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Millions of Americans spent this summer trying to beat the scorching heat at the beach. Next month, the Supreme Court justices will also do some wading of their own: through the ocean of petitions for review that have accumulated over the last few months at the court’s annual long conference.

One of those pending petitions—a case involving police power, the Fifth Amendment, and a Los Angeles print shop—warrants a deep dive from the court. At issue is a particularly troubling vision of law enforcement’s role in American society by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Without the court’s intervention, it could have corrosive implications for American policing and its place in everyday life.

Pena v. City of Los Angeles began with the pursuit of an armed fugitive by law-enforcement officials in southern California in 2022. At one point, Carlos Pena heard noise outside his print shop. “He opened his door to investigate, and saw a man running towards him, pursued by United States Marshals with weapons drawn,” his lawyers told the justices in their petition for review. “The fugitive struck Pena on the shoulder, threw him out of the shop, and barricaded himself inside.”

During the ensuing standoff, the Marshals called for backup from the Los Angeles Police Department, which sent its SWAT team to take control of the scene. The SWAT team eventually used heavy amounts of tear gas and pepper spray in an attempt to force the fugitive out of the building. Thirteen hours later, after conducting a thorough search of the building and its attic, officers concluded that the fugitive had either “escaped or was ‘gone on arrival,’” according to a lower-court ruling, which appears to be a polite way to say that the LAPD may have spent half of a day gassing an empty building.

While both the fugitive and the police soon moved on, Pena did not. The consequences for the small business he had operated for thirteen years were immense. To access the building, officers had damaged the “walls, doors, roof, and windows” at multiple points, either to gain entry or deploy gas. The chemical munitions took their own toll. “In addition, the tear gas and pepper spray permeated the entire shop, which [Pena] claims caused additional damage to his shop, his printing equipment, and his inventory, and rendered his shop uninhabitable until [he] had it cleaned by a hazardous materials team,” the lower court recounted.

After the unexpected siege, Pena sought to rebuild his livelihood. He told the courts that his insurance company (unsurprisingly) refused to compensate him for the destruction inflicted upon his business. The police officers who caused the damage were “under the impression that the city would compensate Pena” when he spoke to them, he told the justices, but city officials “categorically refused to pay for the damage.”

In 2023, Pena sued the city in federal court, arguing that the intentional destruction of his property violated the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. That clause states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This language is most familiar to Americans in the context of eminent domain: When the government wants to build a railroad or highway through someone’s farm, it has to provide fair compensation for the value of the property that it seizes to do so.

Pena argued that the clause’s language applied to him as well. Government officials, he contended, intentionally inflicted $60,000 worth of property damage while carrying out their official duties, then declined to compensate him for it. According to court filings, city attorneys not only didn’t deny that the city was responsible for the damage, but they never even responded to his initial requests for compensation before he filed his lawsuit.

Two separate courts ruled against Pena for different reasons. First, Judge John Walter rejected his claim in the district court by reasoning that the LAPD’s actions “constituted a valid use of police power” and therefore “did not constitute a taking for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.” The Supreme Court has not directly ruled on whether a state’s police power is exempt from the Takings Clause, but some of its rulings lean that way.

In 1996, for example, the court ruled against a Detroit woman whose car was seized by the city after police found her husband “engaged in sexual activity with a prostitute” inside the car, which the couple jointly owned. William Rehnquist, the chief justice at the time, noted that the wife had made a Takings Clause claim, but dispensed with it by blithely noting that the city had “lawfully acquired” it through forfeiture.

Walter’s opinion ably cited precedents from other courts that rejected similar Fifth Amendment claims after people’s homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the course of police actions. One of them, from the Fifth Circuit, involved a family whose home was partially destroyed by SWAT team bulldozers after a gunman took refuge in their garage with a hostage. There, the city declined to compensate the family for the inadvertent loss of their home, and the courts held that the Constitution provided them no recourse.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not embrace Walter’s reasoning. The three-judge panel observed that the district court had gone too far by assuming that there was a categorical exception to the Takings Clause in this context. “We hold only that no taking occurs for the purposes of the Takings Clause when law enforcement officers destroy private property while acting reasonably in the necessary defense of public safety,” Judge Mark Bennett wrote for the panel majority.

From there, however, Bennett engaged in a history-and-tradition examination of the Takings Clause. It led him to a different rationale by which Pena’s claim could be denied. “In addition to the common law right to enter private property, the common law has long recognized a ‘necessity’ privilege for the destruction of private property,” Bennett explained.

This necessity defense has a long and well-established pedigree in some contexts. In 1788, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a claim for compensation by a man named Sparhawk who lost 227 barrels of flour after patriot forces had removed them from a warehouse in 1777 as British forces approached Philadelphia, then lost them to the British anyway when they captured the barrels at the depot where they were moved. The court had denied Sparhawk’s claims, ruling that they were justified by wartime necessity.

“It is a rule, however, that it is better to suffer a private mischief, than a public inconvenience; and the rights of necessity, form a part of our law,” Chief Justice Thomas McKean, an influential founding-era statesman, wrote in his decision. That principle made its way into American constitutional law even after the Fifth Amendment’s ratification. The Supreme Court later invoked it to deny claims in cases where the military destroyed private property to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, including Southern railroads during the Civil War and petroleum refineries in the Philippines during World War II.

Bennett applied the same reasoning to civilian law-enforcement practices without hesitation. “We find Sparhawk particularly persuasive given that, as discussed further below, the Supreme Court has repeatedly cited Sparhawk for the principle that the government’s destruction of private property in wartime does not warrant just compensation,” the panel noted in a footnote. Though Pena’s shop was obviously not destroyed in the context of wartime, the panel concluded that the rules applied in the context of “governmental takings in the context of defending public safety.”

This is a deeply flawed view of the police power and law enforcement’s role in American society. Our constitutional order has always recognized a sharp and essential divide between civilian and military power, with the latter subordinated to the former at all times. Treating civilian law-enforcement officials as constitutionally equivalent to soldiers in an armed conflict logically places our free society under a permanent state of war—and radically reshapes the relationship between ordinary citizens and the police. It transmutes 330 million Americans into an occupied people subject to the arbitrary whims of whatever armed power determines to be a “necessity.”

Other members of the court recognized the problems with this reasoning. Judge Michelle Friedland wrote a separate opinion where she concurred only in the court’s judgment. She argued that Pena’s claim failed because it all within the search-and-arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment, which he would transpose to the Takings Clause. Friedland criticized the majority for expanding Sparhawk beyond the context it was written and the limits McKean himself had acknowledged.

The court in Sparhawk emphasized, however: “The transaction, it must be remembered, happened flagrante bello [during a state of war]; and many things are lawful in that season, which would not be permitted in a time of peace. The seizure of the property in question, can, indeed, only be justified under this distinction.” Sparhawk thus expressly relied on the fact that the country was in a state of war, and the government’s uncompensated seizure of private property was justified only by its need to protect the property from enemy forces.

