Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics
Transcript: Trump Iran Humiliation Worsens as Leaks Take Damning Turn
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
It’s a widespread assumption among political strategists that foreign policy rarely matters in U.S. elections. But what if Donald Trump’s failures on this front are so disastrous and destructive that he’s about to break this rule too? Trump’s Iran fiasco is getting worse, and newly leaked photos show dramatic damage to the U.S. abroad. On Russia and Ukraine, he buffoonishly proclaimed that he’d secured an agreement that neither would attack the other’s energy sources, but then that blew up in his face. And new polling shows him cratering on both fronts.
So is there a way to make all this matter in the midterms? We’re talking about all of it with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who’s written well on the Iran debacle. Nick, good to have you on.
Nicholas Grossman: Hi, great to be back.
Sargent: So with soaring diesel prices killing Republicans in the midterms, Trump tried to blame this on the Russia-Ukraine war and not Iran. And the other day he posted this on Truth Social: “Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise.”
Trump then suggested this’ll hold down the world’s diesel prices, but then Russia and Ukraine both said, no, we didn’t really agree to that. Nick, can you bring us up to speed on that?
Grossman: Sure. So Russia and Ukraine are in a war stalemate at the line. I mean, they’re fighting a lot and killing a lot of people, but not moving dramatically in terms of land one way or the other. They’re both bombing each other long distance, bombing each other’s energy resources.
And Trump tried to interject himself, among a trip with both Kushner and Steve Witkoff, trying to once again make deals, and then tried to get this to stop by just claiming that it was Ukraine’s fault, not his Iran war, that actually made diesel prices rise. Which nobody bought. And so then, when nobody bought that, he tried to sell the lie by saying they’re going to stop right now—which they then did not do, as they kept on attacking each other.
Sargent: Right. So they’re not really listening to Donald Trump on this, are they?
Grossman: No, not at all. Just about nobody is anymore.
Sargent: Nick, just briefly, the Russia-Ukraine war has basically receded from the headlines and Trump’s basically stopped talking about it. But we should probably remind everybody that Trump said during the campaign that he would end this war on day one of his presidency, didn’t he?
Grossman: He did. He said he would end it on day one. And the big idea that he and his team have had is to try to pressure the Ukrainians to surrender to Russia. And that’s even what Kushner had just did, where he complained that the Ukrainians would not give up the land that Putin wanted, and therefore that he couldn’t make a deal. And of course, the Ukrainians aren’t doing that.
But the other big change is that they’ve managed to really increase their strike program into Russia, and they’re hitting a lot of, in particular, refineries, which is contributing to the rise in gas prices. But it’s nowhere near as big as what Trump has done with the Iran war. It just compounds the problem.
Sargent: It’s not a small thing for the president of the United States to go out there and say, I’ve secured a deal between two major nations that are at war not to attack each other’s assets in one way or another, and then for that just to be bullshit. That’s not a small thing, is it?
Grossman: No, no. It’s a dramatic change. And it’s another example of how Trump has disrupted the international system by removing that bedrock idea of American credibility, that he has forfeited it in so many ways.
And another—perhaps the biggest current example of Trump’s blown credibility—is the way that the United States has not been providing security to its Middle Eastern allies, to all these different Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where an Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline, and they went and asked Trump for help. MBS reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and clear it up. And both times the United States said no.
And the Gulf Arab states are reportedly shocked by this, and it upends the entire Middle East architecture. And Trump just simply isn’t there, and also isn’t able to stop either the Houthis or the Iranians.
Sargent: Well, my foreign policy doctrine says that Donald Trump will screw anybody if he sees it in his own interests. Let’s go to Iran for a bit more. The House just passed another bill that directs Trump to end the war there or get congressional authorization for it. Seven Republicans defected from Trump this time. Trump’s been threatening to blow up the whole country again. Iran doesn’t seem to take that seriously.
Nick, can you just very briefly bring us up to speed on what’s going on in Iran, who’s doing what, and why the situation’s stuck?
Grossman: So they’re both blockading each other, occasionally bombing each other, but largely holding back from full-scale war. So nobody’s giving in, and nobody is letting ships go through. The U.S. under Trump has tried bombing a few more times, but it hasn’t really accomplished anything.
And the Iranians aren’t giving in because their allies are on the march, like against Saudi Arabia—because while they’re feeling economic damage from this squeeze, they are also able to impose a lot of economic damage. And they can see the U.S. political calendar. They can see the midterms. If Democrats capture the House, they will be better able to try to assert Congress’s war powers.
Which really the whole thing should not be necessary at all. The legal thing should be that the president is supposed to have congressional authorization to go to war, and then, under the War Powers Act, is supposed to withdraw if he doesn’t get authorization.
And this is now multiple times that they’ve taken away authorization that he didn’t even have in the first place, just to underline it. So it’s this more authoritarian moment. But the Iranians can see this, and they can use this to their advantage, and neither can get one over on the other at the moment.
Sargent: Right. It never hurts to remind people that Trump is abusing his power in every conceivable way that he can. CBS News just published extraordinary photos of U.S. equipment and positions in the Middle East that have been badly damaged by the war. The pictures are powerful. There’s aircraft that’s been blown up, buildings reduced to rubble. It’s much worse than we knew.
But here’s the kicker: U.S. service members anonymously sent these pictures to CBS due to restrictions on communicating with the media. As one service member told CBS News: “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed, getting punched in the face.”
Nick, Pete Hegseth’s propagandists suppressed this info about what’s happening to United States interests and assets, and it’s getting leaked right around them. Your thoughts on all this?
Grossman: Right. It’s really bad. And I think we’re going to keep finding out about additional damage that this did, because the Trump administration’s main foreign policy priority has been lying to the American people. And so when the war did not go well—which started, I mean, really before it started, but it was clear that it wasn’t going well within a few weeks—and they’ve been still stalling and flailing and trying different things the entire time.
And while they’re doing this, because they can’t admit their own failure, they are then trying to cover up all this damage. Because instead of correcting the problem, or instead of addressing the problem in the first place, they are trying to just keep it from the public. And they can’t. It’s too big.
It’s too many bases that are not being defended. This is too much money, too many people involved. And the way they’ve tried to keep it out of the media—we can see, especially in the internet age, that you can’t keep images from getting to the public.
Sargent: You know, those photos really reminded me of Trump’s 2016 ads, in which he tried to demonstrate what he called “American carnage.” There were pictures of, you know, rusted-out factories through the Rust Belt. A lot of these pictures almost look like that. They’re like these American bases which are just have been bombed, they’re falling apart, their windows are broken, they’re deserted.
Grossman: Yeah. The United States has bases all throughout the Middle East, and this is the big geopolitical architecture that is changing. Trump has lost the Gulf. He’s lost freedom of navigation. It seems like he’s losing Saudi Arabia and losing the Middle East. And it’s not clear where the chaos of it will go, but it’s clear that they do not have a handle on it at all.
And the damage to the American bases—on top of that, there’s all the munition shortages, the fact that they used a lot of the best stuff without really thinking through a plan beyond that. And there’s all the damage, various injuries to troops, that keep on coming out, more than to U.S. allies and to U.S. interests. And we’re seeing this come into politics now more and more because it is increasingly unignorable.
It’s something where they were never in control of the situation, but now they have really lost control of it, and it is spilling over in all directions.
Sargent: You can almost look at these images, which are really quite striking—I want to underscore how striking the imagery of these bombed-out American bases really looks. It’s haunting stuff. You can almost see it as kind of symbolic of American decline, in the same way Trump used rusting-out factories to symbolize his critique of American decline, right?
Grossman: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And now that you mention it, I’m trying to think of when the last time there were a bunch of American military bases damaged, and photos of, like, American aircraft in pieces and American facilities in rubble. That wasn’t something that happened during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was more the sort of thing that we would see at one isolated location from a terrorist attack.
Even if you think of the images out of Vietnam, it’s the withdrawal, the helicopter on the roof of Saigon. It’s not these large military defeats in which there’s all sorts of damage.
So yeah, it looks like the United States is no longer that number one global power. I mean, still, of course, the U.S. has the biggest military, biggest economy, but is no longer acting like it, exercising the powers like it, the responsibilities and benefits of it—and being seen, I think definitely internationally, but increasingly domestically also, like this is a problem. There were a lot of advantages for the United States being the world’s premier power and being seen as such, and the responsibilities and benefits that go with it. And giving that away—I mean, it really was a choice, which really sucks.
But while the American people might not care about foreign policy often, they do when things go really bad. And, you know, you can think of the 2002–2004 elections, foreign policy was a serious issue. I might say in 2024, you know, it wasn’t the number one issue—things like inflation were—but certainly Middle East, Gaza, Israel-Palestine were issues in the election. And now that it is reaching out into economic damage to everybody, with no end in sight, and compounding other economic damage Trump is causing, politically it seems unignorable.
Sargent: Well, the polling here has become absolutely crippling and completely underscores your point. The latest Quinnipiac survey found that approval of Trump’s handling of foreign policy is 33 percent to 60 percent disapproving. That’s 27 points underwater. On Iran specifically, approval of Trump’s handling of it is 29 percent to 65 percent disapproving—36 points underwater. And on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump clocks in at 28 percent to 61 percent, or 33 points underwater.
I mean, that’s just extraordinary stuff. It’s extraordinary failure, and an amazing repudiation of Trump’s handling of the commander in chief role, or whatever you want to call it. Donald Trump really campaigned as the guy who was just American military power personified. Trump’s strong, opponents weak. And he’s just falling apart across the board. It’s almost amazing to see, isn’t it?
Grossman: It is. I mean, in a really, I’d say negative way, but yeah. And he has always presented this, but he and Hegseth really dialed it up when it came to foreign policy and put it into practice. It was this very shallow conception of strength, this kind of blustery, and reality TV, I-yell-a-lot, I-act-like-an-asshole, I-insult-you conception of strength.
Or I screw you over, I renege on the deal, and what can you do about it, version of it. And that is not how the world works. It never has been. It’s something I feel like I’ve been saying this the entire time, and now the bill is coming due. But that’s not what real strength is.
The real strength comes from things like allies, and he has alienated at this point virtually all of them. It does not come from kissing up to authoritarians, like he’s tried with Russia or North Korea or China. And it certainly doesn’t come from things like, with Hegseth, of white men who are clean-shaven and look good on television, who disdain the laws of war as, like, woke and dumb, and commit war crimes. That’s how you win wars. And it sounds so stupid to say it out loud, but it’s real, it’s in practice now, and this is why it is failing terribly.
And it’s also amazing that they went for it, because that’s kind of what Russia has been failing with in Ukraine. They also had a, no, we’re taking on a “they/them” army. It’s just, like, transnational culture war where Putin’s manliness will overcome them. And that is just not how war works. It seems absurd to say that in the twenty-first century. I mean, with things like drones, you do not need to do pushups to pilot them. I mean, just, like, it doesn’t connect.
But it is a failure of that worldview, and with the most serious consequences. But I am cautiously optimistic that the midterms will create a degree of a vibe shift—of a rejection not only of the specific, say, Trump policies, but of that larger Trump worldview and the kind of Trump-Hegseth way of doing things.
Sargent: I want to try to tease out a deeper point that I think you’re getting at here that concerns the way MAGA understands war. You look at Pete Hegseth strut up and down—in the early days of the Iran conflict, he thought he was on top of the world. He would essentially go out there and he would talk about how our precision machines were blowing this up and blowing that up, and the enemy was just absolutely decimated.
And he even invoked God. He said God wasn’t answering the enemy, the Iranian enemy, and presumably is answering Pete Hegseth. He actually appealed directly to God for help with his violent conquest. I guess God’s not listening or something.
But that aside, what’s interesting here is that they conceived of war as a rejuvenating and revitalizing thing for American empire. We’d get rid of the wokeness, we’d get everyone to cut their hair and shave their beards and get into manly shape, and the nation would be rejuvenated after its decadence and decay and decline under liberals.
But the opposite has happened. We’ve seen an extraordinary amount of decay and decline because of that worldview and because of Trump’s implementing of it. Can you talk about that?
Grossman: Sure. First, I think a lot of the stuff you were just saying could be summarized as “fascist.” I mean, really fascist in a—especially like an Italian Mussolini way. Often too many people think of fascists as exactly what the Nazis did, and especially late Nazis, say in the ‘40s, exactly what they did. And so it’s a very Mussolini fascist style, especially with the strutting, and if you think of the picture of Mussolini with chest puffed out and the rest of it.
But yeah, it is failing in so many ways. And I mean, we can connect this to domestic stuff with manufacturing, or the idea that the working class are large white men doing, particularly—and it’s, I mean, always racialized—doing a particular type of factory work. And whereas what is actually the working class in numbers—I mean, obviously there’s some people who work in manufacturing, but most of manufacturing at this point is robots.
The working class is all distributed in things like, I don’t know, service jobs, for example, cleaning hotels and waiting tables and nurses and, I don’t know, many others that we could mention. And they have never connected to that.
There is a degree of denial inherent in fascism, in that the past that they are trying to recapture is fake. It never was real, it was sort of imagined nostalgia, and so it can’t be recaptured. And yet they force it to a point where it usually then consumes itself, where it falls in upon itself. And I think we’re witnessing that now. I hope we’re witnessing that now, that I’m reading it right.
It’s going to take a decent amount of more time to fully dislodge from power—let’s, you know, get through the midterms, then we deal with Trump in the presidency and bigger questions about that. But it does seem to be imploding in a way that a lot of fascist movements do. And I’m just thankful that it would be before the election, as opposed to doing a lot of this stupid stuff and economically damaging stuff after the election, when the public did not have a chance to react.
Sargent: Another piece of this is immigration. You get rid of all the nonwhite unskilled workers, and then the yeoman American working class will get more jobs as a result. The men will be more attractive to women, they’ll have more babies, and they’ll solve the fertility problem without having to let in more dark people. It’s part of the same story.
Grossman: Yep, very much so. And again, it still feels weird to me that we’re living through it, because it does sound like something out of 20th century fascism. But that’s a lot of what they’ve done, and Stephen Miller has done. Or there was a Department of Labor propaganda that they put out, all these AI images of strapping white blond guys working the fields. And it has not materialized that way at all.
You notice they have done a lot of the immigration crackdown that they’ve promised. It’s been, you know, violence in the mass deportation. They’ve gotten a lot of people out of the country, or made it that people don’t come. And yet there aren’t all of these great jobs that have suddenly flowered in response to that, because that was always nonsense.
Sargent: And by the way, the violence of the removal of nonwhite immigrants was also supposed to be rejuvenating. The ICE propaganda, ICE recruitment info, is very, very, very steeped in that basic imagery.
Let’s just wrap this up. Donald Trump is essentially becoming a global laughingstock, isn’t he, Nick? I mean, that’s the opposite story of the fascist warmongering rejuvenating story that they think they’re telling.
And we’re now looking at a possibility that one or both chambers will be under the possession of Democrats going forward. What can they actually reasonably, credibly do with the House to put real brakes on this?
