If you’ve ever turned to artificial intelligence to try to figure out how to handle a tricky situation with a friend or colleague, you’re far from alone. For many, AI has become a modern oracle – a source of guidance, emotional support or clarity in moments of uncertainty – though critics worry that they could lead to emotional dependence on the technology.

Of course, the urge to seek answers from forces beyond ourselves is hardly new. For generations, people have turned to psychics, astrology charts or tarot cards for reassurance.

Once fringe, these practices have increasingly become mainstream. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, nearly 1 in 3 Americans consult tools such as tarot or astrology at least once a year, interest that’s thought to largely be fueled by Gen Z and social media.

Now, we’re seeing these two forces – AI and occult practices – meeting in strange and fascinating ways. An increasing number of tarot readers, from novices to seasoned practitioners, have been turning to AI to help make sense of their tarot readings.

What makes this pairing so striking is that interpretation is the whole point of tarot. And yet AI often brings little knowledge of your history or your unique situation when it dispenses advice.

In a study published in April 2026, we examined which aspects of the practice that tarot readers were delegating to AI, and how the technology was shaping their interpretations.

Watching what happens when readers hand that important interpretive step to AI may offer a glimpse of what helpful AI guidance could look like – and where it could go wrong.

The mainstreaming of occult practices

Tarot cards are experiencing a revival.

Tarot did not start out as a spiritual or fortune-telling tool. It began as a popular card game in the Italian Renaissance, before spreading across Europe.

Over time, readers and occultists layered the cards with mystical symbolism drawn from Kabbalah, Egyptology, numerology and other mystical and symbolic traditions. In the early 20th century, the British publisher William Rider & Son released the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which became the most popular tarot deck in the English-speaking world.

Whereas only a handful of tarot decks were being published in the early 1970s, today thousands of tarot and oracle decks are in circulation. A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards, each carrying its own symbolic meaning. Practitioners use the cards to sit with hard questions, which can range from difficult relationships to world events: Should I leave my partner? Is this job worth it? What’s going to happen with Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz?

After cards are pulled, their meanings are interpreted through the lens of the reader’s question, circumstances and life history.

Someone asking about a relationship and drawing the Tower card, for instance, might read it as impending rupture, or as false assumptions finally giving way. Which reading fits depends on the other cards, the specific question and what the reader already knows about their own situation.

This stands in contrast to AI, which is primed to produce a seemingly definitive answer, even when it’s unaware of the nuances of your situation and context.

The adoption of AI in tarot reading

For our study, we interviewed 12 tarot practitioners about their use of AI in readings they did for themselves.

They generally found themselves pulled in two directions.

On the one hand, they often sought explicit guidance from AI in the process of self-reflection. By using AI to interpret the cards, they could sidestep the frustration of interpreting many cards in light of the question asked.

Say someone drew the Fool and the Ten of Wands for a question about a career change. The Fool points toward a leap into the unknown, while the Ten of Wands speaks to burnout and an unsustainable load.

But do the cards say, “Leave, you’re exhausted and something better awaits”? Or “Leave, and the new job will be just as demanding”?

Rather than sit with that ambiguity, some readers simply ask the AI for the meaning of the reading.

For more challenging readings, AI’s “yes man energy” helped them feel more confident about their interpretations. This was true for cases where participants both drew physical tarot cards and then interpreted them with AI, or used AI to directly simulate tarot readings.

These uses of AI are seductive. They make the act of self-reflection less demanding. But within the broader tarot community, we found a lot of criticism of AI, and there were concerns about how the sycophantic nature of the technology could undermine people’s intuition and reasoning.

AI as a tool for critical engagement

On the other hand, the tarot readers we interviewed also used AI as a tool to challenge their own biases and assumptions – blind spots in their readings, or what they might be missing in their own interpretation of the cards.

Along these lines, they used AI to generate alternative perspectives so they could compare the different interpretations and see which resonated more. And some even asked for an “objective reading” of the cards, because AI appears to have no skin in the game and be unburdened by personal biases or motives.

Many readers did this when they didn’t want to “bug” or “pester” their friends for help with a reading. Instead, they relied on chatbots in a one-sided relationship that feels supportive – an example of what scholars call parasocial interaction.

Some interviewees even treated bizarre AI-generated outputs or hallucinations as meaningful precisely because they were random and unintended, the same way that a card drawn at random feels like it carries a secret message.

What does this mean for the future of AI?

AI is becoming a powerful new oracle in its own right.

In one recent survey, researchers found that up to 87% of generative AI users are consulting the technology for “personal applications,” which includes advice and emotional support for relationship conflicts and mental health struggles.

Sometimes these chatbots are genuinely helpful. But at the same time, advice seekers can also become emotionally dependent. Some rely on the technology for companionship and guidance instead of friends and family. Chatbots have also been found to nurture delusional beliefs and even lead to self-harm.

Meanwhile, professionals that regularly give guidance are using AI in their practice, from lawyers to therapists and even priests. Pope Leo XIV recently urged priests to resist the temptation to use AI to write sermons.

We think it’s important to make sure the technology isn’t seen as an all-knowing source of truth. It can certainly open up users to new ideas, but it should be a tool to enhance self-reflection, rather than one that serves as a substitute for it.

In some cases, that’s what the tarot readers in our study did. They tapped into their own capacity for reflection by using AI to explicitly challenge their own biases and assumptions. This points to an alternative blueprint for the future of AI – one in which the technology doesn’t simply hand you answers but keeps you actively engaged in the process of finding them.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison says alerts from ShotSpotter, a gun detection technology, help officers respond quickly to shootings.

“Without it, I wouldn’t have the closure rate [of resolved crimes] that I have and a lot of families wouldn’t have the justice they deserve,” he said in March 2026, according to BridgeDetroit, a nonprofit news service.

During a Detroit City Council committee meeting on May 18, 2026, police officials said ShotSpotter led to hundreds of search warrants and confiscated guns in 2025.

It’s not clear how many arrests resulted last year. Bettison has been quoted saying that ShotSpotter during the May 18 City Council meeting and 256 during a March 23 budget briefing. We reached out to the Detroit Police Department to clarify the number, but it didn’t respond by our deadline.

The department has requested a nine-month extension for ShotSpotter, which would cost the city an additional $US2.06 million, while it considers other vendors to provide gun detection technology, the Detroit News reported.

The system uses a network of acoustic sensors to detect, locate and alert police to shots fired. ShotSpotter is in use in more than 180 American cities, according to the company. The technology has been criticized for its high price tag, ineffectiveness in improving public safety and lack of transparency.

Detroit City Council first approved ShotSpotter in 2020, and the system became fully active in 2021. In 2022, City Council members narrowly approved, by a 5-4 vote, expanding the program to more neighborhoods. The technology now covers approximately 39 square miles (about 101 square kilometers), about a third of the city, and is deployed in the neighborhoods police say are most likely to experience gun violence. The contract that expires on June 30, 2026, cost $7 million over a four-year period.

Divya Ramjee and Tian An Wong are part of a team of researchers who studied the effectiveness of gunshot detection technology in Detroit during its first two years. The study is currently under peer review. They answered the following questions for The Conversation Detroit.

How did ShotSpotter affect calls to 911 to report gunshots?

Wong: Our research first looked at calls to 911 reporting gunshots before and after the first deployment of ShotSpotter in Detroit, covering February 2018 to November 2022. This data is available on Detroit’s Open Data Portal. In the areas of Detroit where ShotSpotter was implemented in 2021, calls to 911 to report gunshots initially dropped by 47%. This effect disappeared about after a year, however, and these calls returned to previous levels.

Our study does not cover the 2023 expansion of ShotSpotter in Detroit, though the data is currently available for those interested.

Although ShotSpotter alert time and location data is publicly available, the outcome of the police response to those alerts, is not and the DPD has never released data on the effectiveness of the technology during these first two years of use. To analyze outcomes, we made a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to the Detroit Police Department.

Did the technology affect officer response times or the rates of arrests for violent crime in Detroit?

Wong: By analyzing the FOIA data, we found that of the 5,853 ShotSpotter alerts from that first deployment, just two alerts, or 0.03%, resulted in at least one arrest. Additionally, 798 alerts, or 13.63%, resulted in at least one firearm recovered.

