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A Thursday report from the Inspector General states that former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer went to a strip club while on the job, even forcing her driver to rain dollar bills on one of the dancers.

The report further details just how sloppy and reckless Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as Labor secretary was until she stepped down in April.

“During Chavez-DeRemer’s April 15–20, 2025 personal travel to Oregon, she requested an off-the-record stop at an establishment that was determined upon entry to feature partially nude dancers,” the IG report reads, noting that Chavez-DeRemer made a point to bring her limousine driver inside with her.

“Chavez-DeRemer subsequently took money from her purse, gave the money to the driver, and directed him to give it to the performer. When the agent resisted and sought guidance from [Assistant Special Agent in Charge]1, ASAIC 1 instructed him to comply with Chavez-DeRemer’s requests,” the report continues. “Chavez-DeRemer then took additional money from her purse and asked the agent to drop the bills one by one onto the partially nude woman. The agent again hesitated and sought intervention from ASAIC 1, who told him to follow Chavez-DeRemer’s instructions. The agent complied against his wishes.”

This is the woman President Donald Trump handpicked—at the behest of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien—to lead the country’s Labor Department as part of a so-called “pro-labor” administration. And that strip club moment is just one of many ways in which she created what the IG report describes as a “toxic, intimidating, and humiliating” work environment.

The report also notes that while in Michigan, Chavez-DeRemer massaged ASAIC 1’s shoulders “while seated behind him in a vehicle after he completed a driving shift,” and asked if he was tired. ASAIC 1 told her he was “solid as a rock,” which witnesses interpreted as a sexual innuendo in reference to a massage-induced erection.

Chavez-DeRemer also reportedly discussed employees’ performance in front of them, including whether they had cried, and would drink during the workday. She and her aides would pressure other employees to join them and would mock them if they declined, witnesses said.

The dysfunction wasn’t just from Chavez-DeRemer. Her chief of staff Rebecca Wright screened Office of the Secretary applicants by race, weight, and sexual orientation—even moving someone’s desk because she didn’t want a “fat person” in her line of sight. She also told women in the office not to cut their hair too short to stop them from “turning into a lesbian.”

This is an update from the April allegations that led to Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation—that she had an affair with a member of her security detail, asked staffers to buy alcohol for her at various hours of the day, and used taxpayer funds to throw a birthday party for herself.

On July 4, 2023, Caitlin Ditta had just finished hosting a barbecue with her husband and baby daughter when she felt a strange sensation. Ditta, a 33-year-old school therapist living in Oakland, California, had suffered a hemorrhage after giving birth in the hospital a few weeks earlier. She recovered quickly, but the doctors issued a stark warning: If the bleeding started again, she should seek help immediately. Delaying care could be fatal.

Now, breastfeeding her baby on the living room couch, Ditta felt what she describes as “a rush of something coming out of me.” She hustled to the bathroom, wishing against her own certainty: Please don’t be blood. Please don’t be blood.

It was blood—“a murder scene” of it, she says.

She immediately called 911 and told her husband to do the same. But as they dialed and re-dialed one of the best-known telephone numbers in America, no one picked up. Ditta recalls holding both phones in her hands, panic and disorientation washing over her. Time seemed to be slowing down. She felt certain she would die.

“ It felt like every second counted because there was blood pouring out of me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Where are the people who are supposed to pick up?’ Like, where are they!?’”

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Her emergency came at a particularly troubled time for Oakland’s dispatch center. For years, a slew of city audits and grand jury reports had highlighted the same tangle of problems: There were simply not enough 911 dispatchers to keep up with the volume of calls coming in. Workers faced grueling conditions and mandatory overtime, and the hiring process was chronically slow. In 2023, more than 123,000 callers—40 percent of the year’s total—waited at least 40 seconds to connect during their emergencies. A few weeks after Ditta’s call, the state issued an ultimatum to Oakland: Answer the vast majority of 911 calls within 15 seconds or risk losing funding. 

For emergency callers like Ditta, the stakes of delayed 911 pickups can be life or death. Studies have shown that administering CPR immediately after a cardiac arrest can double or triple a victim’s chances of surviving. And in an era of endless mass shootings, prompt bleeding triage is more essential than ever.

“The national average EMS response time is roughly seven to ten minutes,” explains Pat O’Neill of Stop the Bleed, a Department of Defense program designed to train the public in emergency care. “In many of the most severe cases, no emergency system, however well-staffed, can place a professional responder on scene before the survival window closes.” Dispatchers, who are often trained in emergency procedures, can help in seconds—as long as they’re available to pick up the phone.

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Ditta had never given much thought to the inner workings of America’s 911 system. Like many people, her understanding of the service was rudimentary: Call the number, get immediate help. The hemorrhage, and what happened after it, shocked her out of those preconceptions.

“What if I had been alone?” she says. “And what if I had bled so much that I passed out? When would they have picked up?”

In the American imagination, 911 is a simple service with a straightforward purpose. But on the other end of the line, a complex machine is operating, often beyond its capacity. There are approximately 6,000 dispatch centers across the country. Some are tucked into rural areas and employ just a handful of telecommunicators. Others function as urban command centers, with dozens of employees answering millions of calls each year. The service is funded in large part by fees attached to individuals’ and businesses’ phone bills. But as tech upgrades have rolled out in recent years, the cost of 911 has outpaced fee revenue, leaving municipalities increasingly on the hook to make up the difference. All the while, call volumes have increased.

“The 911 system is a part of our core civic infrastructure,” says Rebecca Neusteter, Executive Director of the University of Chicago Health Lab and a leading 911 researcher. That—and the fact that it’s largely funded by direct consumer charges—carry “an expectation that people are going to be able to access the care that they needed.”

Although there is no federal agency overseeing the performance of 911 centers, one standard holds firm nationwide: “call answer times”—the speed at which telecommunicators are expected to pick up the phone. In 2020, a professional organization called the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) established the current benchmark: Dispatch centers should pick up 90 percent of calls in 15 seconds or less. (It also calls for 95 percent of calls to be answered within 20 seconds).

In a fragmented and decentralized system, the NENA standard is perhaps the clearest indicator of 911’s efficacy. Yet dozens of major cities have fallen short of it for years, causing catastrophic delays for the public and raising serious questions about the reliability of America’s emergency infrastructure.

In early 2026, I submitted records requests seeking five years’ worth of answer time data from more than 100 dispatch centers in and around America’s largest cities. Of the 68 that have so far provided records, nearly half failed to meet the NENA standard last year. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Metropolitan Dispatch Center, for example, only picked up 64 percent of its 2.9 million 911 calls within 15 seconds in 2025; more than 500,000  callers waited at least 40 seconds, according to state data. In Kansas City, Missouri, records show that police telecommunicators answered just 56 percent of 911 calls within 15 seconds last year. Its department left more than 100,000 people waiting a minute or longer on hold—278 callers per day, on average. 

A limited tally of 911 calls placed on hold paints a picture of a system in the throes of its own emergency.

The overall scale of this issue is difficult to comprehend and nearly impossible to measure. But a limited tally of 911 calls placed on hold paints a picture of a system in the throes of its own emergency. More than 1.3 million callers across 18 cities waited for at least 40 seconds before reaching a telecommunicator in 2025. The true count is undoubtedly much higher, since many cities haven’t yet provided a tally—and since others don’t even track that information. 

The crisis is bicoastal and slices across socioeconomic strata: Dispatch centers in cities like Phoenix, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Atlanta, Georgia all flunked the test in 2025. So did those in Indianapolis, Indiana; El Paso, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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Some cities, like Austin, Texas, have been able to improve their performance dramatically in the face of public pressure. In others, though, the problems have dragged on.

On Jan. 27, 2023, a Missouri National Guard Sergeant named Richard Schlesing left work and texted his wife, Ashley. While driving down a two-lane road near the city’s downtown area, he accidentally shot himself in the leg with his Glock handgun. He pulled over, attempted to administer first aid, and dialed 911. The call never reached a dispatcher.

Roughly an hour later, Ashley Schlesing grew worried and began driving along her husband’s usual route home. She found him unresponsive in his car, blood covering the seat and floor. She called 911—also unsuccessfully—and began trying to flag down passersby. Finally, a man named Luke Springer stopped and began performing CPR on Schlesing. Springer’s 911 call went through, but it was far too late. In security camera footage of Schlesing’s accident, later acquired by police, he appeared to go motionless two minutes after firing his gun.

Ashley Schlesing filed a wrongful death suit a few months after her husband’s death, accusing St. Louis officials of failing to fix “a malfunctioning, understaffed and inept 911 system” and alleging “deficiencies including, but not limited to, long hold times, unanswered calls, and gross understaffing.” Although the city has improved its answer times since, it still fell well short of the 15-second standard in 2025. More than 43,200 callers waited at least 40 seconds for an answer last year—nearly 120 per day. 

The St. Louis Metro Police Department declined to comment on its answer time data, or on the lawsuit, which is ongoing.

Crises like Schlesing’s play out routinely across the country. In Georgia, when a stray bullet ripped through Brittany McElrathbey’s neck and face in January 2024, several people tried unsuccessfully to connect to 911. Her brother Cornelius finally decided to haul her into a car and speed toward the hospital.

“It was like something out of the movies,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I wasn’t really trying to break the law, but the law didn’t matter at the time. We tried to get the law on the phone.” 

“These workers are never seen. They’re never even heard. They are most of the time four floors underground in a dark, cold room.”

Oakland was in its sixth straight year of failing the NENA standard when Caitlin Ditta placed her call in 2023. That year, its telecommunicators were only able to answer 42 percent of emergency calls within 15 seconds, and the number of abandoned calls climbed past 74,000. In more than a dozen interviews, Oaklanders described waiting on hold during robberies, fires and after car accidents. One person claimed they’d been unable to reach dispatchers after watching someone throw a Molotov cocktail at a children’s center. Another said she couldn’t get through after seeing someone in a wheelchair weaving in and out of highway traffic.   