Grossman: What he really doesn’t like—and this is of that type, but really doesn’t like—is sort of being ignored, being shrugged at, not taken seriously, which is happening with a lot of the countries.
What the Democrats can do if they take the House, and hopefully the Senate, but just the House would be enough for it—I think two of the biggest things would be funding. They should very seriously not fund various things, including relating to the military, that is just going to be burned up in the Iran war, to try to force congressional power—both power of the purse and also Congress’s war powers—to end the war.
And also to do investigations, and to impeach Pete Hegseth. Start with that. Funding and investigations. So those are two biggest tools, and they should use them to the max.
Sargent: That’s right, Nick Grossman. They should defund the war, impeach Hegseth, and investigate the shit out of all of this. Nick, always really, really great to talk to you. This was really interesting stuff. Thanks so much for coming on.
Grossman: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them
‘Music is in my blood’: Santana singer Andy Vargas returns to Watsonville for Santa Cruz County Fair performance with his dad
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When Watsonville native Andy Vargas first performed at the Santa Cruz County Fair at 7 years old, he never could have imagined returning to that same exact stage decades later for a homecoming show.
The Storm
When it dies out, the storm, the silence
of frost hammering its fists against the glass.
Last night, they asked about their father again,
when will he call, what does it all mean?
Now a small white ghost rests in the corner
of the window. We’ve tried to summon it before,
poured full bags of salt into jars of boiling water,
lowered pieces of string and returned morning
and another morning for the crystal that never formed.
Somehow I always got the balance wrong.
Now it’s arrived to us on the courtyard-facing window
that I can’t afford to replace yet.
We inspect it through the electric handheld microscope.
Magnificence spreads across the lower part of the pane
in patterns of ferns, feathers. I say
the broken part of the glass made this possible,
the frost outside, the moisture inside, met.
We are not broken, we are three full bodies
huddled over a morning gift. In the silence
after the storm, it grew across the punctured double glazing,
each feather, leaf shaped by the cold, our sleep,
the structure of glass. They listen. This, I can explain.
The Liberated Women of Sigrid Nunez’s New York
A writer receives a letter from her high school teacher, who married the writer’s high school sweetheart. A professional Brad Pitt impersonator entertains a woman with dementia. A stoical former lover reappears as the defendant in a murder case. A British aristocrat, masquerading as Keith Richards, menaces a hotel employee and gives birth to an enduring fantasy.
These are just a few of the strange, serendipitous encounters that fill the pages of It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez’s new collection of short fiction. Comprising 13 stories, all previously published, the collection explores the writer’s long-standing preoccupations with the clashing of social classes, the consolations of the intellect, and the messy romantic lives of women who love men. The women at the center of these stories—with few exceptions, the stories are told from a woman’s point of view—are, for the most part, intelligent, unmarried, and unsentimental about aging but afraid of death itself. Some are writers; others merely have novelistic imaginations. All are inclined to speculate about their acquaintances and to fill memory’s gaps with their own inventions.
They share with the narrators of Nunez’s best novels a flaneur’s sensibility, honed over many years. (Nunez is 75.) They wander the streets of New York City, encountering friends and strangers, reflecting on their favorite books and films, and remembering scenes from their younger years, which were spent walking the very same streets. In this way, they resemble the narrator of her prize-winning novel The Friend (2018), who, traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn, recalls scenes from a vibrant, complicated friendship with her recently deceased mentor. The narrator of Nunez’s subsequent book, What Are You Going Through (2020), operates similarly: At the gym she’s attended for years, she looks around the locker room and remembers a time when both she and a woman she recognizes were younger and leaner. For women like these, the city is a kind of palimpsest, and their walks are projects of excavation. (This they share with the memoirs of Vivian Gornick, another native New Yorker.) While the women at the center of her novels sometimes long for their youth—and their youthful beauty—they also recognize that the richness of their lives depends on the experiences and relationships they’ve accrued with age.
These stories, spanning Nunez’s career, capture the ways the city can shape life’s different phases. We meet women just starting out as city dwellers and those who have lived in the same apartment for years. Characters scan the streets that surround them, comparing themselves to other women, and trying to place themselves in life’s grand, finite sweep. Set free from social conventions and the narratives that accompany them, they seek out the sorts of experiences that make for good stories: one-night stands and doomed love affairs, cocktail parties and courtroom dramas. If they’re not generating their own stories, they’re mulling those shared by friends and relatives, people they once thought they knew. The best stories in It Will Come Back to You are those that could only take place in a big city, where women are empowered to create their own lives in every sense.
It Will Come Back to You is presented as Nunez’s first collection of stories, suggesting a pivot for a writer who has published nine novels. But her astonishing debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), published when Nunez was 43, is also, in some sense, a collection of stories. “Chang,” the first section of the novel, was published as a stand-alone story in The Threepenny Review in 1989; “Christa,” a companion story, appeared in The Iowa Review two years later. “Chang” is about Nunez’s father, a Chinese Panamanian immigrant, a silent type who worked himself to death. “Christa” is about her mother, a German housewife whose sense of humor helped her cope with an exhausting life. The third and fourth sections of the novel describe the narrator’s teenage years and young adulthood, periods marked, respectively, by her arduous training as a ballerina and by a passionate, potentially dangerous affair with a Russian taxi driver. The stories might best be classified as autofiction: Nunez has said that “Chang” in particular could have been published as nonfiction because “it’s all true.”
Though different in focus, the novel’s four sections share an elegiac tone and a curiosity about the past. “One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame,” Nunez writes at one point. Later, mulling over her younger self’s boldness, the narrator asks, “Why did she go with this man? What was she looking for?” Like an analysand free-associating on the couch, the narrator of Feather recounts her formative experiences, seeking to understand them—or, perhaps, to be free of them.
Nunez’s strongest novels preserve this associative quality. The narrator of The Friend sounds much like the narrator of Feather: She is erudite and intellectually curious, attentive to nuance and inclined to citation. The book is an elegy for the writer’s friend and mentor who has recently died by suicide, as well as her attempt to work through her grief—in part by taking in her dead friend’s Great Dane, who becomes another friend. Far from a straightforward account of these intimate relationships—between teacher and student, between woman and dog—the novel weaves together the narrator’s notes from the narrator’s stalled writing projects, memories of her friend, anecdotes from the classroom (like her mentor, the narrator is also a teacher of creative writing), encounters with dog-curious strangers, and reflections on the sexual politics of the literary scene. While the narrator doesn’t quite excuse her friend’s tendency to treat the classroom as a dating pool, she nonetheless finds him sympathetic and comprehensible. Published in the immediate wake of the #MeToo movement, the novel earned Nunez the National Book Award for fiction.
The stories in It Will Come Back to You are each more tightly focused on a specific scenario, but they are linked by setting. Manhattan and the outer boroughs provide the backdrop for nearly every story, enabling the coincidences and conflicts that drive the plot. Characters are constantly running into people they know, or think they know, from the pages of a tabloid or from a past life. In “The Naked Juror,” a middle-aged writer named Flora, reporting for jury duty, believes she recognizes the defendant as a former lover, Bruno, an Eastern European immigrant who worked in the building next to her old home. Though initially shocked, Flora reminds herself that this is the kind of thing that happens in New York: “Millions of people lived in this town, yet such things were bound to happen—in fact, more than likely, it had happened before that a juror had recognized a defendant,” she muses. But it turns out she had the wrong man: Later, wandering her old neighborhood, she crosses paths with the actual Bruno—older, preoccupied—and chastises herself for the error.
For Flora and others, the city is full of familiar faces; nobody ever truly goes missing. In “Curiosity,” a young woman waiting tables at a Bowery bar finds herself serving her mysterious neighbor, a sex worker who seems to use a pseudonym. In “Philosophers,” a writer receives a letter from her high school English teacher, informing her that the classmate she once loved died not long after becoming the teacher’s second husband. “This is a big city, perceived by outsiders as a place where you can easily lead an anonymous life,” observes the narrator of “The Balloon.” “But we who live here know that we must be prepared to run into acquaintances each time we step out our doors.”
For those characters who, like Nunez, grew up in New York, the city is a minefield of memories. “The Rabbit’s Foot” traces the shifting relations among three generations of native New Yorkers: Carmine, a foundling raised in the Bronx, who goes on to work in a fancy Manhattan hotel; Teresa, her ambitious daughter, who makes a fortune in finance and lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn; and Celina, Teresa’s daughter, who valorizes her grandmother’s working-class roots. Each interprets Carmine’s life differently: Teresa is outraged by the social injustice she perceives, while Celina is both admiring and sympathetic. Carmine herself is ashamed. “Wasn’t the world a funny place?” Nunez writes. “To Celina, it was her mother’s overvalued, late-capitalist career and class privilege that were cause for shame.” Each woman interprets another’s life according to her own values.
In the story’s narrative present, Carmine and Celina are having afternoon tea at the hotel where Carmine once worked in housekeeping. Returning to her former place of employment, Carmine recalls being held at knifepoint by a strung-out British lord. The man had been accused of seducing a 15-year-old girl under false pretenses. Carmine, who happened to be on the scene when hotel management confronted the guest, ends up, briefly, as a hostage. Teresa has always found the story upsetting: Her mother “might as well have been the steak” on the room service tray. But Carmine, who never told Teresa the complete story, remembers the event as sort of sexy. Celina, unknowingly echoing her mother, tells Carmine she has “nothing to be ashamed of,” but Carmine knows, as her descendants apparently don’t, that shame operates independent of rational thought, and that it can shape our desires and our lives. The story ends with grandmother and granddaughter shamelessly eating all the food offered to them—“every sandwich, every scone, every piece of cake”—an ambiguous image of female appetite.
“The Rabbit’s Foot” is one of several stories exploring the mother-daughter dyad. The aptly named “Mother-Daughter Story” begins with the incomplete sentence “How to explain to her daughter.” Mo and her grown daughter, Jo, are cleaning out Mo’s deceased mother’s house. The two are so close that they go by the compound noun “MoJo,” yet each disappoints the other in small and subtle ways. Mo had been a disappointment to her own mother, who was critical and disinterested. “When a person has had a bad parent, the person remains that parent’s child all their life,” Jo reflects.
Even the daughter of a good enough mother remains a daughter all her life. In “It’s All Good,” a woman in her late forties tries to manage her grief as her mother slides into early-onset dementia. Gathering for a birthday celebration with her mother, now a resident of an assisted-living facility; her happy-go-lucky younger brother; and a Brad Pitt look-alike hired to amuse their mother, the narrator strives to match her brother’s high spirits. But she finds herself longing for the mother she remembers: a woman who played golf, cleaned her house, and drove herself into Manhattan to take in a Broadway show. “I never saw that woman again,” the narrator reflects. And yet, much like her mother, the narrator has trouble adjusting to this new reality: “I have never been able to let go of the idea that her problem is temporary.” Time may march forward, but the mind and heart can remain stuck in the past.
Relations between women have long fascinated Nunez. Several of her novels—including the excellent For Rouenna (2001), the flawed campus novel The Last of Her Kind (2006), and What Are You Going Through (2020), adapted for the screen in 2024 by Pedro Almodóvar—center on intense, complicated female friendships. But not since “Christa” has Nunez so deeply explored relationships between mothers and daughters. The title story, the last and strongest in the collection, links the narrator’s own experience of aging with that of her older friend Gilda, who was once a mother figure for the narrator. Gilda is now 89 and living in a senior housing complex, where she’s found herself a “beau,” a man who eschews hearing aids because he enjoys the humor of mishearing. “You ask someone for directions and they say, ‘That depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot,’” he jokes. The narrator listens to Gilda reminisce about the past and realizes she is “filling in the blanks with things she made up.” The narrator never corrects her older friend: “The point was for me to listen, not to set the record straight.”
Besides, the narrator, who appears to be Nunez’s alter ego, feels an affinity with Gilda:
I see in her the little novelist that sits in each of us busily working to arrange experience into story. The idea that a human life isn’t like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc, that our memories can’t be relied on for shit, and that everything depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot—this the human heart will not have.
This is what passes for epiphany in Nunez’s short stories: not an earth-shattering insight or a neat resolution, but an honest reckoning with life’s absurdities. As in so much of her writing, Nunez presents us with a bleak vision but leavens it with humor, showing us how we, too, might cope with our nonsensical lives.
With this book, Nunez joins a tradition of writers who have used New York City and the proximities it demands as inspiration for their short fiction. One thinks of the New York stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, who was Nunez’s teacher at Barnard, and of certain stories by John Cheever, such as “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s malfunctioning radio picks up conversations from neighboring apartments. Within Nunez’s generation, there’s Mary Gaitskill, whose groundbreaking collection Bad Behavior (1988) is largely set in the seamier sections of New York, and various members of the Brat Pack, who made the city seem at once glamorous and ruthless. Nunez’s New York, with its mix of intimacy and anonymity, is a less alienating environment, a place where one can fashion an interesting, imperfect life.
When she departs from the city, the stories are less successful. “Imagination,” set at a family’s summer home, follows Elsie, an adolescent girl gripped by the imp of the perverse. The story tries too hard to inhabit the teenage mind—there are text messages that no owner of a smartphone would countenance—and ends up being far from believable as a result. “The Plan,” which takes place largely on Long Island, is the opening section of a thriller that Nunez failed to sell. It has its moments, but it mostly serves as a reminder that Nunez isn’t as skilled at genre fiction as she is at something closer to realism. And “Airport Story,” set, as one might expect, in the liminal space of the airport, is a misanthropic portrait of humanity that seems more like a formal complaint than a work of short fiction.
But these are rare misses in a rich collection, one that showcases Nunez’s strengths. At her best, she is clear-eyed but not nihilistic, sharp but not entirely unfeeling. The women of her stories may have been wounded by life, but they never lose their curiosity, nor their humor. As they wander the city’s streets, keeping an eye out for those they know, they open themselves up to the kinds of adventures one has by accident. After all, they’d rather their lives be anything but boring: They know just how much depends on what the chimpanzee put in the pot.
The Dire National Crisis That Washington Won’t Touch
When she was 11 years old, Maddie felt a crippling despair and loneliness that rendered her daily existence almost unbearable. She was already the target of significant bullying when a fellow student took a picture of her, photoshopping her head onto the body of a dog. Maddie had felt confident in that photo, sporting a dress and a hairstyle that she loved. Now classmates at her school in Houston, Texas, were making their own edits of the picture, changing its color and enlarging her head.
“It was very embarrassing and tragic for me,” Maddie, now 23, recalled. “I was already being bullied at school, and now I’m coming home, and I see this, and so it felt like it didn’t end.”
The tormenting by her peers continued into middle school. In an environment that punishes individuality, Maddie—who asked that only her first name be used to preserve anonymity—was unabashedly quirky, wearing bow ties and suspenders along with her school uniform. As she wryly noted a decade later, this defiant sense of self did not help her avoid bullying. Maddie is Black, and she felt as if she needed to hide her struggles because of stigma toward mental illness that she believes is still pervasive within the Black community.