Those numbers are obviously low. However, we don’t believe that arrest rates should be used as a measure of ShotSpotter’s success. We need to understand the nature of those arrests and if they helped bring down gun-related incidents in the community.

We did not find any difference in officer response times. Some have argued that the alerts generate responses to events that would otherwise not have been reported due to lack of trust in law enforcement, but it is difficult to verify this claim.

I’d argue the request to renew ShotSpotter is not based on a rigorous review of the technology’s impact. In addition to ShotSpotter, Detroit also introduced a community violence intervention program in 2023 with a similar name – Shot Stoppers. That program determines grant renewals to participating community organizations based on a drop in homicides and nonfatal shootings in their geographic area.

But the reality is that homicides in Detroit hit a 60-year low in 2025, and nonfatal shootings are also significantly down. This tracks with nationwide crime trends. Our research tries to get at the role ShotSpotter played in this reduction, if any.

What do you make of Bettison’s statement that ShotSpotter alerts led to dozens or hundreds of arrests in 2025?

Wong: The arrest data that we obtained from the Detroit Police Department covers February 2018 to November 2022. Bettison is referring to a later time period – after the expansion of the coverage area – so his numbers don’t necessarily contradict ours. The only way to know for sure is to FOIA data for this most recent time period and fact-check what the chief is saying. This process is currently underway.

In the meantime, two arrests, as we found in the actual data we obtained from the police department, compared with 78 – or even 256, as Bettison as said – seems like a big jump, and more context is needed.

Is there any evidence that ShotSpotter saved lives of gunshot victims?

Ramjee: Evidence is inconclusive at best. Some research supports that the technology can potentially increase the likelihood of police transport of gunshot victims to hospitals and reduce EMS response times for victims, which could potentially improve survival outcomes. However, research hasn’t proved a corresponding reduction in mortality rates in areas where ShotSpotter has been deployed across the U.S.

How is ShotSpotter received in other U.S. cities?

Ramjee: There are continued issues with the accuracy of sensors, including false positives and missed gunshot detections, that complicate its practical effectiveness.

The lack of evidence that ShotSpotter improves public safety, given its high cost, has prompted a number of communities to reassess its value. Chicago; San Antonio; Houston; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Portland, Oregon have either terminated existing agreements or indicated that they do not intend to renew them upon expiration.

In New York, the city comptroller indicated that available evidence from a June 2024 audit did not support continued investment in ShotSpotter. Nevertheless, the New York City Police Department opted to renew its contract for an additional three-year term, at a cost of approximately $21.8 million.

What happens to the data ShotSpotter collects? Specifically, does the city of Detroit own it, can researchers access it, and how does that compare to 911 data?

Ramjee: ShotSpotter data ise not broadly shared with the public. The company, which rebranded as SoundThinking, Inc. in 2023, considers the raw audio from sensors, the underlying algorithms and other system-generated data to be proprietary. SoundThinking states that the company only shares alerts, gunshot locations, timestamps and short, isolated audio clips with police agencies. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and courts may also access this incident data as part of criminal cases, depending on legal rules.

Cities and municipalities themselves do not necessarily obtain full ownership of ShotSpotter data even when data is shared with them. In most cases, contractual agreements dictate the access and use of incident data by the respective jurisdictions, and there are generally constraints on how they can store, analyze or publicly release the data.

For 911 call data in Detroit, access to the data depends on the level of detail required. The city’s Open Data Portal provides a large dataset of law enforcement-serviced 911 calls that includes time of incident, call type, response metrics and ShotSpotter-initiated 911 alerts, but it redacts information that exposes a person’s identity.

Obtaining the actual dispatch logs or the arrest outcomes from ShotSpotter alerts typically requires submitting a FOIA request. That process can be tedious, may involve delays due to issues with resources, outdated technology or flawed data reporting practices, and may ultimately result in partial data or data with redactions.

Tian An Wong received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Divya Ramjee is affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The resignation of Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, on May 12, 2026, brought to the forefront a heated controversy over fruit-flavored nicotine vapes.

Rumors had been circulating for weeks that President Donald Trump was planning to fire Makary, in large part due to Makary’s disagreement with Trump over the FDA’s recent approval of two fruit-flavored vapes. Makary reportedly disagreed in private with the FDA’s decision, which came soon after Trump pushed the FDA to move more quickly in approving fruit-flavored vapes.

Before that FDA approval, the agency had only approved menthol- and tobacco-flavored nicotine vapes. The clash between Trump and Makary over whether to allow fruit-flavored vapes is a high-profile example of the continued debate surrounding these products.

Beyond Washington, the public health community is also divided. Researchers are working to understand how flavored vapes affect public health, but the evidence is complicated.

We are a team of public health researchers who study scientific evidence, health policy and regulation as it relates to tobacco and nicotine products. Our team at the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations at the University of Michigan and University of Massachusetts Amherst is studying questions about flavors in these products.

The authorization of two fruit-flavored vapes marks a pivotal moment in U.S. e-cigarette regulation.

FDA’s role in regulating tobacco and nicotine

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law in 2009, gave the FDA the authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution and marketing of tobacco products. This includes nicotine alternatives such as e-cigarettes, vapes and oral nicotine pouches.

Tobacco and nicotine products, such as major cigarette brands, that were on the market before 2007 did not require FDA authorization, but new products, like vapes, do. To be authorized, new tobacco and nicotine products must meet the standard of being “appropriate for the protection of public health”. In other words, their benefits to the population as a whole must be judged to outweigh their risks.

The Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA is responsible for making these decisions and implementing regulations. Academic research centers, like ours, support the center in understanding how its policies might affect public health.

Vaping has a lower relative risk than smoking

Vaping nicotine is not risk-free, but research is clear that it is much less harmful than smoking. Vapes and e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco leaf like cigarettes do, nor do they have the same toxic chemicals that are found in cigarettes. Smoking involves burning organic material, which releases cancer-causing pollutants; vaping does not.

Vapes can contain potentially harmful chemicals, but these are usually in much lower amounts than those found in cigarettes. Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but it does not on its own cause cancer. The FDA’s regulation and oversight of vapes is important for public safety. As of May 2026, the FDA has approved 45 vaping products that can be lawfully sold in the U.S.

On the other hand, the U.S. is flooded with illegal vapes, including colorful devices manufactured in China. It can be difficult to know what is in illegal vapes.

Because vaping is not risk-free but has a lower relative risk than smoking, it presents an increased risk for people who do not otherwise use tobacco or smoke, but a decreased risk for people who smoke.

Flavored vapes attract new users, especially youth

Flavored vapes can include menthol and mint, fruit and sweet flavors and concept flavors with names like “jazz,” “solar,” “fusion” and “unicorn puke.” Other flavored vapes are often packaged in bright and appealing colors, even if they do not include explicit flavor description words.

The recent FDA decision to approve two fruit- and sweet-flavored nicotine vapes, which have the color-coded names of “Sapphire” and “Gold,” is a potentially significant expansion of the FDA’s approach to authorizing e-cigarettes.

Research shows that flavored vapes attract new users, including young people who do not have a history of smoking tobacco. It also shows that experimenting with flavors increases the appeal of vapes among adolescents. Young people often think fruit-flavored vapes are less harmful than tobacco-flavored vapes.

Flavored vapes might help people quit smoking

Flavored vapes can attract youth, but they can also appeal to people who smoke. For people who smoke, switching to nicotine vapes can diminish their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals and potentially lower their likelihood of tobacco-related disease.

Researchers regularly assess the scientific evidence on whether e-cigarettes can help people stop smoking. Regularly updated evidence across more than a hundred studies continues to show that nicotine vapes can help people who use cigarettes to quit smoking.

However, researchers don’t yet know whether or how adding flavors to vapes might affect smoking and vaping. While fruity and sweet flavors can be appealing to people who smoke, tobacco and menthol flavors are sometimes more popular among older people who have a history of smoking tobacco.

As the recent clash between Trump and Makary shows, the debate over flavored vapes continues. Whatever the outcome, it remains important that decisions made about vapes are based on scientific evidence, and that the reasons behind policy decisions are communicated effectively to the public.

Claire L. Ma is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations, where she leads research dissemination efforts for the Policy Analysis and Dissemination Core. Her research is funded by the FDA and NIH through a Federal grant to the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. Ma does not receive any funding from the tobacco or vaping industries.

