standing models. The software allowed the user to draw a pattern on screen, and then have a cutting machine produce a template for cutting the impregnated paper.

We had 42 participants, evenly divided into three groups, try out the different versions. All found it easy to use, and we were pleasantly surprised that some participants moved beyond the supplied designs to their own creations.

For full details of the current process, see our open access LiqMetCraft research paper published in CHI ‘26: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. In the future, we plan to try different substrates for the impregnating solution, as well as explore further types of papercraft, such as pop-up books. We’re also interested in developing ways to use the material to support inputs as well as outputs by constructing switches and potentiometers directly out of the material. Imagine traditional papercraft creations becoming interactive devices!

5G telecommunications, according to industry hype when 5G first launched in 2019, was going to be all about buzzy applications like mobile augmented reality and autonomous vehicles. But the surprise plot twist came when replacing home cable internet turned into 5G’s most widely adopted new application.

Fixed wireless access (FWA) now serves over 14 million U.S. customers, and contributes 28 percent of worldwide wireless traffic. Fixed wireless access is what the term sounds like: broadband internet delivered over a cellular radio link to a stationary location, no cable, no fiber, no trenching, no satellite broadband antenna pointed at the sky. What makes FWA distinctive is that it repurposes the same towers, spectrum, and 5G infrastructure that was built for mobile devices.

One U.S. Federal Communications Commission commissioner has called FWA 5G’s killer app. And that’s true not just in the United States either. Jio, India’s largest carrier, is also one of the world’s largest FWA providers, with over 9 million customers as of last year.

Carriers discovered they could repurpose surplus 5G capacity, while also exploiting a usage pattern quirk: mobile traffic starts to drop after 8 p.m., just when home internet usage peaks. The result is broadband, delivered via traditional cellphone towers, at a lower cost than fiber deployment. For these reasons, FWA provides real price competition to cable broadband, while reaching underserved rural and suburban communities.

Fixed Wireless Access Repurposes Ambitious 5G Infrastructure

FWA is cheaper to deploy than fiber, and for most homes and small businesses, fiber’s gigabit speeds are overkill anyway. And since FWA uses the same wireless networks built for cellular service, FWA works anywhere that receives a steady cellular signal.

As cellular networks extend into areas with minimal service, FWA’s coverage map expands with them. In these remote locales, the other main viable broadband alternative typically comes from satellite services like Starlink, which are, compared to FWA, more expensive, with higher delays, and lower bandwidth.

While most FWA deployments use currently underused microwave bands, some FWA deployments use electromagnetic spectrum that 5G launched but that mostly failed with mobile users. Millimeter waves operate at frequencies 10 to 40 times higher than 4G’s spectrum, offering high data rates from their wide available bandwidth.

However, there are good reasons 5G mobile users today don’t generally use millimeter-wave spectrum. Millimeter waves can’t penetrate buildings. Plus, they lose signal strength within a kilometer or two of the transmitter. Millimeter-wave antennas are also a real drain on cellphone batteries compared to microwave and radio-wave tech.

Yet none of these challenges applies to a fixed station with a clear line of sight to a nearby tower. FWA home units (called customer premise equipment or CPEs) outperform 5G handsets by a significant margin. That’s mostly because of hardware. CPEs carry larger, more sensitive antennas than a typical cellphone, paired with more capable transceivers. CPEs also tend to be plugged into wall outlets, making battery concerns a nonissue.

Another 5G technology that did not gain traction in mobile wireless is multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO). A base station with MU-MIMO uses an array of antennas to serve multiple users on the same frequency simultaneously.

However, maintaining a MU-MIMO signal involves tracking each user individually, a problem that quickly becomes overwhelming with enough mobile users. FWA is different, however. Static CPEs, with their steadier downlink traffic loads, are an ideal match for MU-MIMO technology.

So, FWA internet service not only uses mostly fallow spectrum but also uses 5G spectrum more efficiently than do 5G mobile users, for whom, of course, these 5G technologies were originally designed!