Plagued by frequent panic attacks and overwhelmed with depression, she turned to Crisis Text Line, a secure service that offers support for people experiencing severe emotional or psychological distress. The volunteer counselors on the other end of the line, who are trained in crisis response, taught her breathing exercises and grounding techniques to help manage these painful experiences.
“Around the time I was, like, 12 [years old], I didn’t think I was going to make it to 16. When I made it to 16, I didn’t think I was going to make it to 18, and so in between 12 and 16 I made myself a promise that if I lived to be 18 years old, I would volunteer at Crisis Text Line,” Maddie recalled. That goal helped sustain her until she arrived at the University of Texas at Austin as a freshman, and she signed up to become a volunteer for the text line.
But Maddie was quickly overwhelmed by the academic demands and financial pressures of college, which only exacerbated the mental health challenges related to her then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. As she struggled, academic advisers told her that maybe she was not cut out for the rigors of college, without offering sufficient resources for support.
In 2023, when she was a junior, she made a suicide plan, although she ultimately decided not to attempt. On the very night she had planned to take her life, a student who lived in the building across the street from hers died by suicide, and Maddie witnessed the aftermath. She was admitted to the hospital for the first time that night and was hospitalized another two times within a year after the first stay. Thankfully, she had friends who helped coordinate her treatment, but even acknowledging that the situation was serious enough to warrant assistance was difficult.
“I wanted to keep pushing through. I wanted to feel like I had everything together, that I could handle it, that I didn’t need help,” she recalled. “That year of hospitalizations was honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Getting that type of help was very, very scary to me … even though I had always told people, like, ‘If you need help, reach out for help.’”
Maddie has continued to process her trauma through writing, and particularly poetry. In one poem, entitled “The Day I Planned To Kill Myself,” she outlines the anguish she felt in the months before and after that experience. She wonders, “How many academic advisors have co-authored a student’s suicide?”
Maddie’s specific experiences are emblematic of the challenges felt by many young Americans contending with the inescapable torment of cyberbullying, a stressful academic environment, cultural stigmatization of mental health issues, and interactions with social media that aggravate a sense of isolation. And recent actions by the current administration and Congress—for example, threatening funding for mental health research and cutting key social safety net benefits—could put young people struggling with their mental health at risk.
In her poem, Maddie recalls two younger college students in the hospital seeking her guidance. She writes:
The second time I am in the hospital,
six months after the day I didn’t kill myself,
I am joined by a freshman and a sophomore, looking up to me, asking if life gets better.
And I feel like the leader of an army band,
preparing young soldiers to die, and I so badly want to shake them.
Want someone to shake me and say:
“Debt is not worth your life.”
“Your parent’s ‘sacrifice’ is not worth your life.”
“The fear of failure is not worth your life.”
“College is not worth your life!”
“Your life is worth it.
You are worth it, and you don’t
have to walk across that damn stage.
But please,
walk out of here
alive!”
A National Crisis
Since the height of the coronavirus pandemic, during which many schools and colleges closed their doors to in-person learning for months at a time, there has been a general consensus among medical experts that the kids are not all right.
“What a lot of young people are telling us is that there’s just high levels of anxiety and depression and stress, more so than we’ve seen with other generations,” said Courtney Gallo Hunter, the then vice president of public policy and advocacy at Crisis Text Line. Where adults might feel stress about weighty topics such as economic instability, political division, climate change, and systemic discrimination, teenagers—who already feel the impact of life events so deeply, from the stress of homework to first crushes—are experiencing those same concerns with higher intensity.
Although the trend of declining youth mental health predated the pandemic, the loss of social opportunities in 2020 and 2021 highlighted the ways in which members of Generations Z and Alpha face different challenges than their predecessors. Young people became more reliant on social media for connection, as they were prevented from interacting with friends and attending school in person; this was associated with a commensurate uptick in depressive episodes and thoughts of suicide. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of the “devastating” effects of declining youth mental health.
After lockdowns concluded, there was some improvement, evidenced by a decrease in suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults since 2021. But the situation remains grim, as millions of young Americans struggle with their mental health and a pervasive sense of isolation.
“Social connectedness is not like what it used to be. People will spend time together, but they’re on their phones. They’re not making eye contact. They’re not sharing that social connection that is so important in every human being,” said Ana Tueme Lezama, a 24-year-old clinician living in Boston who volunteers with Crisis Text Line.
In 2023, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34. Around 11 percent of adults aged 18 to 25 had serious thoughts of suicide during the previous year.
In 2023, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34. A recent survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that in 2025 around 15 percent of youth between ages 12 and 17 reported having a major depressive episode in the previous year, and roughly 10 percent had serious thoughts of suicide. Around 11 percent of adults aged 18 to 25—among whom Maddie can be counted—had serious thoughts of suicide during the previous year.
The root causes of mental health issues among young people are varied and intertwined, making it difficult to tease out any particular problem that, once fixed, would lead to an immediate and universal cessation in internal psychological hostilities. But if one were to braid the fine strands of these roots into a single prescription—say, for the purposes of an explanatory magazine article—it may be this: Adolescents and young adults exist in a world where they lack sufficient external support and a sense of community.
Federal law mandates that insurers covering mental health and substance abuse services treat them in the same way they would medical and surgical benefits; however, it doesn’t require insurers to cover those services in the first place.
The “lack of external support” condition could be met by any number of metrics, most obviously a difficulty in accessing care. There is a nationwide dearth of behavioral health providers, with 40 percent of Americans living in an area with a shortage of mental health professionals. And those existing professionals are less likely to take health insurance, due to lower reimbursement rates from insurers. Federal law mandates that insurers covering mental health and substance abuse services treat them in the same way they would medical and surgical benefits; however, it doesn’t require insurers to cover those services in the first place. Meanwhile, more generalized clinicians often lack the training to spot the warning signs of mental distress.
Then there are the other, more structural predictors of poor mental health. Among Americans younger than 18, mood disorders, substance use, and suicidal behaviors are more common among low-income individuals; youth who have been involved in the criminal justice system; American Indian and Alaska Native young people; those who identify as LGBTQ+; and rural youth.
Dr. Maria Rahmandar, an attending physician for adolescent and young adult medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Chicago, noted that there was nothing “inherent” about these identities that made young people particularly susceptible to suicidal ideation. “It’s about the systems that people live within that persecute them, that discriminate against them, that make them feel unsafe and disconnected—that is likely a big contributor to why we see youth die in these populations,” said Rahmandar.
Asheton Medlin, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up in an area where mental health care was a literally and metaphorically distant prospect. In her hometown of Roxboro in rural northern North Carolina, visiting a therapist would require a 45-minute trek to a larger city. This is a significant challenge for someone in a town where one-third of residents live in poverty, and getting time off from work or affording gas for such a drive can be an insurmountable hurdle.
A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that rural adults between the ages of 20 and 39 were significantly more likely to die by suicide than their urban counterparts. There is also a dearth of mental health care in less populated areas: 47 percent of nonmetropolitan counties do not have a psychologist, 65 percent do not have a psychiatrist, and 81 percent do not have a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
“There’s no resources to talk about it there. And so if there’s no fix, [and] there’s no reason to talk about it, then people just didn’t bring it up,” said Asheton, who is 23 years old. “People just kind of learned, like, ‘Oh, just toughen up, we don’t talk about that.’”
“There’s no resources to talk about [mental health] there. And so if there’s no fix, [and] there’s no reason to talk about it, then people just didn’t bring it up,” said Asheton, who is 23 years old. “People just kind of learned, like, ‘Oh, just toughen up, we don’t talk about that.’”
Along with this keep-it-to-yourself mentality, rural communities have been affected by overuse of alcohol and other substances, especially opioids. Young people in a small town may turn to alcohol or drugs out of boredom, said Asheton. But as adolescents approach adulthood, she continued, their anxieties become more existential and tied to stress about their future.
“How are you going to move on with your life when there’s not so many opportunities in the small town? I think that’s when that mental health struggle kind of shifts from, ‘Oh, we’re doing this for fun,’ to, ‘Oh, I’m doing this as a way to cope because I’m not quite sure what’s next,’” Asheton said.
It’s a problem that Charlie Moser witnessed when he was growing up in rural Montvale in southwestern Virginia. The recent Cornell University graduate recalled the struggles of his friend, Brady, who died in 2021. Brady had issues with mental health, and he may have benefited from resources and support to help him with difficulties at home. Brady became involved with “the wrong group of people,” Charlie said, and his subsequent use of drugs and alcohol ultimately resulted in his death.
“The drug and alcohol scene is sort of a negative outlet for a lot of students where I grew up,” said Charlie, who is now 23. “If you don’t have a job, if you don’t go to college, if you don’t go to community college, if you don’t have any kind of [plans after] high school, it’s a very easy and appealing scene to get into.”
The “Danger Switch”
Despite significant differences in circumstances, poor urban youth face challenges similar to those of young people living in rural communities. Research has found such factors as food insecurity and lack of stable housing contribute to poor mental health among adolescents and young adults. In inner-city Baltimore, for example—an early adopter of the discriminatory redlining housing policies in twentieth century—primarily Black neighborhoods that experienced this kind of institutionalized racism firsthand see lower health outcomes.
“There are a lot of young people who are exposed to chronic stress and trauma that have to do with growing up in sort of historically and currently disenfranchised communities,” said Dr. Tamar Mendelson, director for the Center for Adolescent Health at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Young people living under these kinds of conditions are often “responsible for things that kids shouldn’t necessarily need to be dealing with.”
Mendelson continued: “Not having enough food is a deeply stressful experience, or not having a place to feel safe, not feeling safe in your neighborhood, not feeling like your home is safe. These are things that affect the developing nervous system…. That danger switch is sort of permanently switched on, and that can help in the short term for young people to respond to acute stress and danger—but over time we know that that has a lot of negative health and mental health implications.”
It’s a feeling that Keontè Lewis, a native of Washington, D.C., knew too well as a child. Keontè’s parents had an antagonistic relationship when he was growing up, and he felt unsafe to communicate his feelings with either of them. They were also each raising multiple children—Keontè’s father has nine children, and his mother three—and struggled financially. School didn’t offer any respite from his troubled home life, as he was bullied for not having cooler shoes or nicer clothes.
“I would come home and like, you know, try to find comfort in my parents, or my brothers, and then that was not really accessible either, and it was really hard for me,” recalled Keontè, who is now 23 years old and lives in Maryland. His family was in line with the cliché of strict Black parents, he remembered, scolding him for crying.
“Toxic masculinity was just something that was literally ingrained in us,” said Keontè. “It was never taught to us. That’s just what it was to be a boy, to be a man.”
Similarly, Keontè did not realize the impact racism had on his life until he was an adult. He believes that the legacy of slavery and segregation had a “subconscious” effect on Black communities, such that he naturally saw himself “in a different light.” The idea that he had to “work harder than others to break even” was a fact of his daily existence. “I just kind of thought of myself and my peers as the underdog, so to speak,” said Keontè. “That’s just something that we always kind of were ingrained with, without anyone [having] told us that.”
When his high school began remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic, Keontè was unable to successfully use the software to log into class—a relatively common experience during the pandemic among low-income young adults without regular internet access, and particularly Black and Latino youth. But when he was expelled for his truancy, Keontè wasn’t overly bothered. He was never the best student, and he didn’t want to attend anyway; he was already “in the streets,” as he put it. He was incarcerated for the first time as an adult at age 19 in 2022—he had been in juvenile detention more than once as a teenager—serving 17 months in D.C. jail before being transferred to a federal prison in Pennsylvania for three months. He came home to the D.C. area in 2024.
Like Maddie, Keontè found an outlet in poetry. While he was in jail, he became involved with Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, a D.C.-based organization that serves incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth and adults. He has remained involved with Free Minds as a volunteer since returning home. In a recent poem entitled “Redemption,” Keontè outlines some of the challenges he faced as an adolescent—both due to his circumstances and his own actions—including “poverty, struggle, addiction, conviction, then prison.”
“I can write a book or let people write for me,” Keontè writes. “I seen more than a man at 40.”
Beyond his own experiences, Keontè has keenly felt how life in the streets can result in tragedy. Last year, Keontè’s close friend, Malik, died by suicide. Malik was in the streets at the time—meaning that he was selling drugs to make money—in large part because he felt pressure to financially provide for his partner and his parents. Although Keontè offered support for his friend and encouraged him to leave that kind of life behind, he was unable to provide the assistance a trained professional could offer.
“I told him all that I could. I’m not a specialist, so I can’t tell him anything a clinician would tell him,” Keontè said. Life as the underdog, as a man beholden to a very specific version of masculinity in a context rife with violence, took its toll.
Meanwhile, in Washington
By the time I met Saanvi Arora in a conference room in the Rayburn House Office Building in late June, she had been engaged with legislative advocacy work for years. When she founded the Youth Power Project as a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley in 2022, she had been motivated by a desire to connect young people with the lawmakers who write policy on youth mental health but rarely hear from the population whom they are purportedly trying to help.
Now, barely a month after graduating from Berkeley, Saanvi was among the leaders of a day of advocacy organized by the Youth Power Project and Crisis Text Line. Fifty young adults from more than 30 states fanned out across the Capitol Hill complex that week, visiting congressional offices to discuss their own experiences and voice support for certain legislation, including a bill to put information about mental health resources on student IDs.
“We’re here because we believe that young people with lived experiences are most qualified to advise and craft solutions for mental health care in their communities,” Saanvi told the group of assembled volunteer advocates at a June breakfast briefing before they embarked on their visits to individual congressional offices. “Many young people are already doing that work in their communities, and they have really powerful ideas for change. Oftentimes, however, they’re not really met with the resources or opportunities to bring that change to life at a more systemic level.”
Saanvi, who is 22 years old, knew this struggle firsthand. When she was about 15, she lost a friend to suicide and had been motivated by that tragedy to volunteer with a peer-led crisis service focused on youth mental health. She and her peers began advocating for local California state lawmakers to pass a bill allowing school-excused absences for mental health reasons, and they were cold-calling legislative offices to push the measure before they had even taken their PSAT. The bill was introduced and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021.
“I felt like, in that moment, I just wanted to continue to get involved and figure out how I could get more young people to understand the legislative process and help them understand how they could use their voice and their story to effectuate change,” Saanvi recalled. The Youth Power Project has continued to advocate for state and federal legislation, including support for a Senate resolution approved in 2024 that recognized a “pressing need” for youth mental health awareness with recommendations for state governments.
Addressing mental health is, in theory, the rare unifying issue in Washington. Perhaps the most significant bipartisan victory for mental health legislation occurred in 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term, when Congress approved the use of the three-digit 988 number for the federal toll-free suicide and mental health crisis hotline. Between the implementation of the lifeline in 2022 and December 2024, suicide deaths among people between ages 15 and 34 decreased by 11 percent, with the greatest reduction occurring in states with the highest call volumes.