Holly Jarman is the Co-Lead of the Policy and Dissemination Core for the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations (CAsToR) at the University of Michigan and receives funding from the NIH and FDA for that work. Jarman does not receive any funding from the tobacco or vaping industries.

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce receives funding from the NIH, FDA, Truth Initiative, Cancer Research UK and the Massachusetts Department of Health for research related to tobacco control. She does not receive any funding from tobacco or vaping industries.

In 1994, the last time U.S. stadiums hosted the World Cup, an average ticket cost US$58. The most expensive ticket for the final could be grabbed for $475.

Adjusted for inflation, that would be $131 and $1,069, respectively, in today’s prices. Fast forward 22 years and things have become a lot pricier.

In the tournament due to begin on June 11, 2026, at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico, the average ticket prices have been in the region of $1,300. The cheaper tickets for the final are going for a whopping $10,000, and it is even more for the better seats.

That represents an inflation-adjusted increase in average ticket prices of about 1,000% between the two times the U.S. has hosted or co-hosted the event. As a benchmark for comparison, over that period, median household incomes in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, have risen by only 32%.

But is ticket pricing the real problem with the World Cup? As a soccer economist and co-host of the Soccernomics podcast, it is a question I have long thought about. And economic analysis can bring some clarity as to what brought about such eye-watering ticket prices, whether they are justifiable and why many think them unfair.

To start things off, let’s entertain a thought experiment. The three host nations of the World Cup – Canada, Mexico and the United States – are home to around 200,000 ultra-high net worth individuals, those sitting on fortunes in excess of $30 million. If that elite group contained 82,500 soccer fans prepared to pay $300,000 for a ticket to fill out the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for the final, it would represent a payday for FIFA of close to $25 billion. And that isn’t a fanciful price — tickets for the final have listed for far higher.

Now if FIFA vowed that all that money would go to good causes – say, eradicating malaria or ensuring that underprivileged kids had access to state-of-the-art soccer equipment and programs – would anyone really gripe that it came at the cost of making tickets affordable for all?

The problem is FIFA is not vowing any such thing. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has stated that all money generated “goes back into the game all over.” But given the governing bodies’ reputation for shadowy financial doings, there are reasons to think much of the money will never be properly accounted for.

The key point is this: It’s not really the high ticket prices in themselves that are the problem; it’s the context in which they are being sold.

The devil in the dynamic pricing

That context involves at least three elements that critics have found particularly offensive.

First is the same thing that is bane of gig-going music fans and frequent fliers alike: dynamic pricing.

The economic term for such a policy is “price discrimination.” It amounts to charging people according to their willingness to pay rather than the cost of supplying the commodity or service.

Dynamic pricing is simply an algorithm created to achieve that by exploiting market power. Although not illegal, the announcement of investigations by the New York and New Jersey attorneys general suggest that FIFA might have some legal problems down the road.

Second, the whiff of corruption around FIFA never goes away.

The 2015 prosecutions of high-ranking soccer officials revealed the extent of corrupt practices relating to the sale of broadcast rights. A recent statement by prominent figures in the world of soccer administration suggested that since then, things have gotten worse.

When it comes to ticket revenues, where is all the money going? Most of it goes back, in one way or another, to the national soccer associations that make up FIFA.

How they use it depends on their probity. Ideally, the money goes to invest into grass roots development — but in many cases, there seems little to show for FIFA’s largesse. Notorious figures such as Jack Warner from Trinidad and Tobago and Chuck Blazer from the U.S. — known as “Mr. 10%” due to the cut he took for doing business with him – are just the most egregious examples.

FIFA stands accused of doing little or nothing to investigate where the money it hands out eventually ends up. I believe a little sunlight would be a great disinfectant.

Fans hold their nose … up to a point

The third issue, which is related to corruption, concerns the identity of the host nations.

Russia hosted in 2018 despite having invaded the sovereign territory of another FIFA member four years before. Qatar in 2022 was allowed to host despite evidence of human rights abuses. Now, we have the bizarre spectacle in which a World Cup is being co-hosted by a country with a leader who has threatened to annex a fellow host country and started a war against one of the participating nations.

There is a long history of supporters looking past the political realities in order to enjoy the soccer, but there are limits for fans. World Cups don’t just boost the coffers of FIFA; they provide a diplomatic and economic fillip for the host nations – something many see as “sportswashing” when the said hosts have checkered reputations.

So fans have genuine reasons to resent the way in which FIFA organizes the World Cup both politically and commercially.

But in an ideal world, should ticket prices be cheap? Economists often have a smug answer to this: The price should be set at what the market will bear. The World Cup is popular, tickets are scarce, and so, of course they should be expensive.

In my view, that is a little too simplistic. The fundamental economic proposition is that prices should reflect the additional cost of supplying the service, or “marginal cost” in the economic jargon. And in this case, the marginal cost of each ticket is small – there are not even any very substantial overheads to cover, which often justify a higher price.

The fact that marginal cost pricing would lead to reselling, creating windfall profits for anyone lucky enough to get a rationed ticket, does not alter the principle. Rather, it just demonstrates that there is a problem.

Global soccer’s affordability crisis

FIFA’s apparent answer to the problem of rationing is allowing for a system that lets only the richest people have access.

If rich people were rich because they work hard, and poor people were poor because they didn’t, then maybe this would all seem fair. But most people don’t think that’s how the world really works. If there is to be rationing, most people would probably prefer that committed fans, with no interest in reselling, were rewarded with low-cost tickets.

Put simply, the typical fan is experiencing an affordability crisis when it comes to ticket prices at this World Cup — the tickets they could afford in 1994 may now be unattainable, or at least would put a major stress on their household budget.

But this reflects a broader social problem. The dissatisfaction with World Cup ticket pricing reflects a general discomfort with income distribution in the modern world. Income inequality has far bigger consequences for most people – in terms of their life prospects and life expectancy – than whether they can squeeze into a stadium to watch a World Cup game.

The gap between the wealthy elites that can afford anything they want and the struggling middle for whom more and more of life’s opportunities are becoming out of reach is one of the primary economic problems of our age. To me, World Cup ticket prices are a striking illustration of how deep this reality has become.

Stefan Szymanski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The gesture may lack the explosive drama of a rooftop fight or the tension of a car chase, but on May 11, 2026, a street sign honoring a legendary comics creator was unveiled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

After a lobbying effort by comics expert Roy Schwartz, the New York City Council in December 2025 approved the naming of a block of Essex Street between Delancey and Rivington streets in honor of Jack Kirby.

Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 to Jewish immigrants, spent roughly the first 40 years of his life in New York, aside from a stint serving in the military during World War II. Before enlisting, he’d already embarked on a career as a comics artist. He went on to become a key figure during the medium’s golden age, a period that most scholars and fans agree began with the creation of Superman in 1938 and ended with the implementation of the Comics Code Authority in 1956, which heavily restricted content until enforcement weakened in the 1970s.

Though you may not have heard of Kirby, you’d have to deliberately avoid pop culture to miss his most influential creations: Captain America, the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man and Black Panther.

For my part, however, as a scholar of American Jewish immigration history – and as a lifelong comic book fan – I hold a place of reverence for the man known as the “King of Comics.”

Jewish American history, immigration history, the history of New York City and the origins of the comics industry are inextricably linked. New York played a starring role in the golden age of comics. And like Kirby, many of the genre’s most famous artists were Jewish.

Jewish immigrants put pen and ink to paper

Comics found a wide audience in New York City during their early years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from early newspaper strips like “The Yellow Kid” and “Abie the Agent” to later ones like “Little Orphan Annie.”

As World War II drew to a close in the summer of 1945, there was a citywide newspaper delivery strike, leaving many New Yorkers desperate for news and entertainment – so much so that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took it upon himself to read the Sunday comic strips over the radio, performing them with characteristic vigor and enthusiasm.

Among the first publications that would today be recognizable as “comic books” were compilations of these early newspaper strips, assembled by newsprint salesman and Jewish New Yorker Max Gaines. Gaines, born Maxwell Ginzburg, compiled various comic strips into neatly packaged, inexpensive entertainment for the masses, helping pioneer the saddle-stitched comic book – thin, stapled magazines that would become the primary format for superhero stories.

