Warning: This post contains light spoilers for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

There have been many Spider-Men since the character was introduced in the comics in 1962. First, there were the TV shows. Then came Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man in 2002, before Andrew Garfield assumed the role in 2012. In 2016, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a slate of three movies (in addition to appearances in other MCU films), the last of which saw all of the modern Spider-Men meet up for the first time with the villains they’ve faced off against. In 2018, Miles Morales made his big-screen debut in the animated hit Into The Spider-Verse, which reveals that all of the Spider-People are connected through the Spider-Verse.
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Into The Spider-Verse introduced a whole team of Spider-People, including Spider-Man (Jake Johnson), Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), and Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). Their coexistence is explained by a multiverse with many dimensions. In the latest Miles-led film, Across The Spider-Verse, audiences get a greater understanding of the vastness of the multiverse. The number of Spider-People can get a little unwieldy, so here’s a primer on who each of the key webslingers are and who they were in the comic books before making their movie debuts.

Miles Morales (Shameik Moore)

Miles Morales, our main protagonist, is a Black and Puerto Rican high school student from Brooklyn. Much like the other Spider-Men, he was bitten by a radioactive spider and was given superpowers in his dimension of Earth-1610. He meets Gwen Stacy in the first Spider-Verse movie and she comes back to visit him in the second installment, which kicks off a series of events that unfold throughout Across The Spider-Verse. His father was recently promoted to captain of the police force, a development which drives the tension in the new movie. Miles is also up against a supervillain named The Spot (f.k.a. Dr. Jonathan Ohnn, voiced by Jason Schwartzman), who has set out to destroy everything he loves.

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In the comics, Miles’ story is similar to the movie, but more bleak. He received powers from a genetically modified spider that his uncle, Aaron Davis (a.k.a. Prowler), stole from Oscorp. But Miles assumes the role of Spider-Man after Spider-Man dies at the hands of the Green Goblin. He feels guilt over what happened and meets up with Jessica Drew at S.H.I.E.L.D., who gives him a uniform as he officially assumes the role of Spider-Man.

Read More: The Story Behind the Spider-Man Pointing Scene in Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld)

After being bitten by a radioactive spider on her home world of Earth-65, Gwen was turned into Spider-Woman, the one and only Spider-Person in her universe. This resulted in her best friend, the Peter Parker of her dimension, turning himself into Earth-65’s version of the villainous Lizard. Believing she was fighting a mindless monster, Gwen battled the Lizard—only to realize it was Peter all along when his mangled body morphed back into human form. That was also the moment that Gwen’s father, Captain George Stacy, arrived on the scene and became convinced that Spider-Woman was responsible for an innocent Peter’s death.

Gwen first teamed up with Miles in Into the Spider-Verse when Kingpin’s super collider disrupted the multiverse and pulled her into his dimension. The two eventually developed what seemed to be a budding romantic connection. In the comics, the character of Spider-Gwen, created by Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez, made her first appearance in the 2014 miniseries Edge of Spider-Verse. She is now the star of her own ongoing series, Spider-Gwen.

Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac)

Miguel O’Hara is the melodramatic anti-hero from Earth-928 in Across The Spider-Verse. When we are first introduced to him, we learn that he’s the leader of an inter-dimensional effort to wrangle all of the “anomalies” that have escaped to other dimensions. He and Jessica Drew meet Gwen Stacey during a fight and O’Hara takes Gwen under his wing, begrudgingly. His main objective is to keep the Spider-Verse intact because he’s seen first-hand the destabilizing effect of trying to alter the course of events in one dimension.

O’Hara was the first non-White Spider-Man in the Marvel comics when he was introduced to the world in 1992. His story was a bit different from the other Spider-People. O’Hara was the head of genetics at Alchemax and attempted to replicate Spider-Man’s powers. He was addicted to a drug called Rapture and threw himself into his experiments to curb his addiction. When he was experimenting, his coworker sabotaged his machine and his DNA became 50 percent spider. He became Spider-Man 2099 and joined forces with Peter Parker to fight alternate versions of Peter’s most infamous villains.

Read More: What to Know About Miguel O’Hara a.k.a. Spider-Man 2099 in Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Jessica Drew (Issa Rae)

Making her first film appearance in Across the Spider-Verse, Jessica Drew is the Spider-Woman of Earth-404 and Marvel’s first pregnant superhero to hit the big screen. She originally shows up to help Gwen and Miguel defeat the version of the Vulture that has appeared on Gwen’s home world of Earth-65. As Miguel’s right-hand Spider-Person, she then convinces him to let Gwen come back with them to Spider-Society headquarters and becomes Gwen’s mentor as she trains with them.

