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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.”

Go a little deeper

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 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 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.

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Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

I am someone who notoriously struggles with big decisions. Over a year ago, I found a wonderful partner, who very much feels like they could be my soulmate. We’ve been dating three time zones apart for a while. Being near our families, communities, and aging parents is a shared value — unfortunately one that makes it hard to compromise on location. Either way, I have to give up something I want and value — a wonderful partner who I can see a life with (the first time I’ve felt this way about someone), or the place I’ve always imagined settling down and that represents the person I am becoming and values I want to live. Two good things are pulling me toward opposite paths and there’s not much room for compromise. How do I make the “right” decision? 

Dear Fork in the Road,

You’ve found a place in the world that you feel connected to and you met a person you envision spending the rest of your life with. Geographically restless and lonely people everywhere are jealous! But with your good fortunes seemingly at odds with one another, it feels that by choosing one, you’ll forsake the other — and doom the choice you did make to feel like a sacrifice. 

When circumstances have forced me to make a tough decision, I’ve daydreamed about a thought experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation. 

In quantum physics, particles behave differently than us mortals. For example, an electron can be in more than one place at once until it’s measured. How can it be in multiple locations and then be observed to be in a single position? In the 1950s, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed an explanation: The universe splits into alternate versions of itself, one for each place a particle could be measured. To apply this theory to your life, if you chose to move cities, don’t worry, another universe would be created in which you didn’t choose to do this, and you’ll stay right where you are! 

Yes, I know you can’t transport yourself into such a quantum realm, but there is something helpful in thinking about alternative universes. Did you have an immediate reaction to which universe you would be upset not to inhabit? Take that information to heart, because it’s likely you’re not ultimately going to make your choice based on a tidy pro-con list.

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that most of our decisions are not based on rationality. People use two systems for decision-making: System one is faster and emotionally based, and system two is more logical and slow. But even the slower, more deliberate decision-making can fall prey to any number of cognitive biases. 

In your case, one called loss aversion may be especially relevant. People have the tendency to worry more about what they’ll lose, even if what they stand to gain is equal in value. For example, it will likely feel worse to lose a $10 bill from your pocket than it would feel good to find a $10 bill on the ground. This bias is relevant in people’s social lives too: They hold onto older, maybe fading, friendships because the thought of losing them is too painful, but don’t seek out new friends with equal effort. Or, they stay in a meh job because it feels scary to let it go, rather than applying that same energy to finding a new one. Once you accept that your decision-making process will be subject to messy feelings and biases, you can let go of trying to make the perfect choice. 

You opened your question by sharing that you struggle with big decisions, and it makes me wonder if you simply feel anxiety about making a choice at all. This is called analysis paralysis. When outcomes are uncertain, anxiety wakes up, and a voice in your head tells you to avoid taking risks. People with analysis paralysis overthink their options, over-research, and second-guess their first instincts. These actions have more to do with stress over committing to any decision rather than the content of what you’re deciding on.  

A surprising finding from psychology may ease your paralysis. Researchers told people to make a big life decision — on the order of ending a relationship or quitting their job — by flipping a coin. Heads, they made the change; tails, they didn’t. For those who followed the results of the toss, the people who made the change were overwhelmingly happier, even though their decision to do so was made by pure chance. These random-flip outcomes also show “that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices,” the authors wrote. The coin helped the participants resist the bias of tending to stick with the status quo, even if it doesn’t make them happier. 

To begin to loosen your paralysis, something that might assist you, paradoxically, is to introduce more options into the mix. Jacques Derrida, the 20th-century French philosopher, is known for the concept of deconstruction, a way of analyzing texts or ideas more critically, and showing they’re not as stable as they seem. He pointed out that we often think in binaries and false opposites: good vs. evil,  man vs. woman, nature vs. culture. This can set up an easy dichotomy in which one of the items is good, and the other, by being its opposite, is bad. 