As the superhero genre took off in the late 1930s, other publishers emerged from Jewish New York. Harry Donenfeld and Jack Leibowitz, in partnership with Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, created Detective Comics and Action Comics, which helped establish the company later known as DC Comics.

In addition to early publishers, many pioneering comics artists were raised in New York City as the children of Jewish immigrants, including Marvel Universe architect Stan Lee and his brother, Larry Lieber; Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit” and co-creator of “Sheena: Queen of the Jungle”; and Al Jaffee, a longtime contributor to Mad Magazine.

An ode to the Lower East Side

In Jack Kirby’s comics, the city shines through.

The Fantastic Four – the superhero squad that Kirby created with Stan Lee – operates out of midtown Manhattan’s fictional Baxter Building, which Kirby modeled after the city’s mid-century skyscrapers.

Kirby also based the character of Ben Grimm – The Thing – on himself, mining his own life to write Grimm’s backstory. Grimm’s home is on the fictional Yancy Street, a tribute to Kirby’s own working-class upbringing on the Lower East Side’s Delancey Street. The thoroughfare is rich with Jewish history and in close proximity to iconic businesses like Katz’s Deli and Russ and Daughters.

Another of Kirby’s most iconic characters was Steve Rogers – Captain America – which he co-created with Joe Simon.

A poor orphan from Brooklyn, Rogers attempts to enlist in the U.S. Army to fight the Axis powers during World War II, but is rejected as unfit for duty. He is later recruited into Project Rebirth, where he is transformed into a super-soldier after being injected with a serum designed to maximize human physical and mental abilities.

Captain America attracted legions of fans among American youth, many of whom saw themselves in the superhero. Though Rogers is Christian, his story of transformation from weakling to hero certainly spoke to young Jewish boys and men, who were often inaccurately portrayed in the media and press as intellectually superior but physically inferior.

Captain America, though fictional, is already recognized as a part of New York City history, and has a statue in Brooklyn, which was unveiled in 2016 with the inscription “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.”

The city as a muse

Even comics created by artists outside New York City – like Ohio natives and Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – are, by virtue of their content, still in many ways New York comics.

The glittering Metropolis in “Superman” is widely understood as a stand-in for New York; for example, in the April 1950 issue of Action Comics, the Statue of Liberty is said to appear in “Metropolis Harbor.”

If Metropolis is the bright, shining, optimistic view of the city, then Gotham, the home of Batman, reprises the city through a grittier lens.

Writer Washington Irving had first described New York as Gotham in the early 1800s. But by the time Batman came on the scene, the term had become less common in everyday speech, and DC Comics repurposed the name for the fictional Gotham City. Beyond the name, Gotham City’s architecture, bridges, boroughs and neighborhoods are an homage to New York.

By officially recognizing Jack Kirby, the city adds the artist to a distinguished roster of politicians, community activists and celebrities honored with street names.

Jack Kirby Way celebrates a legendary comics artist while also acknowledging the immigrant creators who helped shape the genre. It’s a fitting tribute: As much as the comics industry is indebted to the city, the city is indebted to the comics industry.

Miriam Eve Mora does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

For nearly 60 years, the Philippine government’s war against the insurgent New People’s Army, or NPA, has rumbled on with little accountability in Manila and scarce scrutiny abroad.

That seemed to change on April 19, 2026, when 19 people were killed by Philippine troops in Toboso, Negros Occidental, the Western Visayas region of the country.

As a scholar of political violence in the Philippines, what I found notable was not only the volume of death but also the intensity of public reaction.

For a media ecosystem that seldom reports on the atrocities of the counterinsurgency, this episode has drawn weeks of political scrutiny. Congress members, Catholic bishops and the country’s Commission on Human Rights have all condemned the killings.

Foreign groups, such as the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights and the largest communications union in the U.S., the Communication Workers of America, have also raised alarm, noting that among those killed were a community journalist and two Filipino American activists.

Such attention to the army’s alleged brutality is important because it is rare; impunity has long been both a motivation and outcome of extrajudicial killings.

But the coverage of the Toboso killings has also revealed an ongoing obstacle to achieving full accountability: a media and public narrative that grieves victims selectively.

Responding to Toboso

According to officials, all of those killed in a series of clashes were combatants of the NPA, a Maoist guerrilla group that seeks to seize political power from Manila. But a recent fact-finding mission carried out in Toboso by civil society groups found at least six of those killed were civilians. The mission also alleges that evidence was planted and bodies were desecrated.

The army blasted the findings as “time-worn propaganda” peddled by the NPA.

On social media especially, many Filipinos have either lambasted the army’s lack of restraint or the NPA’s negligence in exposing civilians to danger.

In an essay for news site Rappler, criminologist Raymund Narag noted that some people were quick to assign blame “not to the gun that fired, but to the bodies that fell. The dead, especially the students and journalists, are accused of choosing their fate. They went to a ‘hotbed of communism,’ we are told.”

American right-wing media and think tanks, such as The Daily Wire and The Manhattan Institute, echoed this view.

Selective grief

Despite the noise, there is a through line in much of this coverage: It highlights certain casualties over others. Nineteen people were killed, but media attention has largely focused on just a handful: University of the Philippines student leader Alyssa Alano, journalist RJ Nichole Ledesma and Filipino American activists Kai Sorem and Lyle Prijoles.

There has been considerably less commentary regarding the other civilians killed: student Maureen Santuyo, community researcher Errol Chen, local resident Roel Sabillo and two unnamed minors. And almost nothing has been said of the 10 NPA recruits killed alongside them.

One wonders why some victims have drawn more attention or, put differently, why others haven’t. In the words of a friend of Santuyo on Facebook, it banishes some of the victims into a category of “others.”

One way of understanding this selective grief, I believe, is to see Toboso as part of a long history in the Philippines of normalizing violence against peasant movements for their purported militancy. In 2025, some 390 people were killed in state-related violence, according to researchers at the University of the Philippines. More than half were civilians.

The deaths of student leaders, journalists and Americans register as shocking due to their perceived higher profile. Even if they knew the risks to their lives, the media narrative goes, they are not the usual fatalities: NPA members and predominantly poor, rural civilians caught up in the violence.

Decades of repression

The selectivity of who is grieved helps clarify the particularly strong public reaction now.

After all, the counterinsurgency against the NPA is the longest-running in the world. It is what journalist Sheila Coronel called the Philippines’ “forever war.”

The NPA formed in 1969 as the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines, embracing a Maoist focus on rural peasants and guerrilla warfare. With assassinations and ambushes as its trademark tactic, the NPA was perceived as the chief security threat under longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and then reformist President Cory Aquino in the 1980s.

Every administration since the Marcos dictatorship has directed particular attention to the island of Negros, which has seen considerable NPA activity because of the area’s chronic struggles over land rights. Under Aquino’s “total war” policy, the army declared Negros a priority area, a designation that continued in the 2000s under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Yet for critics of this militarized approach, the army has done less to tame rebellions than to terrorize the island’s peasant communities. Rights groups have documented at least five mass purges of farmers and activists since 1985, making Negros the Philippines’ “massacre capital.”

During the years of right-wing populist President Rodrigo Duterte, attacks were especially rife. From 2016-19, rights group Karapatan tracked 250 extrajudicial killings, 10 disappearances and 450,000 evacuations due to military operations. Such scale was made possible by the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which Duterte created in 2018.

Counterinsurgency today

The task force continues to be active under the current government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Earlier this May – as the Philippines used its chairship of ASEAN to broker peace talks between Thailand and Cambodia – Amnesty International revealed dozens of rights violations across rural Luzon, the most populous island in the Philippines.

Indeed, counterinsurgency operations have only grown under Marcos and been vigorously supported by the U.S. government and military. That support from Washington is the latest instance of a decades-old alliance that grew in the early 1950s and blossomed in particular during the first Marcos presidency.

Despite the recent killings, public confidence in the Armed Forces of the Philippines remains high, sitting at 76% as of May 25, 2026. According to Octa Research, the firm that organized the survey, “The (military’s) consistently high trust and performance ratings reflect the public’s continuing demand for competent, professional, and apolitical institutions that deliver effective public service.”

Reckoning with Toboso

In response to the Toboso killings, lawmakers and civil society groups have called for an independent investigation. Legal scholar Ross Tugade suggests a more proactive Commission on Human Rights. Such are hefty goals for a government that is thinly resourced, decentralized and prone to corruption scandals.