The issue permeates everyday life, says Janani Ramachandran, a city council member who has worked to reform Oakland’s system. 

 ”I have people coming up to me—they’re like, ‘Oh wait, you’re a city council member, right?’” she says. “‘Can you do something about the 911 system?’ And this might be at a party at 10 o’clock on a Friday night.” 

There is no single cause for the lapse in America’s 911 answer speeds. But a key factor, according to experts, academics and telecommunicators themselves, is chronic understaffing. Between 2019 and 2022, the average vacancy rate in US 911 centers was around 25 percent, according to a 2023 report from two industry groups. Another study, published in 2025, surveyed nearly 1,400 911 professionals and found that 74 percent of them worked in centers that were struggling to fill vacant positions. In many areas, staffing dipped to perilously low levels in the years following the pandemic and has been on an uphill climb ever since. 

Part of the problem is pay. Although 911 telecommunicators can earn more than $100,000 per year in some cities (including Oakland), government data show they often make significantly less than police officers and firefighters. A dispatcher’s average salary is just over $56,000 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Police make nearly $80,000.    

Another factor is systemic underfunding. Each year, the Federal Communications Commission produces a report that tallies the overall cost of maintaining 911 in America. Recently, the agency added a section specifically seeking information about financial shortfalls. The responses carry an urgency familiar to anyone who’s answered a 911 call. 

“911 fee revenues have never been sufficient to cover the full cost of 911 service,” wrote one respondent from North Dakota in the latest report. “As the cost of technology and human resources increases[,] the surcharge fees and percentages do not increase commensurate with those additional expenses. This means that local governments must dig deeper into their general funds each year to support 911 services.” Another respondent from Nevada wrote that underfunding had produced challenges in “maintaining or upgrading essential equipment” and “supporting staffing levels.”

Meanwhile, mountains of academic research have drawn a clear line between the grueling work of 911 telecommunicators and pervasive mental health problems. Dispatchers suffer from higher rates of anxiety, depression, PSTD and suicidal ideation than police or firefighters, according to one recent government study. Nonstop traumatic calls, combined with long hours and what researchers have called “a culture of resilience and underreporting,” can produce a doom loop of attrition.

“If you’re understaffed, you start the day in the hole,” explains Ty Wooten, Director of Government Affairs for the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. “When you get understaffed, that creates overtime issues, which leads to people being burnt out. Which leads to more people leaving, which creates this hellacious circle of just not being able to move the needle.” 

For years, the federal government has classified 911 telecommunicators as “office and administrative support occupations”—a category they share with customer service representatives, bank tellers and bill collectors. They are not part of the “protective service occupation” category, alongside police officers and firefighters, because the government has claimed that “most dispatchers are precluded from administering actual care, ‘talking’ someone through procedures, or providing advice.”  

In reality, telecommunicators save lives on a regular basis. They assist callers with the administration of CPR roughly 320,000 times per year, according to one industry estimate. They coach callers through childbirth and stroke care. And, in many cases, they show their work: One dispatch center in Dane County, Wisconsin, maintains a “Wall of Life” with glass plaques commemorating each time a telecommunicator provided lifesaving care. Since 2020, they’ve racked up more than 120 saves. Many other centers across the US keep similar tallies.

“People think, ‘Oh, they just answer the phone. How hard could it be?’”

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, they just answer the phone. How hard could it be?’” Wooten says, but “911 call takers and dispatchers have to be subject matter experts in everything. We have to know criminal law. We have to know civil law. We have to be social workers. … We have to know everything, because when people call 911, they don’t care that you work for a service that only does one of those things.”

Since 2019, dispatchers have pushed for federal legislation that would reclassify their work, placing them in the same labor category with other first responders. This change could help unlock new benefits and support, including earlier retirement, more comprehensive training and improved mental health care. Although each reclassification bill has garnered bipartisan support, none have ever been signed into law. 

That may soon change. Last year, a reclassification bill, the “Enhancing First Response Act,” passed the Senate for the first time ever. One of its key architects, Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.), spent nearly 20 years as a dispatcher before joining Congress. She often describes a call that stuck with her: A young girl who’d been on hold for 20 minutes waiting for a Spanish-speaking dispatcher before Torres could answer was shot and killed by her uncle. 

The call “ tore at me,” Torres says. “ The consequence for me has been carrying this responsibility of ensuring that no one else would ever die because we were not responsive.”

The Enhancing First Response Act landed in Congress last September and has been sitting there since. It entails no additional spending—although it could create trickle-down costs for states and cities—and it has yet to attract any opposition. Meanwhile, advocates say the costs would be minimal and the recognition long overdue.       

“These workers are never seen,” Torres says. They’re never even heard. They are most of the time four floors underground in a dark, cold room. They never complain. They go there, they put in their eight, 10, or 12 hours, they go home. And that is how they live.”

In early July, Torres and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, urging him to take up the Enhancing First Response Act on the House floor. That hasn’t happened yet, and Johnson’s office did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the bill’s status.

After Caitlin Ditta and her husband finally connected to Oakland’s 911 center, a team of firefighters arrived quickly. They stayed with her, offering reassurances, until an ambulance whisked her to the hospital.

There, she was given anesthesia and underwent an emergency surgery to stop the bleeding, during which she hemorrhaged again. When she awoke, doctors told her she had come very close to needing a hysterectomy; she would need a blood transfusion. Once she was stable, Ditta was transferred back to a delivery bed to feed her baby daughter.

 ”I got lucky with my situation that it wasn’t actually life or death,” she says. “ But I’m like, What if someone has a heart attack?” She thinks “all the time,” she says, about people who weren’t as lucky. 

Thanks in part to changes in hiring and recruitment, Oakland has improved its performance significantly: the city’s average answer time, which was 55 seconds the year Ditta called, dipped below 20 seconds last year. But it’s still well short of the NENA standard: In 2025, telecommunicators picked up 71 percent of calls within 15 seconds. The center remained understaffed and reliant on overtime into 2026.

Ditta’s daughter recently turned three. She and her husband are trying for another child. But it’s hard to forget the trauma associated with her hemorrhage—the blood, the panic, the surgery—or what happened when they sought help. They called the number they’d always been taught to rely on in situations like theirs; the number millions of Americans know by heart—and no one picked up.

“ It just illuminates a glaring difference in where you live, the care that you’ll get or response you will get from 911,” Ditta says. “Which sucks, because I like where I live, and I want to feel safe in the city where I live, and I want my kid to feel safe.”

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.

Byard Duncan is continuing to report on America’s 911 system. Reach him at byardd@gmail.com, on social media @byardduncan, or on Signal at ByardDuncan.35 with experiences or tips.

I have many books about feminism on my bookshelf, but only one by Gloria Steinem. It’s an old copy, possibly a first edition, of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, the book she considered her first. (Prior to this, she’d co-authored a book and curated an anthology of writing about the beach.) Published in 1983, Outrageous Acts brings together 20 years’ worth of Steinem’s writing, most of it previously published, ranging from her 1963 undercover report on the labor practices of the Playboy Club—a piece that made her notorious in New York media circles—to her 1982 profile of the poet and novelist Alice Walker, a longtime contributor to Ms. Magazine, the feminist glossy Steinem and other activists founded in 1971. 

My copy of the book is a signed one, inscribed by Steinem “To Robin—with gratitude for this International Women’s Day—and the future.” I can’t be certain, but I like to think that the Robin addressed here is the poet and activist Robin Morgan, Steinem’s friend and collaborator, and one of the books many dedicatees (there are more than a dozen of them). Outrageous Acts may have a single author, but Steinem knew that feminism is a collective project.

Steinem, who died this past Wednesday at 92, was many things: an editor, an organizer, a public speaker, a fundraiser, a co-founder, a mentor, and, in her own words, an “entrepreneur of social change.” But before she was all these things, she was a writer, and she remained one until her death. (Her final book, the memoir An Unexpected Life, will be published on September 22.) It’s easy to forget this, despite her impressive publication record—she published 11 books over the course of her lifetime—and her evident way with words. A kind of poster girl for women’s liberation, with her aviator sunglasses and her long sun-kissed hair, Steinem spent so much time in the public eye that one could be forgiven for thinking she was more like the jet-setting elites she occasionally profiled (and dated) than the working writer toiling away in relative obscurity.

But writing was Steinem’s first and perhaps most enduring love, the activity that gave her a sense of purpose even though, or perhaps because, it could be so daunting. “For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of a metier: (1) when I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it’s frightening,” she wrote in Harper’s in 1965.

That she felt so committed to writing is all the more impressive given the media environment surrounding her. Media was a man’s world: Magazines and newspapers were run by men, edited by men, and distributed by men—although much of the work needed to put out an issue was done by women. Male journalists got assigned better stories and earned higher fees. Even though many magazines were marketed to women, male editors scarcely believed women knew how to read. (A top editor at Ladies’ Home Journal described its audience as “mental defectives with curlers in their hair.”) Steinem struggled to earn respect, let alone interesting assignments. When she first tried to break into Life magazine, the editor she spoke to told her, “We don’t want a pretty girl. We want a writer.” 

Steinem was a writer, as the pieces in this book attest. At her best, as in the 1978 piece “If Men Could Menstruate,” she is pointed and funny, displaying the same gift for aphorism that she showcased in her public speeches. But she could also be earnest and introspective, expressing complicated truths in a plainspoken style. “I still don’t understand why so many, many years passed before I saw my mother as a person and before I understood that many of the forces in her life are patterns women share,” she writes in “Ruth’s Song,” a moving autobiographical essay about her troubled mother, written specifically for Outrageous Acts. “I suppose I couldn’t afford to admit that what had happened to my mother was not all personal or accidental, and therefore could happen to me.”