You’ve created a binary situation, and you don’t actually have to be in one. What if there’s a third option, or a fourth? What if you and your partner move to a brand-new city, and set out to create new community, together? What if you and your partner find a way to split your time between your respective hometowns? Now you don’t have only two good things pulling you in opposite directions, you would have different options you can be more creative with. You also don’t have to commit to the decision you make now for the rest of your life. You can always move cities again, or try to find another mate. 

You are with a partner you love, and live in a place that you love. You might reframe your situation as a win-win, rather than a lose-lose. And remember that if you don’t make a choice, you’re not successfully avoiding a decision — it’s a choice of its own. Your partner may get tired of long-distance or end the relationship for another reason. Or, you could start to resent the place you live since you have to travel so much to spend time with your partner. 

I also want to point out how you describe your partner. Don’t turn your nose up at finding someone who you can see making a life with, especially as you note, if you’ve never felt that way before. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said that there were two most important moments in his life: when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife. “What happened with me would not have happened without her.” Buffett’s view is supported by research that shows that people with supportive spouses tend to take on more rewarding challenges throughout their lives, and end up having more personal growth and happiness. 

Another quantum idea that might interest you is spooky action at a distance. This is when two particles, even far apart, become connected to one another. Measuring one affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If your partner feels like your “soulmate,” perhaps you have become entangled already. Don’t fret about making the perfect choice about the next phase of life, but do make a choice (any choice!) that considers your futures as bound up together. For the other details, maybe it’s time to find a coin to flip. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I’m currently re-watching The Twilight Zone and recommend the episode Mirror Image, about a young woman who encounters her double from a parallel universe. The show’s creator, Rod Serling, was inspired to write the script when he saw a man at the airport who looked suspiciously like him, and had a similar suitcase and jacket. What if he approached the man, and it turned out to be himself? The dreamy story also inspired the movie Us by Jordan Peele. 

• The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on “handedness”: how molecules can have variants that are non-identical mirror images of one another. These variants are their own kind of dark doppelganger; only one can exist in the body. The science writer Ann Finkbender wrote a charming essay about understanding this principle of life in Last Word on Nothing. 

• If you haven’t yet read Stoner by John Williams, just put down whatever you’re currently reading and do it. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t act, and let your passivity make choices for you.

Powering a car dashboard is more demanding on your handset than you might think. These tips will save battery life and help your phone chill out.

The author reads her story from the November 2, 2026, issue of the magazine.

A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it. 

Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study. 

It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.

In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions. 

Now we have AI tools, too. 

With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.

AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.

Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.

The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers

Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.

Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.

Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year. 

“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”

But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions. 

Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious. 

“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”

An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.

“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”

It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.

That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes. 

One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane. 

“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”

Don’t assume your data is safe

Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.  

It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads. 

Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life. 

“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”

The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.

Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are. 

“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”

Trust but verify — and then delete your data

In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.

Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.

The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources. 

“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”

When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days. 

Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.

“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”

Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates. 

Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence. 

Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.

The Beetlejuice Fortnite skin has been revealed by dataminers, giving us our first look at the Fortnitemares 2026 collab. Here is when the Beetlejuice cosmetics go live in every major region, everything included in the bundle, and potential pricing.

Beetlejuice Fortnite Skin Revealed – First Look

Dataminers have fully revealed the Beetlejuice Fortnite skin ahead of its Item Shop release. If you’ve been waiting for the iconic Tim Burton character to join the battle royale, we finally have a preview of what he looks like in-game.

However, the new outfit isn’t the only thing that has been revealed. Dataminers also uncovered the full Beetlejuice Fortnite bundle and all the cosmetics included, from the Six-Stringed Sandworm to the Day-O emote.

For a closer look, we’ve included an HD image below so you can see what the Beetlejuice skin looks like before you purchase it:

Beetlejuice Outfit

when is beetlejuice coming to fortnite?

The Beetlejuice Fortnite skin release date is today, Friday, October 23, 2026. The much-anticipated Fortnitemares 2026 collab will be available through the in-game Item Shop starting at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET.