The truth is that reckoning with the killings requires more than overcoming institutional weakness. For me, the greater task lies in fully acknowledging the violence and all its victims.

Patrick Peralta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When I first became co-director of an archaeological project at Jebel Barkal in northern Sudan in 2018, I was amazed by the site’s pyramids, temples and palaces. It had been an urban center in the ancient empire of Kush, which dominated the Nile Valley off and on for over 2,000 years, from 2000 B.C.E. to 350 C.E.

I was far from alone in admiring the ruins – European and American travelers have visited and archaeologists had documented the site for the past two centuries. More recently, Jebel Barkal was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.

But researchers still know so little about the ancient city and its residents, particularly compared with other ancient cities of Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. Where did nonroyal people live? What did they eat? We don’t even know how they got their water, since the site is about a mile away from where the Nile flows today. Could there have been a nearby channel of the Nile that has since filled in? What was this landscape like when Jebel Barkal was a major urban center? More broadly, how did changes in climate over the past 4,000 years affect the growth of the city?

Some of these questions can be studied by a field called geomorphology, the study of how the Earth’s surface changes, especially by erosion. To learn more about how the landscape around Jebel Barkal had changed over millennia, I invited two Dutch geomorphologists, Jan Peeters and Tim Winkels, who had previously worked on Nile landscapes in Egypt, to come to Sudan to design a study.

The Nile as a source of life

The Nile floods at the end of every summer, as rains from the Indian Ocean monsoon fall on the highlands of East Africa. The ancient historian Herodotus famously called Egypt “the gift of the Nile” because in Egypt. the rich silt the floods deposited every year made for fertile fields. Egyptians retained the floodwaters in ponds and basins to use later for irrigation.

Upstream in Sudan, however, the underlying geology and geomorphological setting is different. This stretch of the Nile is interrupted by bedrock outcrops that break the flow of the river by what are called cataracts: islands, rapids and even small waterfalls.

The Nile also cuts more deeply into the bedrock and is more confined to the riverbed in Sudan than in Egypt. The floodplains here are generally more limited. As a result, it’s harder to hold onto water to use for irrigation after the annual flood has passed.

Our team wanted to understand how the ancient city interacted with the Nile and how that relationship developed through time as climate and the local environment shifted. Our recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at how the Nile channel and floodplain and Jebel Barkal evolved over centuries.

To learn about the ancient landscape, we collected 26 sediment cores, averaging 26 feet (8 meters) in depth and 3 inches (8 centimeters) in diameter. These cores are like time capsules that preserve the stacked layers of sediment from Nile floods that accumulated gradually over thousands of years. Connecting the dots, 17 of our cores formed a line across the Sudanese Nile valley. A second group of nine cores focused on the area where the ancient city developed.

The work was physically challenging, due both to the unrelenting Saharan sun and the depth of the sediments. Together with a team of five local men, we spent weeks drilling the cores using hand augurs and a gas-powered drill.

Hatim Awad Abdullah was this group’s energetic leader. He had his own interest in the history of Nile flooding, in part because his father and grandfather had told him that the river used to flood different areas than it has in more recent times. Our conversations with Hatim were part of a broader effort on our project to engage members of the local community, and they informed and enriched our understanding of the landscape. Other projects in Sudan have taken similar steps toward community engagement.

Extracting info from the sediment layers

Once our team had extracted the long sediment cores, we laid them out in sections so the geomorphologists could document what was in them at different levels. Sediments at the top of the cores are more recent, those lower down come from earlier in time.

Finer clays, silts and coarser sands would all have been deposited by different processes. Gentle flooding from the Nile could have carried some of these particles. More turbulent water draining from the desert via seasonal drainage channels called wadis might have brought others. By working from the deepest, oldest parts of the core samples to the ground surface, the geomorphologists could reconstruct a sequence of flooding and sediment deposition over thousands of years.

Our next step was to try to establish dates for when the sediments at different levels were deposited. One set of information came from fragments of ancient pottery found in some of the cores. Our team’s ceramic specialist, Saskia Büchner-Matthews, was able to analyze these small pieces and could often tell by their color, texture and shape when they had been made.

Another line of evidence relied on a technique called optically stimulated luminescence dating. By measuring the energy given off by minerals in the sample, like quartz grains, this amazing technique establishes when a sediment was last exposed to light. In order for optically stimulated luminescence dating to work, the samples need to be kept in the dark, so we had to be careful that our sediments were collected in black opaque tubes. Our team member Liz Chamberlain did this labor-intensive analysis in a specialized lab at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.

Our results show, first of all, that there had been an ancient Nile channel close to Jebel Barkal, but more like 10,000 years ago – millennia before the people of Kush built their city here. By the time the site was first occupied around 2000 B.C.E., that channel had long since filled in. So we still don’t know for sure how the people of Jebel Barkal got their water, but it’s clear that the Nile wasn’t running right next to the city.

The data also shows that the floodplain began to build up from regular Nile flooding starting around 2000 B.C.E. This process continued until the early 20th century, when upstream dam construction altered the Nile’s natural flood regime. That gentle accumulation of fertile soil in the floodplain, which the people of Jebel Barkal used as agricultural fields, encompasses nearly the entire ancient history of the city.

The cores our team drilled show that the city grew during a time of abundant rains and productive, predictable Nile flooding that provided fertile soil for agriculture. It doesn’t look like local climate change is the reason Jebel Barkal eventually went into decline.

Our scientific results lend new weight to an inscription of the ancient Kushite king Taharqo, who ruled over both Nubia and Egypt from about 690-664 BCE. It records a gentle and particularly abundant flood in the sixth year of his reign.

“When the time for the rising of the Inundation came, it continued rising greatly each day and it passed many days rising at the rate of one cubit every day.

"It penetrated the hills of South-land, it overtopped the mounds of North-land, and the land was (again) Primeval Waters, an inert (expanse), without land being distinguishable from river. …

"Every man of Nubia was inundated with an abundance of everything, Egypt was in beautiful festival, and they thanked the god Amun for His Majesty.”

This research has been particularly satisfying for me because it helps build a richer picture of life in ancient Sudan, comparable in depth and detail to what we know about other ancient civilizations.

Geoff Emberling has received funding from the U.S. Department of State (through its Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation), the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic, and private donors including Kitty Picken, Steve Klinsky, and Roger and Ann Cogswell. In addition to his position at the University of Michigan, he is a board member of the International Society for Nubian Studies and Secretary of the American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center.

Imagine this scenario: In late 2025, a social worker sits down with a transgender teenager and his parents. The family is trying to decide whether, and when, to begin gender-affirming hormone treatment.

No one in the family was questioning this young person’s gender identity. The teen had been living as a boy for years. By all accounts, he was thriving: emotionally, academically and socially.

He felt ready for this next step, and so did his parents – at first.

What gave them pause was not a wavering in the parents’ support of their child’s identity, or a change in the teen’s needs. Instead, they felt unsure whether starting hormone therapy was still legal – or even safe.

As a clinical social worker who works extensively with children and families navigating gender‑affirming care – and as someone whose trans child is now an adult – I have encountered several families facing similar questions about their options. These concerns have grown in recent years, especially as more states have moved to restrict gender-affirming care for minors.

In states like Michigan, gender-affirming care for minors remains legal as of May 2026. Yet news coverage and political rhetoric have left many families uncertain about what care doctors are still permitted to offer.

In response to evolving federal legal and regulatory pressures, several Michigan health systems have limited or discontinued certain forms of gender-affirming medical care for minors. This includes puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy. These limitations have increased confusion among families about what care remains available.

Families are flooded with disinformation and misinformation suggesting the science on gender-affirming care has changed. It has not. But a growing gap exists between what the law permits and what families believe possible, shaping how parents make medical decisions for their children.

What the law says – and what families hear

As of May 2026, gender-affirming care for minors remains legal in 23 states, with shield laws that protect against prosecution in other states. Around 27 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Regardless of legality, gender-affirming care is endorsed by every major medical association, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society.

In states where gender‑affirming care is banned, the effects on youth and families are often immediate and far‑reaching. Patients may be forced to stop care, and these unplanned treatment disruptions can negatively affect mental health. Research shows that transgender youth experience increased anxiety, depression and suicidality when they’re exposed to restrictive policies, and a majority have reported that these policies have negatively affected their well‑being.

