Let’s say that you’re savagely beaten by a federal officer despite the fact that you committed no crime. Or maybe your home is ransacked by FBI agents who didn’t even bother to get a warrant. Or maybe you’re shot in cold blood by immigration officials engaged in a paramilitary occupation of your home city.

The Supreme Court has worked hard, especially in recent years, to ensure that you will have little, if  any, recourse against federal law enforcement officials who abuse their power. In one case, decided about six years ago, the Court’s Republican majority gave lawsuit immunity to a US Border Patrol agent who fatally shot a Mexican teenager in the face.

Now, the Court is poised to finish the job. On November 9, the Court will hear Nielsen v. Watanabe, a case that could eliminate all remaining hope that someone targeted by a federal officer with no regard for the Constitution might be able to hold that officer accountable in court. Among other things, the justices could use Nielsen to overrule its decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which established that federal law enforcement officers may sometimes be sued if they violate someone’s constitutional rights.

Bivens was rooted in something very similar to the Spider-Man Rule — with great power comes great responsibility. As the Court explained in Bivens, a federal officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer some remedy to people who are injured by such an officer.

But Bivens quickly fell out of favor in the Supreme Court as its membership moved rightward. The Court’s current, Republican majority is so unrelentingly hostile toward Bivens that it is hard to imagine any plaintiff prevailing in a Bivens suit before this Court. The Court’s most recent decisions have described Bivens suits as a “disfavored judicial activity.” In one decision, they’ve said that it is “doubtful that we would have reached the same result” if Bivens were “decided today.” And they’ve instructed judges to reject Bivens claims if there is “any rational reason (even one)” to do so.

In Nielsen, the same justices who wrote these lines are now being asked to overrule Bivens altogether. Even if they decide not to go that far, they’ve already done so much to carve up Bivens that there is virtually no hope for anyone who sues a federal officer for violating their constitutional rights.

What’s the specific issue in Nielsen?

Nielsen arises out of an alleged violation of the Eighth Amendment, which forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.” The Supreme Court has long held that this amendment requires prisons to provide medical care to incarcerated people, because if the prison does not provide them with care, they will have no other way to treat their illnesses or injuries.

The last time the Court ruled in favor of someone who sued a federal officer under Bivens was Carlson v. Green (1980), a decision that allowed the estate of a man who died in prison due to poor medical care to sue prison officials under Bivens. The Nielsen plaintiff, a formerly incarcerated man named Kekai Watanabe, raises a similar claim to the one in Carlson. Watanabe was assaulted by fellow inmates, and received some medical care for “severe back pain.” But when he asked to be treated in a hospital, that care was denied.

He claims that, for months, he “received only intermittent and short-term treatment for pain, often over-the-counter medication,” despite repeated requests for more care. After seven months, according to his brief, Watanabe was finally given an X-ray, which revealed that he had a fractured tailbone and that “bone chips had migrated into the surrounding soft tissue.” Watanabe also claims that he was never given treatment by a medical specialist, and “remains in tremendous pain today.”

A federal appeals court concluded that Watanabe’s legal claim “is identical to Carlson in all meaningful respects,” and thus his lawsuit against a prison health provider could move forward. Though the Supreme Court “has cautioned against extending Bivens remedies,” the lower court explained, “it has consistently maintained that” Carlson is “still good law.”

On the one hand, the appeals court is correct that Watanabe alleges a legal violation that is very similar to the one in Carlson. In both cases, someone incarcerated in a federal prison alleged that their Eighth Amendment rights were violated because the prison did not provide them with adequate medical care. So that does suggest that Watanabe should be allowed to bring a Bivens claim for as long as Carlson remains good law.

Still, the Court’s recent cases tell judges to rule against Bivens plaintiffs if there is “any rational reason” to do so. And there are certainly some distinctions that can be drawn between Carlson and Nielsen. The plaintiff in Carlson, for example, had an asthma attack and died within hours, while Watanabe is still alive and his medical condition played out over many months. The defendants’ lawyers in Nielsen also argue that Congress has changed the law governing suits brought by federal prisoners in ways that make their case meaningfully different from Carlson.