That rationale, even on Bennett’s terms, cannot be fairly applied to the facts at hand in Pena’s case. Had British forces captured Sparhawk’s flour in Philadelphia, they might have used it to prolong the war against the early republic. The LAPD, by comparison, did not flood Pena’s print shop with chemical munitions because SWAT team members feared that the fugitive might produce obscene literature or reprint copyrighted texts without authorization. There was no direct “necessity” in destroying the print shop; it was merely how the LAPD chose to go about carrying their duties.

It is worth noting that Pena’s lawsuit is not hostile to law enforcement. He conceded that the LAPD SWAT team’s actions were “reasonable” and even acknowledged that, per court filings, “the public good required the destruction of his shop.” Similar cases cited by the district court had involved challenges where the plaintiffs had also alleged excessive force or other constitutional violations. Pena, on the other hand, did not even list the LAPD as a defendant. He simply argued that the city should compensate him for what they had to do.

A friend-of-the-court brief filed by Thomas Tiderington, a longtime police chief in Dallas, Jacksonville, and elsewhere, turned the policy justification for the necessity exception on his head. He argued that it would be more harmful for future police operations if officers had to consider the fate of innocent people’s livelihoods and property when making their decisions. “Officers have not asked for, do not expect, and are not motivated by this constitutional carveout” of the Takings Clause, he argued.

“Asking officers to execute raids or pursue fugitives knowing that their innocent neighbors or loved ones will foot the bill places an unfair burden on officers’ already heavy shoulders,” Tiderington told the court. “It asks officers to harm the people they are charged to protect—to act against the very mission of policing.” He emphasized that police officers “are not a separate caste,” and should not be asked to consider bankrupting their neighbors and friends as part of their job.

The Supreme Court may be interested in this case for its implications on the scope of the Takings Clause, which the conservative justices have expanded in some contexts in recent years. The lower courts are divided on when and how it applies in these situations, further justifying their intervention. More than anything else, Pena’s case warrants the court’s review because of the profound misapplication of wartime necessity exceptions to ordinary law-enforcement operations. Extending the wartime legal exceptions of military forces to more than 18,000 police departments around the country in everyday life is a mistake worth correcting by the Supreme Court.

As Stephen Young stepped into the woods about an hour drive from Mt. Lassen volcano in northeast California, the forest began communicating to him in an unspoken language learned from his years collecting plants. The tree-shaded March air felt cool against his cheek, and he could sense the moisture of the forest’s understory hanging in the air. He inhaled the rich scent of pine needle duff wafting up from the ground. “I said to myself, there is bracken fern in this area,” he recalls. “I walked maybe 50 yards, and there it was, a whole field of bracken ferns.”

Young, 26, is a traditional Maidu basketweaver who collects the roots of the fern and other native plants for material. Over the years, he’s learned to avoid the toxic chemicals sprayed by the US Forest Service in California’s woodlands. He scanned the area, looking for signs that the Forest Service might have sprayed herbicides nearby. Nothing. The site was clean, or at least that was his best guess.  

“We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality.”

Earlier this year, our Mother Jones investigation found that record amounts of glyphosate—the key ingredient in the herbicide Roundup—have been sprayed in California’s forests in recent years. It also exposed how key scientific studies that the Forest Service and others relied upon to say glyphosate was safe were ghost written by manufacturer Monsanto. 

The Forest Service uses glyphosate and other herbicides in the wake of forest fires or logging operations to kill native plants the agency says compete with replanted saplings for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. By eliminating the native plants, freshly planted timber trees will grow back faster and in greater density for future logging. The Trump administration announced plans this month to roll back protections for 45 million acres of national forest, including old growth trees, following President Trump’s call last year to increase timber production by 25 percent.

https://youtube.com/shorts/sNjafmuqTPc

But a growing number of Native American community leaders from across the state—Mt. Lassen in the north to Lake Tahoe and down to Southern California—say the government’s spraying of glyphosate infringes on their cultural and religious practices by poisoning their traditional gathering areas and changing the composition of the forest. They told me that the moment has come to take action, maybe even legal action. And it wouldn’t be the first time. 

Nearly 25 years ago, a coalition of tribal members from across the state joined with environmental groups to challenge the Forest Service in court after they say community members got sick from ingesting the chemicals. Their efforts back then reduced, and in some areas all but eliminated, the Forest Service’s use of herbicides. 

“We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality,” Young said. “If we can’t do that then our culture is at risk.”

Stephen Young is a traditional Maidu basketweaver who collects the roots of ferns and other native plants for material. Courtesy Stephen Young By removing native plants, the Forest Service is harming the wildlife that depends on it, including mammals, birds and insects, says Jun Bando, executive director of the California Native Plant Society,Courtesy Stephen Young

The California Indian Basketweavers’ Association helped lead those legal challenges a quarter century ago. Today, it instructs members to watch out for the warning signs of the government’s herbicide spraying: plants and bushes that are unexpectedly brown and dead in the middle of summer, patches of ground where nothing is growing, and recent logging or replanted timber trees. Young had his herbicide training in mind as he approached the bracken ferns, large fronded plants that resemble ferns you might see for sale at the hardware store. Bracken fern, like other native plants that return after wildfires, will die after being sprayed by glyphosate. But depending on the time of year, it can be hard to tell if brown, dried out fronds have been sprayed or are just changing with the seasons.

In 2000, the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association joined a coalition of nonprofits that challenged the Forest Service’s use of herbicides in the Tahoe National Forest after it says members began to get sick, which the native community blamed on the government’s use of herbicides in their gathering areas.  “There were elders who started to get sores in their mouths because of the pesticides. We use our mouths to help in basketweaving,” Young says. “And then if you’re cooking in these baskets, and the material has been sprayed, then people can be ingesting it.” The US Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment. Bayer, which manufactures glyphosate, has maintained that the herbicide is safe when used as directed and notes that regulators around the world have approved its use. (Although, notably, the Canadian province of Quebec, one of the largest timber producers in North America, has banned it.)

The coalition of nonprofits that included the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association got a federal judge in 2001 to issue an injunction to stop the government’s spraying in the Tahoe National Forest, at least temporarily, because the court ruled the government had not fully assessed the risks of herbicides as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Following the ruling, and amid widespread public outcry and a series of similar lawsuits in the years that followed, the Forest Service significantly reduced its large-scale spraying in California forests, according to state pesticide records and interviews with foresters, environmentalists, and government officials.

But in recent years, following a series of massive wildfires that hit California, the Forest Service began returning to chemical spraying as the cheapest way to regrow dense forests intended for timber sales and harvesting. When replanting trees after a fire or logging operation, the alternative to herbicides is to manually clear areas around the baby pine trees. But a Forest Service study found that hiring people to do that work instead of using herbicides in California’s Eldorado National Forest following the Caldor Fire would cost three times as much. The government chose the cheaper option.