In the Ultimate Marvel comics, Jessica Drew, a character created by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley, is a female clone of Peter Parker who was engineered by Doctor Octopus during the “Clone Saga” storyline. Her character’s pregnancy was introduced in a 2015 issue of Spider-Woman by Dennis Hopeless and Javier Rodriguez.

Spider-Punk (Daniel Kalyuua)

Hobie Brown, a.k.a. Spider-Punk, is a laid-back, anti-establishment, punk rocker from Earth-138, who dons an electric guitar while fighting villains in Across The Spider-Verse. Gwen brings up Hobie’s name when she catches Miles up about the people she’s met in different dimensions, and he helps the two of them fight The Spot. After the fight, Gwen brings them to the Spider-Man HQ and he delivers some great one-liners.

Spider-Punk is relatively new to the Spider-Verse world. He was first introduced in 2015 as an unhoused youth and was bitten by a radioactive spider that was mutated due to President Norman Osborn’s dumping of toxic waste. He joins forces with Captain Anarchy and Earth-138’s Hulk (Robbie Banner) to fight for freedom against oppressive power structures.

Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson)

When Peter B. was pulled into Miles’ universe in Into the Spider-Verse, he had no interest in helping Miles defeat Kingpin, let alone becoming Miles’ mentor. After more than two decades of fighting crime as the Spider-Man of Earth-616, Peter B. was worn out both physically and emotionally. Luckily, Miles and the Spider-Gang helped reinvigorate Peter B.’s enthusiasm for being a hero and he returned to his universe ready to turn his life around.

In Across the Spider-Verse, we learn that Peter B. made things right with his wife, Mary Jane, and the two had a child together. Peter B. expresses hope that his daughter will turn out to be like Miles. In the comics, Earth-616’s Spider-Man shares a backstory with Peter. B Parker, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni)

Pavitr’s Mumbattan on Earth-50101 in Across The Spider-Verse is the setting for a major juncture in the new movie’s plot. Gwen travels to this dimension to find The Spot and Miles ends up following her. While there, they meet the fast-talking yet charming Pavitr Prabhakar (voiced by Karan Soni). He helps Gwen, Spider-Punk, and Miles fight The Spot, but while the team is not able to apprehend the villain, Miles disrupts a “canon event,” which could have catastrophic consequences for the Spider-Verse. Pavitr has a lovable, optimistic attitude that make him a great addition to the movie.

In the comics, his character was born in a village that was home to a coveted amulet for which supervillains were searching. Pavitr moves out of his village to Mumbai and when he leaves, the villain Oberoi destroys his home village with everyone in it while looking for the amulet. With this heavy grievance, he seeks the help of a superpowered entity named Master Weaver, who helps him unlock his spider powers. From there, he became the protector of Mumbai.

The Duggar Family, best known for a series of reality TV shows based around their lives, are at the center of Amazon Prime’s latest docuseries, Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, out June 2. The series digs into the headline-making scandals that have surrounded the family and the cult-like religious group they promoted, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).

The Duggars’ most notable show was TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, which followed the daily lives of married couple Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children for ten seasons between 2008 and 2015. The series presented a seemingly cohesive family unit, but Shiny Happy People, which includes testimonies from daughter Jill (Duggar) Dillard, her husband Derick Dillard, niece Amy (Duggar) King, as well as several former IBLP members, reveals that the family and larger religious group was dealing with allegations of sex abuse, child abuse and financial mistreatment.
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“They believe that they’re populating the army that will help us,” says Tia Levings, a former congregant of the IBLP interviewed in the series. “The Duggars’ TV show was the engine for letting this thrive. The shiny happy images is the sugar and we’re all high on it.”

Here are the major takeaways from the docuseries.

Read more: How Docu-Mania Took Streaming by Storm, From Tiger King to WeWork

Behind the scenes of 19 Kids and Counting

Jim Bob Duggar’s reality stardom stemmed from his political career. In 2002, after four years serving as Republican Arkansas state representative, he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Though he didn’t win, he did grab the attention of Discovery Network, whose executives took notice of media images of his large family attending campaign events.

“Jim Bob and his family are at the right place at the right time,” says Kristin Kobes DuMez, a professor of history and gender studies at Michigan’s Calvin University, in the documentary. “Jim Bob is presented with a new opportunity which will give him the power to present his values to the entire country and an opportunity to make a lot of money.”