When does the world need your words, and when does it need your action? Should you go to that organizing meeting or meet your deadline? Steinem lived these tensions, wrestling with them and, sometimes, writing about them.

But she was not always the writer she wanted to be. During the 1960s, when she wrote the most, she rarely expressed her political commitments or personal values in print. During the 1970s, when she honed her politics, she rarely had time to write. “It’s one of the ironies of trying to be a writer and an activist at the same time that just when you feel you have the most to say, you have the least time to say it,” she later recalled. Traveling on the lecture circuit, often with Black feminists like Florynce Kennedy or Margaret Sloan-Hunter, she couldn’t even find time to keep a diary. 

It’s a problem familiar to many activist writers: how to live according to your political principles without sacrificing your art—or vice versa. (We’ll leave aside, for now, the whole question of earning money.) How do you reach a wide readership without diluting your message? When does the world need your words, and when does it need your action? Should you go to that organizing meeting or meet your deadline? Steinem lived these tensions, wrestling with them and, sometimes, writing about them. If she never quite resolved them, she did something perhaps equally admirable: She faced head-on the challenge of being a writer while living a politically committed life.

The fact that Steinem became a writer at all is remarkable. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, to Leo Steinem, an antiques dealer and the owner of a summer resort, and Ruth Steinem, a journalist turned homemaker, Steinem, the second of two girls, had a difficult, itinerant childhood. Her father was a schemer and a dreamer, taking the family on the road in a trailer during the winter and evading the debt collectors who tried to track them down. Ruth, meanwhile, struggled with mental illness and underwent multiple hospitalizations.

When Steinem was ten, her parents separated; with her sister away at college, Steinem became her mother’s caretaker. The two lived in “a deteriorating farm house” on a small fixed income. Steinem tended to her mother, who used tranquilizers to calm her nerves and who often slipped into a stupor. When she could, she escaped into books—and plotted her ultimate escape. “My ultimate protection was this: I was just passing through, a guest in the house,” she later reflected. She would get out of East Toledo and avoid her mother’s fate.

She succeeded, matriculating at Smith College, where she majored in government. Smith in the 1950s presented a different set of challenges than East Toledo did. Populated by well-off, intelligent, entirely conventional women, Smith sent, in Steinem’s words, a “double message” to its undergraduates. As she later wrote, students were “encouraged toward personal accomplishment and excellence, and then expected to subordinate themselves to children and a husband’s career.” Ambivalent about marriage, and eager to chart her own course, Steinem left Smith for a fellowship in India—but not before stopping in Britain to have an illegal abortion, performed by a doctor who made her promise never to mention his name.

It wasn’t until she was sent, as a journalist, to cover a 1970 Greenwich Village speak-out on abortion that she would understand her abortion in political terms. “Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong,” she later wrote. “I knew.” She called it her “big click,” as in the “click of recognition,” a term used in feminist consciousness-raising circles to describe the moment when the scales fall from your eyes.

Radicalized and galvanized, she did what journalists do: She pitched stories about her new interest. There were a few takers: New York, where she was a regular contributor, ran several of her columns about sexual politics. But for the most part, editors were dismissive—as Steinem later wrote, the very same “editors who had assumed I had some valuable biological insight into food, male movie stars, and textured stockings now questioned whether I or other women writers were biologically capable of writing objectively about feminism.” Such stonewalling and sexism drove Steinem to “try speaking instead of writing,” despite her longstanding fears of speaking publicly. Inspired by her companions on the lecture circuit, by Kennedy in particular, she got more comfortable in the limelight—so much so that other leading feminists, such as Betty Friedan, came to resent her.

It also drove Steinem to create her own magazine. In 1971, she hosted a group of female journalists at her Manhattan apartment to talk about the sexism in their industry. One of them, Brenda Feigen, suggested that the group produce a “slick magazine,” something that would stand out from the pamphlets and newsletters that various feminist groups distributed. With the help of Clay Felker, Steinem’s editor, Ms. magazine launched as a special insert in New York. Few thought the project would be successful, but when Ms. published its first standalone issue, the magazine sold out in eight days.

As a founding editor of Ms., and one who remained with the magazine until 2001, Steinem did more than almost anyone to change the media environment for women. Ms. was entirely run by women, and it solicited only female contributors. It broke taboos about what could be published in a glossy, running articles on lesbianism, welfare (a “woman’s issue”), abortion, and the household division of labor. Editors solicited contributions from women of color and put a Black woman on the cover of the June 1982 issue—to the dismay of Southern newsstand owners, who refused to distribute it. And Steinem and her fellow editors proved that there was, in fact, a national audience of intelligent, curious, politically engaged women who were willing to pay for a magazine that spoke to them about the real problems they faced. Ms. eventually reached a circulation of 550,000, spawned all sorts of feminist media successors, and recently published an anthology celebrating its 50th anniversary.  

Steinem contributed to Ms. as she could. Her first piece for the magazine, “Sisterhood,” is a well-meaning if perhaps overly optimistic argument for building solidarity across racial and class lines. But she spent much of her time courting advertisers, whose money was needed to fund the production and distribution of the magazine. In a 1990 essay for Ms., she wrote about the sense of “desperation” she felt, trying and failing to convince advertisers to buy space. Ms. eventually started running more ads, including ads for traditionally feminine products, which meant cutting fiction and poetry. In that same essay, Steinem admitted that the magazine’s “edges got smoothed down—in spite of all our resistance.” It’s a tidy formulation, as so many of Steinem’s were, providing a perfect image of political compromise. One imagines a counterfactual Ms.—less successful but perhaps spikier—and wonders what writers it might have nurtured, and to which readers it might have appealed.

Steinem was smooth, not spiky; there is a reason she became the figurehead of women’s liberation and not, say, Kate Millett.

But Steinem was smooth, not spiky; there is a reason she became the figurehead of women’s liberation and not, say, Kate Millett. She wanted feminism to reach as many women as possible: not just the New Yorkers and the professed radicals, but, as she put it, the “wives with white gloves welded to their wrists” and the “students with boots who used words like ‘imperialism’ and ‘oppression.’” She wrote—and edited, and fundraised—for the white woman, the woman of color, the agricultural worker, the factory worker, the housewife. She knew what it was like to need print the way one needs water. She wanted her magazine to reach the women who needed it desperately, so they could learn that were others who felt just the same.

By the 1980s, the beginning of the “backlash” against feminism described by Susan Faludi in her book of the same name, Steinem didn’t see herself primarily as a writer. She had given herself over to other projects; she’d let political action triumph over art. “There have been days in the last ten or twelve years when I thought my collected works would consist entirely of fund-raising letters, scribbled outlines of speeches, statements hammered out at the birth of some new coalition, and introductions to other people’s books,” she writes in the introduction to Outrageous Acts. She imagined her legacy wouldn’t be a book or an essay but rather “the invention of something as brief and pithy as the phrase reproductive freedom.” It wasn’t until her friend and Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin went through boxes of old articles and put together a potential collection that Steinem took seriously the idea of writing a book. 

There was a part of Steinem that always wondered what she could have done as a writer, had she had world enough and time. “I didn’t take myself very seriously,” she reflects in the introduction to Outrageous Acts, recalling the frivolous stories she wrote as a young journalist. She didn’t fight hard enough for the stories she wanted; she let herself be distracted and make excuses. “I’m not regretful of the time I’ve devoted to those projects”—those many projects that took her away from writing—and one can’t help but think that she’s protesting too much.

In truth, neither Outrageous Acts nor any of her subsequent books amount to Steinem’s legacy—though they are certainly part of it. In this way, Steinem differs from her contemporaries—Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Millett among them—who are best known for their books theorizing sexism and feminist utopia. Steinem will be remembered for her actions: co-founding Ms., advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, mentoring younger feminists, and forming coalitions with feminists whose politics and interests might have differed from her own.

By her own account, she loved the work of organizing—as much as she loved writing, or perhaps more. “On a good night, a roomful of people can set off a chain of thought that leads us all to a new place—a sudden explosion of understanding, a spontaneous invention,” she writes in the introduction. “We hear ourselves saying things we had felt but never named.” It’s an ephemeral moment, a collective feeling. It’s an experience that can’t be captured in words.

Quick Take

• DC Comics and Amazon Prime have teamed up for a DC Villains 6-film limited-edition Steelbook that’s coming in October.
• The library case of the films include glow-in-the-dark depictions of villains like the Joker, Catwoman, and more.
• The films included range from Superman: The Movie to The Batman.
• Nerdist’s Take: This makes a cool addition to your collection or even a great gift for a friend.

We all know that a film or a franchise is only as great as its adversaries. Without the diabolical machinations of a villain, there’s literally nothing for a hero to do. That’s especially true in the world of comics and the nerdy films based on them. DC Studios and Amazon Prime know this, and that’s why we have this DC Villains 6-film limited-edition Steelbook coming soon. 

DC Studios/Amazon Prime

This Amazon exclusive collection features iconic adversaries like the Joker, Catwoman, Lex Luthor, and the Riddler, with films spanning several decades. It is a collector’s item for sure, from its library case to the goodness inside of it. Each film in the DC Villains 6-film limited-edition Steelbook has its own unique case couched inside of the library case, and they are all in crisp 4K.

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The following films are included in this collection: 

• Superman: The Movie (1979)
• Batman (1989)
• Batman Returns (1992)
• Aquaman (2018)
• The Suicide Squad (2021)
• The Batman (2022)

This is honestly a great list of films, especially the Batman trio. And thankfully fans won’t have to wait for it for long because it releases on October 27, and you can pre-order it right now. It retails for $139.99 and will make a great addition to your physical collection or even a holiday gift for a friend.

DC Studios/Amazon Prime Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villain apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post DC Villains 6-Film Limited-Edition Steelbook Has an Evil Glow appeared first on Nerdist.