Saanvi and her peers were on the Hill to promote legislation including the Campus Lifeline Act, which would encourage college campus mental health efforts and clarify that information about the 988 Lifeline can be included on driver’s licenses and student IDs. The measure was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers earlier this year. (Mental health experts have encouraged states to maintain regular funding for 988 by implementing a monthly telecommunications fee for phone bills, similar to how 911 is funded, a practice that has been enacted in 12 states.)
Nevertheless, certain actions by the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress could have a long-term negative impact on mental health care accessibility. Shortly after Trump took office, the CDC pulled the Youth Risk Behavior Survey from its website because it addressed the mental health of transgender youth; a judge ordered it restored in February 2025. The Trump administration also ended the 988 hotline’s specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth in 2025; despite Congress authorizing funding to reinstate “Option 3” (so named for its specific place in the menu), the Department of Health and Human Services has yet to reinstate the line. Freezes in certain federal grants have been disruptive for mental health research, even as some of that funding was reinstated.
The GOP congressional majority last year approved dramatic cuts to Medicaid, which is the largest payer for mental health services in the country. Millions of people are expected to lose health coverage, with significant knock-on effects for access to behavioral health care. Many public schools use Medicaid funding to subsidize in-school mental health services; if states are forced to slash their Medicaid spending, it could result in schools losing funding for these programs.
“We’re really concerned about how that resource limitation is going to impact the availability of these early intervention services,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “There has been quite a long effort—bipartisan effort—to make it clearer what states can use Medicaid for in schools, and unfortunately, with limited resources … we might start to backtrack a bit there.”
Access to lethal means is a major factor in youth suicide as well. Between 2014 and 2023, rates of suicide by firearm increased by over 40 percent among young people ages 10 to 24, according to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety. But given the political controversy over gun safety legislation—a result of persistent lobbying by organizations such as the National Rifle Association—action on this front is unlikely to be taken on a federal level. (One of the authors of 2022 gun safety legislation, GOP Senator John Cornyn, was defeated in his primary this year; his opponent had hammered him on his role in crafting the measure.)
Action is still possible on a state level. Research has shown that stricter gun storage requirements are associated with a decrease in youth suicide by firearms, and 26 states have enacted such policies, known as child access prevention laws.
“The thought of suicide remains a thought if there’s nothing to use to take action. The thought of suicide becomes an action when there’s something available in that moment when a child feels most despondent,” said Dr. Shairi Turner, the chief health officer at Crisis Text Line.
The Social Media Beast
Although gun control may be off the table, members of Congress have lately turned their attention to another area of concern: access to social media. In July, the House approved the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, which includes provisions incentivizing certain platforms to verify the age of their users and establish policies to reduce access to harmful content. Critics say this measure threatens the privacy of young people and could result in over-censorship that removes resources for youth on issues such as addiction and sexual exploitation. In early August, the bill cleared the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation with bipartisan support.
Saanvi worries that measures to implement “age gating”—that is, age verification for minors—could result in sites learning more information about young people. “We already have such a severe issue with how targeted our recommendation systems are,” she said.
The argument over young adults on social media isn’t new. Adults have been worried about adolescent use of social media for as long as there has been social media to use. From the perspective of teenagers and young adults, the benefits are more apparent, but the collateral damage is significant.
Recent polling by the Pew Research Center found that the majority of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 believe social media has encouraged their creativity and the formation of connections; however, 27 percent believed social media made them feel a lot or a little worse about their own lives. Teen girls were more likely than boys to say they had negative experiences on social media.
The harmful aspects of social media may be particularly acute among youth struggling with their mental health. According to a poll conducted in 2023 by researchers at the University of Chicago, the majority of youth aged 14 to 22 with depressive symptoms reported that social media made them feel stressed and anxious due to the prevalence of bad news. They were also more likely to say that using social media made them feel as if others’ lives were better than theirs, and to feel bad about the way they look.
Dr. Christine Yu Moutier, the chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said that young adults already combating depression, anxiety, or trauma may be more likely to spend several hours at a time on social media, with interactions that only intensify those preexisting stressors. “It can go very, very badly for a certain subset of people, whereas for some of those folks who are farther along or very intentional about their social media use, they actually may find connectedness and community in a way that’s lifesaving,” said Moutier.
Ana Tueme Lezama could be counted among those teenagers who used social media as a tool for negative comparison. After she received her first iPhone upon graduating from elementary school, she created a profile on Instagram, because everyone else she knew was using Instagram. She believes the use of that app and Snapchat had a significant detrimental effect on her mental health. Ana would scroll Instagram for hours, comparing her own life to photographs of her peers.
“That would oftentimes make me think about myself and, like, ‘I don’t have happy moments,’ or, ‘I don’t feel this connection with my friends,’” she remembered. It was easy for Ana to find others who battled suicidal ideation, and she “trauma-bonded” with them in a way that encouraged her darkest thoughts. As a Latina child growing up in Pound Ridge, New York, where nearly 90 percent of the population is white, Ana also regularly experienced racist interactions and microaggressions that only served to further isolate her and exacerbate her sense of being disconnected from her peers.
Other triggers included “pro-ana”—short for “pro-anorexia”—accounts on Instagram that glorify eating disorders and discourage followers from seeking treatment. Ana had anorexia, her weight eventually dropping to such a dangerous level that her organs began to fail. That led to her first hospitalization; she was involuntarily committed three more times afterward because of her severe depression. Looking back on those difficult times, Ana can easily come to a definitive conclusion: In her words, “social media made my mental health struggles significantly worse.”
Where accounts promoting eating disorders and encouraging suicidal ideation proved triggering for Ana, Keontè had an analogous experience with videos and songs that glamorized life “in the streets.” Given his sense of isolation at home and in school, he sought fulfillment from external sources, including “drill” music. Drill, so named because its percussion beats are akin to the firing of a gun, is a genre of hip-hop that originated in Chicago in the early 2010s, and that critics—including, now, Keontè—argue glorifies gang violence.
“A lot of young adults aspire to be someone recognized as someone who—you know, call it what it is—like, as a murderer, as a killer,” he said. Because of social media, Keontè recalled, drill culture was so big in D.C. when he was a teenager that the music was easily findable on sites such as YouTube and Instagram. Being in that culture was like “drinking water,” he said; in a sense, it provided an avenue for connection because it reflected his life experiences.
But experiencing that lifestyle was not nearly as romantic as the music made it seem. “When you’re in it, it’s not that fun. It may sound good on beats, but it’s not fun for real. Like seeing homeys die, it’s not fun. Going to funerals, it’s not fun. Being locked up is not fun,” Keontè said.
Like all teenagers, Keontè wished to belong. Now, he believes his desire to fit in with that specific culture placed him on the “downward spiral” that began with him stealing from neighbors and culminated with his entering federal prison while still a young adult. Without drill music and social media, he added: “I don’t think that I ever would have been in the spot where I was at when I was 19.”
Although Ana and Keontè’s negative experiences with social media are severe cases, they are indicative of some of the issues that extremely online young people face across the country. Several of the young people with whom I spoke discussed social media as a vehicle for comparison that damages self-esteem, especially for young women who despair of their own appearance when looking at others, and lower-income youth who spend their scrolling time contrasting their own lives to peers with greater opportunities.
Maddie has felt the effects of that kind of comparison. Along with the cyberbullying that she underwent during her childhood, Maddie’s struggles with mental health meant that her life took a different path than many of her college friends did. After her hospitalizations, she left UT-Austin and later attended Houston City College to get her associate degree.
“This year was extremely rough, to see so many people I know graduate or start their master’s programs, and then just feeling like I no longer relate because I’m off the timeline that I thought I was going to be on. So in that sense, social media has been distressing,” Maddie said.
For those who do not experience rigorous academic pressures, social media can still be a lifeline that ultimately entangles its users and is unable to provide the same connection as in-person interactions. “I think it’s incredibly dangerous to young people in rural communities, especially when the internet, in some ways, is all they have to be connected to anything,” Charlie Moser said. “For some people, that’s their escape.”
Persistent use of social media also affects amounts and quality of sleep, which can have a significant impact on youth physical and mental health. According to the recent Pew poll, 40 percent of teenagers said social media platforms hurt their productivity, and 45 percent said it hurt the amount of sleep they received.
“The last thing they see before they go to bed is a screen, and the first thing they see when they wake up is the screen, and then it wakes them up overnight when friends are chatting, or they get a notification on some platform,” said Rahmandar. “Not getting enough sleep is a huge concern for suicidality and generates worsened mental health in general.”
The integration of generative AI into teenagers’ daily lives has raised red flags for mental health experts. The company OpenAI has faced multiple lawsuits by parents alleging that its generative AI tool, ChatGPT, encouraged their children to follow through with suicide plans, resulting in their deaths. In the first known lawsuit, filed in August of last year, Matthew and Maria Raine alleged that ChatGPT had encouraged their son Adam’s suicidal thoughts, urged him against communicating with his parents, and given him step-by-step instructions for methods of suicide. Adam died in 2025. Researchers at Northeastern University recently found that OpenAI had implemented stronger safeguards around questions related to suicide and self-harm, but concluded that chatbot companies in general have failed to extend specific protections regarding other mental health conditions, including substance abuse and eating disorders. And Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, recently agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle a lawsuit with 47 states for the alleged harm it has caused teenagers.
Another Pew Research Center survey, conducted in late 2025, found that a majority of teens use AI chatbots, including three in 10 who use them daily. Sixteen percent say they have used them for casual conversation, and 12 percent to get emotional support or advice. The appeal of AI as a tool for mental health assistance may lie in its anonymity, or the sense that the advice a chatbot is providing is judgment-free, said Saanvi.
“We could do a better job of educating young people that this is an algorithm. It’s not actually answering you, it’s kind of putting together [outputs] based off of your input that sound correct,” argued Saanvi.
Moutier said that in consulting with the large language model companies on the forefront of developing generative AI, she has learned that how a chatbot responds is based on an initial assessment. “If the assessment is off, then you’re more likely to see these negative outcomes,” Moutier said.
Of Struggle—and Hope
When Asheton Medlin arrived at UNC Chapel Hill, she was quickly overwhelmed. In Roxboro, she had been valedictorian, and she entered college with “full confidence that I would do amazing.” She had always done amazing.
But at Chapel Hill, she wasn’t the smartest student in the room; she was one of thousands of smart students, many of whom had attended high schools with greater resources and college preparation. Everyone else seemed to be fitting in, acing their classes, finding friends. Asheton felt like she was drowning.
Around October of her freshman year, a fellow student living in her dorm died by suicide. Asheton hadn’t known him personally, but she was struck by the similarities of their circumstances: He was from a small town, too, and had dealt with a heavy workload in college. In the wake of his death, other students began to speak more openly about their own challenges.
“People started talking, like, ‘Yeah, I also am struggling with this. I also, you know, feel overwhelmed and feel like I’m not enough.’ And I think when they started talking about it, I realized I wasn’t alone in that, and it really shifted my whole perspective,” Asheton recalled.
She started doing better in her classes and using the mental health resources at Chapel Hill. She became involved in advocacy, and has worked closely with Rural Minds, an organization focused on rural mental health. Asheton and Charlie are both on the steering committee of the Youth Rural Mental Wellness Program at Rural Minds, a pilot program in New York and Pennsylvania that aims to provide resources and assistance for young people with mental health challenges in rural areas.
Asheton’s experiences are likely recognizable to young people across the country, not only because of the universal struggle of trying to find one’s place in a new environment, but because of her closeness to tragedy. Of the six young adults with whom I spoke for this story—individuals of different races, ethnicities, income level, gender, sexuality, and home states—every single one had known someone who had died at a young age in connection with their mental health issues, or whose challenges had nearly resulted in their own death.
Connection with others has provided purpose: Ana as a clinician working with families in Boston and a volunteer at Crisis Text Line; Keontè and Maddie with their poetry and their own volunteer work; Saanvi, Asheton, and Charlie with their advocacy. But they each believe that addressing the mental health of young people will require significant action. This means commitment from schools that need proper funding in order to provide helpful resources, from state and federal governments that must bolster the investment, and from a society that can work harder to destigmatize seeking help.
Although the “Make America Healthy Again” movement has ostensibly made youth mental health a priority, the Trump administration has taken several actions that undermine the federal government’s ability to respond to the crisis, including significant layoffs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the pause on full enforcement of a 2024 rule aimed at more strictly applying the law requiring insurers to implement mental health parity. While a future president could reverse some of the changes made by the Trump administration, they may be hindered by a hollowed-out federal infrastructure, the impermanence of executive actions, and congressional inertia.
There are some efforts in the House and Senate to expand behavioral care services in schools, and both chambers of Congress have bipartisan caucuses focused on mental health that essentially function as working groups. A few rare policies are backed by members of both parties, including further support and establishment of Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, which provide round-the-clock care for mental health crises and substance abuse disorders while meeting federal certification criteria. Pilot programs to cover CCBHC care through Medicaid have been expanded to 31 states, although this could be threatened by cuts to the program implemented by Congress.
Reducing funding for mental health programs is politically unpopular—according to a 2025 National Alliance on Mental Illness/Ipsos survey, 73 percent of Americans “oppose cutting federal jobs and programs focused on mental health services, opioid treatment, suicide prevention programs, and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.” The poll also found that 64 percent of Americans believe Congress is doing too little to address the current state of mental health care, along with 58 percent who say the same of the president. Given its importance, political candidates who prioritize mental health in their campaigns could benefit from focusing on it, particularly at a time when health care remains a major motivating factor for voters.
In the meantime, young adults have taken on the responsibility of destigmatizing the seeking of help at an individual level. Keontè plans to apply for college in the D.C. area so that he can remain involved with Free Minds and his community. In his poem “Redemption,” Keontè ends on a note of hope, recalling how he was able to move forward with his life despite the challenges of his upbringing and incarceration.
I found life in my death and I keep growing
Patience is a virtue I keep showing
My hope is my love for the people so potent
you gotta get with it
He sees the universality of mental health challenges—and that chance for redemption—as a point of connection between young people, regardless of circumstances.
“No matter where you come from, you know, like no matter who you are—you can even be someone who doesn’t have any experience being in the streets, or don’t know anyone who are in the streets. We all have experienced being in the struggle,” said Keontè. “If that’s you, that’s something we can relate on.”
Transcript: How Purple-State Democrats Should Talk About Trans Issues
This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Evan Urquhart, who’s the founder of Assigned Media, which is a website that writes about transgender rights and transgender policy issues.
And what we’re going to talk about today is, there’s been a sort of a discourse last week or so about Democratic candidates, particularly in quote-unquote red or swing or purple districts, talking about transgender issues, in some ways distancing themselves from transgender rights. So Evan and I are going to talk about some of the things that are happening on the campaign trail and what he thinks about them. So Evan, thanks for joining me. Welcome.