These distinctions are fairly minor. But if judges are really supposed to look for any rational reason to deny Bivens claims, then these distinctions are almost certainly enough. Again, it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court ruling in favor of any Bivens plaintiff, including Watanabe. In Nielsen, the lawyers asking the Court to overrule Bivens claim that, since Carlson, the Court has rejected 13 different suits raising Bivens arguments.

For what it is worth, the legal debate over Bivens focuses on whether Congress must specifically authorize suits against federal officers before those suits can move forward. The Court’s Republicans claim that the absence of such a law means that no suits against federal officers are allowed (a federal law does authorize suits against state officials who violate constitutional rights). 

Meanwhile, proponents of Bivens argue that the 1971 decision merely added coherence to a long line of pre-Bivens decisions permitting suits against federal officials — some of which stretch back to the early 1800s. As the Court said in Larson v. Domestic & Foreign Commerce Corp. (1949), “the principle that an agent is liable for his own torts ‘is an ancient one and applies even to certain acts of public officers or public instrumentalities.’”

But it matters little who is correct about this debate, because Republicans control six seats on the Supreme Court, and those six justices are fully dug into their opposition to Bivens.

The biggest open question in Nielsen, in other words, is whether the Court will take the defendant’s lawyers up on their invitation to overrule Bivens in its entirety. Just a few years ago, a decision overruling Bivens would have been a very big deal. But, in light of the Court’s decisions holding that judges should look for reasons to deny Bivens claims, little of Bivens remains to be further undermined by this Court.

Federal officials already enjoy such broad immunity from suit that an opinion overruling Bivens will probably do little more than rescue judges from the menial task of hunting through legal records in Bivens cases, searching for a reason to rule against the plaintiff.

Chatbots are often quite good at retrieving the information you want from the web. But sometimes you’ll get better results by typing your query into a good old search engine.

Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I’ve had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a “bland” diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table.

I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don’t want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this?

Dear Would-Be Vegetarian, 

You’re not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they’re vegetarian or vegan. What’s more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren’t even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face. 

So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you’re really wrestling with this. I’ll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory. 

There’s a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, “always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you’re treating the animal as a means to an end. 

Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands. 

Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it’s “always treat others as ends in themselves” or “always maximize happiness.” 

A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it’s incredibly soothing to think, “If I just do X, then I’ll know for sure that I’m being a good person!” 

But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really? 

Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging. 

I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),” Anderson writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

In other words, Anderson doesn’t think there’s some universal rule like “eating animals is inherently morally wrong.” It’s our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn’t believe there’s a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That’s because moral evaluation isn’t just about animals’ intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild. 

It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, “We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.”

Anderson’s point is not that animals’ intelligence and sentience don’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a “purist” diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a “reducetarian” diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously. 

The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others. 

For one thing, if you’re eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America’s meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They’re also often mutilated without pain relief: think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they’re in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish.

A pasture-raised label doesn’t mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn’t guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they’ll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end.

It’s a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it’s better than farmed.

The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you’ll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label “Certified Humane,” that’s genuinely higher-welfare — but don’t mistake it for “American Humane Certified,” which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like “cage-free” or “free-range.” They’re better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they’re not as meaningful as you might think. Here’s a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin. 

Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That’s both because of how miserable chickens’ lives are on factory farms and because, as my former colleague Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow.

That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don’t want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too.

Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers). 

But assuming you’re going to eat meat, it’s a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, “I’ll reduce how much meat I eat,” but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you’d intended. So it’s probably better to commit to something like “weekday vegetarian” or “vegan before six” — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions. 

At the end of the day, remember that there’s a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. That’s because you won’t be shirking your values: You’ll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you’re doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• The blogger Bentham’s Bulldog published a piece titled “How to cause less suffering while eating animals.” It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn’t: “offsetting” your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities. I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it’s worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet. 