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Inside Washington

President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting have grabbed news headlines in recent days, as the Postal Service builds an involved screening system that would require states to submit voter information before sending out absentee ballots. But one potential consequence has not received the same level of attention: the implications for Indigenous voters across the country. In addition to throwing up more roadblocks for a population that has historically faced significant obstacles to voting, these moves by the USPS could have an impact in key elections in states such as Alaska and Arizona. 

Tribal voters living at remote addresses on reservations may need to travel for hours to reach their nearest polling place, meaning that absentee voting is the best method for having their voices heard. “Often, vote by mail is the only option that is made available to Native communities. And so, when you disrupt that process or start creating lists that are imperfect and keep people off [of voting rolls], then Native voters are going to be inevitably cut out and disenfranchised,” said Jacqueline De León, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund. 

A federal whistleblower has alleged that the development and deployment of the USPS system has been rushed and haphazard, and could result in voter disenfranchisement ahead of the general election. Despite a court order barring the Postal Service from continuing to develop the portal, the agency said this week that it is moving forward with its plans.

Native voters already face difficulties in having their vote counted. Some states with photo ID requirements for voting do not accept tribal identification. Because many Native Americans living on tribal lands do not have traditional addresses, they may need to pay for a P.O. box if they want to receive any kind of mail—including absentee ballots. The new policy would present yet another barrier.

“I know tons of Native people who all have their mail delivered to one family member’s house because it’s the only house that USPS reliably can find. These are things that could easily trigger false red flags in a system that’s not carefully designed around the realities of Native voters,” Elizabeth Reese, an associate professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in tribal law, told The New Republic in an email.

The lack of traditional addresses also presents challenges to registering to vote and staying on voter rolls. A new report by the Native American Rights Fund, or NARF, and Blackwell Consulting found that rejections of voter registration applications via mail and the Department of Motor Vehicles spiked dramatically in counties where Native Americans account for at least 25 percent of the population between 2020 and 2024. The report analyzed data from the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections.

“Native voters do not receive equitable services, and often receive inadequate services, which result in Native voters having to navigate really unreasonable barriers in order to cast a ballot,” said De León. “I think that it would shock the conscience of the everyday American if they knew how difficult it can be to vote in Indian country.”

Native voters may be particularly susceptible to being purged from the rolls because notices sent by election officials to confirm voter information go unanswered, and that in turn could be because the mail is undeliverable.

When voters are removed from the rolls—sometimes without their knowledge—they can submit provisional ballots, but these can also end up being rejected. Provisional ballot voting more than doubled between 2020 and 2024 in counties with a significant Native population, according to the NARF report, but the provisional ballot rejection rate in counties with significant Native populations is higher than the national rate. The rate of rejection for mail-in ballots also increased in these counties between 2020 and 2024, even as the actual number of mail-in ballots cast declined.

These challenges may have significant repercussions for critical swing elections this year, which could determine control of Congress and of governors’ mansions across the country. Alaska has a large Native population, a significant portion of whom live in rural areas that may not reliably receive mail—a factor that could affect the outcome of the competitive Senate race between Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan. Reese said she was “particularly worried” about how the screening system being built by USPS could potentially affect that race.

“This is the state with the highest percentage of Native voters, the most significant challenges for in-person voter access, and that happens to be one of the races that could determine control of the Senate,” said Reese.

Native voters could also have an impact in the close gubernatorial race in Arizona, where Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs is fighting to stay in office. 

Native Americans have faced deliberate hurdles to make voting more difficult for them since they were granted the right to vote in 1924. This election is making both the stakes and the complexities of voting access especially clear. “Native voters hold a tremendous amount of political power,” De León said. But they also “have to expend more time and resources to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” In close contests, that vote may be a determining factor in which candidate wins the race.

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel finds that ICE arrests spiked dramatically in Wisconsin over the summer. “ICE detained and arrested more than 250 people in Wisconsin in June alone, an 82 percent increase compared to the previous month. Immigration arrests slowed but remained elevated in July,” reports Eva Wen. (For more on how ICE seems to have adapted post-Minneapolis, hitting new records without making as many headlines, read Melissa Gira Grant’s analysis from July.)

Colorado Public Radio profiles Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral who’s challenging Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 4th congressional district. “There are more than twice as many registered Republicans as there are Democrats in the district, although almost half of the registered voters are unaffiliated,” reports Caitlyn Kim. “The last time the district elected a Democrat was in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama was at the top of the ticket.” But despite that, some people are letting themselves feel just a wee bit optimistic about Dem chances of flipping the seat: Laubacher has far out-raised Boebert, and Trump is very unpopular.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Data for Progress finds that voters “strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of Israel-Palestine conflicts” and that this disapproval has grown over the course of the year: “In January, voters were roughly split in their assessment of Trump’s handling of the conflict, with 42 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving—a −2-point margin. Today, only 33 percent of voters approve of Trump’s handling of this issue, while 56 percent disapprove—a −23-point margin.”

At the Brennan Center, Derek Tisler, Edgardo Cortés, and Elizabeth Howard have put together a guide to how official election results are tallied. “Each of these steps has safeguards in place to protect the rights of voters and the integrity of our elections,” they emphasize. “They are conducted in public; representatives from both parties, citizens, and the media can observe that they are done properly. At each step, voters, candidates, and other interested parties can go to court to enforce these safeguards if needed.” They take readers through the steps of receiving and processing ballots, tabulating, election-night reporting of unofficial results, provisional ballots, curing, and more. A useful resource as the November elections (and concerns about the process) draw closer.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good week: Mary Peltola

The Democratic candidate for Senate in Alaska keeps getting encouraging signs in a very tough red-leaning state. The latest vote tally of the state’s nonpartisan primary now shows her and the other Democratic finisher totaling over 50 percent, a key metric. The news came as the other Democrat, David Leslie, withdrew this week, enabling Peltola to consolidate the Democratic vote. Indeed, one forecaster now rates Peltola “narrowly favored.” Though a lot can still go wrong, there’s now a pretty clear path.

Bad week: Scott Bessent

The treasury secretary has had a string of unsightly public pratfalls. This week, reporters grilled the Trump administration on Bessent’s July prediction that gas prices would drop to $3 per gallon by Labor Day, which hasn’t exactly panned out. Bessent also engaged in heavy-handed ridicule of Canada’s supposed weakness, which looks particularly tone-deaf amid mounting GOP angst about his and Trump’s dim-witted trade war with our northern ally. And Bessent endured harsh mockery over his sneering claim that Ukraine’s defense of itself against Russian aggression is to blame for high energy prices. In sum, Bessent is now the front man in defending some of Trump’s most buffoonish and destructive failures, and as he’s finding out the hard way, they’re, well, indefensible.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Name the union each of these labor leaders helped found or famously led for many years: Bill Haywood; John L. Lewis; A. Philip Randolph; Dolores Huerta; Walter Reuther; William Winpisinger. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

New details from Maria Bartiromo’s sudden firing from Fox News reveal internal upheaval that resulted in her being completely isolated at work, as her own staff was banned from speaking to her and her primary producer was fired alongside her. 

Puck News’s Dylan Byers reported that executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was fired from Bartiromo’s show on Thursday, following her out the door after she was sent packing for “betraying” Fox News by offering the Trump administration information on how the network was covering the president. 

On top of that, Fox News kept the Mornings with Maria host isolated from her colleagues for weeks, a move stemming from issues over the $787.5 million settlement Fox News was ordered to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 due to their false claims of election fraud in 2020.  

“In order to talk to her, you had to go to management,” an anonymous source told Mediate. “[That’s how we] knew something was up.… Even her own staff had to go through management.… People were freaking out.” The source also noted that Bartiromo wasn’t even reachable over the phone, being completely iced out from the Fox News work environment. 

It’s unclear where Bartiromo will find herself next. 

Donald Trump’s administration has made a game of the president’s deadly crackdown on immigrants.

The White House launched a new arcade website Thursday that hosts a series of retro-style video games touting the administration’s policy priorities—including one where players can detain undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

In “Rio Run,” players are directed to “pick up every crosser in the lot.” An avatar of a balding white man dressed in a suit and tie collects stationary bodies, and adds them to a growing line of orange-jumpsuited figures floating behind him. The snake-style game evokes the horrific images of chained immigrants boarding planes to foreign countries.

If you thought that was callous and dehumanizing, just wait: In a Tetris-style game called “Build the Wall,” players are directed to stack bricks in order to stave off a “border zombie siege.” It has never felt more clear that the Trump administration is made-up entirely of terminally online right-wing trolls desperate to appease deportation fanboys.

Other White House arcade games invite users to “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again,” or use a net to catch cash and gold to “fill your kids’ Trump accounts.”

A White House official told CNN the arcade was “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”

It’s hard to get much darker than turning a mass detention policy into some kind of game—a legal front on which the Trump administration is definitely not winning. A total of eight federal appeals courts have ruled that the policy is unlawful.

Quick Take

• Ahead of the play’s last production in Stratford-upon-Avon, George R.R. Martin has announced The Mad King is moving to London in 2027.
• Martin himself brought the news to fans via a social media video.
• Nerdist’s Take: We love this for people in London, but we want The Mad King play in the US.

This summer, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought Westeros to the stage with its new play The Mad King. The production tells the story of how and why Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark fell in love. It was a cataclysmic whirlwind relationship that led to Robert’s Rebellion and the end of the dragonlord dynasty. It also might have saved the world of the living, as Lyanna died giving birth to Rhaegar’s son, Jon Snow. The show has been a huge sell-out hit with audiences, and the final performances are happening in September in Stratford-upon-Avon. But don’t despair like Reek. It’s not the show’s final show. George R.R. Martin announced The Mad King is moving to London in 2027.