How FWA Became 5G’s Surprise Killer App

Not long ago, the high-bandwidth use cases for 5G made for an impressive list: millisecond latency for autonomous vehicles, mobile augmented reality headsets with extensive high-speed data needs, and massive machine connectivity for an expanding internet of things (IoT).

These applications have all stalled. Autonomous vehicles pose challenging, and still unsolved, problems unrelated to spectrum allocation. Augmented and virtual reality technologies have yet to create meaningful spikes in bandwidth demand. And the IoT has, to date at least, fragmented across an array of competing standards.

Mobile carriers had built dense 5G networks for mobile customers whose needs rarely saturated the network’s capacity. Home broadband usage peaks in the evening hours, precisely when cellular networks are quietest.

FWA sits at cellular networks’ crossroads of supply and demand.

The Advent of 6G Will Only Expand FWA’s Reach

In December, the telecom standards body, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), issued its latest 5G specification, Release 20, the final “5G only” update. So, although 6G is still years away (its first specifications are expected in early 2029), engineering decisions that will define 6G are being made today. And FWA is not on the margins of that conversation; FWA is currently considered an established day-one use case.

6G wireless technology promises to expand FWA’s reach, not only via spectrum but also via geometry. Instead of following 4G and 5G’s connectivity model, strong signals near towers and weak signals far away, future 6G networks will let homes connect to multiple towers simultaneously, using a technology called distributed MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output).

Where 5G’s version of MIMO (a.k.a. massive MIMO) concentrates user communication with dozens of antennas at a single tower, distributed MIMO uses antennas across multiple base stations and coordinates them to deliver signals to your home from multiple directions simultaneously.

The practical result: Because no single tower is responsible for any given connection, the “edge” of a cell network, that outer boundary where signal strength falls off and service degrades, no longer represents a hard limit on who gets well served. A home that would once have been too distant from a tower, or blocked by terrain, could now be within reach of several base stations working together.

6G may eventually adopt distributed MIMO technology for mobile users, when synchronization challenges and other signal engineering hurdles are solved and deployed for real-world cellular networks. The jury, as of 2026, is still out on whether the full distributed MIMO problem will be solved once the 6G standards start to be set in place, within three years.

As demand for FWA grows, carriers will also deploy increasingly capable millimeter-wave infrastructure for fixed customers first, the stationary CPE use case that millimeter wave best suits. The dense millimeter-wave antenna infrastructure that FWA requires is the same infrastructure that future mobile applications will eventually inherit. AR glasses, AI-powered wearables, and other bandwidth-hungry applications originally promised for 5G are not canceled, they are waiting for the infrastructure to arrive.

The pathway to FWA is being prepared at lower frequencies, too. There is growing interest today in the largely unoccupied FR3 band, which spans roughly 7 to 24 gigahertz, situated between crowded low/mid-bands and the much higher millimeter-wave frequencies.

Recent field trials by Nokia have demonstrated FR3’s viability for both cellular and FWA applications. FR3 is emerging as one of the more promising near-term frontiers for extending FWA coverage beyond its current footprint.

None of this was the plan. No carrier executive in 2020 stood on a stage and announced that 5G’s defining achievement would be delivering living room broadband to rural homes and suburban subdivisions underserved by cable.

FWA became 5G’s killer app because the engineering economics made it happen. Surplus wireless capacity met unmet consumer broadband demand, with the physics of a stationary receiver doing the rest.

That is not a criticism of the engineers or the carriers. It is simply how technology sometimes advances, sideways, through gaps nobody was trying to fill.

But FWA’s model of prioritizing unconnected users may in the end prove to be telecom’s on-ramp to everything else. Fix the digital divide first. Tomorrow’s sci-fi future appears set to follow close behind.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed edge-on starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82), nicknamed the Cigar Galaxy. Webb’s new view of M82, added to archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, gives us a more complete picture of this starburst galaxy. Because Webb can see infrared light, it is able to peer through clouds of dust and gas to see the shape of this edge-on galaxy, as well as approximately 16.5 million of its stars.