• This Aeon essay answers a question I’ve often wondered about: Why haven’t other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don’t they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I’m grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer.

• I can’t stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified “helpful assistant” character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, “Gee, that really tickles my circuits!”). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.

You may not have noticed everything Google’s free software suite offers—especially a web app called Google Vids.

We often pick up hobbies to add some fun to our lives. We join a book group, take up knitting, or commit to finally learning how to play pickleball. But before long, what started out as leisure can begin to feel like just another obligation to execute and perfect: We fall behind in the reading, can’t stop dropping stitches, or the tournament schedule gets overwhelming.

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the United States. Our obsession with productivity may feel new, especially when it crosses over to our hobbies, but according to Gary Cross, a historian and author of the book Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal, Americans have been trying to make the most of our time for a while now. “A lot of it is that old Protestant work ethic that was part of the early migration to the United States,” he told Vox. “They were predominantly Protestant Christians who saw work as a kind of a special calling from God.”

As Cross explains, this attitude kicked into high gear alongside industrialization. “The capitalists really were all about increasing productivity. Time away from work begins to be seen as in some ways wasted time,” Cross said. And when the labor movement helped win workers some free time for hobbies around the turn of the 20th century, the same mentality made the jump into our leisure time.

That time is something that writer Jenny Odell has thought a lot about and explored in her books Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  “I think both of my books came out of observing the daily experience that I and the people I knew were having, where our relationship to time felt so painful — this unending intensity that was so exhausting,” she said. “There has to be another way.”

Odell says that one of the ways to shift our relationship with time is through cultivating hobbies — without falling into the trap of relentless quantification and optimization. So how do we learn to truly enjoy our leisure time, and why should we all consider failing a little more along the way? We learn that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Odell, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How is our pursuit of hobbies connected to how we think about time?

Hobbies are a place where you can see different ways of thinking about time battling each other. There’s a very fine line between someone who pursues a hobby for the sake of doing it versus someone who feels that they need to optimize it, perhaps even make money off of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but these are different ways of thinking about the activity that you’re doing.

People read the title How to Do Nothing and they think that I’m a person who literally doesn’t do anything. I love to do things and I love to learn things. I think a lot of people start hobbies because they want to learn. 

In American culture, a lot of us stop being given opportunities to learn after we’re children or after we’re students. I think it’s really beautiful that adults seek out ways to learn, often leaning into communities where they’re learning with other people. And learning has progress in it. You do get better at things when you learn them. 

My feeling is just that that sense of forward movement and learning gets co-opted by this larger culture that we exist in that is also very American: needing to have something to show for your time. What starts out as wanting to learn something turns into something that you’re giving yourself a score on, without your ever having decided to do that.

I spoke with a historian who said part of the reason that we relate to our free time in this particular way in America specifically is the history of the Protestant work ethic. It’s just so ingrained in us. How do you help yourself break out of that mentality?

I have to shout out this book called The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. He talks about this very question. In that book he talks about games and how when you play a game, you take on a whole new set of values, and you do that for whatever couple of hours and then you put it away. It’s kind of this practice in taking values, putting them on, taking them off, putting them away. 

For me, either literally playing games or trying to have a more playful, experimental mindset about what it is that I’m doing can break that cycle. When you get closer to [a goal], it gets more and more seductive. Like “I want a higher number.” You just need something to break you out of that and be like, “What is this number even measuring?” 

For me, I’m a writer. Words per day are a measure. You think you want more words per day, but all words are not the same. There have been moments where I was trying to optimize words per day. I have to stop myself and think about what other ways I could value the situation. Like, “What were those words? Did I make some sort of breakthrough?” 

There’s all these other different ways that you could think about what it is that you’re doing.

Something I think a lot about when it comes to hobbies is failure. For instance, I’m getting back into photography. I did film photography in high school and this year I picked it back up with the goal to shoot a roll of film per month. 

The year’s almost over. I’ve done three rolls of film, one of which I must have unloaded incorrectly because it was completely blown out. What role does failure play in our hobbies and how we interact with that?