The A Song of Ice and Fire author took to social media (with an announcement we first saw at Deadline) to reveal The Mad King will return next year. Adapted by Duncan Macmillan from Martin’s work, the Royal Shakespeare Company is moving the original show to London in 2027. While no official information is available in regards to dates and the second run’s expected length, the RSC’s London home is the Barbican Theater.

While the stage might change, the story won’t. Here’s the official synopsis for this monumental moment in Westeros:

A long winter thaws in Harrenhal, and spring is promised. At a lavish banquet on the eve of a jousting tournament, lovers meet and revellers speculate about who will contend. But in the shadows, amid growing unease at the bloodthirsty actions of the realm’s merciless Mad King, dissenters from his inner circle anxiously advance a treasonous plot. Far away, the drums of battle sound.

Family bonds, ancient prophecies, and the sacred line of succession will be tested in a dangerous campaign for power. Who will survive? Who will rise?

The Royal Shakespeare Company

You can sign up at The Mad King‘s official site to get updates from the RSC. Hopefully that will eventually include learning when the play will cross the not so-narrow-Atlantic Ocean. We’re excited for the people of London, but we’d like to see Westeros come to a stage closer to us soon.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @‌burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post GAME OF THRONES Play THE MAD KING Moving to London in 2027 appeared first on Nerdist.

On this cusp of Labor Day, when election campaigns kick into fourth gear, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have to say it: The voters are going to barber-strap Donald Trump in the November midterms.

I’ve been wrong before, of course. On the other hand, I’ve also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody—I mean everybody—was saying that Bill Clinton’s Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year’s midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police—Gingrich’s mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican—than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbo-charged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, okay, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel okay about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

Well, that defense against reality has been crushed like a grape under a tire. Trump has failed on the economy. He’s gone way too far for these people on immigration (Joe Rogan this year compared ICE to the Gestapo). And finally, the Iran war destroyed it. Trump and the Republicans are losing the “manosphere,” a process Sidney Blumenthal described with coruscating precision on this site a couple weeks ago. But they’re losing many other segments of MAGA-land as well that simply can’t believe he started a war; let alone an obviously stupid war that we’re losing; let alone at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, as the Israeli prime minister just bragged on Israeli TV.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And their absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught.

Well, you say. That may all be true. But a clever politician can reframe things. We’re on the cusp of Labor Day—the traditional start of general-election campaigns in the regular-people-start-to-pay-attention sense. On the assumption that most people haven’t been paying attention so far, doesn’t Trump have time to redirect the narrative?

The answer is that he does, maybe, have the time. He certainly has the money, though he may be hoarding it for his own selfish purposes well beyond this year. But he doesn’t have the brains. And he doesn’t have the brains because his brain marinates in a fantasy world in which Trump can do no wrong. His reality-denying cocoon has sometimes been beneficial to him. Last year, for example, when he was riding (comparatively) high, when law firms and elite universities quaked before him, he was able to create a willed reality. But today?

The cultural power that he possessed in the spring and summer of 2025 has completely vaporized. He sits up there and says we’ve won the war, we control the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation’s no big deal. Affordability isn’t a thing. Data centers are great, and if you’re against them, you want to stay “backwards and poor.” The United States is the “hottest” country on earth. As the American people cry out for help, he’s obsessed with building monuments to himself.

With the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine he’s got behind him, there are, of course, still millions of Americans who believe him. But to return to my three groups: The first group of course doesn’t believe a word; the median representative of the second group has lost all faith in him; and the BMPs have turned on him.

And ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

So: By November 3, there’s every chance that Trump will be more unpopular than he is today. His mental deterioration in just these last few weeks is noticeable, and in two more months, he may literally be drooling. Even dear old Rasmussen may have him down in the 30s by then.

The result? Again—I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ll just say it like this: I heard someone the other day on TV say that we may need to start paying more attention to Senate races in states like Kansas, where Democratic preacher Adam Hamilton is in a near dead heat with GOP incumbent Roger Marshall. In Nebraska, a recent poll has independent Dan Osborn running even with GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts. One recent Arkansas poll was close. In Florida, everybody laughs off the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. But she pulled off a stunning upset in the Democratic primary, and she did it without running a single television ad. And the appointed Republican incumbent is knee-deep in that Medicaid scandal involving the governor’s wife.

I’m not predicting Democratic wins in the last two states. I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Quick Take

• The world of popular video game God of War is coming to Prime Video. Here’s everything we know about it so far.
• The production had a major shakeup with Ryan Hurst, the show’s original star, was seriously injured, forcing a recast of Kratos.
• Dave Bautista is now in the role and, as of September 2026, training for it.

Live-action video game adaptations are all the rage right now. From the bizarre and hilarious world of Twisted Metal to the heart wrenching bleakness of The Last of Us, streamers are finding success with these gaming driven series. It makes sense considering there’s already a built-in fanbase. Next up is Prime Video with God of War, which already has a two season order. Who will be in this series? What will it be about? Those are questions that we will get answers to in the coming months.

One thing we do know for now is that Dave Bautista is getting himself physically ready for this challenging role. He took to Instagram to show his followers his progress so far, saying that he still has a couple of more months of training. Idk, he looks like he’s in good form to us already.

Here’s everything we know about Prime Video’s God of War TV series so far. 

Title

For now, the title appears to be God of War. 

God of War’s Plot 

This series will adapt the story of Kratos starting with the 2018 God of War game. Here’s the official logline for God of War to deliver a bit more clarity: 

God of War follows father and son Kratos and Atreus as they embark on a journey to spread the ashes of their wife and mother, Faye. Through their adventures, Kratos tries to teach his son to be a better god, while Atreus tries to teach his father how to be a better human.

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Frederick E.O. Toye will direct the first two episodes of God of War, which is currently in preproduction as of December 2025. When the show was greenlit back in 2022, Rafe Judkins was on board as a showrunner. That’s no longer the case. Ronald D. Moore will be in charge of this series now. 

God of War’s Cast  Dave Bautista/Instagram/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Ryan Hurst was originally slated to portray Kratos in the God of War live-action series. Many know him as Opie from Sons of Anarchy as well as Beta from The Walking Dead. However, due to an injury, Dave Bautista has been recast as Kratos.

Tonje Thilesen/The New Yorker/PlayStation

Mandy Patinkin will be the powerful and mighty Odin in God of War. Check out his character description:

Odin, the All-Father, is not physically imposing or particularly god-like: but looks can be deceiving. He is the most powerful Aesir god, a patriarch who leads with an iron fist, and an unrivaled seeker of knowledge. When it comes to seeking out prophecy, Odin is paranoid, manipulative, and dangerous— he will do anything to try and prevent Ragnarök, the Norse end of days. He serves as a formidable antagonist to Kratos.

Apple TV/PlayStation

Severance‘s Ólafur Darri Ólafsson will portray Thor in the God of War series. We cannot wait to see him in costume. Here’s a description of his character: “The God of Thunder is a mountain of a man who has weathered many a battle in his time but whose actions in a war fought long ago now haunt his waking hours.  Once the loyal soldier of Asgard and his father’s right hand man, Thor is now but a shadow of his former self as he drowns himself in alcohol and tries not to think of the price he paid.  Keeping his wife and children at arm’s length has only deepened his isolation, but the power (and danger) of the God of Thunder is still there just beneath the surface.”

David Reiss/PlayStation

Boots‘ Max Parker has come aboard the God of War series as villain, Heimdall. Prime Video describes Parker’s God of War character as, “The Watchman of Asgard, and one of the sons of Odin, Heimdall is a god in his own right with the special ability to anticipate what’s about to happen at any moment. Handsome and dynamic, he feels unappreciated by his father and underestimated by the rest of the family, and as a result, Heimdall is constantly looking for ways to improve his position in the hierarchy and increase his stature and power.”

Meg Vinson/PlayStation

Callum Vinson will play Kratos’ son Atreus in season one of God of War. Here’s the character description for him: “Atreus, the ten-year old son of Kratos, grew up in a remote forest cabin, isolated from the rest of the world and raised almost entirely by his mother Faye.  He is an accomplished archer, has an affinity for animals and is intensely curious about what lies beyond the confines of his forest home.  After his mother’s death, Atreus is left with a cold, distant father who he barely knows and who knows little about him in return.  Nonetheless, Atreus yearns for his father’s approval and is desperate to prove he is strong enough to survive in a harsh and dangerous world.” However, reports indicate that Atreus may be recast with someone older in season two of the God of War series.

Bob Wolfenson/PlayStation

Ed Skrein will play Baldur, and here’s his character description: Baldur may be the youngest son of Odin, but he’s his father’s most dangerous weapon. Charismatic, unpredictable and armed with a razor-sharp tongue, Baldur lives by his own rules. As a boy, Baldur was cursed; this curse denied him the ability to feel pleasure and physical sensation. This fuels an insatiable anger and bloodlust in Baldur, who favors a brawling fighting style that blends his immense power with the raw impact of his fists. Above all else, he longs for an opponent that can truly match his prowess in battle. An opponent that can finally make him feel something.

Patch Studio/PlayStation

Louis Cunningham will play Modi in God of War. The character description says: Sif and Thor’s middle child, Modi has a gentle disposition and an obsessive, almost insatiably curious mind. He loves puzzles and complex problems—to such an extent that he often gets lost within them and forgets everything else around him.

Marnya Rothe Photography/PlayStation

Ben Chapple will have a recurring role as Magni, and his character is “Sif and Thor’s eldest son. Handsome and adventurous, Magni is an excellent hunter and natural ladies’ man, but the life of an immortal playboy has begun to feel hollow and Magni is yearning for a greater purpose. He is extremely protective of his younger brother, Modi.”

YellowBelly/PlayStation

Evelyn Miller will recur as Gna, Odin’s Valkyrie commander. Here’s her character description: A fierce warrior, she is devoted to her duty with a loyalty to Odin that borders on fanatical. Highly disciplined and uncompromising, she is dedicated to serving the realm, occasionally at the expense of her own wellbeing.