“It’s devastating,” says Starla Madrigal, chairperson of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association, which continues to oppose herbicide use on wildlands. “It stays in the plants. It contaminates the water.”

Back in 2001, at the urging of native basketweavers, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation published the results of a multi-year study documenting how long herbicide chemicals linger in plant materials after being sprayed on Forest Service land. It analyzed spray areas in Eldorado, Sierra, and Stanislaus National Forests, and specifically tested plants used by tribal communities for basketweaving, such as bracken fern roots and buckbrush shoots. 

The report found the chemicals linger in plant material for well over a year, and it advised that “to be certain of avoiding plant materials with detectable herbicide residues, plants should not be gathered within 80 weeks of glyphosate and triclopyr applications.” These are two of the same chemicals the Forest Service is now spraying in the Lake Tahoe area, where plans call for more than 70,000 acres of the Eldorado National Forest to be treated.

These chemicals are not staying where they are sprayed, but are instead entering the waterways.

Despite the recommendations from state pesticide experts to avoid collecting from these areas for 80 weeks, the Forest Service sprayed glyphosate and triclopyr in the Tahoe area in 2025 but did not notify the public of where it had sprayed until this spring, more than a year later. In an email, an unnamed Forest Service spokesperson wrote that its workers post signs after spraying, but that those signs are typically removed no more than 48 hours after application, well short of the 80 week recommendation for avoiding herbicide residues. In fact, signs can be removed as soon as a day after glyphosate is used, according to the Forest Service’s protocols. (The agency did not respond to my questions about the apparent discrepancy.)

A hillside behind the home of Beverly Ogle that was negatively affected by herbicides sprayed by the government.Mother Jones

Another herbicide the agency approved for use in the Tahoe area, hexazinone, can linger even longer. The 2001 state report recommended not gathering plant material for 130 weeks after hexazinone is used in order to avoid residues. But the Forest Service stated policy says signs can be removed within days after the chemical is sprayed.

A more recent report by California Department of Pesticide Regulation found that these chemicals are not staying where they are sprayed, but are instead entering the waterways. The 2024 study tested rivers, creeks and drainage ditches in the Central Valley—California’s main farmland region—and found glyphosate in 100 percent of the samples. A similar study that tested streams for triclopyr in other parts of California found it was also detected in 100 percent of the waterways.

The herbicides can impact the ecosystem for decades, according to the Forest Service’s own 2025 report, which found many native plants will be replaced by invasive species after large-scale herbicide spraying. A study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management in 2010 found that herbicide use for reforestation resulted in fewer native plants growing back, and instead resulted in “significantly greater” invasive species taking root in the replanted forests.
“This is a particularly destructive way to manage the forest,” says Jun Bando, executive director of the California Native Plant Society, who holds a PhD in ecology from University of California, Davis. “There is long-term ecological damage.” By removing native plants, she explains, the Forest Service is harming the wildlife that depends on it, including mammals, birds and insects. It also might be increasing wildfire risk, she says, because many of these invasive species, such as the French broom shrub, are what fire experts refer to as “flashy fuels,” meaning they are more likely to catch fire and kill the replanted trees. This idea is backed up by the 2010 study, which found that the most common invasive grass to take root after herbicide spraying is cheat grass, and that this invasive plant burns nearly ten times more frequently in western ecosystems than the native shrubs that normally repopulate after forest fires. 

Bando says the only time her organization endorses herbicide use is against these invasive species after all other measures have been tried, and even then only in highly targeted approaches—not anywhere near the scale being deployed by the Forest Service.

Assemblymember James Ramos, who was the first Native Californian elected to the state legislature, said protecting the native grasses is important because “basketweaving is truly who we are.”

Ramos is the author of the California Indian Freedom Act of 2026, which would give Native people more protections and the right to sue if the state government infringes on their tribal customs or beliefs. The bill passed the assembly and is now up for a vote in the state senate.

“We have to stand our ground. We have to make sure our voices are heard,” Ramos said.

“There were elders who started to get sores in their mouths because of the pesticides,” says Stephen Young. “We use our mouths to help in basketweaving.”Courtesy Stephen Young “We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality,” Young says. “If we can’t do that then our culture is at risk.”Stephen Young

The Native American community is once again starting to organize against the government’s plans to spray herbicides, said Beverly Ogle, a Maidu elder in the Lassen area of California.

“I’m afraid to go out in the backcountry and gather plants. Because are we gathering something that’s got poison on it?”

“We’re just not going to let it go,” she told me, sitting in her living room in the foothills of Mt. Lassen volcano. “It’s kind of like killing our tribe again. That’s the way I truly feel. It’s gotten to the point where I’m afraid to go out in the back country and gather plants. Because are we gathering something that’s got poison on it?”

Ogle, 85, said the herbicide spraying is the government’s latest attack on their native culture and religious practices, a long continuation of an injustice that began more than 150 years ago.

In the 1800s, native people were hunted down and killed by authorities, she told me. An English-language newspaper near Mt. Lassen ran this description in 1859 of local efforts to kill native people in eastern Tehama County: “Some men are hired to hunt them, who are recompensed by receiving so much for each scalp, or some other satisfactory evidence that they have been killed.”

We survived that, she said, but then the federal government funded a boarding school in nearby Greenville, Calif. where her relatives were sent so that their native language and customs would be replaced by English and American traditions.

Today, the Forest Service’s plan is to spray glyphosate and other herbicides across the same areas where the militiamen were paid to murder and scalp Native Americans, and where school-aged children were taken without consent from their parents. It is a continuation of the same genocidal behavior, Ogle said to me, quietly, shaking her head.

The Maidu people survived, Ogle said, but their customs, medicines and religious practices are once again being threatened by government officials, this time to grow trees as cheaply as possible.

“It’s not a good feeling,” she said.

“We’re just not going to let it go,” says Beverly Ogle, as she sat in her living room in the foothills of Mt. Lassen volcano.Mother Jones

I’m not sure when my smartphone began to feel like an albatross, when my unease about relying on it devolved into full-blown anxiety that I was ­frittering away my life on this tiny screen. As if reading my mind, ­purported solutions to this digital malaise began ­appearing on the very device that caused my angst, to paraphrase ­Hemingway, gradually and then suddenly all at once. TikTok influencers, riffing on the trend of “touching grass” instead of scrolling, touted self-guided digital ­detoxes.

I kept seeing advertisements for Brick—a physical plastic block that, for $59, can turn smartphones into devices that merely call and text. The Opal app directs users to wholesome dopamine hits, like solving math problems, instead of trawling “culprit” destinations like Instagram. Some people are ditching devices altogether in favor of flip phones and meeting up in “Luddite” clubs dedicated to offline pursuits like painting and reading. Goop wellness empire queen Gwyneth Paltrow says she underwent a digital detox to be more “present.”

The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.