Evan Urquhart: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
Bacon: So I’m going to start at the big issue, because I think it’s worth it, and then unpack it from there. Which is that, I read a lot of polls, and they suggest that a majority of Americans are skeptical of transgender athletes playing in sports. I think we should start there, just so that’s lingering here. And therefore, I think the conventional wisdom is, if the majority of Americans are skeptical, that if you’re a Democrat running in a red state or a purple state, you need to take the stance that there should not be transgender athletes, particularly in high school sports. Particularly, really, we’re really talking about transgender girls in sports, is what we’re talking about here.
So talk about that position and talk about that issue specifically. Should Democratic candidates be leery of defending transgender athletes in sports?
Urquhart: Absolutely. I think you’re talking about polling that has shifted over the past five to maybe six or seven years. We’ve seen a clear shift to the right, as the right has made attacks on transgender people central to their policy, central to their platforms. And when we’re thinking about this polling, it’s absolutely true that the right has succeeded in convincing people that there’s some sort of problem going on with trans people in sports.
They have not succeeded in convincing people that this matters. It ranks consistently the absolute bottom of people’s issue priorities. And when you actually look into those numbers and see who actually ranks it high, the people who actually rank it high are people who care a lot about trans rights and support trans rights. Those are the only people in America who are voting based on that issue. So the polling also says that.
And so when you think about, how does a Democrat who is running in a red state approach trans issues? I think the most cautious approach would really be to not alienate that base of voters that cares a lot about getting a Democrat in and that might care about trans issues, but also, no one is saying, Be a fire-breathing, trans issues is my top priority.
I think no one’s really making the argument that they should campaign on trans rights as central to what they’re doing. But I think people are arguing that these attempts to distance themselves from trans rights isn’t really winning anyone over, and might actually be hurting them, in some small way.
Bacon: When I asked my question, you said absolutely. You said absolutely what?
Urquhart: So absolutely, the polling does show that Americans are uncomfortable with trans people playing sports, particularly with trans girls playing sports. And the context of that is that the right has owned this issue. They have presented trans girls as boys who are dominating sports. That has never happened. They have presented trans people as sort of interlopers and fakes who are trying to get one over on people or harm cis women.
That doesn’t exist. But do people feel that it exists now? Are people afraid of it? Yes, that’s absolutely—the polling does show people have been swayed on that issue.
Bacon: So in that sense, do you think Democrats should be doing the thing they’re doing now in red states, the sort of distancing, the saying, “Sports are bad. I oppose transgender athletes in sports.” Is that the position they are required to take, quote unquote?
Urquhart: I don’t think that Democrats need to go so far as to favor bans on sports, or adopt the language of the right and use things like boys and girls sports, or that kind of language.
I do think that a cautious Democrat probably isn’t going to make supporting trans people in sports central to their—so that’s where I’m saying, I don’t think that moving on it is necessary. That isn’t to say—I think saying something like, When was the last time a trans person in sports brought your grocery prices up? And pivoting to an issue that they do feel they can feel good about.
Bacon: So you think the sort of don’t defend trans rights, or just defend trans rights generically and change the subject, is that what you’re suggesting?
Urquhart: Yeah. And accuse the person asking the question of being distracting, of talking about something voters don’t care about, of talking about something perhaps that the politician doesn’t particularly worry about or care about, and kind of pivot to what people are really interested in.
And I think that’s pragmatic politics, is not to fight on this ground where Republicans have weakened Democrats so successfully. I think the thing to have done five years ago was to push back on the attacks and not have the swing in public opinion. But that didn’t happen.
Bacon: I guess the candidates would argue at this point the full distancing is necessary. You think that’s wrong?
Urquhart: Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think that no one is going to vote for a Democratic candidate because they came out for a trans sports ban. No one is on the fence being like, Ah, if they just came out for a trans sports ban, then I would vote for them. I don’t think that person exists. I don’t think the polling shows that person exists. Does the polling show that Americans’ opinions are more like that? Yes. But does it show that they’re making voting decisions based on that? No.
And I think what people miss is that what people do say about Democratic politicians, it’s that they seem weak, that they seem like they’re chasing polls. They seem like they’re not confident. They don’t have principles. They’re not standing up for themselves.
So I think what a Democrat signals when they shift on this very low salience issue that no one cares about is, I don’t really believe anything. I’m just trying to say whatever I think will win your vote. I’m wishy-washy. I’m not really a fighter. I think that’s kind of the risk that they take, in terms of playing into some of these other stereotypes of Democrats.
Bacon: All right. Let’s say that you’re confronted with the sort of, OK, the grocery prices are more important, but let’s talk about this issue. So is the best answer, I want to defer to the local sports authorities? What’s the best answer to the actual question? Should transgender athletes play high school sports? Answer.
Urquhart: Yeah. So I would never counsel a Democratic politician to actually answer questions, because as I understand, they’re not in that business. But for me, I am happy to say the right answer on trans sports is that fairness is important and inclusivity is important, and that it is extremely possible to include trans people in sports without fairness or safety being a problem.
And that the perception that it is a problem is false. It’s based on lies. It has never been a problem, isn’t a problem. And the reason is that trans people’s bodies are very different from cis people of their same birth-assigned gender, and that guardrails already existed to prevent someone from joining a sports team without—day one of coming out as trans and immediately switching into the opposite sex sports team and dominating it. That wasn’t happening. There are reasons why you might be upset if it was happening, but—
Bacon: What are those guardrails, just so people know? What are those guardrails?
Urquhart: Yeah. So usually in high school sports, it was usually decided on a case-by-case basis, where, for example, if an athlete came out, they would start by practicing with the team of their gender, but they wouldn’t be competing. And then generally over time, as if they started hormone therapy or if they started medical treatment, then competing might come into play.
But generally speaking, it was case by case and very slow, but in a way that was trying to be inclusive in allowing that person to participate without potentially compromising fairness.
And there are individual cases. There are trans girls who have never gone through testosterone-fueled puberty because they were on puberty blockers, who were athletically identical already to a cis girl.
So those kids were generally just included on teams from the beginning, because as soon as there were competitive teams, they were the same as their peers. But the reason that Democratic candidates don’t say this is because it takes time to explain how things were already working, already had these kind of guardrails and protections.
Bacon: When you say how things were working, isn’t this how things work, I assume, in like New York or California? What is—how do things work now in the states where they don’t have these bans?
I assume most states do not have these really restrictive bans. So how does it work in—I don’t know where you live. New York, or yeah.
Urquhart: It is a shifting target, because the Republicans and the Trump administration have worked very hard to really try to nationalize these bans. So there are states where there’s still a case-by-case basis, and someone’s sort of physiology and hormone profile and what would make the most sense is still balanced. What’s also balanced is how competitive a team is.
There are these very—at the high school level, at the middle school level, there are these very uncompetitive teams where people have wildly different ability levels, and just generally speaking, whoever shows up plays in those kinds of teams. So those are the kinds of individual decisions that are usually made now.
But even in blue states there have been a lot of efforts to punish schools that are inclusive, to chip away at that inclusivity. I know that at the college level, I think inclusivity is not allowed by the NCAA currently. So it isn’t just in red states. It’s being chipped away at. And there are local towns where these politics have been exploited as well.
Bacon: So we’ve been at 10 minutes here, and this has been a challenging question, so I’m glad I’ve asked it a few different ways now. So if you’re Amy Acton in Ohio, it’s easier to say biological male should not—it’s easier, I can see how they’ve arrived at this simple answer of saying no transgender athletes in sports.
Urquhart: Absolutely. I can see how they’ve arrived. Yeah. It takes time to explain why things weren’t working.
Bacon: Yeah, if you were sitting down with them, how would you start?
Urquhart: It doesn’t take that much time, I think, though, to say, We didn’t have a problem in trans sports. I’ve never seen—trans people haven’t dominated any sports. The most successful trans athlete won one race and lost two. What are we even—when there’s a problem, let’s worry about it, but I don’t see a problem. I think a politician could say something like that.
Bacon: And why do you think they aren’t doing that?
Urquhart: Because I think they are weak and scared, and they think this is a weakness, and they think that if they move, they don’t think they’ll win over more people than they’ll lose. And that is an understandable calculation that a politician would make. I think it is the wrong calculation, because changing your position just allows Republicans to say you’re a waffler, you did this and now you’re saying that. You know what I mean?
So it doesn’t really help you, especially two weeks before the election—or not two weeks, a couple months before the election. It doesn’t really help you to change where you are. It just gives more fuel to the attacks, because the attacks are going to continue, and now they’ll be, And you’re a waffler.
So while I understand why it would be appealing for a Democrat who feels like, I can’t go into this long explanation about hormones and puberty blockers and fairness and inclusivity, I do think it’s a mistake, because I don’t think that there are voters that are being won over by making this pivot.
Bacon: And I guess we should talk about the morals of the question itself. We think transgender athletes should be able to play sports because we think people should be able to play sports. To explain why transgender athletes should be able to play sports, I think it’s obvious, but just talk—
Urquhart: Yeah, I love this question. Because I really do think it’s a great way to think about, what are sports for, right? And I think that sometimes there’s almost two competing thoughts that we have. And one is, athletics are really important for health, for team building, for cooperation, for a sense of self-worth and stuff. We want every child to have it.
And then there’s this other thought which kind of coexists, which is, like, all sports is basically ranking people on a list of, a kindergartner in a soccer team with the World Cup winner, right? And so we need to make sure everyone is in exactly the right spot on that kind of master list of athletes, which is divided into women and men. And that idea I think is silly.
I do think it is important to protect fairness at the Olympics. It’s important to protect fairness when there are these high-stake scholarships and stuff, right? And it’s important to balance that and say, “What does the science show? Can we include people fairly?” But when someone’s just on a soccer team in fifth grade or whatever, it’s important to get that child involved. It’s important to be concerned about that child’s health and their ability to make friendships and their ability to be part of the team.
So trans kids need the benefits of sports that we want all kids to have, and they can’t get those benefits if they’re being othered, disrespected, misgendered, being placed with children who have a completely different hormonal balance and are therefore much bigger and stronger than them because they’ve been on hormone therapy for the last however many years. They’re just not able to play if they can’t play with the appropriate team.
Bacon: I’m glad you distinguished that, because I saw a congressman talk about the fact that a lot of people are concerned because they want their kids to play in college. They want the kids to get a scholarship and play college sports. I agree that might be the case.
I know lots of parents now who are planning their lives around their kids getting a scholarship, but the number of people who get a scholarship to play a sport in America is a very small number, so I find that to be frustrating.
That said, in this conversation I’m a little worried that the one and two collide in this point of—is part of the problem here that everyone’s OK with trans kids playing sports unless they win? Is that the subtext here, right?
I assume what is driving this is, a trans athlete might beat somebody who’s not trans, and that means—and we’re going to disqualify everybody else because that one person might. If trans kids were all playing football, but they were the kicker, I don’t think anybody would really be discussing this, right?
Urquhart: And I think this is the interesting thing, where a very conservative estimate of how many trans people there are would be around 1 percent, right? So if trans people are competing in total fairness and getting the exact amount of achievements that their percent in the population would suggest, then one out of 100 gold medals would go to a trans woman, and that would be, like, a couple gold medals every Olympic. You know what I mean?
And so when people melt down because one trans athlete wins one race, anywhere, that is immediately seen as a sign that something is unfair, that something has gone wrong, as opposed to, “Oh yeah, we’d expect a couple of trans athletes to win some of the time.”
And I think for trans people it is very hard to argue against that idea that if it’s fair, no trans woman would ever win anything. And honestly, I think trans people would take that deal, if we could somehow assure that trans athletes were included, but none of them were ever good enough to win. But you can’t—people have different individual strengths.
Bacon: If you’re setting these bans or anything, a lot of trans kids who would never win anything, right? That almost definitely is the case, right? These bans are going to be overly broad to solve a problem that maybe is really about, did my kid win this soccer game, so they can maybe get a scholarship, so they can not play professional soccer, because very few people do.
Urquhart: Yeah. And I don’t think, at the moment, I don’t think trans people are getting scholarships. Like, even if they’re winning—because the NCAA hasn’t allowed it even. At the high school level, they’re not getting scholarships.
They can still play, they can still win at the high school level, and not be competing for those scholarships, which may be unfair and may be something that’s needed to change, honestly. But is not really a problem that exists in the world.
Bacon: So I’m going to go through some of the statements that have been made recently, and I want to hear what you think about them. This is Josh Turek. He’s running for Senate in Iowa. “As someone that’s spent a lot of my life in high-level sports, I don’t believe that biological males should compete against females in sports.” What do you think about that?
Urquhart: It is heartbreaking to see this fundamental Republican anti-trans extreme idea, which is that trans people are really members of our birth sex, that I am really a woman who is faking, who is pretending to be a man for the purposes of this interview. You know what I mean? That is what he is saying.
He is saying trans people are illegitimate, they are fakers, they need to be weeded out. And I do understand that the fairness issue in sports does create complexity, but using that language where—
Bacon: You mean the biological males? That’s what you’re objecting to. OK.
Urquhart: Biological female. You know what I mean? It’s dehumanizing, it’s hateful, it’s awful. So that’s the worst thing I could see from a Democrat, is using that language.
Bacon: So this is James Talarico of Texas. So I guess first I want to talk about—he is saying, “I oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness.”
Urquhart: Yeah. So I think that Talarico is a really interesting case, because I do think he’s really trying to be cute. He’s really trying to be smart, right? He’s trying to leave himself this out. And this is a much better statement than the one you just read. If a Democrat really feels they have to do this, I would still argue you’re just going to sound wishy-washy. You’re just going to sound like you’re lawyering. I would still argue that find a different way to deal with this question.
But I do think what he is trying to get into the conversation is the possibility that safety and fairness could be protected and we could include people. And I do think that’s the right message, is that if it is possible to protect safety and fairness, which it is—in parentheses, it is possible—then we should value inclusion.
Bacon: Let me press you, because I found, if the comment was if it ensures fairness, that’s what you’re saying. Endangers safety does, I think, get into the sort of—
Urquhart: It does. I’m giving him—I’m not a fan of the choices that Talarico has made, but I’m also not someone who’s so maximalist that I feel like you need to go as hard against someone. The biological males thing is terrible, is hate speech. This is someone trying to be cute. This is someone trying to be clever.
Bacon: He also said, Talarico, he will absolutely vote for a national ban on transgender surgery for minors. I think it’s worth emphasizing, I’m assuming he means he would oppose puberty blockers and bans on those, on the other policies. But on surgery itself, he is for a national ban. And he would absolutely go for that. What do you think about that?