Deidhra Fahey/PlayStation

Island Austin will play Thrud, the youngest child of Sif and Thor. She is “precocious, inquisitive, curious, and fearless, with a natural yearning for knowledge. She’s gentle and kind, and often acts as a peace-maker with the rest of her troubled family. Her grandfather, Odin, sees seeds of greatness in Thrud (mostly because she reminds him of himself) and the two have a special bond.”

Finally, Alastair Duncan, Jeff Gulka, and Danny Woodburn also join the cast of God of War.

Prime shares:

Alastair Duncan has signed on to play Mimir in Prime Video’s God of War from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios. Alastair also played Mimir in the video games God of War and God of War Ragnarök.

Mimir Character Description: Mimir is a cheery fellow from Celtic lands with an expansive intellect, a quick wit and a good head on his shoulders. Never at a loss for words, Mimir is the self-described “Smartest Man in the World”. He served as an advisor to Odin the All-Father, who ultimately banished Mimir to confinement in the trunk of a tree, forever cut off from the people he loves and anything that could nourish his mind. In the wake of his banishment, Mimir seeks atonement for the terrible deeds he committed in the All-Father’s name.

Jeff Gulka has signed on to play Sindri in Prime Video’s God of War from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios.
 
Sindri Character Description: Sindri is a renowned dwarven blacksmith whose incredible weaponry is sought after across the realms. Neurotic, helpful, and extremely germaphobic, Sindri is the complete opposite of his cranky, foul-mouthed brother and business partner, Brok.

Danny Woodburn has signed on to play Brok in Prime Video’s God of War from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios.
 
Brok Character Description: Brok is a legendary dwarven blacksmith who was alienated from his community when he helped build a super-weapon. He is brash, irreverent, and gruff – the complete opposite of his uptight brother and fellow blacksmith, Sindri, with whom he has a contentious relationship. Gamers will know Brok as the beloved weapons dealer with an unrivaled artistry for creative, foul-mouthed curses.

God of War’s Release Date

As of August 2026, this series does not have a release date. 

Originally published on December 24, 2025.

Nerdist writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post Everything We Know About Prime Video’s GOD OF WAR TV Series appeared first on Nerdist.

Embattled Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman blew off meetings with disabled veterans, the families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and countless constituents in his past two years in Congress—once again displaying his indifference and apathy to any cause that isn’t shamelessly lobbying for Israel.

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal showed that Fetterman couldn’t care less about the bare minimum presence and effort his Senate job requires, or the Pennsylvanians he’s supposed to be fighting for.

Text messages obtained by the Journal show Fetterman asking an aide why he had to meet with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) of all places in September.

“Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop,” he asked.

“Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide said. President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid have negatively impacted children’s hospitals across the country.

“Well I’m not,” Fetterman responded. “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

Another exchange shows Fetterman calling a funeral for three slain police officers that same month a “nonstarter” because it was three hours long—a sensible length of time given it was three officers at once. And even if it wasn’t, any U.S. senator should be able to spend a few hours at a cop’s funeral.

The report also notes that Fetterman canceled a scheduled meeting with three paralyzed military veterans in June, telling them he had eaten something that upset his stomach. He arrived at his office an hour later, perfectly healthy, and got on Fox News to talk about how great Trump’s war on Iran was going.

And aside from these more recent developments, he is still skipping votes, still ghosting constituents, still sitting out of committee meetings, and still choosing to side with Republicans and the larger conservative landscape—all things that have become common for him, particularly after his 2023 stay in Walter Reed for clinical depression.

Fetterman has free health care, good pay and pension, and a job that is really not that hard in the grand scheme of things. And yet he can’t be bothered to cast votes, attend funerals, or look paralyzed veterans in the eyes.

President Donald Trump admitted that he’s just building monuments to himself.

In a sprawling dispatch Friday, New York Magazine’s Ben Terris asked Trump what he made of a viral barb from Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who suggested in June that the president had become obsessed with building monuments to himself because “no one will honor him when he’s gone.”

“That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Monuments are typically something that great leaders earn by being, well, great. Trump’s comment suggests that the president is well-aware that he’s going to walk away from his two terms with few great deeds worth remembering. It also indicates that Trump has no idea there are things you have to earn, not just buy.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that construction would begin on a “Great Triumphal Arch” in a traffic roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Trump has been raving about the project, nicknamed online as the “Arc de Trump,” for almost a year. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative-majority ensured it was virtually impossible to challenge the illegal construction of a $600 million White House ballroom.

Trump has skipped work to oversee at least a dozen renovation projects around Washington, D.C.

The president gilded the Oval Office in the gaudy golden style of Mar-a-Lago, demolished the East Wing, paved over the Rose Garden, renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway with white granite, directed statues to receive a gold leaf makeover, built and rebuilt a helipad, re-lined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and then had to scrape that off to re-line it again. And who can forget that he launched a months-long legal campaign to tack his name onto another man’s memorial.

Previously, a prominent clinical psychologist signaled that the president’s tireless obsession with renovations could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

On September 17, prosecutors from the Justice Department are scheduled to appear in a federal courtroom in Pasadena, California, for a rather odd event. They will argue that a mysterious former FBI informant with connections to Russian intelligence—who was convicted of lying to the bureau to spread the false accusation that Joe Biden and his son Hunter each received a $5 million bribe from Ukraine—should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and get a new trial.

That allegation about the Bidens was embraced and weaponized by Donald Trump, right-wing media, and House Republicans, who in 2023 and 2024 cited it as smoking-gun evidence for Biden’s impeachment—until the informant, Alexander Smirnov, a Ukrainian-born Israeli national and businessman who acknowledged he had ties to Russian intelligence, was indicted for lying to the FBI. He pleaded guilty and was subsequently sentenced to six years in prison. (The punishment also covered failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in income that was not fully explained.)

The Trump Justice Department’s effort to assist Smirnov, a longtime confidential source for the bureau, has been puzzling. In March, I broke the news that the DOJ was helping him get out of prison by supporting his appeal, in which Smirnov is trying to throw out his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea.

Smirnov’s false report to the FBI fueled the GOP’s absurd effort to impeach Biden and provided ammo for the ludicrous MAGA mantra that Biden was the head of a crime family.

The appeal hinges on a technical point: Smirnov, who is represented by an attorney with multiple connections to the Trump administration, claims the federal judge who presided over his trial did not stick to a provision of his plea deal regarding a reduction in his sentence to match his pretrial detention. The judge denies this. What’s highly unusual is that Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, intervened in this case on the side of this Russia-connected fabricator whose lies, according to the federal prosecutors in his case, were concocted to impact the 2020 and 2024 elections—that is, to hurt Biden.

Which they did. Smirnov’s false report to the FBI fueled the GOP’s absurd effort to impeach Biden and provided ammo for the ludicrous MAGA mantra that Biden was the head of a crime family. When Smirnov was indicted in early 2024, that impeachment campaign fizzled. The whole Smirnov episode looked like a Russian covert action waged to hurt the Democrats and aid Trump. (For more background on the Smirnov saga, see this previous Our Land issue.)

It was not shocking that Moscow would try to insert a phony allegation of Biden bribery into the American political discourse, given that Vladimir Putin had mounted various clandestine operations to help Trump in 2016 and 2020. But most surprising was that there was no public investigation of the Smirnov caper after it turned out this Russian-linked informant had peddled lies to the FBI. Was this truly another Russian assault on American politics? What was the extent of Smirnov’s ties to Russian intelligence? What were his connections to other intelligence services? (Prosecutors feared he might flee to Israel.) Why did his lies to the FBI go undetected for so long? How could he fool his bureau handlers for years?

In my forthcoming book How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, which will be published on September 15, I examined these important and unanswered questions about Smirnov. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Though Smirnov’s criminal case would be resolved, left unanswered was a crucial question: Why did he do this? Smirnov tried not once but twice to insert into the FBI disinformation that could possibly influence a US election: first, in 2020, with his claim he had been told about a $10 million Biden bribery scheme, and then in 2023, with an allegation that Hunter Biden had been secretly recorded by the Russians. The FBI didn’t bite either time. But Smirnov managed to provide the Republicans with a fabricated charge they weaponized and used for nine months to threaten impeachment and sully Biden’s image.

Had the Russians put him up to this? His false stories aligned with the Biden-­Ukraine corruption narrative pushed by Russian intelligence. Yet there were no investigations of this episode. No inspector general reports on how the FBI had handled him. No congressional inquiry. “It was a matter of great curiosity where Smirnov had come from and who he was reporting to,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, later said.

Within the Biden White House, officials were frustrated that no deeper digging into the Smirnov case occurred. “It was maddening,” recalled Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser. “Because it was an FBI investigation, we were walled off from it. Biden was absolutely convinced it was a Russian operation.” But neither the president nor the American public ever got the full story.

The White House decided not to raise a fuss about a possible Russian active measure undergirding the GOP’s crusade against Biden. His political advisers insisted that it was best not to talk about the Republicans’ impeachment drive. American voters were not taking it seriously. There was no need to direct more attention to this stunt. “The intelligence people were uncomfortable being drawn into this,” Sullivan recounted. “The political people were uncomfortable. It was hard to dial it up to ten.”

Biden had repeatedly told his aides he believed much of the right-wing attack on him over Ukraine had come straight from Moscow. But the administration never pressed the Ukrainian government for the intelligence it had on the efforts to malign Biden. “You could have gone to Ukraine’s leadership and intelligence and asked for all the files,” Sullivan said. “Who were the Russians involved? Who put [Russian agent Andriy] Derkach up to it? But no one wanted to touch any of this with a ten-­foot pole.” [Derkach was a Ukrainian legislator who claimed to possess evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine. He produced no such proof, but he worked with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden.]