The smartphone backlash has even reached the corporate world: ­Companies like Spotify and Dolby have invited keynote speaker Nina Hersher, the founder of Digital Resilience Lab, to talk about device-specific wellness. The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.

My own algorithm started serving me marketing materials from wellness retreats featuring digital detoxing—or, in the case of Arizona’s Miraval Resort, “digital mindfulness.” At The Ranch in Malibu, California, guests can ­expect, in addition to daily massages, to “detox from digital devices.” Such retreats are one of the wellness industry’s fastest-­growing sectors, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report. In just a few days, they seem to promise, they will cleanse you of the virtual residue mucking up your mind.   

I went to get a glimpse of a well-­reviewed digital detox retreat offered by Golden Door, a posh resort set amid the Merriam Mountain range on the outskirts of San Diego County. I drove there in mid-May and parked near a wooden bridge that arched over a small burbling creek. The heavy scent of jasmine suffused the air. As the highway noise dissipated, I felt my jaw unclench for the first time that day.

The retreat center’s founder, Deborah Szekely, attributed nutritious, fresh food as central to her family surviving the Great Depression. Drawing from this ethos, Golden Door’s program has, since 1958, centered on organic meals shared in a dining room and daily exercise like hiking. These days, it also offers LED treatments, dermaplaning, and an experimental “multisensory” video experience, The Circle, that is modeled after Las Vegas’ Sphere, with live musicians soundtracking a nature film shown on a circular screen under a forest ­canopy. The lawns are trimmed by a silent robot so as not to disturb the 40 or so weekly guests while they’re unwinding, Golden Door General Manager and COO Kathy Van Ness points out when she meets me for a tour. Guests typically stay for seven days (a “classic women’s week” costs $12,950) and, according to Van Ness, 60 percent of visitors return every year.

“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world.”

In the 13 years that Van Ness has led Golden Door, she’s noticed that the younger clientele, rather than obsessing over fitness fads, arrive anxious and desperate to take charge of their relationships with smartphones. This is easier said than done, even at one of the most intentionally relaxing places on Earth. When Van Ness first arrived at the retreat center in 2013, she’d inherited a place with no wifi. “The stress of not having [wifi] was more fearful than actually telling them to put [their phones] away,” Van Ness says, “because they felt that they couldn’t do it.” (Fans of The White Lotus might find this story­line familiar.)

So she installed wifi, and in 2017, she started experimenting with something less rigid. Minimal phone use is permitted in common areas, but attendees may use them inside their rooms, which are outfitted with a small black “sleep” bag for guests to tuck their digital devices away. Each is emblazoned with words of encouragement, such as “choose to look more at your inner wisdom than the screen.”

“When you tell people who are successful that they can’t do something, you’re taking something away from them,” Van Ness explains. “If you give them the choice to understand why they should not do that, they are gleeful to put it away.” Her sleep bag strategy aligns with 2017 research suggesting that a smartphone within one’s sight can diminish cognitive capacity. But I suspect that Golden Door’s digital detox has become popular with the well-heeled for a different reason. They get to indulge in the ultimate quiet luxury: being unreachable.

Lily Lambie-Kiernan

Although it’s now positioned as a form of wellness, digital detoxing ­entered the cultural lexicon at a time of panic. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how the company had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data and used it to influence the previous US presidential election. “All of a sudden, everyone started saying, ‘Oh, by the way, social media can manipulate you, and social media can be evil,’” says Anastasia Dedyukhina, the founder of the Consciously Digital Institute, an organization that is attempting to set standards for digital wellness practices.

In 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation, which hinged on an argument that digital devices were “rewiring” children’s brains, changed the tenor of cultural conversations around screen time. “You cannot argue about the social importance of this book,” Dedyukhina says. “It mobilized lots of people to push back big time on social media, specifically on phones, and it became an institutional thing, a ­concern for governments.”

Solid research has shown that prolonged use of smartphones is linked to poor posture and eyesight issues as well as psychological maladies like anxiety, burnout, shredded attention spans, and the degradation of human connections. In the past few years, a spate of high-profile lawsuits have alleged that tech giants intentionally encouraged social media addiction, particularly among children; Meta is currently facing such claims in a federal trial that began earlier this week. At least 20 states and several countries have instituted cellphone bans in school classrooms. ­Earlier this year, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for promoting design features that worsened a young woman’s depression and anxiety—a ruling that opens up the potential for other lawsuits and tighter regulation. (Meta and YouTube plan to appeal the decision.)

The view of screen time as an “addiction” has led to a growing digital wellness industry that promises to help you “detoxify” from its poisons. Several years ago, Marck Lund-Nielsen, a brand consultant based in Denmark, says he began noticing a “dopamine detox” trend picking up steam in manosphere circles online. To “dopamine detox” was to abstain from compulsively pleasurable things, like seeking likes and follows on social media, supposedly in order to lower one’s cortisol levels. The podcaster Joe Rogan has touted “dopamine fasts” with guests on his show, and Andrew Huberman, the “wellness bro” Stanford neuroscientist, offers lessons in “controlling dopamine for motivation, focus, and satisfaction.” Just to be clear, the concept of a total dopamine detox misrepresents the science of the brain. According to Cleveland Clinic psychologist Susan Albers-­Bowling, dopamine is “a critical component that we can’t and don’t want to get rid of.”

Recent online chatter about being “aspirationally offline”—indulging ­instead in nostalgic analog tech like CD players and wired headphones—stems from a backlash to techno-­utopianism (and its billionaire boosters), says Samantha Chen, a writer and content creator who analyzes digital trends. The rise of AI has only amplified this sentiment, Chen says, as people want “to exert some kind of control over what ultimately may not be controllable.”

The digital detoxing craze has taken on a performative air. Gen Zers tote around “analog bags” bursting with coloring books and Game Boys in Instagram Reels. Even Brick has become a trendy accessory with which to broadcast one’s mindfulness around screen time. ­“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world,” Lund-­Nielsen says. People with this privilege may not need to, say, monitor a bank account to keep it from overdrawing, or check work email while on vacation, he explains: “You can disconnect from it actively.”

Of course, the digital detox trend stems from a real dissatisfaction with life online and an understandable suspicion of the way tech companies design their products’ algorithms in a way that keeps people scrolling to maximize profit. But some of the quick-fix solutions offered to supposedly cleanse us of these ills are most likely fads, both Lund-Nielsen and Chen told me. A more permanent societal shift would depend on people doing the tough internal work of untangling the loneliness that may be compelling all of us to reach for our phones. But that makes for a less-compelling Instagram story than posting a vintage VHS haul from an estate sale.

Still, while a digital cleanse might be no panacea, could it curb my anxiety that I’m wasting my whole life online? Without $9,950 to spare for Golden Door’s shortest-possible unplug ­regimen, I decided to try a mini-detox at home. Heeding the advice of Colin Corby, a former tech industry worker turned digital detox coach, I did some self-examination to understand why this cleanse might help me: I’ve always identified as an extrovert, yet I also realized that scrolling was giving me an excuse to decline plans with friends, even when I wasn’t that tired.