However, depending on your time zone, the Beetlejuice Fortnite skin will arrive on October 24 instead. To make it easier to track, here is when the crossover goes live across different regions:

Beetlejuice Fortnite Release Times

Region / Time Zone	Release Time	Date
Pacific Time (PT)	5:00 PM	October 23
Eastern Time (ET)	8:00 PM	October 23
UTC	12:00 AM	October 24
United Kingdom (BST)	1:00 AM	October 24
Central Europe (CEST)	2:00 AM	October 24
India (IST)	5:30 AM	October 24
Japan (JST)	9:00 AM	October 24
Australia — Sydney (AEDT)	11:00 AM	October 24
New Zealand (NZDT)	1:00 PM	October 24

Beetlejuice Fortnite Bundle and Cosmetic Prices

Dataminers have also revealed the full Beetlejuice Fortnite bundle, including the outfit and its matching cosmetics. Alongside the character skin, the collection features Back Blings, Pickaxes, and a weapon wrap.

However, two of the more notable items in the bundle are new Beetlejuice emotes. One features the iconic “Day-O” dance scene from the 1988 Tim Burton film. The other allows players to surf on top of a giant Sandworm, and it can even be used as a traversal walk in the game.

Here is the full cosmetic list and their potential pricing:

Cosmetic	Item Type	Expected Price
Beetlejuice	Outfit	1,600 V-Bucks
Six-Stringed Sandworm	Back Bling / Pickaxe	800 V-Bucks
Beetlejuice’s Marquee	Back Bling	500 V-Bucks
Marquee Smasher	Pickaxe	800 V-Bucks
Beetlejuice Spirals	Wrap	500 V-Bucks
Day-O	Emote	500 V-Bucks
Sandworm Surfer	Emote	500 V-Bucks

The final Beetlejuice Fortnite bundle price will not be confirmed until it hits the item shop later tonight. The above table is an estimate based on recent Fortnitemares 2026 bundles, such as the Nightmare on Elm Street Freddy Kreuger collab.

Players may also be able to purchase cosmetics separately if they only want the Beetlejuice outfit or a specific item. We’ll update this guide with the confirmed bundle price and purchase options once the crossover goes live.

The post Beetlejuice Fortnite Skin Revealed – Release Date and Price appeared first on VICE.

This feature common to VPN services gives you protection and privacy specifically when and where you need it.

Great for typing and fine for gaming, but too many compromises keep this mechanical keyboard from leveling up your play.

Here’s how to pick the best mattress for your sleep needs, straight from a professional mattress tester.

Ancient plants reveal that the vestiges of the North American ice sheet started expanding a few thousand years ago, but that climate change caused it to reverse course.

The harrowing allegations of rape at a Cornell University fraternity have been rippling out in both New York state and national politics.

Democrats have tended to voice sympathy with the accuser, saying that they stand with her and other victims. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said there was “a culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia” in elite institutions across the country. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said Cornell “protected her abusers, letting them off with a slap on the wrist.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the accuser was “failed” by local police and county prosecutors who did not bring charges, so Hochul appointed state Attorney General Letitia James to take over the investigation. Days before that appointment, James posted on social media that “what this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” adding: “To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.” 

Some Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of rushing to judgment. Saritha Komatireddy, who is running for attorney general of New York against James, said in a debate that James had “screwed this one up by prejudging it.” The investigation, Komatireddy said, “requires someone who approaches the case with fairness, impartiality and integrity.” And right-wing commentators like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro have questioned the accuser’s story.

But beyond the procedural fight over this particular investigation, many Democrats have also called for changing the law to make cases like it that involve drugs or alcohol easier to prosecute in general. 

This might seem like a clean issue for the party, in line with prior progressive efforts to crack down on sexual assault via Title IX and expanding statute of limitations laws. 

However, it’s not so simple: According to my conversations with experts and advocates involved in these reform conversations, this is where the Democratic unity begins to fray, because of a divide between two key parts of the progressive coalition. 

The impulse to create stronger protections for victims has crashed into the left’s longstanding suspicion of the criminal justice system. And as a result, a coherent policy response has been hard to craft — and may end up being impossible to get agreement on.