When care is banned, families shoulder added burdens. They must take time away from work and school and travel long distances – sometimes crossing state lines – to access care. One national study found that more than 1 in 4 transgender youth were living over four hours from the nearest clinic after state legislators enacted restrictions. Many faced even longer travel times. For young people, having to retell their story to a new care team can feel exhausting and traumatizing.

Even in states where care is legal, there are longer wait times and reduced access as providers and families pivot to navigate evolving legal risks. These pressures compound the emotional, logistical and financial toll on families trying to maintain stable care. Parents and young people are also concerned that their care may be abruptly withdrawn once started.

Additionally, parents worry that supporting their child’s gender transition could bring unwanted government scrutiny. In July 2025, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to doctors and clinics to obtain the private medical records of transgender minors as part of an effort to end pediatric gender-affirming care.

This heightened scrutiny has had a chilling effect on patients and providers, undermining patient privacy and trust in care.

What gender-affirming care actually involves

Much of the pushback concerning gender‑affirming care arises from misunderstandings about what it actually involves.

Gender-affirming care is an individualized approach to supporting young people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. It includes social support, mental health assessment and, for some patients, medical treatment.

Care begins with a comprehensive, thorough assessment of the patient, including their mental and physical health and social relationships. Clinicians interview patients about significant aspects of their life, including their gender identity, trauma history, educational status and overall well-being. The parents’ perspectives are incorporated into the assessment as well, along with religious or cultural barriers to care.

To initiate any medical care, consent from the parent and assent from the patient is required. Each patient’s plan is grounded in a full understanding of the child’s needs, and this may or may not involve medical transition.

Access to gender‑affirming care has been consistently associated with improved mental health outcomes, including reductions in depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts among transgender youth. While some research has reported regret after transitioning, many of these studies tend to discount positive outcomes, minimize the harms of restricting care or apply standards of evidence unevenly for transgender and cisgender children.

For example, the National Health Service England’s 2020 Cass Review has influenced public discourse about gender-affirming care in the U.S. and the U.K. It concluded that there is limited and uncertain evidence supporting medical interventions for transgender youth and recommended a more cautious approach to care. However, scholars across medicine, mental health and law have criticized the Cass Review’s methodology and conclusions, noting that the authors misused or misrepresented parts of the available data and applied inconsistent standards when evaluating research.

Critics caution against applying the review’s findings to patient care. Doing so risks harming young patients by treating transgender identities as a disease and making blanket recommendations against care.

Even where care is legal, accessing it is harder

Together, misinformation, legal threats and evolving policies have made accessing evidence‑based care more difficult. This has resulted in the weakening of the safeguards supporting comprehensive care and ongoing monitoring of young patients’ physical and mental health. Some families have been forced to navigate fragmented access to care, rely on less experienced providers or attempt to piece together care on their own.

Some politicians frame restrictive policies as protecting young people. But these restrictions in fact have the opposite effect by limiting access to care and destabilizing established treatment plans.

When care is delayed or interrupted, the resulting distress that a young patient experiences stems not from a change in their gender identity, but from uncertainty about what comes next.

Research has shown that this instability can increase a young person’s risk of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.

How parents can support their trans child

When medical care is inaccessible, there are still tangible ways parents can support their children.

For one, parents can affirm their child’s gender by using their chosen name and pronouns, and asking other family members to do the same. They can also support their child by allowing them to explore their gender expression, welcoming their child’s trans friends into family activities and creating spaces where their identity is respected.

Parents can monitor changes in their child’s mood or behavior and use those moments as opportunities to check in. When concerns arise, they can consider connecting their child with a gender‑affirming therapist.

Parents can also advocate for their child at home and at school. They can work with schools to develop a gender support plan that proactively addresses potential challenges, including name and pronouns, access to restrooms and activities, and identifying adult allies.

Parental support remains one of the strongest protective factors for the mental health and overall well-being of their child. For some parents, this parallel process involves letting go of expectations or assumptions about who their child would be, and fully loving and seeing the child in front of them. That shift can provide a sense of direction and open the door to deeper, more genuine intimacy.

My experience has shown me, time and again, that when a child transitions, the whole family transitions alongside them. Consistent parental support helps young people tolerate uncertainty in an unpredictable legal and political climate. More importantly, steady, affirming support from adults helps transgender youth maintain connection, safety and hope for the future, even when access to care becomes unstable.

Susan Radzilowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When an asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, it ended the age of dinosaurs and transformed life across the planet. The effects of that catastrophe are visible in the fossil record on land, but scientists know far less about what happened to fishes in the seas during the first few million years after the extinction.

Like many people during the pandemic, I suddenly found myself living through long stretches of isolation and uncertainty. In 2020, while alone in my apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was finishing a study on fossil fishes from Egypt. This question of what happened to fishes immediately after the age of the dinosaurs kept troubling me.

That missing chapter represented a major gap in scientific understanding of how modern marine ecosystems emerged.

A unique opportunity

At the time, I was studying younger fossil fishes, but I kept wondering whether older rocks in Egypt might preserve clues to this critical period. During those long pandemic months, I spent countless hours reading geological reports and searching for mentions of formations with fish fossils of the right age.

Then, Hesham Sallam, my adviser, introduced me to earlier work by paleontologist and geologist Robert Speijer and colleagues who had documented rocks at Qreiya in Egypt that were deposited only about 4 million years after the asteroid impact.

That single detail changed the entirety of my Ph.D. research.

As this research started to point my work in a new direction, the pandemic was simultaneously disrupting my own life. I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan and was living in the United States, preparing to begin my studies. But COVID-19 restrictions suddenly forced me to return to Egypt, my home country. What felt like a major setback at the time ultimately became one of the most important turning points in my career.

While waiting for the embassies to reopen and student visas to be issued, I continued discussing the fossil-bearing rocks with my adviser. Those conversations soon became a plan: We would travel to Egypt’s eastern desert and see the site for ourselves.

Discoveries in the desert

In July 2021, our team of five researchers set out for Qreiya 3, a remote fossil locality in upper Egypt. Reaching the site required two days of travel from Mansoura. The terrain was so rough that our vehicles could take us only part of the way, forcing us to hike over sharp rocks carrying equipment, food, water and eventually fossil specimens.

Finding the fossil layer itself was not easy. With limited information about its exact location, we spent hours searching before finally reaching the end of a remote desert valley.

Then came a moment I will never forget. Belal Salem, a member of our team, struck the rock with his hammer. Almost immediately, a fossil moonfish appeared.

Moonfishes already held special significance for me because they were among the fishes I had previously studied from younger Egyptian rocks. Seeing one emerge from rocks that were millions of years older felt almost surreal, as though the site itself was answering the question that I had first asked during those quiet pandemic days.

It was the first sign that Qreiya 3 might be extraordinary.

Later that same field season, I received another unexpected email: My request for an expedited student visa appointment had been approved. We had only a few days to wrap up the expedition and return home so I could prepare for my departure to the U.S.

Returning to Qreiya 3

By the fall of 2021, I had begun my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and Qreiya 3 quickly became the center of my dissertation research.

These expeditions had revealed the promise of the site, but it was only the beginning. Over the following field seasons, our team continued returning to Qreiya 3, and I took part in the expeditions that gradually expanded our growing collection of fossils from the site curated at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center.

It became clear that this was not simply another fossil locality. It preserved an unusually rich fish community from a critical moment in Earth’s history, only a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The biggest breakthroughs came during a 2023 expedition supported by a National Geographic grant awarded to Hesham Sallam. Once again, we returned in July, working under some of the harshest field conditions I have ever experienced. Temperatures often approached 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), forcing us to organize each day around the heat. We worked early, paused during the most intense hours, drank water constantly and returned to the fossils whenever conditions allowed.

For three weeks, the Sallam Lab team excavated fossils under the intense desert sun. The work was exhausting, but every new specimen brought fresh excitement. By the end of the expedition, we had collected nearly 500 fossil specimens.

Piecing together an ancient ecosystem

Back in the laboratory, a different challenge began. Preparing the fossils was painstakingly slow. Removing the surrounding rock and exposing delicate anatomical details required years of careful work.

One fossil proved especially remarkable: an early relative of seahorses and pipefishes preserved with its body armor still intact.