I love failure. I think it’s so underrated and games are very useful here. A good sports person is open to failure and knows that that’s fun.

I think that along with not having opportunities to learn as adults, we also aren’t given opportunities to fail. That’s probably been the case for a long time, but now with social media and things being more visible for a lot of people, we really are not used to failing. We think we don’t want it. 

I feel like I am actively now seeking out things that I’m bad at just so I can have that feeling. I’m a failure addict.

That is true. Once we leave school, what opportunities do we have to safely learn things and fail and try it again?

I don’t know how else to describe it: It’s really fun to be bad at something. Once you accept that you are bad at it, your reason for doing it has to be something else. 

I’ve been going to this native plant restoration thing for two and a half years now, so I definitely know my weeds and I am better than the day that I showed up, but I don’t go there to be the best at something. 

I showed up on day one and I wasn’t wearing the right clothes. I didn’t have gardening gloves. I had never gardened in my life. I had no idea what I was doing. It was this fascinating feeling. It’s just so different from being an adult who’s specialized in something.

What’s a way to help yourself fall back in love with hobbies if it’s been a while or if you’ve optimized so much, you want to find the joy in it again?

It’s like the equivalent of being right-handed and trying to write with your left hand. Anything you can do to relax the perfectionist grip that you have on this thing. 

That means throwing obstacles in your own way or trying to do things in a way you’ve never done them before. Rediscover the same thing from a new angle or in a different context with new people.

The author reads her story from the November 9, 2026, issue of the magazine.

The police chief of Westborough, Massachussets, is on administrative leave after he was reportedly found asleep in a police SUV outside a liquor store. His colleagues were summoned "around noon" Friday by a caller at Star Liquors on Route 9 in Shrewsbury, and one of the responsing officers told a lieutenant that "it's the Chief of Police for Westborough and he's hammered drunk. — Read the rest

The post "Hammered drunk" police chief slept outside liquor store appeared first on Boing Boing.

In May, when federal Judge April Perry uncovered apparent grand jury misconduct, the underlying Broadview Six prosecution collapsed. Perry began examining whether federal prosecutors were candid with her about what happened and whether officials outside the Chicago U.S. attorney's office were involved. — Read the rest

The post DOJ tells judge probing prosecutor misconduct that Trump can make it go away appeared first on Boing Boing.

ICE agents retaliated against two U.S. citizens observing them in Portland by pushing a shopping cart at them, tailing them, boxing in their vehicle, and finally slashing one of its tires. An official complaint filed by the ACLU of Oregon requests a prompt investigation into the incident and discipline for the responsible agents. — Read the rest

The post ICE agent filmed slashing car tire appeared first on Boing Boing.

Whenever I need a good laugh, I look at an Instagram account called Good Advice for Shitty People. This satirical account is like an advice column for the worst people ever, determined to stay that way. Every time I start reading through it, I can't stop because it's so ridiculous and funny. — Read the rest

The post Good Advice for Shitty People is an advice column for the worst people ever appeared first on Boing Boing.

The iOS app Oh My Hours takes a new approach to curbing screen time. It splits up your day into hour-long blocks, then shows which ones you wasted on Instagram and TikTok.

Your cell phone can handle basic language translation, but dedicated translator devices can offer a much more immersive, versatile experience.

Samuel Sey spent the past two years telling American Christians that the Bible demands what Immigration and Customs Enforcement does. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations,” the conservative Christian blogger and podcaster wrote in Feb. 2025. “They demand it.” Immigration was a privilege and not a right, he argued, and America “doesn’t owe anything to people born outside of the country — including me.” Should his own residency ever be ended, he allowed, that would be “inconvenient — not unjust.”

Now Sey, who is originally from Ghana and grew up in Canada, has found himself swept up in the very deportation apparatus he spent years cheering on.