I gave myself a weeklong window to explore better digital habits. First, I tried to reduce my screen time by one hour per day to see if it would have a positive effect on my attention span, as research has suggested it might. I also deployed the power of inconvenience; I used Opal to block Instagram and Reddit, the apps where I linger the most. Using the phone an hour before bedtime? Verboten. And I said yes to all social plans so long as they didn’t require doing something terrible, like waiting in an hourlong line at a ­matcha place. Corby suggested that a change in environment could help build better habits, so I set out to wake up slightly earlier and go for a walk instead of mainlining my phone the moment I opened my eyes.

The experiment started off badly. My attempt to wake up 20 minutes earlier resulted in snoozing my alarm two days in a row. Realizing I was not cut out to be an early riser, I opted to pet my dog for a few minutes before checking email. The next day upon waking, I read a chapter of a book instead of staring at my phone. I went out with friends four nights in a row, something I hadn’t done in at least a year. By the end of the week, I was surprised when Opal told me that my screen time had gone down from a daily average of four hours and 21 minutes to three hours.

So was I able to concentrate longer, sleep better, feel less anxious? Not in the life-changing way I was expecting. I thought the break would help mitigate some ongoing sleep issues, but something else was keeping me up. Most personally beneficial were the mornings spent reading and dog snuggling, which made me feel a little less spiky throughout the day, and the nourishment from catching up with friends. Given that it takes several weeks, if not months, to develop new habits, I’d need to keep this up for a while to see demonstrable changes.

But on day eight, my screen time spiked once again. I’d found a video of a CGI fish with Jim Carrey’s face transposed over it. Apparently, test audiences had found the creature so disturbingly lifelike that Warner Bros. scrapped the film it was designed for altogether. Delighted, I sent the discomfiting Carrey fish to a few friends over Instagram. Laughing about it over text with them fed the lingering desire to reconnect with friends—and felt just as good as not having my phone in hand.

Ultimately, the slow and methodical building of better habits around tech, like being more present and scrolling less, is a slog. Which is probably what makes digital detox retreats so popular. They play into the quintessentially American approach to problem-­solving: We’re convinced that any dilemma can be quickly remedied—for a price.

Donald Trump just issued a crazed, rambling tirade, vowing to hit Iran with the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN” while threatening “TREMENDOUS” economic consequences to any country that helps Iran. News organizations are struggling to divine what he means and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Regardless, it shows just how stuck Trump is in this quagmire. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene offered her own extended prediction that the GOP is in deep trouble in the midterms and in 2028 as well. Trump’s broken promises on Iran, Greene said, have effectively shattered the MAGA coalition. Greene’s statement constitutes a remarkable moment, so we talked to New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about MAGA’s crackup. We discuss the deeper meaning of Greene’s stand, the hidden fissures splintering MAGA, why this threatens the GOP’s midterm hopes, and why even a crushing Democratic victory won’t get us out of the woods just yet. Listen to this episode here.

There possibly can’t be anything more terrifying to a Republican candidate facing brutal electoral headwinds this November than the prospect of President Donald Trump hitting the campaign trail on their behalf. Just these past few weeks, he’s delivered winning gems like this: “For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing that a very evil…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Democrats can make Natalie Harp scandal a bigger headache for GOP…

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As we’re all wondering who is going to step into Karoline Leavitt’s dainty slingback heels, or whatever living monsters masquerading as press secretaries wear these days, a new contender has emerged. Yes, it’s Natalie Harp, the gift that keeps on giving. She’s currently the absolute weirdest person in Trump’s orbit, a sort of human printer and human Canva, dutifully tapping out his little…

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Donald Trump apparently wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again. Is this some kind of twisted midterms strategy? Hard to say. But as Timothy Noah points out in The New Republic, the current and former National Economic Council directors Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow were on Fox News last week talking about two tax proposals the president is mulling, and both are pretty misguided.

The first one, which they would likely try and sell as a middle-class tax cut, is to expand the current (fairly generous) capital gains exclusion on profits from home sales. Under current law, when a couple sells their residence for more than they paid, the first $500,000 in gains is nontaxable. Kudlow seemed to be advocating for a $2 million exclusion.

Now, some kind of means-tested relief for people who have owned their primary residence for decades may be reasonable, but a $2 million exclusion, let’s be honest, doesn’t exactly scream middle class. Especially when you consider that the rule also applies to second homes. That means the Van Doughs, after unloading their $10 million Aspen ski chalet for $12 million, won’t pay a dime on the proceeds.

We’re already paying handsomely for the smaller exclusion. I reported in June that this $500,000 tax break, combined with the mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, will cost the government $574 billion from 2025-2029. That’s according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And since we talk about budgets in 10-year terms, we can say it will add at least $1.15 trillion to the national debt—which, in case you haven’t heard, just passed $40 trillion.

Quadrupling this real-estate tax break is not gonna help with that.

A more appropriate response to out-of-control deficits would be to repeal the ill-conceived tax giveaways in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, legislation that the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center calculated will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost revenues over a decade. DOGE’s mindless cuts to the federal workforce, executed with Trump blessing and encouragement, will cost America a fortune as well.

And now Trump wants to double down on all the losses he’s created with his profligate policies, pet construction projects, and inept military adventures?

The second proposal, indexing capital gains to inflation, is even stupider. I wrote about this idea last summer, after none other than Reagan-era anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist told the Washington Post that he’d urged Trump to make it happen with an executive order.

Here’s the thing: Taxes on capital gains are already wildly discounted relative to taxes on labor, discounts that, based on the JCT’s numbers, will cost the government at least $2.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. The current top rate for capital gains is 23.8 percent, which includes a 3.8 percent surcharge enacted to help cover the cost of the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, as I wrote previously:

A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It’s no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code.

Also…

Indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the [deficit]—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits.

TNR’s Noah, citing more recent estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, writes that “indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.”

All of which is to say that these hare-brained proposals, apart from being likely unconstitutional due to their sidestepping of Congress on tax issues, would exacerbate Dickensian wealth disparities and make our bloated federal deficit even worse, just as borrowing costs have reached a two-decade high.

Those midterms cannot come soon enough.

The national deficit has ballooned to $40 trillion, helped along by the GOP’s tax cuts for the rich, President Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs, and spending on the Iran war. But as Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attempt to do damage control, they are leaning into their one trick: Blame it all on former President Joe Biden. “Even though the debt is too high…

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In the last week alone, the U.S. Federal Food & Drug Association has recalled twelve different products—a rate four times higher than the same week a year ago.  

In the past week, the FDA has discovered salmonella in granola, salad dressing, jalapenos, and animal food; glass in fruit popsicles; and metal in sourdough—just to name a few. 