Urquhart: So I once again think that he is trying to be cute, and I think it is at least possible that he believes that he’s talking about genital surgery, which actually doesn’t happen for minors. And so you can say, if you’re trying to be cute, if you’re trying to be clever, you could say, I’m against genital surgery on children. But the problem here is—
Bacon: So meaning that any Republican bill, he could vote against it, because it’s broader than that? You’re saying—
Urquhart: Part of the problem with that framing is that Republicans include puberty blockers as a type of surgery. Because it’s an implant that is like a minor surgery that is done on an outpatient basis in a doctor’s office. It’s like—what’s it called—stitches are a minor surgery. So in that same way, puberty blockers are a surgery. So that’s one problem with saying you oppose surgery, because the Republican bans tend to include puberty blockers as a surgery.
The other problem is that there is a small number of trans boys who, as recently as five or six years ago, were able to access chest masculinizing surgery, including in Texas, because it was desperately needed. And I have spoken to—there is one family in particular that I wrote about who got top surgery for their 14-year-old, and this was a child who had a suicide attempt at 10, and who had since 10 been affirmed in his gender, and was still really struggling with not being able to shower, not wanting to leave the house, not having friends.
And they really thought, This surgery could allow our child to have a more normal life. And it did. And so, I think people believe that these surgeries don’t happen, and the truth is that they’re very rare. But there, again, nothing was going wrong. These were things that were very slowly and carefully decided on by parents and doctors for a small number of children who really needed them.
Bacon: So you do not like Talarico’s position.
Urquhart: So I’m not happy with him. Yeah.
Bacon: OK, so that’s Talarico. I’m going to move to—there’s enough of these. I’m going to do two more, I think. This is Rob Sand, who is in Iowa. Let me see if I can find it quickly here. Sorry about that. Rob Sand says he agrees with Republicans who oppose transgender women and girls playing in sports. He avoided giving a—he just said, “I tend to agree with them on that.” So there’s a law in Iowa that bans transgender athletes from playing sports, and he’s saying he’s for that. What do you think about that?
Urquhart: Yeah, I think that I understand why a politician in a red state would feel like that is the position to take. I think it is, again, as I’ve been talking about, this kind of opening the door for Republican framing of this issue, which really casts trans people as being dangerous or inauthentic or cheaters.
I think is really harmful and really dangerous, and is really going to—once we get hopefully more Democrats in office, trans people’s fight is not going to be over, because we’re going to have to be fighting some of these Democrats to try and get back to where we were just a few years ago. Because we’ve lost rights.
I think something I really want to make sure we bring up in this conversation is that this is not about the trans movement demanding new rights and saying that progress isn’t fast enough, though that is also a very valid thing to do. What we’re saying is, we have been massively attacked and made public enemy number one by the Trump administration. It’s been the absolute tip of the spear. I, in a blue state, can’t renew my passport without having a passport that outs me as trans.
Bacon: What state are you in?
Urquhart: I’m in Massachusetts. But there is a national ban on passports that reflect—and so you can see me. Anyone on this live stream can see me. I would need to have a passport that says that I’m female, and anywhere I traveled internationally would out me as trans, no matter how dangerous.
And I’m a reporter. If I want to report on areas that are dangerous for trans people—and that’s happening in every state. And so we’re at a point where every single trans person has been affected by these attacks.
And so for Democrats to say, They have a point on some of this, it is engendering a lot of hopelessness and a lot of fear in the trans community, because we have been just trying to hold on, hoping that this time would end and we would be able to get back to where we were five years, six years ago. And what Democrats are signaling is, like, No, we’re going to keep things as they are, and maybe even make them worse.
Bacon: So the Sherrod Brown situation would be, these candidates would say, “If we win the election, we’ll be in charge and we would not legislate.” Like, if I’m Josh Turek, I win the election, Chuck Schumer’s the majority leader. I’m the governor if I’m Rob Sand. So I will not push. So even if I say anti-trans stuff on the trail, once I win, I’ll just not do that stuff.
And I’m not a Republican in office, so I won’t—so I think that’s the subtext here, is the best thing you, Evan, can do is shut up and let me win, and then I will just not do this stuff. How do you respond to that?
Urquhart: Yeah. And I do think that’s definitely the discourse that we’ve been having on Twitter, and I’m really glad to kind of get to it. Because the alternative to that is looking at what happened to trans people in the UK under a Labour government. So trans people’s rights in the UK today is roughly similar to a red state, to the worst red states.
They have bathroom bans, they have hospital ward bans. I would be forced to be in a hallway because I can’t be with the women in a hospital, and I can’t be with the men because my biological sex is wrong according to the UK. The most extreme policies, and all of that happened under a Labour government.
And how that started was the Labour government doing these things, saying, The Tories have a point on— And so if what Democrats are saying is, We’re just saying this, we swear we’re not going to do it, A, say that out loud and then lose whatever benefit you think you’re going to get. But if you’re not saying that out loud, I can’t trust that.
Because I’ve seen what’s happened in other places where Democrats have started to say, The Republicans have a point. Maybe trans people are dangerous to women. Maybe trans people healthcare is not right and needs to be regulated differently from all other healthcare.
And once you start saying maybe Republicans have a point, then you need to prove you’re serious about that. We’ve seen this with Democrats on immigration. You have to prove, right? You have to pass laws. It’s ideology. And so I don’t trust that Democrats are just saying it to get elected.
And honestly, I think that the belief that some Democrats just say things to get elected is one of the problems that the Democratic Party has right now. And so if that’s what they’re doing, maybe they should stop doing that.
Bacon: So Amy Acton, who’s going to be governor in Ohio: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor, I will uphold and enforce the law.” Useful because of what you’re saying, which is that Amy Acton is promising to do this in the office, so that’s useful. But her comment about, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports,” what do you think about that?
Urquhart: It is heartbreaking, as someone who has fostered trans-feminine children, who has known families of trans girls, to have these fragile, delicate children that we love portrayed as dangerous, as deviant. She’s almost saying these people are degenerate and we need to get them out of our sport. She’s not—this is not a neutral, defusing the situation type of statement. This is a demonizing and hateful statement.
Bacon: Let me think about the UK point, because I think one thing people are saying is, I’ve named four politicians, they’re running in swing states. But that said, the median Democrat is more like, I was going to say Ed Markey is my guess. Ed Markey’s on the good end. But I think there aren’t a ton of Democrats saying these things.
I still think we’re pretty far from the Democratic Party becoming anti-trans the way the Labour Party is. I think these five people I’ve named are making bad statements. I don’t think the average Democrat sounds like them. Or do you disagree with me? I don’t think we’re close to Labour yet. Or do you think we’re closer than I think?
Urquhart: How would I answer that? It’s interesting, right? Because you don’t know what happens until it happens.
Bacon: What I would say is that, like, Ayanna Pressley, I can name Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey—I can name your whole delegation is not where they stand.
Urquhart: Absolutely. And I don’t want to catastrophize over a very smart four Democrats in all of these races. I don’t want to catastrophize that. That being said, The New York Times is the paper of record and has been waging a campaign to convince the Democrats that they need to go right on trans issues for the last five or six—you know what I mean?
Bacon: The New York Times has been waging a campaign on this, I think, is a great way—an important point here, and I’m glad you said it. The New York Times has a lot of power on the Democratic center left. And they are waging a campaign on trans issues to the right. I’m going to emphasize that. Go ahead.
Urquhart: And certainly the glass half full is that most Democrats have not caved to this pressure. Most Democrats, and I think a lot of Democrats who are trying to be careful, are saying, “I don’t think I gain anything by moving to the right on trans issues. I’ll just try to avoid this issue without pissing off people, when I’m not going to win anyone over.”
But I do think that there is a risk, because there is a very strong—I think it is very appealing to a certain type of person to think, if we just throw over this part of our coalition, everyone in the center is going to love us again, and we’re going to have the kind of decades and decades of Democratic majority that existed in the time of FDR, right?
I think that is something that Democrats really want to believe we’re on the verge of, and that there’s just some tiny little tweak that if they just do that, they’ll get that back again. And I don’t think it is realistic, but I do think it’s what The New York Times is telling them. I do think it’s what Third Way is telling them. I do think it’s a very seductive way of thinking about this. So that’s what I think the risk is.
Bacon: And to make your argument would be, if Talarico, Amy Acton, these people in these sort of pinkish, reddish states win, the argument will be, “This is the way to win a red state.” Or, this is the way to win purple America. So presidential candidates, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, AOC, you need to sign. If you really care about winning and stopping fascism, you need to throw the trans people under the bus, particularly on athletes. Have you seen the poll? James Talarico won in Texas.
Urquhart: Exactly. That’s what I think is the real worry. And I think my ideal outcome in this election would be that all of these Democratic candidates win, and that they underperform relative to other Democrats. You know what I mean?
I’m not rooting against them. But I would love to see them not do as well as other people, and I would love to see polling that suggests that this hurts more than it helps. But, we’ll see.
Bacon: So speaking of someone who—I worry that since the party has decided they’re going to trash him all the time, he’s probably going to underperform. But El-Sayed was asked on this issue, and I think he was asked more about the medical procedures and surgeries. “The decision about healthcare ought to be between the person and their provider. That’s it. Let’s use that standard and keep to that standard, and make sure the government doesn’t have the ability to tell you what you can do with your own life.” What do you think about that?
Urquhart: I think that is exactly the right way to talk about this issue. I think it’s also very real. I think that Republicans have problems with ADHD medication now. They have really politicized healthcare in a way that supplements are good, right, and psychiatric medications are bad. And they have shown that they’re willing to use regulatory power and legislative power to impose this order of what healthcare they think is right for people, against science, against doctors, against what people actually want.
And I do think trans healthcare and abortion care—trans healthcare and birth control are, like, the thin end of the wedge of making people’s healthcare decisions something that is subject to a popular referendum. The polls get to decide whether you get to treat your ADHD or not.
Bacon: Let me finish on what might be a tricky question. When voter ID laws have been pushed over these last 10 years—Amy Acton is maybe breaking this rule, but in general, Democratic politicians have opposed voter ID laws. Voter ID laws are actually very popular as well. The reason they oppose them is that the Black community, NAACP, LDF, have very much said voter ID laws are racist attempts to stop us from voting. If you are a legitimate liberal, you will not support that. And Black people are a very strong part of the Democratic Party, and people feel like part of being a Democrat is defending Black civil rights, and that’s part of being a Democrat.
It feels right now that part of being a liberal Democrat in America does not—you’re not required to fully defend trans rights, and you can be a liberal in good standing without defending trans rights fully, and I think that’s problematic.
So I want you to talk about why defending trans rights should be—I’m not asking you to compare it to race, but I think trans rights are as important as civil rights and part of civil rights, and I think being a good liberal, to me, should include defending trans rights.
Urquhart: So what I’m going to say to this is that I’m not going to put all of the blame on LGBTQ orgs, but I do think that LGBTQ orgs and trans orgs have suffered from being too good of Democratic soldiers. They have been too willing to say, Oh, it’s OK. It’s OK to go a little right on this. It’s OK.
I think they have been bending over backwards to show how loyal they are and how much they’re with the team and pulling in the same direction, to the point where I think those votes have been taken for granted. We deserve those votes. We should get them no matter what.
And I think that these issue organizations really need to—sorry, I just had a person taking something. That these organizations need to understand that they are not part of the Democratic Party, that they have goals that are in alignment with electing Democrats, but they are not identical.
And so I do think Democrats have been given more of a pass from LGBTQ organizations than maybe they have from civil rights organizations, and that one of the things I would like to see is for the LGBTQ community to be saying, We are part of the coalition. We want to help elect good Democrats. Not every Democrat is a good Democrat who we want to help elect. Maybe we sit one out once in a while.
Bacon: For example, Seth Moulton in a blue state, you do not have to elect that person. In fact, you can punish them for saying the wrong thing.
Urquhart: Yeah. And politics is messy. People are trying different things. I think the stakes are very high for trans people. I do think, if you have viewers, listeners who are feeling angry or who are feeling upset about some of the trans people who have been angry and upset and saying they might not vote for these Democrats—usually people who aren’t even in the state, saying they might not vote for Democrats that they wouldn’t vote for anyway—just understand, people are terrified. They’ve lost a lot of rights.
We’ve seen our acceptance that we thought was there dematerialize in a very short amount of time. We’re devastated. We’re trying to take care of each other. We’re trying to help people relocate to states where they’re safer. Give people just a little bit of patience, particularly ordinary people who aren’t candidates, who aren’t organizers, who are just upset and scared online.
Bacon: Yeah. Let’s make sure to emphasize that again as we finish here. We have seen an assault on transgender people over the last year that has been aggressive, and maybe even worse than—they’ve done more to target them than Black people, for sure. Maybe more than immigrants.
We don’t need to do a ranking here, but we have seen a horrible assault the last year and a half on trans people. I think we need to emphasize how bad this has been. So of course you’re looking for allies, not people to triangulate against you, right?
Urquhart: And we’re looking for reassurance that when Democrats are elected, we’ll get some relief from all of this. And I have been trying to gently tell the community, it’s going to be a long fight. We’re not just going to get back to where we were in 2020, next year, or even in 2028. But we need to have reason to think that we’re going to start going in the better direction, that this isn’t just everything continuing to fall apart with Democrats helping.
Bacon: Last thing, and on a positive note. I’m on the progressive end, so Abigail Spanberger, usually not somebody I cheer that much, to be totally honest. But she actually did—in Virginia, I don’t know if you saw this in the news this week, there was Governor Youngkin, who was a Republican, who preceded her, had started a rulemaking process to further ban trans athletes from participating in sports in Virginia.
And it sounds like Spanberger, I’m reading a story, has quietly ended a rulemaking process that would’ve targeted transgender athletes’ ability to play sports and use facilities. So Abigail Spanberger, she didn’t really campaign on this issue. She did more of a, “I’m talking about other issues.” But in office, this is an example of a Democrat who actually is defending trans rights, and not even a progressive, for that matter.
Urquhart: Yeah, no, I think Spanberger is a great example of someone who is a more moderate Democrat in a more purple state, who did not make support for trans rights central in any way to her campaign, but also didn’t make any promises that she was going to continue Youngkin’s anti-trans policies.
And Youngkin was really someone who seemed to have kind of national ambitions and made a point of punishing trans people, particularly trans students, wherever he could in Virginia, and really causing harm to that community. Which, I have family in Virginia, so I kind of know more about that than some other states.
So I appreciate when Democrats signal that there will be an end to this wave of oppression and targeting. Which, again, I would not for a minute say that trans people have it worse than any other community. But we have been a very prominent target, and we have lost a lot in a very short amount of time.
Things that were completely not even really debated, not even questioned. The ability to get a driver’s license that doesn’t out you as trans. People, in Kansas, had their driver’s licenses invalidated overnight and had to get rides to the DMV to get a legal driver’s license, because all of a sudden something that had been uncontroversial was illegal. Just having a driver’s license in the gender that they were living as.
Bacon: Evan, this was a great conversation. I appreciate your candor. I appreciate you joining me. Tell people where they can find your work.
Urquhart: Assignedmedia.org is a daily trans news outlet. We do original reporting. We do analysis and commentary. If you care about trans issues, if you’re interested in what trans people have to say, assignedmedia.org, come and find us. I write for them, but we have a great stable of freelancers and columnists and contributors as well.