Identifying the fishes often felt like solving an enormous puzzle. Some specimens were recognizable immediately, while others required months of comparison, CT scanning and detailed study.

I was fortunate to work under the supervision of Matt Friedman, one of the world’s leading experts on fossil fishes.

Gradually, the picture became clearer.

We began recognizing early relatives of tunas, jacks, moonfishes, pipefishes and other groups that today play major roles in marine ecosystems. Some are fast-moving predators and others are prey for these predators. The site provides direct evidence that several modern-looking fish groups were already established surprisingly early – only about 4 million years after the impact.

At the same time, just as revealing as what the site preserves is what it lacks. Many characteristically Cretaceous-era marine fish lineages are absent from the fossil assemblage, meaning they went extinct at or near the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact.

For me, Qreiya 3 is more than a fossil site. It is the place where an idea, an unexpected return home, years of desert fieldwork, and patient scientific investigation came together to reveal one of the clearest windows yet discovered into how modern ocean life began rebuilding itself after one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Sanaa El-Sayed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Surveys and polls help societies understand what people think about issues in politics, health, education and much more. But fewer people these days tend to respond, so pollsters have to reach out more widely, which raises cost considerably. One survey provider prices a 10 minute survey of 1,000 people in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Could AI models stand in for hundreds or thousands of people, emulating the range of answers humans would provide? This practice, known as synthetic surveys or silicon sampling, is already happening, and it’s far less expensive. But are the results trustworthy?

I am a machine learning researcher. I study large language models and their uses in medicine and science. These systems change constantly as companies update them. Different prompts, settings and model versions can produce very different answers to questions. That trait can make models difficult to use reliably in social science research, but it can help simulate replies of many humans, what researchers call “synthetic respondents.”

To create 10,000 answers from ChatGPT, for example, a pollster would prompt the model with some basic respondent demographics and context, such as “You are a young college-going urban voter with conservative political views. Respond to the following questions.” Researchers can change the demographic settings to elicit many different responses from ChatGPT for the same query.

The model also has its own internal randomness, so it naturally generates different replies to the same question asked repeatedly. In this way, researchers can combine prompting and randomness to create 10,000 different synthetic responses.

Simulations are not opinions

Pollsters have long used statistical models to generalize results from a finite number of replies. And analysts can reach different conclusions from the same survey data. Studies of synthetic respondents suggest they may be even more sensitive than people to small changes in prompts or settings, producing sharply different results.

But the use of synthetic respondents raises a deeper issue. Surveys are not just prediction tools. They are measurement tools meant to capture what people actually think. A thermometer measures your temperature directly. You would not trust one that estimated your temperature by consulting an AI model instead.

Large language models and other AI tools inherit biases and blind spots from the data they train on. For example, AI can oversimplify or distort opinions from groups of people who are underrepresented online. Traditional polling also has biases, but many biases in modern AI systems are hidden from public view inside closed proprietary models. To make matters worse, pollsters may present results from synthetic respondents to the public as if they came from surveys of people.

These shortcomings can erode trust in polls and survey research. They also raise an interesting paradox. Synthetic data, created by computers or simulations, is widely used in modern AI. It helps train AI systems for medicine, finance, robotics, self-driving cars and other disciplines. So why do synthetic survey responses seem more problematic?

The key difference is that synthetic data is checked against reality. A self-driving car may train on synthetic images and videos of different road conditions, but an automaker would never deploy the car on public roads without extensive real-world testing. If synthetic data hurts performance, engineers can correct, retrain or replace the system.

Researchers may treat synthetic survey responses as public opinion itself, but the system is not measuring public opinion. It is running a simulation of public opinion based on data it was trained on. If the simulated opinions distort reality, researchers may not realize it until flawed conclusions have already shaped public policy, business decisions or scientific research.

More efficient design and analysis

Nevertheless, there are ways AI can help survey research without weakening the measurement of public opinion. AI tools can help survey researchers write clearer questions by simplifying wording, reducing ambiguity and eliminating repetition. They can help avoid unnecessary questions, making it easier for people to respond. These tools can also adapt surveys across languages.

Once a survey is done, AI can help researchers organize large volumes of open-ended responses, summarize recurring themes and handle incomplete surveys more efficiently than human analysts. Some researchers are exploring hybrid approaches that combine smaller human surveys with AI-assisted analysis.

Decision makers use surveys and polls to listen to and understand the voices of people affected by their decisions. Replacing human respondents with synthetic respondents risks weakening that connection. At the same time, falling response rates and rising costs are real survey challenges.

I’m confident that further research can find ways to use AI transparently and effectively, in a scientifically defensible way, without replacing people.

Ambuj Tewari receives funding from NSF and NIH.

Property taxes in Detroit, the highest among major U.S. cities, continue to burden the city’s low-income households. Failure to pay these taxes can lead to foreclosure.

Mayor Mary Sheffield advocated for property tax relief during her first State of the City address in March 2026. Sheffield proposed a 30% to 60% cut in property taxes in the city, a change Michigan lawmakers would need to approve.

The City of Detroit will likely take in approximately US$164 million from property taxes in the 2026 fiscal year, less than a tax collected from the city’s casinos. Property taxes fund public safety, libraries, sanitation and other city services.

Amanda Nothaft, the director of data and analysis at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, explains the extent of Detroit’s property tax burden and avenues for reform.

What do you think about the mayor’s approach to this longstanding issue?

Mayor Sheffield’s property tax proposal is a bold effort to bring in new residents, make homeownership more affordable and fight poverty. Tax savings can help Detroit residents pay for their basic needs.

Detroit’s existing high property taxes may deter people from moving to the city and limit residents’ ability to get jobs and start businesses.

Finding a permanent funding source to replace the revenue lost from lowering property taxes is the biggest challenge to the mayor’s proposal. In the long term, Sheffield believes population and economic growth in Detroit will offset the costs, but her administration will need to find other sources of revenue in the short term. Adopting new taxes will require working with state leadership to pass new legislation. Proposals include an entertainment tax on sports and concert tickets.

How much are Detroiters paying in property taxes now? Is it high compared to similar cities?

Detroiters paid the highest effective property tax rate among major cities in the United States at 3.02% in 2024, according to a study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

An effective property tax rate is the actual percentage of a property’s total market value that is paid in property taxes. The high effective rate in Detroit is driven by both high tax rates and low home values.

Detroit’s tax rate is significantly higher than that of other Midwestern cities. Milwaukee’s effective tax rate is 1.78%. In Indianapolis, it’s 1.20%, and in Chicago, it’s 1.50%.

With a shrinking tax base, Detroit faces financial pressures to generate revenue to fix aging infrastructure and fund city services. These factors have encouraged local taxing authorities to set a high millage rate, 48% above the median rate for other Michigan cities. A millage rate is the tax a homeowner pays per $1,000 of the value of their property.

What factors fuel the costly bills?

Detroit has experienced decades of erosion to the tax base due to long-term population loss that has driven down property values, coupled with fixed costs to maintain existing infrastructure.

These constraints, along with the need to fund services to support a low-income population and the lack of authority to generate revenue from other taxes, all contribute to high property taxes. All Michigan cities face this challenge, as state law requires legislative approval to levy local taxes. This power is granted more freely in other states, such as Illinois and Ohio.

How do high property taxes affect a resident’s ability to buy a home in the city?

High property taxes make it harder to afford a home. Let’s look at how property taxes are calculated and what they add to a mortgage payment.

The online real estate platform Redfin reports that the median home price in Detroit was $104,000 in March 2026. A purchaser putting 20% down and taking out a 30-year mortgage at a 6.6% interest rate would have a monthly mortgage loan payment of around $531. Property taxes are an additional cost.

In Michigan, homeowners pay property taxes on 50% of the property’s assessed value. Assessments are based on market value and determined by city officials for each property every two years.

Applying the 2024 Detroit’s homestead millage rate of 67.9464 to 50% of the value of a median-priced home, or $52,000, results in a property tax bill of nearly $3,533 a year, or $294 a month, adding an additional 50% to base monthly housing costs. For a Detroit household making the city’s annual median income of $39,938, $825 per month on mortgage and taxes would consume 25% of their income.

In addition to mortgage and property taxes, homeowners also need to pay for homeowners insurance and water at rates that exceed national norms. And then there are bills for electricity, gas and internet service to pay.