On one side are advocacy groups for women and for victims of rape or sexual assault. They argue that current law — in New York and other states — makes it far too difficult to successfully prosecute perpetrators, and that it should be changed. They’ve advocated for closing what they call the “voluntary intoxication loophole,” which they say makes it harder to prosecute abusers of victims who have willingly consumed drugs or alcohol.

On the other side are various progressive or left constituencies that are deeply skeptical of the criminal justice system. These constituencies — which include key figures in New York’s Black political establishment, public defenders, supporters of criminal justice reform, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America — are united by a shared antipathy to mass incarceration and what they see as disproportionate police targeting of minority communities. 

The former camp argues that false rape and sexual assault allegations are vanishingly rare, that these crimes are hugely underpunished, and that the law needs to be updated to make these prosecutions easier. But the latter camp argues that Black and other nonwhite men are often falsely accused, and that it would be unwise to hand prosecutors another tool they could use to put men in jail in cases where ascertaining consent is more difficult.

It’s a fraught debate. Modern-day progressives have strongly backed the Me Too movement as well as campaigns for racial justice and criminal justice reform. Progressives want to be on the side of victims against the privileged and powerful — but sometimes, they have different ideas about who falls into which category.

The legal issues around “voluntary intoxication” and rape charges, explained

The current controversy in New York focuses on efforts to close what advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in rape and sexual assault law.

Every state says rape is a crime. Every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is unconscious. And every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is incapacitated due to unknowingly being dosed with drugs.

But what about someone who chooses to drink or take drugs, who remains conscious, and who doesn’t outright refuse consent? Should there be a standard by which the law deems that person incapable of meaningfully consenting, because they are too intoxicated? 

Many states have long had laws on the books saying yes — that someone who voluntarily drinks or does drugs can reach a state where they are too mentally impaired to consent to sex, even if they’re conscious and capable of communicating. But about half of states don’t have such a law, according to the Associated Press. And this hasn’t been an especially partisan issue to this point, with a mix of red and blue states adopting each standard.

The push to change the law in New York predates the Cornell case, and goes back to the late 2010s. At that time, the Me Too movement had put Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in the hot seat, with advocates criticizing him for not initially prosecuting Harvey Weinstein and arguing he was soft on rape and sex crimes generally. 

In the midst of pivoting on the issue (he had Weinstein indicted in 2018), Vance claimed that, in certain of these cases, his office was hamstrung by what he called a “loophole” in New York law involving intoxication. “Prosecutors cannot bring sex crime charges in cases where the victim became voluntarily intoxicated and was unable to consent,” he wrote in a letter. So really, Vance said, it was on the legislature to change the law.

Quickly, critics argued that Vance had misstated the law, saying it was not actually true that a loophole allowed people to rape voluntarily intoxicated New Yorkers with impunity. Vance’s office later acknowledged that his initial comments were “inartfully put.” 

The problematic cases, Vance’s team argued, were about victims who were “too intoxicated to consent” but who were also at least partially conscious and didn’t outright express their unwillingness — this, they said, was the “gap in the law.” “There’s a real problem that we have with people getting drunk and then being taken advantage of,” Vance said. 

So some Democrats and groups advocating for victims of sexual assault and rape kicked off an effort to change that law, in New York and elsewhere. Their favored bill says that lack of consent can be established if an alleged victim is “temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling their conduct” — and if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that.

Critics argue, though, that such bills go too far, and could make it easier to prosecute sexual encounters that, to the accused, seemed consensual. 

“The proposed legislation fails to provide any objective guidance about when a partner is too intoxicated to legally agree to engage in sexual conduct,” the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in an emailed statement.

Skeptics of the bill outlined several scenarios that concerned them, including scenarios where one person seems to consent but later decides that, in retrospect, they were too intoxicated for it to have truly been consensual. 