The television network, which included channels like TLC, started programming with the Duggars in 2004, eventually releasing 14 Children and Pregnant Again!, 17 Kids and Counting, and 19 Kids and Counting. The shows were all hits, with millions of viewers tuning in to see how the large family managed to do everyday tasks like laundry, chores, grocery shopping, and commuting while somehow appearing organized and peaceful.

The show was a boon for the network. “Reality TV can take a network that is not exactly a juggernaut in terms of performances and really give it new life,” says Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us, in the documentary. The Duggars’ shows, she explains, gave the network a new life, with inexpensive production yielding high viewership and return.

Read more: The 50 Most Influential Reality TV Seasons of All Time

The Institute of Basic Life Principles and its founder, Bill Gothard

The Duggars followed the teachings of IBLP, a Christian organization that has been described by former members as cult-like. IBLP has shared estimates that over 2 million people have attended their seminars. While its founder was fundamentalist Bill Gothard, it would be The Duggars who became their most notable congregants. “For scientology, the gateway for most people was Tom Cruise. In a lot of ways that’s exactly what the Duggars were for Bill Gothard,” says pastor and journalist Josh Pease in the documentary.

The organization, which Gothard founded in 1961, was strict in its teachings and consistently reinforced gender norms. Rules included wearing modest clothing like “pantaloons,” homeschooling children with Gothard’s “Advanced Training Institute” curriculum, disciplining children with spanking, and as The Duggars’ embodied, having as many children as possible. It also forbade watching television, somewhat ironic given the Duggars’ eventual livelihood. Gothard often referenced a bible verse from Psalm 127:5: “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” As the documentary points out, Gothard himself, in another ironic twist, had no wife, nor children.

The documentary underlines the ways in which several of the congregants felt undereducated, abused, and mistreated from IBLP teachings. “It’s patriarchal, it’s authoritarian, women don’t have rights, children break,” says former member Levings of the group. “That’s the society that they’re building.”

In 2014, Gothard would step down from his position due to several sexual harassment allegations from former female congregants. “It almost feels like whatever was repressed inside of Gothard was spilling out into him testing boundaries on how far he could go with someone before they’d freak out,” says Pease.

Gothard declined to comment for the series and has previously denied the allegations made against him.

Daughter Jill Duggar on Abuse From Brother Josh Duggar

As the eldest child of the bunch, Josh Duggar became a public figure apart from his family. He got married, had seven children, and became involved in politics, working for a conservative lobbying group.

In 2015, In Touch Magazine published a story based on a decade-old police report that stated that Josh had forcibly touched at least five girls including his sisters Jill and Jessa Duggar. The sisters sat for an interview with then Fox-anchor Megyn Kelly to discuss the incident, where they primarily came to their brother’s defense. “In our case it’s very mild compared to what happens to some,” Jill Duggar said on Kelly’s program. In 2003, over a decade before the police report was made public, Josh Duggar privately admitted to the allegations to his parents and was sent to a Christian program for disciplining. Duggar was never charged with any crimes stemming from those allegations.

Eight years after the Kelly interview, Jill Duggar sets the record straight in the documentary: “In hindsight I wouldn’t have done the Megyn Kelly stuff. I felt like I was in a place of like burying the burden and the weight,” she said in the documentary. “Even though you volunteer you feel obligated to help.” Her husband Derick Dillard rebuts, “It was not voluntary,” explaining that Jill had felt that the continuation of the show rested on her and her sister’s shoulders.

19 Kids and Counting was canceled following the scandal, but TLC carried on with multiple spin-offs with a focus on the young women, including Jill and Jessa Counting On and Jill’s Wedding, which at the time was the highest-rated show in TLC history. Jill reveals in the doc that neither she nor any of her siblings received any compensation for appearing in these shows. Jim Bob Duggar reportedly got paid millions, according to the documentary. “Yes, we were taken advantage of,” says Jill . “For seven and half years of my adult life I never got paid.”

In May 2021, Josh Duggar was convicted on child pornography charges. He is currently serving 12 years in federal prison in Texas.

The Future of the Duggars, IBLP, and the Joshua Generation

Amid the federal child porn investigation into his son, Jim Bob Duggar ran for State Senate in Arkansas and lost. Although IBLP founder Gothard has stepped down, Jim Bob Duggar has continued to lead the group. He remains married to his wife. They sent a brief statement via their representative to the filmmakers stating they “love each of their children tremendously and always desire each live their god-designed lives to the fullest.”

The enrollment option for IBLP’s homeschooling program “Advanced Training Institute” concluded in 2021, although booklets for the teachings are still available online.