Between August 14 and 20 in 2025, the FDA recalled only three products. In the same week in 2024, the FDA recalled only two, according to the FDA website. 

It’s not immediately clear whether the increase in recalls can be attributed to increased enforcement or more hazardous food—but the rapid recalls really make you wonder, is this what making America healthy again looks like? 

This week of many public health announcements follows a national cyclospora outbreak that has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused two deaths. Last week, the FDA finally dispatched investigators to the facilities linked to the outbreak—nearly a month after linking the parasite to Taylor Farms. Before any of this, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly cut back on parasite monitoring.

The Cook Political Report on Thursday moved the open-seat Senate contests in Texas and Iowa to toss-ups, as they found strong Democratic candidates and a growing backlash to President Donald Trump are creating the perfect storm to flip these seats long held by the GOP. “These two races, which had been in the Lean Republican column, now are close enough to merit a move to Toss-Up. Even though…

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Fox News showed off on Thursday just how in sync it is with the Republican Party by echoing a party memo defending the steeply unpopular practice of constructing AI data centers around the country. Axios published a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that highlights voter opposition to data center construction and how it is dragging down the party’s candidates in key races.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | A look back at Karoline Leavitt’s legacy of lies and propaganda…

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants you to think that a weak job market is a good thing.

CNBC’s Sara Eisen asked Bessent to comment on recent signs that the job market was cracking. Bessent downplayed the “noisy” numbers suggesting the job market was not stable.

“The jobs that we’re seeing are going to Americans,” Bessent. “After the deportations that we’ve seen during the President Trump administration and the closing of the border, that’s like this unfettered migration, we don’t need to produce as many jobs.”

Bessent on the latest bad jobs report: "After the deportations that we've seen and the closing of the border, we don't need to produce as many jobs" pic.twitter.com/kStWCiXAz5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2026

In July, the U.S. labor market shed 23,000 jobs, a worrying sign when paired with high gas prices and tariff-based inflation. Notably, women accounted for 100 percent of that decline, losing 32,000 jobs while men gained 9,000. The report also revised down job growth numbers from the previous two months.

For several months, the Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Americans don’t need jobs, apparently! It’s a strange spin for the simple fact that the president’s sweeping deportations are hurting the economy.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration claims that more than 2 million immigrants have left the country since Trump reentered office—something that couldn’t possibly be true.

The long-delayed road trip reality show, “The Great American Road Trip,” starring Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his Fox News host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their plethora of children is finally coming out, and the first clips are truly awful. “So I’m nervous about the idea of Paloma going to Harvard,” Campos-Duffy says. Paloma is the Duffys’ 18-year-old daughter…

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The second episode of The Great American Road Trip, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s recently released vanity project travel show, starts in the massive suburban home Duffy shares with his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine more or less interchangeable children. 

Four of those children will accompany their parents on the upcoming leg of their road trip to Boston, Massachusetts and before they leave Duffy has to have a heart-to-heart with Paloma, his 17-year-old daughter. The family will soon be visiting colleges and the Transportation Secretary is worried. “Let’s say you got into Harvard, would you be pushing us to actually have you go?” Duffy asks. 

Paloma, sitting across a massive kitchen island from her father, answers yes as the first notes of foreboding music begin to play in the background. This conversation is not just about where Paloma will go to college. After years of raising their children as devout Catholics, the Duffys are worried about what a single semester at a liberal college could do to their daughter’s faith. This tension is stretched into a full-fledged storyline over the course of the six-part series, a twist on a coming-of-age tale. Paloma wants to grow and change; her parents have other plans. 

The camera then cuts to Rachel Campos-Duffy in a jarring nod to the aggressive editing style that characterizes most reality TV. “We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they’re steeped in faith and values,” a strangely barefoot Campos-Duffy says while curled up on the couch beside her husband. “And so the idea of dropping her off at a place that would undermine that, or try to undo all those things makes me worried.” 

Speaking to Paloma, Duffy is less diplomatic about what he’s really worried about. “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you, and, I think, corrupt their minds,” he says. It’s a sinister, if vague, allegation that a Cabinet Secretary may want to look into. But Duffy is speaking to his daughter as her father, not as the man who currently sits 14th in the line of succession.

 Poor Paloma pushes back. “I went to an extremely conservative school in high school, and I’m part of an extremely conservative family. If I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school and then a conservative college,” she says.

A knowing look spreads across Duffy’s face—his daughter is still learning the ways of the world. She only sees Harvard as the nation’s preeminent private college, not as the sex and communism factory it really is. “They’re so good at it, you’ll see,” Duffy says. “Young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted,” when they stray too far afield—like, say, by attending a prestigious “liberal” university. Paloma is clearly smart, but Duffy seems not to think she’s smart enough to evade the perverts and contortionists at Harvard. 

Unless you’re clamoring for a window into Paloma Campos-Duffy’s college plans for some reason, it’s not exactly compelling television. Still, it’s a conversation that gets at a tension  that runs throughout the Great American Road Trip. Duffy and his family are ostensibly on a journey to “[explore] destinations, transportation, and all the people and places that make America unique.” There’s just one problem: Duffy isn’t actually interested in most of the country he spent months traveling across. In fact, he wants to protect himself and his family from much of it, just like he wants to keep Paloma away from Harvard.

The six-part series is part unscripted series and part illegal advertisement. For something so boring, it has always been controversial. Its announcement was greeted by an immediate and severe backlash—which should have been expected given that The Great American Road Trip was paid for by corporate sponsors like Boeing, Toyota, and Shell—companies the Secretary of Transportation is ostensibly supposed to oversee and regulate. Initially scheduled to drop as part of President Trump’s sketchy Freedom 250 celebration, it quietly faded from view and was quietly dumped on the DOT’s official YouTube channel earlier this week. Millions of dollars were spent for a couple thousand views. The show is dreadfully boring. And the ethical problems that have dogged it from its inception haven’t gone away.

Federal employees are bound by a code of ethical standards that strictly prohibit them from using their public office for private gain and from endorsing any product, service or enterprise while they serve. Of course, that rule has become more of a suggestion during the second Trump administration—which is how we got The Great American Road Trip.

Before each episode, a disclaimer clarifies that no taxpayer dollars were spent on the Duffys’ family vacations. But it does not clarify whether the family received compensation for their participation from The Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit 501(c)(4). Duffy and Campos-Duffy have publicly insisted that they were not compensated for their appearances on the show, but the nonprofit has yet to disclose its beneficiaries. If they got paid, that would not only be a violation of ethical standards, but also could potentially amount to bribery. 

In multiple episodes Duffy announces that he has to go to “work” for DOT, before visiting one of the medley of industry giants funding his family’s Road Trip.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the family visited a Boeing plant to gawk at the new Dreamliner. Boeing, one of the project’s main sponsors that has multiple contracts with the DOT. In Fort Worth, Texas, the secretary broke off to visit Cement Roadstone Holding (CRH), the country’s largest asphalt producer, which stands to earn big from the secretary’s slate of proposed highway expansions. In Scottsdale, Arizona, members of the Duffy family were treated to rides in Waymo’s autonomous vehicles that Dad calls “the future of transportation.”