Bacon: Great. Evan, thanks for joining me. See you soon. Bye-bye.
You’ll Never Guess Who’s Saving the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal
Nearly two years after an unnoticed amendment to a water resources bill mandated the sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building—a government structure facing the National Mall that contains precious murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and others, which has been called by a leading preservationist “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”—a House committee approved Tuesday a bill that would allow the Cohen to remain in government hands. It’s the first such legislation to make any headway at all. (I’m a little obsessed with the Cohen. For my earlier pieces about it, click here, here, here, here, and here.)
The Cohen building’s plight has conjured some strange bedfellows. The sponsor of the bill to save it is Rep. Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, whose mission statement expressing support for “limited government” is the very antithesis of the social welfare programs celebrated in the Cohen building’s artworks.
Perry is a sworn enemy of the Cohen building’s chief tenants, the Voice of America and its parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM. In 2022 Perry wrote that VOA had “abandoned its sacred mission to authentically promote our Nation’s interests,” and that this was “a dereliction of duty.”
Then, in 2023, Perry introduced a bill that he described as requiring federal agencies “to use at least 60 percent of their office space or sell it.” The bill cleared the House but stalled in the Senate. Perry’s 2023 bill was not good news for the Cohen building. The Cohen’s average daily use was reported last year to be about 30 percent of pre-pandemic levels, so the 2023 bill would have forced the Cohen’s sale even if Republican Senator Joni Ernst hadn’t gotten around to doing so in her 2025 amendment to the water bill. The Cohen building has been lightly occupied in recent years in large part because the first Trump administration ordered VOA to move into new quarters. That decision was reversed at the start of the second Trump administration by Trump’s senior advisor to USAGM, the clueless blowhard Kari Lake. (More on that here.) By then Trump was laying off VOA and USAGM workers left and right in an illegal attemptto shut VOA down.
Now Perry is reversing himself and trying to save the Cohen. I don’t know why—my efforts to contact a spokesperson were unavailing—but I’ll take it. The measure was passed without opposition by the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure. Perry is chairman of its Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management.
I think I can guess why Perry changed his mind. Ben Peters of The Washington Business Journal, who broke the story Wednesday, observed that Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal within the General Services Administration (the executive branch agency that manages federal real estate) told the Public Buildings Reform Board in June that selling the Cohen would require “extremely expensive” construction work to separate the Cohen’s heating and other infrastructure from its sister federal building across C Street. The sister building, the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building, was built at the same time as the Cohen and by the same architect. It’s in use by the Health and Human Services department and the federal government has no interest in selling it. One month after Butterworth brought this news to the Public Buildings Reform Board, the GSA de-listed the Cohen building as a property for sale.
Perry’s bill will help save the Cohen, but it’s not ideal. The House should remove the troublesome parts if (I’m tempted to say “when”) the Democrats retake the chamber in January. The troublesome parts are a series of conditions placed on the Cohen remaining in federal hands. The Cohen must be used as a “swing space to facilitate the sale or major renovation of other federal buildings.” The Trump administration and the District of Columbia government are trying to create a retail and residential district in DC’s Southwest quadrant between the National Mall and the Potomac River, which will require the sale of other federal properties in that area (including, possibly, the Cohen if this bill doesn’t pass). I’m not sure the planning of these sales, or of renovating other federal buildings, requires a space quite so vast as the 1.2 million square-foot Cohen, but so be it.
It would be great if the Cohen’s swing space could be used to renovate the Cohen building itself, which the GSA estimated in 2025 (in a report later suppressed by the Trump administration) to cost about $1 billion. But Perry’s bill stipulates that expenditures on retaining the Cohen may “not exceed any savings realized by the sale or major renovation of any other Federal building.” Savings from building sales aren’t likely to be large. Earlier this year, the GSA sold two Southwest D.C. properties at prices so embarrassingly low—in one instance, for less than one-tenth market value—that the Public Buildings Reform Board suggested all Southwest sales be suspended. And I’m skeptical that any federal building renovation can be shown to save an amount even approaching $1 billion (though the $2.5 billion cost of renovating the Fed, about which Trump is famously apoplectic, well exceeds the proposed cost of renovating the Cohen). The Perry bill thus effectively blocks renovating the Cohen, which needs renovating pretty desperately.
“Living New Deal welcomes news of preservation of the Cohen federal building for future generations,” said Mary Okin, assistant director of the Berkeley-based Living New Deal, a preservation group that’s been fighting to save the building. “We maintain that we would like the modernization feasibility study that charted a future for the Cohen building, which taxpayers paid for, to be released.” If the GSA makes the study public, maybe Congress will approve not just saving the Cohen but repairing it. Still, any movement on a bill to save the Cohen is excellent news.
How Purple-State Democrats Should Talk about Trans Issues
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
Iowa’s Rob Sands, Ohio’s Amy Acton, Texas’s James Talarico, and other Democrats running in GOP-leaning states all have recently stated that they oppose transgender girls playing in sports. In the latest edition of Right Now, Evan Urquhart, the founder of Assigned Media, a site that covers transgender policy issues, discusses those comments. Urquhart urges Democratic candidates in tough states to avoid taking explicitly anti-trans stances or using anti-trans language while also emphasizing their positions on economic policy and other issues instead of transgender rights. He emphasizes that transgender Americans feel under siege from the Trump administration and the right, and they are wary that the Democratic Party will drift rightward on these issues as the Labor Party did in Britain. He praises the approach of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has emphasized that medical decisions should be made by Americans and their doctors when asked about transgender issues.
I’m running against Gail Pellerin: We need to hold onto the heart of Santa Cruz by revising recent housing laws
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
Growing up on the Peninsula, I always felt Santa Cruz held a kind of mystique. Known for its funky vibe, rock and roll shows at The Catalyst, artists and wanderers living that gypsy, peace‑love‑and‑freedom lifestyle, it was a place that felt farther away than the miles on the map indicated. I wanted to check it out, so in the summer of 1979, my best friend and I hitchhiked our way to the coast and spent the summer living the kind of carefree, sun‑bleached, hippy life that only Santa Cruz could make possible.
KINGDOM HEARTS Arrives in FORTNITE
- On September 17th, the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts x Fortnite collaboration will arrive on all platforms.
- Four iconic characters from Kingdom Hearts will be making an appearance, as well as a new mythic weapon skin—the Keyblade.
- Nerdist’s Take: You won’t be raining automatic gunfire down on unsuspecting players as Donald Duck, but this crossover still seems pretty fun.
Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts is a series that has always touched a great deal of universes by its very nature. Now it’s time for Sora and company to board the Battle Bus. The release date for the Kingdom Hearts x Fortnite collab is September 17th, dropping alongside the v42.20 update. After v42.20 goes live and downtime concludes, Fortnite players can expect to have access to all of the Kingdom Hearts content, with the exception of certain cosmetics in the Item Shop, which may release a few hours later. Epic Games hasn’t provided a specific downtime window, but it typically happens in the early morning, EST.
Sora and Co. Are Heading to FortniteThere are four confirmed skins for the Kingdom Hearts x Fortnite crossover—Sora, of course, as well as Roxas, Kairi, and Riku. Each of the new playable characters is expected to come with their own Back Bling and Pickaxes.
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The Keyblade is the highlight weapon addition, serving as both a mythic weapon and Pickaxe. It’s only a reskin of the Typhoon Blade, rather than a fresh new weapon, but it looks sick, so who cares? For the duration of the Kingdom Hearts event, a heart moon will appear in the sky, but there aren’t any other changes to the map reported. You also may see Sora and the gang as NPCs on the Chapter 7 Season 4 Island.
RELATED ARTICLE
Disney Announces KINGDOM HEARTS Animated SeriesOnce available, Fortnite players will be able to purchase one or both Kingdom Hearts bundles, each with two new skins, plus a Back Bling, Pickaxe, and LEGO Fortnite style. A release teases, “Keep an eye out for the Shadow Steppers Kicks, too!” These bundles will cost 2,800 V-bucks apiece. In USD, that’s a little over $25 a pop. That’s a mighty big price tag if you want all of the content in the release. If you’re worried about your wallet and you can be patient, try to hold out for a combined deal in the Item Shop.
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Fortnite x Kingdom Hearts Items, Overrides, and Power Hours
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In addition to the above skins, here are some Kingdom Hearts items, Overrides, and Power Hours that will be heading to Fortnite. A release shares:
Fight the darkness as Sora and friends; KINGDOM HEARTS arrives in Fortnite! Wield the Kingdom Key to unleash a flurry of melee combos, and call down a shocking bolt on your opponents. Need a boost? Grab a Sea Salt Ice Cream to restore some health and shields.
The heart-shaped moon hangs over the Island, and two new KINGDOM HEARTS Overrides spawn beneath it:
- Recovery Override (Squad & Match-Wide): Eliminating a player with any weapon drops healing orbs.
- Level Up Override (Squad): Spawns a Mythic Kingdom Key for each squad member at their current location.
Drop into the KINGDOM HEARTS Power Hours where all players start with the Kingdom Key and a Sea Salt Ice cream this Saturday, September 19 from 2 to 4 PM ET and 9 to 11 PM ET.
Nerdist’s Take: Kingdom Hearts In Fortnite Sounds Like a Fun Mix to Us
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While we would have loved to see Donald Duck in the world of Fortnite, we can see why that might not be a 1:1 match. But we do feel excited to see all our Kingdom Hearts favs arrive in this world of collaborations. Sora and co., we’ll save you a seat next to us on the Battle Bus. And ultimately, it’s an amazing time to be a Kingdom Hearts fan—first an animated series, now a Fortnite collaboration.
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Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.
The post KINGDOM HEARTS Arrives in FORTNITE appeared first on Nerdist.
Trump’s War In Iran Could Spark a Home Heating Crisis
As winter arrives and the weather begins to cool, Americans across the country will be contending with increased heating costs, compounding the economic burdens of persistent inflation and stubbornly high grocery prices. The cost of heating oil in particular is expected to rise sharply, as gas prices overall remain elevated due to the ongoing war with Iran.
A new report by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association found that heating costs will jump by 8.7 percent this winter as compared to last year—more than double the rate of inflation—with American households expected to spend an average of $1,030. Prices will increase for all fuel types, but the spike will be especially dramatic for heating oil users: The NEADA analysis projects that heating oil costs will rise by 31.3 percent this winter.
Although NEADA predicts in its report that heating oil users will spend an average of $2,297 this winter, the number might actually end up being higher. Since the report was written last week, Iran-backed Houthi rebels have captured two islands in the Red Sea, leading to a spike in global oil prices—which in turn affects the cost of heating oil thousands of miles away.
“For average families, you don’t know what the cost of gasoline is going to be next week. If you use heating oil, you don’t know what the cost of heating oil is going to be,” said Mark Wolfe, the executive director of NEADA. “If you’re just a typical family, you know, a working-class family, this is now adding considerable uncertainty to what your budget’s going to be in the next couple of months.”
The price of oil is not expected to lower anytime soon. The Energy Information Administration projects that oil production and trade flows will not return to prewar levels until spring of 2027 at the earliest, with the caveat that some Persian Gulf producers may not be able to reach their previous levels of output.
Heating prices will be especially high in New England and the Middle Atlantic, where more households rely on heating oil. This is due in part to the region’s cold winters, but also because the Northeast is a “legacy market” for heating oil, said Oriya Cohen, policy program manager in the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute. Many of these households will buy in bulk for heating their homes, and changing their fuel source would take more than a few months.
“There’s conversations about helping those homes get connected to the grid, or electrify, or use heat pumps and update their equipment, but again, that’s not something that’s going to happen between now and this winter,” said Cohen.
Meanwhile, because energy costs are far outpacing persistently high inflation rates, the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program, which would normally aid in closing the gap, could offer less bang for its buck. LIHEAP is funded by federal block grants but administered by states, which receive a certain amount based on a specific formula that takes such factors as weather patterns and energy expenditures into account. The budget for LIHEAP was $4.1 billion in fiscal year 2026, which ends in September. NEADA has called on Congress to increase LIHEAP funding to $7 billion to help counter rising costs.
“We know that it’s not meeting the demand for energy assistance that is out there, and with these rising prices this winter, we could expect that it still won’t be able to meet, or it even more so won’t be able to meet that demand,” said Cohen. “If you keep the amount of energy assistance the same, your purchasing power—that money doesn’t go as far as it did two years ago, or as it did four years ago.”
John Howat, senior policy analyst at the National Consumer Law Center, noted that households spent a significant amount on cooling their homes this past summer due to hot weather, which depleted the funds they need to keep their dwellings at a safe temperature this winter. Because the bulk of LIHEAP grants are used by states to address heating needs, Howat believes the program should be funded at higher levels to help families through all seasons.
“With prices going up now, and after this tough summer, we don’t have enough money in that program,” Howat said. “In light of the effects of climate change, we need funding to ensure that cooling assistance is available for people that lack sufficient income to make ends meet.”
LIHEAP reaches only a fraction of eligible households. Only 15 percent of eligible households received LIHEAP assistance in 2025, according to the Edison Electric Institute. It also has specific income requirements based on federal poverty guidelines, and middle-income households that are above those thresholds would not qualify for its assistance.
“Just because you’re not income eligible doesn’t mean you can afford these much higher prices. This is coming on top of food, it’s coming on top of health care, it’s coming on top of rent,” said Wolfe.
Even before the war with Iran, energy costs have been steadily rising over the past several years. The increased cost of electricity is due in part to an uptick in demand, including the energy consumption needs of new data centers providing AI services. But there are other factors contributing to higher prices, including increased natural gas costs (which in turn are affected by factors like global events and climate change), the rollback of federal clean energy subsidies and projects by the Trump administration, and outdated infrastructure in desperate need of updating.
There was also an increase in rates of energy insecurity—a household’s inability to meet daily energy needs—between 2020 and 2024, according to Energy Information Administration data. Those rates were especially high for Native American, Black, and Hispanic households, as well as very low-income households.
Energy insecurity can lead to a variety of negative health outcomes, as people forgo other necessities to ensure that their house is adequately heated or cooled, or have their energy service disconnected altogether. The impacts of policies like redlining are still being felt, with communities in formerly redlined areas more likely to experience energy disconnections. As energy prices spike, those energy insecure households living in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods will see those struggles compounded.
“Absent some very intentional, purposive actions by legislators, regulators at the state and federal levels, these historical problems are just going to get worse,” said Howat.
‘La música está en mi sangre’: el cantante de Santana, Andy Vargas, regresa a Watsonville para presentarse con su padre en la Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz
Esta traducción fue generada utilizando inteligencia artificial y ha sido revisada por un hablante nativo de español; si bien nos esforzamos por lograr precisión, pueden ocurrir algunos errores de traducción. Para leer el artículo en inglés, haga clic aquí.