Alex Harris, a lawyer who grew up in the Christian homeschooling movement and had IBLP peers, says the teachings of Gothard and the IBLP have led to the newer iteration of the Joshua Generation, a political Christian youth group that emulates its fundamentalist teachings. “The whole purpose was really to position the best and the brightest of the Christian homeschool movement to assume positions of power and influence in the government and the law,” he says in the documentary. Former Congressman Madison Cawthorn, who served one term representing North Carolina, has been linked to the group.

With the emergence of social media and content creation platforms like YouTube and TikTok that don’t require an intermediary or network like TLC, Duggar family members like Jill Duggar and former members of the fundamentalist movement are increasingly choosing to share their stories online.

“We had this power the entire time over the people who were hurting us,” says ex-IBLP member Chad Harris. “It turns out as much as they try to control us we were ultimately what they most feared and all we had to do was talk.”

In an overture designed to reverse years of stalled diplomacy, the Biden Administration sought Friday to rekindle nuclear arms-control negotiations with Russia and China without preconditions.

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. wants to establish a framework for nuclear arms reduction before the last remaining arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia expires. The public appeal to Moscow and Beijing comes amid escalating tensions with both nations, marked by the war in Ukraine and a series of public spats with China. Since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, both Russia and China have opted to wield their arsenals to coerce neighbors and deter adversaries.
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The U.S. is nonetheless willing to engage one-on-one or multilaterally, Sullivan said, stressing the importance of conversation as anxieties rise. “We’re entering a new era, one that demands new strategies and solutions to achieve the goals we’ve always had: prevent an arms race, reduce the risk of misperception and escalation, and most importantly, ensure the safety and security of our people and people around the world from nuclear threats,” Sullivan said Friday at an event held by the Arms Control Association, a Washington advocacy group.

Read more: U.S. Unveils Strategy for Nuclear Threats from China and Russia.

The challenges are stark. Deteriorating relations between Washington and Moscow has led to the dissolution of key nuclear treaties that helped maintain strategic stability since the end of World War II. The last remaining pact, known as the New START Treaty, is scheduled to expire in Feb. 2026, and President Vladimir Putin has suspended Russia’s participation. The U.S. and Russia are not currently engaging in meaningful talks. If New START lapses without a follow-on deal, it would be the first time since 1972 that the two leading nuclear nations, who together control 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, were without an agreement governing their strategic stockpiles.

China, meanwhile, has never been part of a nuclear-arms agreement and has shown no signs of reining in its weapons programs. China’s unwillingness to engage with the U.S. has raised questions about the two superpowers’ ability to collaborate on nuclear arms reductions.

Arms control agreement take years to craft before all details are ironed out and agreed upon. “We are under no illusions about the task at hand, of the hard work, and likely the long work, needed to help lay a new, stronger foundation for this era,” Sullivan said in his speech Friday.

Sullivan acknowledged the war in Ukraine posed a hurdle to such negotiations. Russian President Vladimir Putin has continually chosen to rattle his nuclear saber at the U.S. and NATO as they try to pressure him to abandon his unprovoked military campaign.

But Sullivan referenced instances during the Cold War when the two sides identified certain weapons deemed mutually menacing and worked to eliminate the threat. Even at the darkest moments, the U.S. and Soviet Union would discuss restrictions of nuclear arms. “There is a track record of our two countries being capable of engaging in these kinds of discussions in a way that serves our respective national interests and the broader common interest,” he said.

Read More: Putin Suspended the Last Remaining Nuclear Pact With the U.S. Here’s What Happens Now.

For more than a half-century, successive weapons treaties have led to a dramatic drop in the number of warheads across the globe. But in recent years, the diplomatic foundation that has helped preserve a fragile peace for generations is now exhibiting “major cracks,” Sullivan said. Many of the key nuclear treaties that helped maintain strategic stability and security since the end of World War II no longer exist, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

And even as Sullivan encouraged renewed discussions, there were fresh signs of the rupture between the U.S. and Russia. On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced it was going to halt information-sharing about its nuclear arms with Russia, a retaliatory move for Moscow’s decision in February to withdraw from New START. Last week, Russia and Belarus signed a formal agreement to deploy Russia’s short-range nuclear weapons inside Belarus for the first time in three decades.

Sullivan said this renewed nuclear brinkmanship was a reason to talk, rather than turn away. “It is in neither of our countries’ interests to embark on an open-ended competition in strategic forces, and we are prepared to stick to the central limits as long as Russia does,” Sullivan said. “Rather than waiting to resolve all of our bilateral differences, the United States is ready to engage Russia now to manage nuclear risks and develop a post-2026 arms control framework.”