M82’s rapid star formation, thought to be the result of its merger with another galaxy, will only be a (relatively) brief period in its history. Ironically, the extreme star formation is causing plumes of material to be ejected above and below the disk of the galaxy, something that will disrupt future stellar birth.

Read the full story.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

by Si-Nan Ma, Fan Li, Yu-Long Zhao, Xue-Han Sun, Xue-Song Chen, Tian-Shi Pan, Qing-Tong Shan, Chao Liu, Gui-Hai Feng, Zhi-Kun Li, Qi Zhou, Wei Li

Successful mammalian development normally requires contributions from both maternal and paternal genomes, yet how these parental components jointly shape organismal development remains incompletely understood. Using engineered bipaternal mice generated from androgenetic embryonic stem cells carrying extensive imprinting-region modifications and produced through tetraploid complementation, we examined developmental and physiological consequences of development supported exclusively by paternal genomes. Placental analyses revealed partial normalization of placental growth but persistent differences among conceptuses. Transcriptomic profiling across embryos and postnatal tissues similarly showed broad alterations in gene expression states involving both imprinted and non-imprinted genes. Despite these differences during development, adult physiology showed a more coherent endpoint: integrated transcriptomic and metabolomic analyses revealed that adult livers converge toward an altered metabolic configuration characterized by coordinated perturbations of the tricarboxylic acid cycle and associated lipid metabolism, accompanied by hepatic lipid accumulation and increased systemic fat mass. These findings indicate that paternal-only mammalian development can proceed across multiple stages but follows altered developmental trajectories that culminate in distinct physiological states, providing insight into how maternal and paternal genomic contributions interact to shape mammalian development and physiology.

by Jing Mo, Ding-Hao Zhuo, Min Gao, Ying Huang, Tao Cheng, Yang Dong, Yan-Yi Xing, Yun-Fei Li, Zi-Xin Jin, Xiang Liu, Guo-Qin Zhao, Hai-Rong Pu, Yu-Meng Liu, Li-Ping Shu, Peng-Fei Xu

Homeostasis is essential for hematopoiesis, and its dysregulation can lead to severe pathological conditions. Retinoic acid (RA) is a key regulator that exerts concentration-dependent effects on both embryonic and adult hematopoiesis. However, the mechanisms that modulate RA signaling in hematopoietic processes remain poorly understood. Using zebrafish as a model, we identified angiopoietin-like protein 5 (Angptl5) as a critical regulator of hematopoietic homeostasis. Loss of Angptl5 function resulted in myeloid hyperplasia in the anterior lateral plate mesoderm (ALPM) and anterior expansion of erythroid progenitors in the posterior lateral plate mesoderm (PLPM), phenotypes consistent with attenuated RA signaling. Molecular analyses confirmed impaired RA signaling in angptl5Δ10/Δ10 mutants, and exogenous RA supplementation fully rescued the hematopoietic defects. Mechanistically, we found that Angptl5 transcriptionally activates retinol dehydrogenase dhrs9 through its interaction with Integrin α6lβ5. Our findings establish Angptl5 as a novel and essential regulator of embryonic hematopoiesis and reveal a previously unrecognized mechanism controlling hematopoietic homeostasis. These insights position Angptl5 as a potential therapeutic target for hematological disorders.

by Swathi Radha, Martina Arends, Georg Kislinger, Agata Rhomberg, Martina Schifferer, Minou Djannatian, Mikael Simons