Compared to a suburban home at the same price point, a Detroit home comes with a higher tax burden – possibly even 70% more than a city like Sterling Heights or Livonia – fewer community services such as recreation centers and poorer performing schools. This could make buying in Detroit seem like a bad financial decision.

Businesses face even higher property tax rates – 82.18 mills in 2025 – which is 34% higher than the statewide median of 61.20 mills. The higher tax rate, combined with complicated regulations and high fees for licenses and permits, makes it hard for anyone to open and maintain a small business in Detroit.

What is the best way to reform property taxes?

Research finds that high property taxes disproportionately hurt low-income households. This highlights the importance of property tax reform in Detroit.

However, research also shows that cutting property taxes can have negative consequences if the cuts result in fewer government services.

Because of these potential negative impacts, how taxes are cut matters if the goal is to improve affordability. Simply replacing property taxes with sales taxes affects low-income residents more, hurts renters and makes the tax base more volatile since revenues are directly impacted by economic cycles. In a recession, sales taxes fall because people spend less. Property taxes remain constant.

What laws are already in effect to protect homeowners?

Proposal A and the Headlee Amendment are the current strategies used to control property taxes in Michigan. Proposal A went into effect in 1994 and the Headlee Amendment was adopted in 1978.

Proposal A is a statewide law that limits the increases in taxable value of a property to the rate of inflation or 5%, whichever is lower.

The Headlee Amendment restricts property tax revenue growth at the city, township or county level to the rate of inflation.

Both laws benefit existing homeowners but do not improve affordability for new home buyers.

Circuit breaker tax credits, which tie property taxes to people’s ability to pay, can be a successful and equitable way to make buying a home more affordable.

Circuit breakers are the basis of programs like the Homestead Property Tax Credit in Michigan, which passed in 1973, and are used throughout the country to help low-income, elderly and disabled homeowners.

By keeping property taxes in check, these credits reduce tax burdens for low-income homeowners and protect owners in rapidly gentrifying areas. They can prevent property tax increases that can economically destabilize a household and lead to foreclosure.

If Detroit were to expand circuit breakers by raising the income eligibility requirements, it could help more Detroiters stay in the city and also attract new residents.

Amanda Nothaft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Punishing regimens of facial exercises. Intentional starvation. Reshaping the jawline or cheekbones by smashing them with a hammer or chisel.

These are some of the more extreme behaviors in a practice called looksmaxxing – an effort to maximize one’s looks at all costs – that’s attracting an enormous following of largely teenage boys and young men on social media. Looksmaxxing has gone from niche to mainstream since trending on TikTok in the early 2020s.

Much of the media coverage of looksmaxxing has focused on cultural dimensions, such as the misogynist ideology underlying this trend and its implications for cultural conversations about masculinity. Meanwhile, looksmaxxers with an especially large following of hundreds of thousands of people on social media platforms like TikTok and Kick have attained pop-culture status.

But in the midst of this spectacle, the well-being of the young men participating in this trend has been largely overlooked.

From my perspective as a mental health professional studying how people think and talk about emotions and mental health, the behaviors associated with looksmaxxing look suspiciously like symptoms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, also called body dysmorphic disorder.

These disorders are especially harmful to young people who are in the throes of figuring out who they are, what they want and how to navigate relationships – efforts already complicated by the pressures of social media.

In my view, platforming these young men and sensationalizing their behaviors, rather than recognizing those behaviors as signs of psychological distress, distracts from the urgent need to address these serious mental health concerns.

A blast from the past

The looksmaxxing trend repeats some troubling history.

A similar ideology emerged in the 2000s, but it was embraced and popularized primarily by young women and girls. Microblogging and social networking platforms like Tumblr and MySpace became hotbeds for advice on disordered eating.

Users developed communities where they could share tips and encourage eating disorder-related behavior – for example, restricting eating, inducing vomiting or hiding weight loss from loved ones. This content was tagged “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia), “pro-mia” (pro-bulimia), or “pro-ED” (pro-eating disorder).

Mainstream media, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2001, covered the phenomenon of pro-eating disorder internet communities with an air of grim concern. Exploring how online pro-eating disorder communities affected girls and young women quickly became an area of research for social scientists and medical professionals.

Still, it took until 2012 for Tumblr, an especially popular site for these communities, to implement a policy banning pro-eating disorder content and warn users about the dangers of eating disorders. This was part of a larger effort by the platform to curb self-harm-related blogging.

Now, in 2026, almost all social media platforms have regularly updated policies or “community guidelines” that aim to prevent such communities from forming and that instead direct users to helpful resources.

In addition to guidelines that prohibit explicit pro-eating disorder content, Instagram and TikTok have dedicated pages about getting help for eating disorders. Meta has a policy page detailing its rationale and practice around “suicide, self injury and eating disorders” – as does Pinterest, which also banned all weight loss ads in 2021 in an ongoing commitment to user safety.

Underpathologizing young men

Despite the widespread recognition that eating disorder-related content is harmful to mental and physical health, looksmaxxing has yet to be addressed by social media platform policies. Instead, prominent looksmaxxers are treated as internet celebrities and have been interviewed and profiled for their methods and worldview.

The language and positioning used for each scenario is likely one factor. “Pro-ED” refers directly to a mental health disorder. Recent research argues that looksmaxxing, by contrast, is positioned as goal-oriented and in that way can masquerade as self-improvement.

Still, what I personally consider the major difference between these movements is gender. Looksmaxxing is primarily aimed at young men, while “pro-ED” internet culture has centered around young women.

Researchers estimate that 1 in 3 people struggling with eating disorders are male. However, the traditional view that eating disorders are a girl’s and women’s illness lingers in both societal understanding and healthcare.

A 2025 analysis of published studies underscored this discrepancy. It found that obsession with thinness is still widely considered the hallmark of an eating disorder, even though it only captures one type – primarily female – of the condition. Boys and men who struggle with eating disorders and body dysmorphia are far more likely to be fixated on leanness – meaning achieving an “ideal” or “perfect” ratio of muscle to fat.

Given that even clinical screenings do a poor job accounting for how this disorder appears in boys and young men, it’s no surprise that parents, teachers and the media also fall short in making this distinction.

A clinical take on looksmaxxing

Seen through an accurate clinical lens, looksmaxxing behaviors clearly resemble potential symptoms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Beginning with an intense fixation on physical flaws, the practice encourages prioritizing appearance above all else.

This mindset often leads to actions to correct these perceived shortcomings. In a clinical setting, mental health experts call such actions compulsions – behaviors that feel impossible to resist – are fueled by obsessive thoughts and eventually begin to interfere with a person’s ability to lead a normal, healthy life.

For example, some actions like wearing makeup or putting lifts in shoes to appear taller aren’t bad in and of themselves, and can even be beneficial if they make people feel more confident. But not being able to leave the house or function without these corrective measures indicates a problem. Similarly, modifying diet or exercise to lose fat or gain muscle can be quite healthy, but abusing amphetamines to suppress appetite – a widespread practice in looksmaxxing – is dangerous and points to a mental health issue.

These behaviors deserve exploration because if left untreated, body dysmorphia and eating disorders can have lifelong implications. Early detection and intervention are key, as these disorders significantly raise the risk of physical and mental health issues, including heart problems, lasting skin changes, gastrointestinal complications, depression and suicide.

As with all mental health concerns, how society frames a problem shapes its response to it. Internet platforms’ and researchers’ responses to the internet culture surrounding eating disorders back in the 2010s set a valuable precedent. Using that precedent to respond to looksmaxxing not just as a cultural issue but as a clinical one could help researchers understand how eating disorders and body dysmorphia manifest differently in boys and young men.

It could also push social media companies to create appropriate guidelines around looksmaxxing content, help parents recognize warning signs and connect struggling boys and young men to the care they need and deserve.

If you or someone you know could benefit from talking to a specialist in male eating disorders or other mental health concerns, search the directory at the National Eating Disorders Association or the men’s mental health organization HeadsUpGuys.

If you or someone you know is in crisis and is based in the U.S., call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to speak with a trained listener, or text HELLO to 741741. Both services are free, available 24/7 and confidential. If you are a reader from outside the U.S., please use a helpline like the one above (Psychology Today maintains a list of resources in other countries) or speak to a healthcare professional.

Jordyn Tovey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.