The resulting uproar has exposed a particularly ugly contradiction in the MAGA movement: Its most enthusiastic defenders of mass deportation suddenly understand the human cost of immigration enforcement when the person facing removal belongs to their own. On Oct. 21 federal agents arrested Sey at the Columbus airport. He now sits in the Butler County Jail on an ICE hold. The Department of Homeland Security says he entered the country legally in 2022 but overstayed by more than four years, that he has no pending applications and that he accepted voluntary departure. Sey’s wife — who was born in the U.S., as were the couple’s three children was born in the U.S. — says he entered legally and has spent years working with a lawyer to secure permanent status. His friends call the whole thing a clerical error. The conservative movement that amplified him is tearing itself apart over what to feel about his detention, because the answer exposes what its immigration politics were always made of.

“This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media,” wrote Joel Berry, the former Babylon Bee managing editor who calls himself a right-wing Protestant evangelical Trump supporter. “There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan.”

For a political coalition that has built its entire identity around the demonization of undocumented immigrants and the ruthless execution of mass removals, the detention of one of their own foot soldiers has triggered a profound internal fracture. Christian conservative influencers like The Blaze’s Allie Beth Stuckey and The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham immediately flooded social media to sound the alarm and rally support for their fallen comrade. Berry rushed to set up a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign that quickly hauled in more than $30,000 to cover legal fees. The right-wing influencers rallying around Sey have suddenly discovered that an immigrant can be a good person, that the government’s account might be incomplete and that separating a father from his children can be devastating. 

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has extensively documented, Stuckey has built a lucrative career railing against what she dismissively derides as toxic empathy whenever progressives advocate for basic human decency toward migrants and asylum seekers. Being so empathetic toward one set of people that you are blinded to everyone else, she has written, “isn’t just misguided, it’s evil.” Yet when Sey was taken, Stuckey asked her followers to empathize with his family. “As you can imagine, his wife, who’s at home with their 3 babies, is devastated and also trusting the Lord to help them find a resolution quickly. Please pray for all of the Seys,” she wrote on X. Berry, who produces the Jeremy Boreing podcast, which Sey was traveling to record when he was arrested, once declared that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.” Now he says that Sey “is in my tribe, and he is my brother” and “would make an excellent American.”

But the reactions from the broader MAGA grassroots suggest that despite Sey’s relentless pandering to white Christian nationalists, he was never truly seen as an equal member of the tribe. “Lord, we thank you sincerely. We thank you for the arrest of Samuel Sey,” Joel Webbon, a prominent Texas pastor, said following the podcaster’s detention. “We thank you for shutting his mouth from spewing out more lies and slander against your servants and your church here in these United States of America.” Webbon described Sey as an “illegal alien wrongfully in our country” who lectures Americans about their heritage. 

Sey has spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology. In response to his arrest, evangelical pastor and author Dale Partridge, who has called himself an “aspiring general in the culture war,” said that he hoped “justice is served” with Sey, adding that “a black migrant who slanders Christian Nationalists is the White evangelicals’ ultimate hero.” 

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The replies that appeared on social media beneath these marquee names were filled with racial slurs and attacks on Sey’s interracial marriage, indicating that the coalition’s submerged half is surfacing. For them, Sey was never a brother whose paperwork went wrong. He was a Black immigrant whose usefulness was conditional, and the condition has expired. The nativist core of the movement cares very little about theological alignment when it comes to crude racial purity. 

The teachings of Jesus Christ — which these Christian nationalists love to weaponize for political clout — explicitly center on radical compassion and hospitality toward the stranger. In the Bible, Christ never asked for someone’s legal status before offering grace or demanding justice, yet the modern American right has twisted religion into a cudgel to justify state-sponsored violence against the vulnerable. Sey believed he was one of the good ones. He thought that by loudly condemning other migrants and bowing before the altar of MAGA he had purchased safety for himself and his family. He learned the hard way that when you feed a beast built on xenophobia and exclusion, eventually it turns on you too.

Even now, leading allies are working overtime to keep sympathy for Sey from blossoming into actual political reconsideration. Berry has reaffirmed his support for ICE. Aaron Baer, Sey’s podcast co-host and president of the Center for Christian Virtue, said that after speaking with his colleague in detention, neither man’s position on immigration enforcement had changed. 