“You get all these scenarios where two people meet up at a bar and they both become voluntarily intoxicated,” said Yung-Mi Lee, a public defender and a former president of New York’s criminal defense lawyers association. “So then, if someone later says, ‘I was voluntarily incapable of appraising my conduct, I lost my inhibitions,’ they could say, ‘You committed a rape against me.’”

To advocates for victims’ rights, these concerns are overstated. “The burden that’s placed on a victim of sexual violence is such a large burden to bear in the first place that these changes to the law are really just slightly opening the door,” Rebecca Zipkin of the advocacy group World Without Exploitation told me.

“The current situation is not working to provide justice for survivors,” Stefan Turkheimer of RAINN, a network for rape and abuse survivors, told me. “The status quo is not okay.”

Why it hasn’t passed in New York

Versions of the voluntary intoxication bill have been signed into law in recent years in Minnesota, Michigan, and Texas. The bill has also repeatedly passed the New York state Senate by overwhelming margins. But it has never been brought to a vote in the lower chamber, the New York state Assembly.

That’s because, advocates for the bill told me, they’ve faced resistance from some influential parts of the Democratic Party and progressive coalition. 

Indeed, the skeptics are said to include two factions that are often at odds: New York’s Black political establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie controls which bills come to a vote in his chamber. He was an architect of the state’s sweeping bail reform law, a critic of what he called the existing “racist and classist system,” and has said he would be “a failure as a Black man” if he did not pass criminal justice reform. 

“It is generally known that Speaker Heastie does not believe in creating new crimes because he believes New York suffers from overincarceration,” Lizzie Asher, an advocate for changing the law and a co-founder of the Justice Without Exclusion Coalition, told me. (Heastie has said that he did not bring the bill to a vote because it lacked enough support among his chamber’s Democrats.)

Assembly member Latrice Walker is another champion of criminal justice reform; she even did a hunger strike in 2023 to protest rollbacks to the bail reform law. She spoke out about her concerns about the voluntary intoxication bill earlier this year, telling the New York Times that while she wanted survivors to get justice, she was “cautious about the creation of new laws and our duty to preserve due process protections.”

Zipkin and other advocates have also pointed to the six DSA-affiliated members of the assembly, who are associated with a general skepticism about the criminal justice system and incarceration, as a potential obstacle. None are currently listed as cosponsors of the bill. Back when Zohran Mamdani was in the assembly, he too declined to sign on, advocates noted. 

The DSA as an organization is very critical toward the police and prison system; many DSA members have called for defunding or abolishing the police in the past, and the DSA’s national platform still holds out “fully abolishing the police and prison system” as a long-term goal.

These objections may be harder to maintain amidst a wave of outrage around the Cornell case. Speaker Heastie announced he was creating a working group to reexamine the voluntary intoxication issue. The group includes Walker, whose office told Vox she would not comment on the law while “they undertake their important work.” Heastie told the group to give him recommendations by the end of the year, for consideration in New York’s 2027 legislative session. 

Is this a bigger divide among progressives?

The divide is coming into public view due to national attention on the Cornell case — but it’s long predated the current moment. 

Back in 2016, a California judge gave Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, a six-month jail sentence. Advocates for victims’ rights were furious at what they deemed an inexcusably lenient punishment; nationwide outrage and an ultimately successful campaign to recall the judge ensued. 

But some progressive supporters of criminal justice reform felt queasy about the idea of punishing a judge for not locking up a defendant long enough. Skeptical of the criminal justice system and the value of incarceration, they worried this public fury would incentivize judges to be harsher across the board.

“What ultimately will happen is that the people that we represent — people of color, minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor in our communities that make up the people ensnared in our criminal justice system — they’re the ones that are going to bear the cost of this recall,” Sajid Khan, a public defender in Santa Clara County, California, said in 2018.

In practice, these two groups of advocates have generally managed to coexist in the progressive coalition. That’s in part because the Me Too cases that get the most attention have tended to be from white-collar work environments or college campuses, rather than in the dispossessed or marginalized populations that criminal justice reformers are more typically focused on.