Still, the disclaimers and quiet release of the series displays a level of self-consciousness that is uncharacteristic of the shameless Trump administration. Is it really possible that they got all the way through production before realizing how badly they’d broken the rules? 

The numerous ethical violations aren’t the only reason the show should never have aired: the series’ central college storyline is a humiliating blow to the Trump administration’s war on American colleges and universities. 

When the Duffy family visits Cambridge, they head to St. Paul’s Catholic Church to speak to Father Nathaniel Sanders, an undergraduate chaplain, about the Catholic culture at Harvard. Crammed together in a pew, the Duffys ask questions about whether a Catholic can possibly attend the Ivy League institution without becoming a God-less heathen. 

Campos-Duffy tells Sanders that after her eldest, Evita, had a bad experience at UChicago, she’s nervous about one of her daughters attending a godless Ivy League. “Why are we giving our money to people who hate us, hate our values?” she asks.

“I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on,” Sanders tells the family. “You come here because it’s the best opportunity. And if someone has a sense of themselves and a sense of God before coming here, that will only flower.” The Duffys’ tour of Harvard Catholic Center is the only footage of the school included in the show, which suggests a college visit without a visit to the college. There’s a palpable sense that showing too much of Harvard would give the game away and expose just how preposterous the Duffys fearmongering about the school really is. 

Later, Duffy and Paloma sit down at Fenway Park to recap tours of Harvard and Boston College, and the secretary finally gives in. “I think a smart, good girl can completely navigate what is a really good school,” he says. After visiting the campus for himself, Duffy can no longer claim that Harvard brainwashes its students. This is what counts as narrative tension and character development on The Great American Road Trip.

It’s what many of us would call a “learning moment,” but amid the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to target the university as part of a larger war on “liberal” institutions of higher education, it feels even more hollow. The administration’s war on these schools is rooted in ignorance, fear, and culture war nonsense. Duffy backed down after visiting Harvard. What would it take for the rest of the administration to do the same?

Duffy may have had a Damascus moment in Cambridge, but the overarching lesson of The Great American Road Trip isn’t really that travel can serve as an engine for personal growth by putting us in touch with different people from diverse backgrounds. It’s that there isn’t much point to it at all. For Duffy, there’s really no point in encountering anyone or anything that contradicts his cosseted world view. Actually, there’s one point: Visiting the corporations that are footing the bill for your road trip. 

In the series’ final episode, Paloma learns she’s been accepted to the University of Chicago while driving down historic Route 66. As her family speeds into the past, she looks toward the future. It’s a heartwarming, kitschy ending to a nothingburger show. It makes you wonder why the family couldn’t visit Chicago. Then you remember that the Trump administration launched a federal invasion there. 

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Inside Washington

This could be Dems’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa

Sarah Trone Garriott might be Democrats’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa this year. But to do that, she’ll have to get past a barrage of culture war attacks from the GOP.

This week, four Iowa races were among the ten total races that Inside Elections reclassified based on recent polling, shifting them toward Democrats. The nonpartisan group reclassified the governor’s race between GOP businessman Zach Lahn and Democratic state auditor Rob Sand from “Toss-up” to “Tilt Democratic,” and switched the Senate race between GOP Representative Ashley Hinson and State Representative Josh Turek from “Lean Republican” to “Tilt Republican.” The 2nd congressional district moved from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican,” and the 3rd congressional district, where Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor and member of the state Senate faces incumbent Representative Zach Nunn, is now considered a “Toss-up.”

These kinds of prospects for Democrats would have seemed unthinkable in the red state even a few years ago. And the excitement from polling alone—the reinvigorating effect it might have on the state’s Democrats—could help down-ballot candidates like Trone Garriott, said Karen Kedrowski, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. “If the Democrats are showing up to vote because it’s an exciting year and they think they can flip some steep seats, and the Republicans don’t share that same enthusiasm, I think that she has a real shot.”

To win, Trone Garriott will have to take on both Nunn and a flood of attack ads against her. Nunn is endorsed by President Trump, but his advertising has instead been emphasizing his track record of bipartisan cooperation on the campaign trail, Kedrowski explained, which could help him appeal to the district’s swingy voters. That strategy changed somewhat on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Nunn at the Iowa State Fair, offering remarks wherein he justified the war in Iran and used an anti-trans slur.

Republicans have been attacking Trone Garriott over her support for trans people during her time in the state senate. As a lawmaker, she voted against a bill to prohibit elementary and secondary schools from letting someone use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity (the bill ultimately passed), and voted against a bill that based school and college sports eligibility on sex assigned at birth (that bill was signed into law in 2022).

Trone Garriott has also faced attacks claiming that she officiated a satanic wedding in 2006—despite the fact that she wasn’t an ordained minister at the time, and thus couldn’t actually officiate weddings. The attacks stem from a story she told publicly in 2023 with the Des Moines Register Storytellers Project. In 2006, she was an intern pastor at a Lutheran church in West Virginia, when the pastor training her officiated a wedding between a couple that identified as Satanists, and it fell to her to read a passage—she chose 1 Corinthians 13—for the ceremony. “I believe my calling as a minister is to share the word of God with everyone, even the most unlikely people,” she said at the storytelling event. “And I saw the power of scripture in that moment. And I do believe it made an impact on them. And it reminded me of my calling to love my neighbor, including the neighbor I don’t agree with and I don’t share the same values with, and I certainly did not have the same beliefs as these people.”

Though Trone Garriott’s campaign has been mostly positive, she’s found ways to hit Nunn. “She’s calling for mandatory town meetings. And with the exception of [Senator] Chuck Grassley, nobody has been holding town meetings because defending the Republican agenda right now is really pretty difficult,” Kedrowski said. In May, Trone Garriott held a town hall in each of the district’s 21 counties.

In recent weeks, she’s also criticized Nunn over his donations from Chinese-owned companies, arguing that he’s not “tough on China.” Between 2022 and 2026, Nunn’s campaign and leadership PAC accepted $18,750 from Syngenta Corporation and Smithfield Foods.

“I’m hearing from voters across the district who are very concerned about rising costs and the corruption in Washington. Zach Nunn is a career politician who has been in office since 2014. Instead of making Iowa more affordable during his time in Congress, he’s voted to increase costs for the rest of us. He’s desperate to distract from the fact that he has taken thousands of dollars from Chinese companies, and then voted to allow China to buy Iowa farmland,” she said in a statement to The New Republic.

Nunn’s campaign has been pushing back against her characterizations, citing legislation he’s supported “confronting” the Chinese Communist Party.