The polling suggests why. In its recent American Values Survey, PRRI found that 47% of white evangelical Protestants back identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants, down from a peak of 53% in 2024. Approval of Donald Trump’s handling of immigration among white evangelicals slid from 74% to 67% over the same year. According to Pew’s Oct. 13 poll, white evangelical approval of Trump stands at 58%, a dramatic decline of 20 points since he returned to office in January 2025.

When a prominent, token defender of the regime like Sey falls victim to the machine, it shatters the comfortable illusion that one can successfully pander to fascistic impulses and somehow remain immune to their collateral damage. The cruelty his friends cheered has no category for “one of ours,” because it never had a category for anything except the count.

The post The ICE arrest of a pro-Trump evangelical has MAGA in an uproar appeared first on Salon.com.

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Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again. 

He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.

Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)

The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”

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When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans. 

That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations. 

But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.

Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office. 

Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.” 

Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.) 

Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.) 

These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations. 

Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.

One link for later

➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
• Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.

The latest generation of Kindle’s 7-inch e-readers have a new look and new accessories. But are they worth the upgrade given Amazon’s new Kindle prices?

The series of photos shows what a particularly cold district in Vorkuta, Russia looks like in the dead of winter. The images at the beginning of the series show a town covered in a heavy blanket of snow, with only slivers of cars and buildings visible. — Read the rest

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It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google started quitting, citing fears that the AI was spiraling out of control. After a string of agents started hacking websites, researchers used AI to discover vulnerabilities in critical systems, leading to large swaths of the web going dark last week and giving rise to a scary term: Black October. At the same time, as it continued to ramp up AI spending, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — and economists once again warned of a bubble.

Yet, a lot has happened recently to make AI genuinely useful for more people. AI agents are getting better and can now make restaurant reservations for you. Walmart made it possible for agents to shop on behalf of humans, a bold move since Amazon banned the practice. Apple announced an AI-ready home display that can turn on your lights. And let’s not forget that AI is also helping scientists find cures for formerly incurable diseases and mathematicians solve previously impossible problems. 

It’s hard to reconcile the incongruity between the recent bad news and good news. For most of us, the state of AI is anxiety-inducing — especially when it comes to our livelihoods. According to a Pew Research Center study published in August, 71 percent of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next two decades. That figure is up 7 percentage points from where it was two years ago. Sure, in the best-case scenarios, AI could erase inefficiencies at work, streamline our daily lives, cure diseases, and generally improve the human condition. 

But what if you are the “inefficiency” at work that gets erased?

That tension is at the heart of Ethan Mollick’s latest book Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. If there is such a thing as an AI sage, it would be Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School and faculty director of its Generative AI Labs. To the nearly half a million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, One Useful Thing, he delivers semiweekly updates from the jagged frontier of the technology’s development. His message in any medium is resoundingly clear: You need to use AI in order to understand it. And to get the most out of using it, he argues that you have to accept that AI is not going away; it’s only going to become more important. 

That ethos doesn’t make the existential threats of AI any less daunting, but that’s not the point. Unless you’re an early Anthropic employee or a United States senator, there’s probably not much you can do directly to rein in AI’s potential harms. But you can, according to Mollick’s worldview, decide how the technology could fit into your life and think about how you fit into an AI-dominated future. 

I recently spoke with Mollick about his new book, what life and work might look like in the agentic AI era, and what it means to be an artisan when even knowledge is industrialized. His theories about living with AI are meant to help you navigate the future, regardless of the latest forecast. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We’re entering a new era for AI, and the vibes are different. AI agents are something that many of us will encounter, interact with, and maybe even embrace. I’ve always known you as someone who jumps on the cutting edge of this technology to figure out what it can do. What do you think most people don’t understand about the next generation of AI?