But some argue that there’s a more fundamental tension here. Aya Gruber, a professor at the USC Gould School of Law, has written a book arguing that feminists’ efforts to ensure rape and domestic violence are punished more severely have, in practice, ended up contributing to racist mass incarceration. 

“I just think it is a really dangerous thing to start expanding the criminal law in ways that grant all this power to prosecutors,” Gruber told me. “This idea that somehow all this cultural power is going to be used against already privileged people and thus have some sort of egalitarian aspect to it makes it very tempting. But we can identify populations that are more heavily policed, and they are generally not privileged populations.”

A Sacramento man claims ICE abducted his wife. The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office issued an arrest warrant for the husband after her burnt remains were found in the woods.

Gurinder Singh Gill says ICE took his wife, Jasmine Gill, who had stepped outside. — Read the rest

The post His wife vanished. He said ICE took her. Detectives found something else appeared first on Boing Boing.

Are you mad about everything?

Another needless, endless war. Rising living costs and gas prices. The fact that the richest 1 percent of Americans own more than the bottom 90 percent combined, or the straight-up corruption happening in the White House. As the old saying goes, if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention. 

But what does spirituality teach us about how to respond to our anger? Is it wise to try to let it go? Should we practice imagining clouds floating gently by and take a deep breath?

I don’t think so. For one, it’s not that simple! There’s way too much happening inside my heart when I’m pissed off to pretend that I’m full of calm and kindness. Plus, this kind of spiritual bypassing is as insulting as it is ineffective. When we try to force a feeling, we fundamentally misunderstand the gift that anger has to give us: a deeper insight into our pain and a genuine compassion that enables wise action for justice.

That said, I don’t want to walk around like a fire-breathing dragon or endlessly stew in my resentment either. So I reached out to some trustworthy religious voices to see what spiritual traditions can teach us about effective responses to our rage — and how it can give us insight without overwhelming us.

Underneath your anger is a broken heart

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist teacher in Atlanta and the author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. The first thing he tells me is that we have to acknowledge our anger. “A lot of us actually don’t know what anger feels like. We’re just reacting to it,” he says. And that rings true. I’m still learning to notice the physical signs of rage: My head gets hot; my stomach tight; my throat fills with the scream that I’m only just able to contain.

That physicality is central to Owens’s definition of anger: The mental and physical tension out of which aggression arises. And that aggressive response is what gets me into trouble — when I snap at my husband or give demon eyes at those who surely have headphones but are choosing not to use them. If I’m not careful, I won’t even notice how rageful I am until my simmering pot of fury suddenly comes to a boil. 

Noticing that tension can be tricky, Owens says, because “a lot of people get gaslit around their anger, particularly women and femme folks.” It can be radical to simply admit that anger is arising in you. Owens is very careful with language here. Instead of saying that we are angry, he encourages us to say that we feel angry. “I know it’s very nuanced,” he explains, “but when people start thinking about an experience rather than being something, it really opens up space.” 

And that space gives us what we need to take the next step. Which, surely, is to move past our anger?

No, he argues. The path of liberation is through anger — not to “get over it.” Owens learned this through personal experience, as well as through the wisdom teachings of his Buddhist lineage. As a Black, queer man living in America, he’s had plenty to be angry about (while also having to navigate the harmful stereotype that as a Black man he’s inherently angry). But, he writes in his book, “I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt.” Through disciplined meditation, Owens realized that his anger was a secondary emotion. Meaning, there was a primary experience that sat underneath the anger. And that primary experience was pain and sadness and a deeper sense of heartbrokenness. 

“It’s like you’re not just angry, experiencing anger about the world. You’re hurt by the world, you’re saddened by the world, you’re grieving the world,” he says. 

Learning to sit with that anger shifted things over time. As Owens practiced noticing and naming his rage instead of trying to push it away or acting out in aggression, he found a way to be with it instead. 

His Buddhist lineage taught him to think of anger simply as energy. And like any energy, he learned to experience it rather than to react to it: “In Buddhism, we would consider the essence [of anger] to be empty…it’s just energy that can be shaped or misunderstood by consciousness.” 