Rapid information processing in complex organisms depends on myelin, which consists of a multilamellar membrane that tightly adheres to the axonal surface along the internode and at paranodal loops, where specialized adhesion proteins maintain axon-glial contact. Because the decision to myelinate an axon profoundly influences neuronal transmission, this process must be precisely regulated. Yet, it remains unclear which specific molecules enable oligodendrocytes to select appropriate axonal substrates for myelination. Several key myelin-associated adhesion systems have been identified, including Myelin-associated glycoprotein (Mag) and Cell Adhesion Molecule 4 (Cadm4) at the internode, as well as Contactin1 (Cntn1) at the paranode; however, these three adhesion molecules have not previously been deleted in combination. Here, using zebrafish, we systematically disrupted all three myelin-associated adhesion systems. We found that the combined loss of Mag, Cadm4, and Cntn1 severely impairs myelin initiation and destabilizes the few nascent sheaths that do form, resulting in a phenotype characterized by oligodendrocytes exhibiting membrane “stubs”. The failure to form myelin triggered cell death of early myelinating oligodendrocytes and resulted in profound hypomyelination. Our findings reveal that axonal target selection and myelin formation depend on a redundant set of adhesion molecules, and that their simultaneous loss largely abolishes myelin biogenesis.

by Tyler Y. Headley, Yesim Tozan

Background Global armed conflict and population displacement are increasing, yet their association with population health remains poorly understood. We developed and tested four theoretical models linking armed conflict, population displacement, and socioeconomic development to measles burden across 193 countries from 2000 to 2023.

Methods and findings We analyzed longitudinal country-level data comprising 4,632 country-year observations, combining fixed-effects panel regression and structural equation modeling (SEM). Observed variables included battle-related deaths (BRDs) and forcibly displaced population sizes, while socioeconomic development was modeled as a latent variable incorporating gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, life expectancy, and mean years of schooling. Outcomes were total measles cases and incidence per million population. All four constructed models demonstrated excellent fit (Comparative Fit Index [CFI] 0.991, 0.996; Tucker, Lewis Index [TLI] 0.976, 0.989; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] 0.046, 0.062). Higher contemporaneous BRDs were associated with higher measles cases (β = 0.17; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] [0.14, 0.20]; p p = 0.091), while the effect of prior-year BRDs was significantly associated with measles cases (β = 0.14; 95% CI [0.08, 0.20]; p p = 0.164). Each standard deviation (SD) increase in a country’s standardized log-transformed BRDs was associated with an approximately 0.20 SD increase in measles cases, equivalent to 2,500 additional reported cases for every 3,700 BRDs. In all models, BRDs had a slight negative association with socioeconomic development (β = −0.10; 95% CI [−0.13, −0.07]; p p p Armed conflict is associated with an increased measles burden, both directly and indirectly through associations with lower socioeconomic development and greater population displacement. These findings suggest that mitigating infectious disease risks in volatile settings requires a dual strategy: preserving the structural foundations of health and education while systematically integrating displaced populations into routine immunization programs. Future research using subnational and higher-frequency data is needed to clarify the precise mechanisms and timing of these associations across other vaccine-preventable diseases.

by Chris Condon, Andrea Galvez, Alexander Kramer, Landen Gozashti, Chris Vollmers, Manuel Ares Jr., Russell Corbett-Detig

Splicing deficiency may represent a critical yet underexplored form of genomic erosion in non-recombining regions. Across four phytoplankton species diverged ~333, 639 million years ago, genes within U (female) and V (male) “UV” mating-type regions, non-recombining chromosomal regions that determine mating compatibility, show strikingly elevated intron retention relative to genes in other genomic regions. Long-read data reveal abundant aberrant, likely non-functional mRNA isoforms despite preserved coding potential. This preservation suggests that splicing defects arose early in UV evolution and have persisted over deep time. We propose that these defects arise from evolutionary changes in sequence composition and chromatin organization that accompany recombination suppression, such as reduced GC content, altered nucleosome occupancy, and disrupted methylation, that collectively compromise splicing fidelity. Unlike sex chromosomes, which often degenerate through gene loss, splicing-deficient UV regions in green algae retain hundreds of genes, indicating that transcript-level dysfunction provides an alternative route to functional decay. Our results identify chromatin-mediated splicing deficiency as a novel axis of genomic erosion and position algal UV systems as models for studying how recombination suppression reshapes RNA processing fidelity in essential, non-recombining genomes.