I really think people haven’t internalized what agents do. Agents mean many things, and we can talk about personal agents, like Muse. But the fact that the problems that plagued working with AI agents before — you had to guide them each step of the way, they made mistakes, hallucinated constantly — that’s kind of gone. You can regularly get hours, days, weeks of work out of a system. 

It’s not just a theoretical thing anymore. I talk to coders all the time who are a hundred times or more productive than they were before. And in other fields, we’ve kind of moved past the theoretical discussion about AI being, “This is going to be a big deal,” to, “It’s here.” From a whole kind of co-intelligence perspective, we’ve gone from, “Here’s how we use AI and work with a chatbot back and forth,” to, “These systems are now doing real work in ways that matter to real people and are reshaping real fields for better or worse.” And if you’re used to using AI a year ago, if you’re not paying for one of these systems, it’s really easy to have lost track of what’s going on.

What about the practical, everyday ways that AI is disrupting our lives? And what do you think are the limits of that disruption?

So outside of the job world and homework cheating, I think life has changed only a little bit for people, partially because these systems were kind of complicated to use and you had to decide what you were using them for. But I think the advent of personal agents, like Muse and Dot, are going to lead to a very rapid change in a lot of ways.

Most people I know who aren’t experts who use these systems, like my parents, are using these things spontaneously. They’re finding that once you know how to prompt the AI to do something, it can do things spontaneously and come back to you because it has your email and everything else. Just as one example, I was unable to figure out how to cancel my standing $8-a-month wifi subscription from my airline, and I was like, figure this out. And it went to customer service, joined chats, then I have no idea what it did, but now I don’t have a subscription to wifi anymore, thank goodness. 

“I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.” 

So there is this sort of lowering friction piece that’s super interesting, with good and bad elements to it. The bad side of lowering friction is both that every article gets written by AI, so there’s no human thinking in it anymore, and that companies don’t want 10,000 customer service agents coming to them demanding new things. So I think we’re just on the edge of seeing the mass change in everyday life. Right now, AI is a really good second opinion on everything. As agents become more popular, they start to take action.

How do you know when to let AI do the work, though? We know that offloading certain tasks to AI can make you worse at doing those kinds of tasks in the future. How do you take advantage of AI’s ability to do drudgery but also hold onto your own expertise? 

If there’s a personal theme underlying Co-Existence, it’s that one. That is an incredibly hard choice to make, and we’re historically very bad at making it. 

Students are the No. 1 case because they’re willing to offload homework because homework sucks and because the incentives for doing any piece of homework are terrible. But overall we need to do it to learn. So people offload that, but even if you’re trying to do the right kind of thing, like using AI only to help you learn and not to replace learning, it turns out that when chatbots are in assistant mode, as opposed to using them as a tutor, it feels like you’re learning even though you’re not. You feel like you’re in the loop even though you’re not. And so that assumes that we both know we want to offload and we do it intelligently and that we do it in a way that helps our long-term gain.

I am worried about us being able to do that. You have to draw lines for yourself about what skills matter to you or not, and you have to be thoughtful, in a way that we’re usually not, about what we’re giving up and what we’re not. Technology’s designed for us to give up stuff. We don’t walk 50 miles a day anymore in forced marches. I don’t know how to weave clothes. There’s a lot of stuff I’m very happy to not know: how to maintain my computer in some ways, even though that’s dangerous. I let Codex scan for security issues because it does a better job than me faster. But I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work. 

So I don’t have an easy answer, but I think that that will be the defining question for most people in their career paths right now and their lives: What do I give up? I think we can be too sentimental about things that we’re giving up. It’s okay, but we don’t know the full chain of consequences. I think that struggle is going to be central to a lot of people’s experience. I wish I had an easy answer, but now that AI can do so many things, de-skilling is a real problem at this point.

We’re living through a huge transformation. That’s increasingly clear. Besides losing their jobs, a lot of people are scared of losing the sense of what makes them human and what makes them valuable. How do people hold onto that in the years to come?