To be clear, he says, “It’s not like the anger disappeared,” but rather that Owens experienced enough space around the anger that allowed him to name the heartbreak that was underneath it. 

And once he could do that, he noticed a completely different feeling flooding in. 

Moving through anger to tender compassion

Nate DeGroot has seen the same connection. DeGroot is a rabbi based in Detroit and the director of the Shalom Center. In his Jewish tradition, anger isn’t just something only humans experience — God gets angry, too. Think of the flood sent to punish humankind that Noah avoids by building the ark, for example. But, DeGroot explains, God’s anger only lasts a moment.

In fact, in Jewish tradition, the Talmud records people questioning exactly how long God’s anger lasts — with some claiming that it remains only for a 15,888th of an hour (which comes to just under half a second), and others saying God’s wrath lasts as long as it takes to say the word “moment” in Hebrew, a word with two syllables. Either way, it only lasts a short while, because a deeper, more enduring compassion quickly emanates from God’s being.

As the parent of two small kids, DeGroot empathizes with both God’s anger — and the love that supersedes it. When his kids mess around, he says, “I’m frustrated!…why did they fling the blue toothpaste on the white shade in the bathroom and now it’s forever stained? I’ve got to bring the rug into the rug cleaner for the fifth time in two years because they peed on it in the middle of the night!” he says, laughing. But those temporary flares of frustration sit within a wider circle of parental care. “I really relate to… this notion of the moment of anger [being] situated within a broader, more expansive, everlasting love,” he tells me.

Once we’ve properly noticed our anger and named the heartbreak it masks, what will (hopefully!) follow is waves of compassion for ourselves and everyone else that is hurting. And it is from that place that you can actually take action.  

From compassion comes a community for justice

Najeeba Syeed is the executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg in Minneapolis and has a long history of doing conflict resolution work. She explains that in Islam, too, the Prophet Muhammad experiences anger. Early in his mission as he travels from one place to another, he’s stoned by angry villagers who reject him. “He was given a choice,” she tells Vox. “Should the divine force go and destroy this community, or should this community have reprieve for what they’ve done?” 

The Prophet Muhammad chooses forgiveness over revenge. But there’s both spiritual wisdom and strategy at play in that choice: Anger can separate us from the very people we need to be connected to when seeking justice, Syeed says. “It makes us incapable of seeing the experience of others,” she says. And it is precisely the experience of other people we need to be aware of when building coalitions that will be able to solve the problems that make us angry. Inequality and corruption and rising health care costs are not going to change if we remain atomized and mad. We have to work together.

“Okay, you’re angry,” Syeed affirms, “But who is the you? Who is in the collective? Who is impacted? If we don’t have a larger identity than our political affiliation — by that I mean the neighborliness, some sense of community that transcends that identitarian political affiliation alone — then we may actually destroy ourselves in the process.”

“If you [take action] by yourself, is it really going to change at the social level?” she asks. “You still have to be able to build allies, and you still have to be able to build connection.”

That’s what the Prophet Muhammad was doing in exhibiting restraint with the angry villagers. In leaving them unpunished, he was later able to build an alliance with them in his campaign to spread his message through the region. 

In the Muslim tradition, a judge is forbidden from making a ruling when angry because it is understood that justice cannot come from rage. Anger helps us cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done — but that work for justice must come from a deeper place of love. 

So, how should we think of anger? Not as something to indulge — but nor should we try to avoid it. Anger is like an alarm bell, telling us something is wrong. When we notice it arising, we must inspect the heartbreak that lies underneath and allow for our innate compassion to emerge. And then guided by that love — and a dash of strategy — we can decide how to act. 

And act we should! Syeed shares a popular saying in the Islamic world: One must tie their own camel. It means that we humans have to intervene in the world; it isn’t just up to the divine to act for us. So: Have hard conversations guided by your morals! Vote in the midterms and in local elections! Call your electeds! Organize your neighbors and your workplace! But do it out of that deeper compassion that guides wise decision-making.