Such a move could backfire politically if it became public. After all the controversy over Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, the last thing the intelligence agencies wanted was to become mired in another to-­do over Russia and Ukraine.

Smirnov’s lies were uncovered. The Republicans were shown to be reckless and irresponsible. Still, this operation, with all the markings of a Russian covert action, had achieved a measure of success. For months, Republicans had waved that FD-1023 [the FBI document that contained Smirnov’s phony allegations] and referred to the “Biden bribery scheme” and the “Biden crime family.”

Conservative media spread this message to millions of viewers and readers. Impeachment was off the table now. But all the noise about the FD-1023 buttressed the impression that Trump had pushed in 2020 and was reviving for the 2024 campaign: Biden was crooked. Smirnov’s lie—­a Russian operation?—­had been of great value to Trump and the GOP.

With its current shenanigans in the Smirnov case, Trump’s Justice Department is helping Smirnov erase his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea. Typically, that would lead to a new trial. But in this instance, if Smirnov wins his appeal, the DOJ might drop the matter and not pursue another trial. Its prosecutors have already suggested in court that the Justice Department is reviewing his case.

Should that occur, the Trump administration would allow a possible Russian agent to escape punishment for conning the FBI and attempting to interfere in two US elections. Moreover, such a move would allow Trump acolytes to cite the phony Biden allegations without having to acknowledge they originated with a convicted liar. Is that the goal of Trump’s DOJ—to buttress what might have been a secret Russian operation to tarnish Biden?

You can find a full accounting of the bizarre Smirnov case in my soon-to-be-published How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. Readers of Our Land can still take advantage of a special pre-order offer to purchase a signed edition of the book. Just click here. As regular readers of this newsletter know—because I’ve been such a pest about it—pre-orders are essential to the success of How Russia Won. (I explained that here.) So if you have any inclination to buy this book, please do so now. Many thanks.

Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo was fired for leaking information about her employer to the White House, Status reported Thursday.

Bartiromo’s sudden termination stemmed from President Donald Trump’s incendiary prime-time speech in July baselessly accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections. Fox News reportedly issued guidance to senior staff to avoid validating Trump’s wildly inaccurate claims on-air, resulting in a noticeable lack of coverage of the speech.

It’s not clear whether someone at the White House asked Bartiromo directly about the coverage, or if she offered the information freely. But Bartiromo told the White House all about Fox News’s guidance, disclosing confidential company information and violating the terms of her employment in the process.

Bartiromo’s departure was announced in an unusually short statement from Fox News Thursday. The next day, she wasn’t even mentioned on Mornings with Fox News, previously Mornings with Maria.

This incident indicates a stunning level of cooperation between the Trump administration and the sycophants working at Fox News. There was early speculation that Bartiromo left her position at Fox News for a role in the Trump administration, which prompts the question: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on September 4

• South Highway 1 at Route 129 in Watsonville and Pajaro is facing closures for grinding and paving work. The closure will last until 5:59 a.m. on Sept. 9.
   
• Alternating lanes are closed on SR-129 at Highway 1 in Watsonville and Pajaro because of roadwork. The closures will continue until 5:59 a.m. on Sept. 9.
   
• There is one-way traffic on SR-129 at Union Street in Watsonville and Pajaro because of roadwork. This closure will last until 5:59 a.m. on Sept. 9.
   
• Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley has alternating lane closures because of bridge work. This will continue until April 30.
   
• A lane on SR-129 at Riverside Dr in Watsonville / Pajaro is closed because of electrical work. The closure is expected to end at 12:01 p.m. today.
   
• There is one-way traffic on SR-236 at Boulder Brook Drive in San Lorenzo Valley because of utility work. This closure will last until 2:01 p.m. on Sept. 8.
   
• A lane on Highway 9 at Watermans Gap Junction in San Lorenzo Valley is closed for tree work. The closure is expected to end at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 8.
   
• A traffic hazard was reported at Laguna Rd and Highway 1 in the Bonny Doon/Davenport area at 5:48 a.m. today. Items were scattered around a vehicle, and it looked like someone might be living in the vehicle. The hazard was on a one-way road.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Friday morning traffic: Highway 1/SR-129 closures in Watsonville/Pajaro for roadwork until September. 9 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

President Donald Trump crashed out on Thursday night after the Missouri Supreme Court struck down Republican redistricting efforts ahead of midterm elections—changing the House map after the primary and before November in an unprecedented move. 

“The Missouri Supreme Court just ridiculously ruled in favor of changing the maps back to what they were a long time ago. It’s called, Ancient History! The problem is, according to Legal Scholars, that not only was the ruling horrible, ridiculous, and unConstitutional, but there won’t be enough time to change the map back with the Election coming up in a very short period of time,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “The Election Process, as usual, is being disturbed in America! Missouri must be able to use the map that was in effect just a couple of months ago, in the Primary. This is a Dark Day for ‘Justice’ in Missouri!” 

The court’s unanimous ruling put a massive damper on the Republican race to redistrict, particularly in the bluer Kansas City region. 

“This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis,” Republican state Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said. Others rejoiced, praising Missouri for not capitulating to the gerrymandering arms race that Trump started last year in a brazen attempt to win as many House seats as possible. 

“Today’s ruling affirms what we’ve been saying all along: voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around,” Missouri Representative Wesley Bell wrote on X. “Now, Missourians will finally get to have their say at the ballot in November on rejecting these partisan and unconstitutional maps. I’m proud of all of the folks who organized, called and lobbied their elected officials, and made their voices heard.  In a democracy, we’re supposed to trust the people to self-govern. Jeff City Republicans might want to take their cue from the people they allege to represent.”

Richard von Glahn, the executive director of the organization People Not Politicians Missouri, also lauded the ruling. “In a year when map-drawing has become a national weapon, courts across the country are watching what happens here,” he said in a statement. “A Missouri win for the referendum is a signal that the people still hold the power.”

Hanaway promised to appeal the ruling. 

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s leading weather organization is sounding the alarm about this year’s super El Niño, issuing its most certain forecast in the history of the organization.

In an update issued early Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization predicted a “nearly 100% likelihood” that the El Niño will last through February. The strong language from the WMO—the UN’s weather and climate agency—underlies just how historic this El Niño is shaping up to be.

“This is the first time that a WMO El Niño/La Niña Update has been so unequivocal,” the agency says, noting that certainty reflects “the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network.”

“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events…that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing.”

El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon defined by warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, a pattern that disrupts weather patterns around the world. Scientists have been warning since the start of the year that a particularly strong El Niño was set to develop. The latest forecasts indicate it will be the strongest on record by a wide margin, and impacts are already being felt throughout the world—and they’re likely to intensify in the coming months.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.”

In addition to affecting regional weather, El Niño also tends to bump up the global average temperature by roughly 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.2 to 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by releasing heat into the atmosphere. But this year’s iteration could provide an even bigger boost. The intensity of this El Niño means this year is likely to be the hottest on record; because it takes a while for the added heat to work through the climate system, 2027 is forecast to be even hotter.

This extra warming is a red alert when compounded on top of the warming caused by manmade climate change. The UN warned in a separate report this week that the world will likely cross 1.5 degrees C of warming over the next few years.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources research network, says this El Niño will be so big, “with consequences that are so large, I’m not sure we fully understand them.”

The intensity of the El Niño, Swain says, means that it may cause unexpected and extreme weather, and he cautions against making certain predictions about what, exactly, is going to happen over the next year. But the impacts, he says, will almost certainly be massive.

“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events—aside from long-term warming, which really isn’t a singular event—that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing,” he says. “That’s a very big deal. And I think there’s certainly going to be dramatic outcomes from this.”

While the El Niño won’t reach its full strength for another few months, the world has already seen some impacts: The US just lived through the hottest summer on record, and the heat was almost certainly juiced up by El Niño. Regions that are typically dry during El Niño have also seen drought emerge. In Sudan, low water levels in the Nile are exacerbating a yearslong hunger crisis, while Puerto Rico has turned to water rationing due to dry conditions and infrastructure failures. Fisheries in the eastern Pacific have also been thrown into disarray by the hotter-than-normal waters there.

“The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said in the release. “We must win that race.”

The other day I asked ChatGPT about a political moment I’ll never forget: “What was the 47 percent story about?” Its answer:

The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In a private fundraising event that was secretly recorded and later leaked to the media, Romney stated that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government support, believe they are victims entitled to benefits, and consequently, would vote for then-President Barack Obama.

That’s accurate as far as it goes. But there’s one glaring omission: any reference to Mother Jones, which uncovered the story that reshaped that election cycle. The summary contained no links or citations to our reporting. You’d have thought it all sprang fully formed from the AI’s, uh, head.

I asked some follow-up questions and ChatGPT spit out lots more details about the story, including lengthy quotes from the video. The whole thing took maybe 20 seconds.

By contrast, it took David Corn, our Washington bureau chief, months to get the scoop. Digging into the candidate’s background in the hedge-fund world, David tracked speeches in which Romney had bragged about investments that exported American jobs overseas. Eventually, that led him to the secret video, at which point David and a team in our newsroom spent weeks verifying the content, reporting out additional context, and working out ways to present it to the public while protecting his sources.

Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers, not all newsrooms are sitting back and letting AI steal our content. Some of us are fighting back.

OpenAI, of course, didn’t do any reporting to create its summary. They simply hoovered up the text of the story to help train ChatGPT to talk like a human. We know this because in its early versions, OpenAI listed the sources of its data (something it has since clammed up about), and in those datasets, we found tens of thousands of our stories.  

OpenAI never asked for permission to use our work, nor did they offer to pay a licensing fee. Not then, when they were building their business, and not now when they are getting ready for an initial public offering that may end up around $1 trillion. Nor, so far as we know, did OpenAI ask for permission or a license from the countless other publishers, writers, creators, or internet posters (including, perhaps, you) whose intellectual property they ingested.