Cuando Andy Vargas, oriundo de Watsonville, se presentó por primera vez en la Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz a los siete años, jamás pudo imaginar que décadas después regresaría a ese mismo escenario para ofrecer un concierto de reencuentro con su comunidad.
Ahora, el cantante principal de Santana se presentará el viernes en el recinto ferial, acompañado por su padre, Javier Vargas, quien dirige Mariachi California de Javier Vargas. Aunque la banda de Javier se ha convertido en una presencia habitual en la feria del condado durante los últimos 30 años, esta será la primera vez que Andy regrese al escenario de la feria.
“Esta es una experiencia única en la vida que quiero conservar para siempre,” dijo Andy a Lookout desde Las Vegas, donde Santana se encuentra actualmente tocando. “Cuando empezamos a organizar todo esto, sabía que tenía que atesorar cada segundo. Aquí fue donde comencé, de una manera muy humilde, y regresar para hacer esto con mi papá es muy importante para mí.”
Ver a Andy regresar a Watsonville para presentarse en la feria del condado —un lugar que fue el punto de partida de su carrera musical— representa para Javier un momento en el que todo cierra un círculo. Él tuvo un asiento de primera fila para presenciar aquellos momentos formativos en el camino musical de su hijo.
“Solo pueden imaginarse cómo me siento,” dijo Javier.
El viernes por la noche, Mariachi California será el grupo encargado de abrir el espectáculo de Andy, y Javier se unirá a su hijo y a su banda, La Verdad, para interpretar algunas canciones durante su presentación. Según Javier, el dúo de padre e hijo planea interpretar una combinación de música de mariachi y canciones de Andy. Será la primera vez en años que ambos subirán juntos al escenario.
Andy creció actuando con la banda de Javier en reuniones familiares y celebraciones locales, y recuerda haber asistido a la feria del condado todos los años. Cuando se presentó por primera vez en la feria, a los siete años, Javier fue quien lo presentó ante el público.
Andy Vargas actúa actualmente en Las Vegas con Santana como vocalista principal de la banda. Credit: Metal Rich Pics
“La música está en mi sangre,” dijo Andy, quien actualmente se presenta con Santana en su residencia en House of Blues Las Vegas. “Estoy muy agradecido de que la música sea la fuerza que impulsa mi vida, lo que me permite mantener a mi familia y a mí mismo, y lo que me inspira todos los días.”
Andy conoció a Santana en Watsonville cuando la banda llegó a la escuela secundaria Watsonville High para ofrecer un concierto benéfico tras el terremoto de Loma Prieta de 1989. Aunque Andy nunca pudo haber previsto que algún día formaría parte de Santana, la música “permaneció en mi corazón,” él dijo.
Andy explicó que ha podido llevar sus raíces en el mariachi y en la música tradicional española a Santana, y agradeció a su padre por haberle inculcado una “visión mundial de la música.”
“Uno de los consejos que le di a mi hijo fue que, si iba a convertirse en cantante o músico, tenía que ser capaz de cantar bien en ambos idiomas, inglés y español,” dijo Javier.
Andy contó que su época como estudiante en Watsonville High School también estuvo llena de música: interpretó a Tony en la producción escolar de “West Side Story” y recuerda cantar con sus amigos durante el almuerzo y en el concurso anual de talentos. También trabajó como DJ durante toda la secundaria, actuando en eventos por todo Watsonville.
La presentación de Andy del viernes por la noche es muy esperada por la comunidad. Javier le contó a Lookout que, año tras año, los asistentes y organizadores de la feria le hacían la misma pregunta: ¿Cuándo viene Andy a presentarse en la feria?
“Todo era cuestión de tiempo,” dijo Javier. “Casi siempre, Andy estaba fuera del país de gira con Santana, y este año está de gira en Las Vegas, lo que le da la flexibilidad para venir.”
El interés de la comunidad por ver a Andy no es algo nuevo para Javier. Cuando Andy crecía en Watsonville, muchos de los clientes de Javier le pedían que se asegurara de llevar a Andy a las numerosas quinceañeras y bodas en las que tocaba.
“Yo les decía que mi hijo me acompañaba cuando podía porque en ese entonces todavía estaba estudiando,” dijo Javier.
Andy destacó su agradecimiento por el apoyo que su familia y toda la comunidad de Watsonville le han brindado a lo largo de los años. Su madre, sus tíos y sus tías también planean asistir al espectáculo del viernes. “Definitivamente será un asunto de familia,” dijo Andy.
Por encima de todo, considera que la presentación de este fin de semana es una manera de devolverle algo a su padre.
“Ha estado presentándose en el recinto ferial desde que tengo memoria, recorriendo todo el lugar con su magia y haciendo felices a todos,” dijo Andy. “Estoy muy feliz de poder iluminar su trayectoria en nuestra comunidad y de poder acompañarlo en ello.”
The post ‘La música está en mi sangre’: el cantante de Santana, Andy Vargas, regresa a Watsonville para presentarse con su padre en la Feria del Condado de Santa Cruz appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Government Digital Service move 'grinds gears' in UK's e-government
The tradition continues: Opening day at the Santa Cruz County Fair
The Santa Cruz County Fair is back, bringing five days of rides, livestock, food, music and community celebrations to Watsonville.
Victoria, 6, from Watsonville, holds up carrots from an agricultural box for kids at the fairgrounds. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Wednesday’s opening day drew families and fairgoers to the fairgrounds, kicking off this year’s event with the familiar sights and sounds of the county fair, from carnival rides and midway games to agricultural exhibits and local vendors.
Trump’s Iran Fiasco Takes Humiliating Turn as Leaks Grow More Damning
Donald Trump has once again stepped up his threats to entirely wipe out Iran, but it somehow isn’t forcing Iran to make the deal he wants. The emptiness of the threats is embarrassing enough. But now, CBS News has published a series of extraordinary photographs of American bases and equipment abroad badly damaged by Iranian attacks. These pictures were leaked by anonymous U.S. service-members who did this because the truth about Trump’s war is being suppressed. As one put it: “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public.” Given the tight controls that Trump and Pete Hegseth have tried to impose on their war propaganda, this is even more humiliating for them. We talked to international relations expert Nicholas Grossman. We discuss all the ways that Trump’s Iran quagmire is deepening, why those photos tell a deeply unnerving story about our nation, what’s wrong with Trump’s conception of “strength,” and why MAGA’s theory of war and power is leading us into catastrophe. Listen to this episode here.
Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case
How the most powerful woman in California government is making her mark on the Legislature
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
The last deal of the legislative session was supposed to be a win for Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón.
After weeks of negotiations, and at least one sleepless night, Limón’s team backed a plan to address the ballooning costs of wildfires that they said would protect survivors and keep utilities on the hook for fires their equipment caused. The Senate had stood firm against Gov. Gavin Newsom — not folding on all the ways he wanted to spread wildfire costs around while reducing them for utility companies.
Then it all came crumbling down.
During an hourlong caucus meeting on the final morning of the legislative session, far past the eleventh hour, the Assembly decided to walk away from the compromise Limón brokered with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and the governor. In abandoning the deal, Rivas – whose district includes parts of Santa Cruz County – said it didn’t “deliver the relief, accountability or meaningful reform that Californians deserve.” Utilities and electrical workers had waged a dayslong lobbying effort to undermine the deal.
Soon after the Assembly killed the deal, Limón told reporters the Senate had the votes to approve the measure.
“There certainly is a sense of disappointment,” she said, flanked by seven other members of the caucus, to whom she encouraged reporters to ask additional questions.
Ever since Limón’s colleagues elected the Democratic senator from Santa Barbara as their leader last summer, one thing has been clear: She wants the spotlight on her caucus, not on herself.
Interviews with current and former legislators and staff paint a picture of a leader who eschews the top-down approach. In contrast to her predecessor Sen. Mike McGuire, who many members and staff have privately characterized as a micromanager, Limón took time to reach consensus with her colleagues and gave senators more authority on issues they’re passionate about.
While she did not finish the session with a blockbuster victory to tout, Limón in her first year as pro tem made meaningful, albeit incremental, progress on thorny topics such as new taxes and changes to sexual assault liability, and protected her caucus from several particularly difficult votes on politically fraught issues from the governor.
And while a tough budget year threatened to fracture the caucus and test the limits of a “govern by consensus” strategy, the Senate leader’s biggest wins came largely because she kept her colleagues united even at the expense of alienating the governor.
“Our ability to effectively get items across the finish line is not based simply on, you know, one or two or three or four members,” she said in an interview with CalMatters. “I think it is the caucus itself.”
And for some members of Limón’s caucus, even the failed wildfire deal still amounted to a win.
“We did not come out looking like we couldn’t make a decision,” said Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat. “We were united in a decision that was made, and we stayed true to it.”
Threading the needle on budget woesAt the beginning of the year, Limón stared down the possibility of a legislative session rife with conflict given the state’s gloomy budget outlook and a host of priorities competing for limited funds.
The governor’s budget proposal primarily sought to capitalize on the windfall of artificial intelligence revenue and pad the state’s rainy day fund. The idea of passing any new taxes to patch holes left by federal cuts and shore up the state’s long-term revenue shortfalls seemed like a long shot given Newsom’s presidential ambitions, especially given the Legislature’s desire to lower Californians’ cost of living on the eve of an election.
Monique Limón was elected to the California Senate in 2020 after a stint in the Assembly. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters/Pool
Yet Limón and her caucus forged ahead with plans for a new tax known as the “fair share plan,” which would require corporations with a large number of employees on Medi-Cal to pay a payroll tax to help fund those employees’ healthcare.
The caucus united behind the idea during a two-day budget retreat in the early spring, according to Sen. John Laird, Limón’s pick to chair the chamber’s budget committee and whose district includes Santa Cruz County. The Senate’s budget plan, released in April, included the tax. A month later, Newsom indicated he’d be open to new revenue sources. From there, Laird said, Limón and Senate Democrats pressed the Assembly to get on board with the idea of at least studying the issue.
Ultimately, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 177, a watered-down version that ordered a study on how the state could implement such a tax, and Newsom signed it in July. Still, Limón’s camp considered it a win — Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra embraced the tax proposal and committed to implementing it if elected governor.
“She took a united caucus into the negotiations, and so I think it was a high level of skill that sort of navigated all the differences in the caucus to get to a unified position,” Laird said.
Sen. Eloise Gómez-Reyes, one of five women of color serving as budget subcommittee leaders under Laird, attributes some of the collaborative spirit to the number of women in leadership positions.
“I will tell you that when we got together for the first time, when we looked around the room, we said, ‘Hey, this is wonderful,’” she said, of the budget leaders.
Laird said, too, that as a member of Limón’s leadership team and the rules committee, which manages internal Senate business such as assigning bills to committees, he often found himself in a room full of women. He pointed out that he graduated from college before 1976, when the first woman was elected to the state Senate. The Senate reached gender parity in 2024 and maintains equal representation.
“It’s not a white guy herding everybody around,” Laird said. “There’s diversity in the caucus, and everybody sees it in the leadership and sees it in the inclusion of all the Democratic senators.”
Committed to justice for victimsSen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Pasadena Democrat who represents the fire-torn community of Altadena, said she was pleased Limón included her in the Senate’s working group to address wildfire liability.
California’s three major investor-owned utilities, a formidable and wealthy force in state politics, have lobbied Newsom hard to decrease the amount they have to pay after their own equipment causes wildfires. The utilities called for banning a practice known as “subrogation,” in which insurance companies try to recoup what they paid in policyholder claims from responsible parties, such as utilities.
Limón, who previously went to bat for survivors of the 2018 Thomas fire in her own district, told Pérez she wanted to ensure victims were central to any policy the Senate endorsed.
“I recognize that that was not something that she needed to do,” Pérez said. “So it certainly meant a lot to me and it’s meant a lot to my constituents, too.”
Pérez said Limón took time to meet hundreds of residents from Altadena who traveled to Sacramento to share their frustrations about the governor’s suggested plan to roll back subrogation and cap noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering for victims. At the victims’ behest, the Senate successfully pushed to eliminate those two contentious proposals from the deal.
Similarly, Limón prioritized including sexual assault survivors during discussions between the two houses over how the state could help cash-strapped local governments and school districts that were being sued by people who say they were sexually assaulted as children by employees of those entities.
Sen. Caroline Menjivar speaks during the swearing-in ceremony for Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Jan. 5, 2026. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters/Pool
Menjivar said Limón appointed her to the working group addressing sexual assault liability partially because of her background as a social worker. As a representative for Los Angeles County, which has paid close to $5 billion to survivors, Menjivar’s district is in the thick of the issue. When the Senate first attempted to broker a deal on the rising costs last year, Menjivar was one of five senators, including Limón, who did not back the plan that she felt limited survivors’ rights too much.
While cities, counties and school districts wanted to cap the amount of money that survivors could seek in damages, survivor advocates were adamant that any damage limit equated to putting a price tag on their assaults. Limón and the Senate Democratic caucus largely agreed with survivors and refused to accept any plan that included damage caps. Such limits were not included in the final deal, which also introduced several new strategies and safeguards intended to prevent child sexual assault in the first place.
“To listen to the people that were the most vulnerable and had no special interest funding really just showed incredible, like, strength as a leader,” said Chantel Johnson, an advocate for foster and justice-involved youth with the Youth Law Center. “We certainly could have been left out of it.”
Going against the governorOver the summer, Limón made the rare move of not bringing up two controversial parole commissioners who Newsom reappointed to their posts after they authorized the release of men who were convicted of sexually abusing children in the 1990s, a decision that flew under the radar of both the press and Republican legislators.
The tactic prevented Democratic senators from having to vote on politically unpalatable appointees and left two parole board veterans without a job. Criminal justice advocates said it further politicized the process. Newsom’s office declined to comment on the decision.
Limón’s office also let local representatives weigh in on other priorities of the governor, including the tech billionaire-backed California Forever proposal for a shipbuilding facility in Solano County and a proposed environmental carve-out for a developer in Santa Monica. Both failed in the final hours of the legislative session last month.
Outgoing Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones, of San Diego, said Limón took a stronger stand against the governor than her predecessors.
Especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones said, “the Legislature just let the governor lead them around by their noses, so to speak,” he said. This year, he said, lawmakers were aware of the governor’s priority projects and then “they never came.”
Incoming Republican leader Sen. Roger Niello of Roseville said the pro tem is popular on both sides of the aisle, and is always “accessible” to hear his party’s perspective.
The one upcoming challenge he sees for Limón is figuring out when it’s time to step aside and usher in a new pro tem, a process that can either be organized or an “overthrow.” All legislators have 12-year term limits, and Limón’s term ends in 2028.
“A leader has to know when it’s time to change,” he said.
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The post How the most powerful woman in California government is making her mark on the Legislature appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Letter to the editor: AB 715 creates a perverse hierarchy of protection
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
I disagree with Gil Stein’s op-ed, “What California’s new antisemitism law means for Santa Cruz County schools,” and his support for Assembly Bill 715.