There’s a transformation happening, and for some people, the work will get more satisfying. There’s a lot of coders who did not like writing lines of code, but they did like summoning software and figuring out what they wanted to build. Their lives are much better because the AI does all the tedious work. They can command things to be built, and it’s so much more exciting than it was before. It lets people who didn’t code start to do incredible coding projects. So on one hand, that’s deeply freeing of the kinds of work that we did. On the other hand, there are people who love writing those lines of code and that’s gone now. You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms. Your stuff might be elegant and beautiful, but it is not going to last in a world where industrialization happens.

Industrialization versus craft is a way to think about this. There’s a lot of craft that we’ve grown to really appreciate, like the handcrafted sentence. Those things will be under threat from the logic of industrialization, which is that we need to do more of it. I think that there’s going to be a shift. There’s satisfying work to do, but I think a lot of what was satisfying human work will be under pressure to disappear, because you took pleasure in something that was not automatable, but now is.

We’ve been through this in industrial revolutions before. This is happening at a very large scale to intellectual work, where craft was a very important part of what we did. Mathematics was craft, software engineering was craft. I think that we’ll be under pressure to produce more of it, which is what industrialization’s about, even if that destroys the value of doing this as a person. You get paid to do it now, but you’re not getting the same value you did before.

“We’re no longer in a place where AI is going away.”

I think we’re going to find lots of crises of meaning. Some people are going to find huge amounts more meaning in their work, either because the work itself is now much more interesting. Work is a lot of crap, too. We can say great things about it, but people spend a quarter of their work life saying they’re bored. It’s not like this was a great job for everybody. So some people will have much more excitement in craft. Some people will have it extracted out of their job, and it’s all going to be happening at once. I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but that’s what’s happening.

Forgive me for saying so, but that was an anxiety-inducing answer. It’s an anxiety-inducing time. I wonder what advice you have for us anxious people?

I think anxiety is real, and there’s different levels of anxiety. We’re going through a wrenching change, or we will be going through one that we’re on the edges of now. There is also existential risk about whether AI will kill us all, where we clearly need more regulation. The answers are unclear. Smart people seem to think that that’s a real danger. It’s hard to know. But leaving that aside, there’s anxiety about our own transformation, our jobs. I mean, the industrial revolutions worked out great in the end, but during it, [that] was the time of Marx and anarchists and Dickens writing about London. There’s a transition we have to go through here.

I don’t think we can pretend it’s not happening, and I see a lot of people taking comfort in the idea that maybe this all will collapse and AI will go away. Even if there was a bubble financially, we’re no longer in a place where AI is going away or stopping development. I worry a lot about people doing that. Once you face that, though, I find people often reconstruct meaning in very exciting ways. Thinking about what more you can do and where you find joy in this is actually quite exciting. So I think that anxious optimism is a reasonable place to be.

What I worry about is sticking your head in the sand saying, “I’m not going to learn AI. This will go away. I’m going to pretend it’s not happening.” I mean, I wish I could give you that option. I think there’s a lot of people who wish we could slow things down or turn a dial down, but there’s also a lot of exciting things. There’s a lot of hard problems in the world that are unsolved.

If you lean into the positive pieces, you can ask how we mitigate risk but also think about how we can build a better world. Part of what makes me nervous is people sitting out that second question and just filling up with anxiety rather than believing we have a tool that can rebuild things. How do we rebuild a better world for journalism or for nonprofits or whatever it is? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and I worry it’s asked too little.

America is a politically polarized country. But one topic has both the left and the right in full agreement: Flock cameras suck. No one likes the government spying on them.

To make matters worse, police and 911 staff enjoy using Flock cameras to stalk their exes. — Read the rest

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With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.

It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”

Trump has yet to admit he lost the 2020 election against Joe Biden, in one six month period alone claiming he won more than 100 times, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The president has lost at least 64 court cases challenging the results.

But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”

On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.

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“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”

Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.

“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”

The post How Trump is prepping to deny election results appeared first on Salon.com.

The Waterdrop X12 improved the taste of my tap water, but reverse osmosis comes with costs beyond the purchase price.