It’s not that one of the most valuable companies in the world can’t afford to pay. They have money for offices, electricity, free lunches, stratospheric pay packages, data centers, and many other things. Why not for content?

OpenAI claims they can use the content for free, under a legal concept called fair use, because they are transforming it into something new, like a musician who samples a track to create a fresh composition. But unlike an artist honoring a predecessor, OpenAI “transformed” the information in such a way that no one would ever know where it came from, by stripping copyright and author information as they processed it. That’s like stealing your car and then grinding off the VIN number (only with millions or billions of cars).

Maybe OpenAI thought that publishers, especially nonprofit ones like us, would not be able to put up a fight. Our budget, after all, is something like one-half of one percent of Sam Altman’s net worth, and their legal team—let’s just say you can’t toss a golf ball in San Francisco or Washington without hitting one of them.

And OpenAI has Donald Trump on its side too: This week, the administration went to the trouble of filing a brief in the lawsuit, an unusual step for the government to take at such an early stage in the process. The brief supports OpenAI, saying it’s a vital national interest for AI companies not to have to pay for content (with a dig about how that would just be a subsidy for “old mainstream media companies” anyway). Given Trump’s history with paying people, that tracks.

But OpenAI—and Trump—are wrong. Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers (despite Trump ordering them to “let data reign”), some publishers are fighting back, and we are one of them. For the last two years we’ve been involved in a lawsuit asking OpenAI to respect our copyright, and September 4 marks a crucial deadline, when both sides are asking the court to decide the case ahead of going to trial. So it seems a good time to unpack what’s going on, because this is about a lot more than journalism.

As a society, we’re starting to grapple with the fact that tech moguls are building things they don’t understand and can’t control. Much as when humans first split the atom, we are dealing with technology that can be both immensely useful and extremely dangerous, and right now it doesn’t seem as if our leaders, from corporate CEOs to politicians, are willing to grapple with those risks. As Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel write in The Atlantic, “it can feel like no individual person, organization, or government is really steering the technology’s development, not because machines have displaced humans but because so many humans have already chosen to step aside.” (Emphasis mine).

One reason it’s so frustrating to watch this happen is that while the tech is new, the playbook is incredibly familiar. From Uber and Airbnb steamrolling communities when they rolled out their products, to Flock putting all of us under surveillance, we’ve seen this movie before: Tech company does what it wants, takes what it needs, and asks permission later. Or never, because “move fast and break things.”

So too with journalism. Back when Facebook and Google were trying to pull in users by offering news, they’d occasionally hand out checks to publishers—paying them to pivot to video, appear in a promoted “news tab,” or be part of a fact-checking program. Inevitably, they would hand-pick big, commercial publishers to partner with, further centralizing the information ecosystem. (In the end, of course, the joke was on the publishers when the tech giants pulled back on news and threw open the doors to disinformation.)

We’ve faced down dark-money billionaires and shadowy charities, the Reagan administration’s IRS and Trump’s Pentagon. So we’re fighting this giant, too.

And now the AI companies are playing that same game. OpenAI has picked select media companies to cut deals with, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vox Media, the German publishing giant Axel Springer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and others. The official take is that these deals will, in the words of Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, give journalism “a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms.” But beneath the cheer lies panic.

We’re headed to a world—we’re probably already there—where most people get their news from a chatbot. Sure, some folks may continue reading articles on websites, just like we still occasionally catch a movie in a theater. But that will not be how audiences connect with news most of the time, which means that a lot of the revenue that pays for journalism today—advertising, subscriptions, donations—will go away.

With a giant robot poised to strangle the industry, pleading for a handout may be an appealing short-term strategy. But it’s never been our thing here at Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ve faced down dark-money billionaires and shadowy charities, the Reagan administration’s IRS and the Trump Pentagon’s lackeys. So we’re fighting this giant, too.

It’s not easy. Our team has spent countless hours digging up information for this case, putting motions together, giving depositions. But it’s worth it, because this is the big one—for us, and for you.

AI models do not fact-check, verify, or investigate. They don’t pore over documents, file Freedom of Information Act requests, or sit with someone for hours until they’re ready to tell their story. They don’t go to sleep at night thinking about how to bring a story to light for the first time.

There have been a lot of crises for journalism in the last 40 years, and we’ve lost much: Tens of thousands of jobs are gone, two-thirds of all the newspapers in the country have shuttered. But if AI companies break the connection between journalists and the people we serve—if a chatbot gives you information, and you aren’t told who worked to dig it up—that’s really game over.

The AI companies have a lot of money and time. Newsrooms don’t. But we are battling for our lives, and for the truth that you need to know. This is all of our fight.

Actually, it’s OK to play with your food. 

Four chefs in Santa Cruz County prove that point with inventive dishes that stand out, even among their own menus. Restrained and refined technique has its place, but it ain’t here. In August, I’m celebrating creations that shout with gastronomic gusto, pose for social media-worthy photos and stamp their experience on diners’ brains long after the meal ends.

It’s been slow coming, but news coverage of climate change may at last be turning a corner. For years, reporting on climate-related disasters—the superstorm Hurricane Helene that blasted the Southeastern U.S. in 2024, the mega-fires that torched Los Angeles in 2025, the record heat that has scorched Europe and Asia in 2026—rarely mentioned the words “climate change,” despite overwhelming scientific evidence linking such extreme events to human-caused global heating. This week, however, even formerly reticent news outlets are making the climate connection clear in their coverage of the deadly flooding in Nepal, where more than 1,100 are confirmed dead and an additional 4,000 are missing.

More such disasters are sure to follow. Even with unprecedented emissions reductions, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.24 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the U.N. Environment Programme announced yesterday. As rising temperatures melt more glacial ice, “we can expect more and more of these events, a greater frequency, a greater magnitude,” Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said at a Covering Climate Now live conversation on the Nepal floods.

Meanwhile, The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets whose reporting has long reflected established climate science suddenly are no longer outliers. The shift is particularly striking among U.S. television networks, whose climate coverage had declined by 35 percent during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.

NBC News did not mince words in an August 28 report, with graphics that spelled out the climate connection: “Past 60 Years Glacial Loss increased 4X, Glaciers Less Stable Worldwide From Melting.” Even CBS News has noted, more than once, the climate connection to the Nepal disaster. This despite a president, Bari Weiss, who has fired the entire CBS News climate unit, derided climate change in newsroom meetings as “woke,” and intervened to push the network’s reporting to the right on a range of topics, above all Israel. Referring to the “glacial burst” that triggered the gargantuan flood that swept away buildings, roads, and bridges, the CBS Evening News stated on August 26, “Experts believe this is linked to climate change.” On August 31, CBS’s morning news show interviewed scientist Daniel Swain while graphics told viewers, “Climate Change Impacting Extreme Weather Events, Shifting Global Sea Levels, Ecosystems, and Human Health.”

The Nepal coverage has demonstrated the importance of public officials speaking plainly, thus giving journalists a peg to make the climate connection to extreme events. Each of the Big Three U.S. networks, as well as CNN, the BBC, and other international news organizations, headlined the statement by Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Kahnal blaming the flooding on global warming. Days later, Kahnal said that Nepal is demanding compensation from the world’s biggest emitters.

Such high-profile coverage predictably irritated the tiny but noisy band of bots and cherry-picking blowhards who still deny climate change. The opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, which has disparaged climate science since the 1990s, published an article on August 28 that studiously avoided engaging with the actual scientific expertise other outlets had cited. Instead, it accused “the Western media” of rushing to judgment by embracing its “all-purpose explanation for everything: climate change.”

The Journal’s accusation was hardly more persuasive than that of an online conspiracy theorist who tried to blame the Nepal floods on a research project in Alaska. The fact-checking unit of Agence France-Presse, which delivers news to thousands of news outlets and government offices worldwide, quickly slapped down that absurdity: “AFP has repeatedly debunked claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is to blame for extreme weather events, and scientists say manipulation cannot cause floods of this magnitude—instead pointing to human-caused global warming.”

Why the Nepal disaster has called forth more plainspoken climate coverage than usual is, at this point, unclear. The availability of stunning video showing the awesome size, speed, and force of the flood was doubtless a factor. But that can’t be the sole explanation: The images of Helene’s ferocious winds and of L.A. hillsides engulfed in flames were no less eye-catching. Yes, the link between higher global temperatures and melting glaciers makes intuitive sense, but is it any more intuitive than the connection between higher temperatures and the extreme heat that has killed 35,000 people and counting in Europe this summer?

In any case, the question now is where climate coverage goes from here. Nepal’s floods are a textbook illustration of the stark injustice at the heart of the climate story: The people who did the least to cause the problem tend to be the ones who suffer the first and worst. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, The Crucial Years, “On average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American.”

At the COP28 U.N. climate summit in 2023, the world’s governments operationalized a Loss and Damage Fund to compensate victims of climate disasters. Contributions have been paltry, but The Nation reported this week that the fund’s board of governors was discussing whether to make an inaugural donation to Nepal as a symbol of why the fund needs to be fully capitalized. As journalists and newsrooms prepare to cover the COP31 summit in Turkey this November, the long-standing debate around climate loss and damage deserves our focused attention.

Nepal’s floods also highlight another aspect of the climate story: Who is responsible for all those losses, and who should pay for the damages? To date, most reporting has trodden lightly on these questions, even though a handful of investigative exposés have made clear who the chief culprits are. “A 1981 internal memo written by the director of one of Exxon’s science labs said it was ‘distinctly possible’ that cumulative carbon emissions could eventually ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial portion of the earth’s population),’” author Jeff Goodell pointed out the day after the Nepal floods.

Exxon and other companies hid that science for decades, instead pressing for ever-increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. If holding power to account is a core duty of journalism, then connecting the dots between Big Oil and the Nepal floods, and other coming disasters that Big Oil’s delaying tactics have made inevitable, is a good place to start.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.