Electorally, Nunn has proved resilient, defeating a Democratic incumbent for the seat in 2022 and winning reelection in 2024. The district voted for Trump in all three of his elections. But Democrats are hopeful that Trone Garriott is the right person to unseat Nunn, and that 2026 is the right year. She won her elections to the state senate in 2020, ran in a new district in 2022 after redistricting, and won that seat again in 2024. In 2024, the district went for Trump, yet also reelected Trone Garriott.

“Nationally, we’re seeing a lot more enthusiasm on the part of Democratic voters in terms of turnout than Republican voters, and we’re seeing that in Iowa too,” Kedrowski said. “I think Iowa has a longer history of being a swing state than it has of being a solidly Republican state.”

Outside Washington

The backlash to data centers has been very bipartisan, but Democratic candidates have typically been more aggressive on the topic than Republicans. As Molly Beck notes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin governor’s race may prove an exception. Once upon a time, it looked like the Democratic nominee was going to be championing a full data center moratorium—but that was because a lot of people expected the Democratic nominee to be Francesca Hong. Then moderate David Crowley pulled off an eleventh-hour upset of Hong in the primary. Now, in the general election, while both Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany are eager to portray themselves as tough on big tech, Crowley appears to be less aggressive than Tiffany on perhaps the biggest issue under debate, which is the state’s tax subsidies. Tiffany “is calling to end tax incentives outright,” Beck writes, “while Crowley said he would make it harder to get them”—specifically by requiring, in Crowley’s words, “100 percent clean power, no secret deals, real money back to the community, and no increase on consumer rates.” (Worth tossing into the conversation: Depending on how all this is measured, the benchmarks Crowley outlines may be tough for companies to meet, especially at the speed the industry is currently moving—so the difference between his position and outright canceling the subsidies may prove to be somewhat theoretical.)

In case you missed it: DeSmog recently published a striking piece about multiple speakers at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council—a powerful conservative lobbying group—openly saying how important the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been for the oil and gas industry. Paul Watkins—a lawyer famous for fighting environmentally conscious investing practices on behalf of a group backed by conservative court strategy mastermind Leonard Leo—even warned of “catastrophic outcomes” for the oil industry should this majority be disrupted, reports Sarah Hofmann. Watkins and others were reportedly speaking, in particular, about lawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.

The Ideas Factory

Tamar Jacoby, director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project, pens a piece in the Washington Monthly about the use of “ground drones,” or unmanned ground vehicles known as UGVs, by Ukrainian forces against Russia. Late last year, Jacoby writes, one Ukrainian strike unit that “emerged early on as a pioneer of ground-based robotic systems … used a single cart mounted with a Browning machine gun to hold a stretch of the front line for 45 days.”

At Pew Research, Drew Desilver asks whether teen summer employment might finally be ticking upward after decades of slump. “A summer job—whether scooping ice cream, busing tables, or teaching campers to make lanyards—once was a rite of passage for American teens,” Desilver writes. “But far fewer teens are working such jobs now than two or three decades ago.” For the summer of 2026, Pew finds, analyzing federal employment data, that 35.5 percent of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have held a paying job. Hispanic and Black teen employment numbers are significantly lower than white teen employment numbers.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Wednesday was Bill Clinton’s 80th birthday. In what year was Clinton first elected governor of Arkansas, and how old was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The Trump administration’s plan to allow oil and gas extraction near the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico is drawing concerns from UNESCO, the United Nations’ heritage organization.

The Guardian reports that the organization is alarmed that the administration is getting rid of a buffer zone around the park, which is a world heritage site. “The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” a UNESCO spokesperson told the paper.

The committee has also “emphasized that projects proposed outside world heritage properties should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value — which are the features of the site that justify its inscription, and should be subject to appropriate impact assessments before decisions are taken,” the spokesperson added.

The federal Bureau of Land Management has proposed getting rid of a 10-mile buffer zone protecting the area from any industrial activity, whether that’s uranium mining or fossil fuel drilling. Tribal leaders, environmental groups, and archaeologists have all warned that the site could be irreparably damaged from such activity. In a 12-day public comment period earlier this year, the government received close to 100,000 comments mostly opposed to ending the buffer zone.

“This park offers an incredible transportive experience where you essentially go back in time 1,000 years to experience what the ancient Pueblo people saw,” Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, told The Guardian. “The buffer zone is incredibly important and removing it would completely change this experience.”

The New Mexico park is one of 27 world heritage sites in the U.S., ranging from national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone to landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. The lone American site on UNESCO’s list of heritage sites whose preservation is in danger is Everglades National Park in Florida thanks to nearby development and pollution. Chaco and other sites where the administration has pushed for development, mining, and drilling, such as Big Bend National Park, could soon join that list.

Senate Democrats are initiating a probe into whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth placed one of his own supporters inside the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“Our offices have been informed that the Department of Defense assigned an active-duty Public Affairs officer to serve as a ‘deputy’ to Stars and Stripes Publisher Max Lederer, reportedly without consultation with Mr. Lederer,” Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Jeanne Shaheen wrote in a Thursday letter to Hegseth. “On August 18, Mr. Lederer announced that he will retire after more than three decades at Stars and Stripes … citing fundamental differences between his understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes and the Department’s plans for the organization.”

“The placement of an active-duty Public Affairs officer in the senior leadership of an organization whose credibility depends on its independence from the military chain of command raises serious questions.”

Stars and Stripes is partly funded by the Defense Department but has long had editorial independence. Installing an active-duty military officer in an editorial position at the newspaper in the midst of an extremely unpopular overhaul of Pentagon leadership—and an even more unpopular war on Iran—reeks of bias. The senators gave Hegseth a deadline of August 28 to offer a “detailed explanation” as to why he appointed the active-duty officer to oversee the outlet.

“For generations, American servicemembers, particularly those stationed overseas and in combat zones, have relied on Stars and Stripes for credible and independent news,” the letter concluded. “At this critical moment of leadership transition, that independence must not be compromised. We urge you to preserve that independence and provide prompt answers regarding these latest developments.”

Hegseth has already demonstrated a desire for narrative control over what both civilians and servicemembers know about his leadership. Earlier this year, the Pentagon fired the ombudsman responsible for guaranteeing the military paper’s editorial independence. Last year, he filled the Pentagon Press Corps with sycophants from the likes of ultraconservative organizations like Turning Point USA shortly after instituting a “pledge” for Pentagon reporters, requiring them to abstain from receiving any unauthorized material or publishing without approval. And the administration at large has fought with reporters covering troops’ low morale, low provisions, and severe injuries in the war on Iran.

Hegseth has yet to officially respond.

There are so many horrifying things that President Donald Trump is doing to Washington, D.C., but his attempts to take over the Kennedy Center might be the most pathetic. He’s so desperate to slap his name on the thing and turn it into a gaudy nightmare that he’ll do just about anything. Trump’s DOJ just pushed their whole chests out and told a federal court they’re planning on adding Trump’…

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