While New START has been suspended, there are still elements of the 2010 agreement that are still in effect. The treaty limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed heavy bombers and ballistic missiles, which both sides say they will hold to—even after it sunsets in 2026. “Today, as we face new threats, and as we face those cracks in our post-Cold War nuclear foundation, I not only believe that we can find this hope again, I believe that we must,” Sullivan said. “Because when it comes to nuclear risks, what is at stake for our people and for our world is too important too consequential for our shared futures not to.”

Read More: Inside the Race to Arm Ukraine.

Sullivan acknowledged any future agreement would not only be influenced by Russia’s nuclear capabilities but also by China’s growing ambitions. The rising power only has an arsenal of 410 strategic warheads, according to a Federation of American Scientists’ assessment. But the Pentagon estimates China’s stockpile could grow to 1,500 by 2035, as it simultaneously constructs hundreds of new silos capable of launching long-range ballistic missiles, potentially targeting the U.S. and its far-flung nuclear forces.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal will not need to match the combined nuclear forces of both China and Russia, Sullivan said, despite signs that the two nations have increased military collaboration in recent years. The White House believes such a strategy risks a volatile three-way arms race, Sullivan said.

“The United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” he said. “We’ve been there. We’ve learned that lesson. Nor does the United States need to deploy ever more dangerous nuclear weapons to maintain deterrence. Rather, effective deterrence means that we have a better approach not a ‘more’ approach.”

TIME receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Outrider Foundation. TIME is solely responsible for all content.

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

For years, one meme in the Spider-Man canon has appeared far and wide across social media. Even the least chronically online among us have probably encountered the Spider-Man pointing meme. In the animated TV still, two people dressed as Spider-Man are pointing at one another. The meme is often used when someone is making fun of two similar people or things or pointing out a comical similarity. And since it’s become ubiquitous online, every Spider-Man property has found some way to incorporate it into their storytelling. In 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, past Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield made surprise cameos with a reference to the meme. A few weeks after the movie premiered, all three Spider-Men (Maguire, Garfield, and current Spider-Man Tom Holland) recreated the meme for a promotional image.
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In the new animated film Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, there’s a quick reference to the meme during a particularly tense moment. It’s only logical that this movie, which features many iterations of the superhero across many dimensions, would find a way to nod to the meme. Here’s everything you need to know about the meme, its origins, and its latest on-screen moment.

Where the Spider-Man pointing meme comes from

The widely-used meme comes from a 1967 episode of the Spider-Man cartoon, specifically from episode 19b titled “Double Identity.” The episode finds the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man trying to subdue a man named Charles Cameo, a villain who impersonates others as he commits crimes. He transforms into Spider-Man to disguise himself as the real webslinger is looking for him. There’s a moment in the show when they come face to face and point at each other, each one trying to claim that the other is an imposter. This scene culminated in the iconic meme that has been used for years.

When the meme began and how it’s used

The meme has been used for years across platforms like Reddit and Twitter. As with many internet trends, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint the true original poster, but according to KnowYourMeme.com, it came into use as early as 2011 and saw its popularity increase in 2016 and 2017, especially with the help of Black Twitter.

Over time, the meme has been used in different ways, but it’s most commonly used when poking fun at celebrities, or other people and things, that are similar. Various iterations of the meme have also been introduced, many of which include three or more Spider-Men, as have images that appear to accidentally replicate it.

How the meme is referenced in Across The Spider-Verse

In Across The Spider-Verse, the film’s protagonist Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) has just been told that he’s disrupted a “canon” event, an event that every Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse must experience on order to maintain equilibrium. The topic arises after Miles saves the police captain’s life while trying to defeat a new supervillain, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman). Miguel O’Hara, also known as Spider-Man 2099 of Earth 928 and voiced by Oscar Isaac, explains to Miles that if he disrupts another “canon event,” the fate of the Spider-Verse hangs in the balance. The police captain needs to die in every universe, prompting Miles to remember that his father was just made captain and to go off to try to rescue him. Miguel tries to stop him, chasing after him through the Spider-Man headquarters, which has hundreds of Spider-People from across all different dimensions standing around.

In a silly moment that lets some of the air out of the tension in the scene, Miguel yells out, “Spider-Man, stop him!” and all of the Spider-people standing around the headquarters look at each other, point and say, “You?”

The chase continues as the film reaches its climax and ultimately leaves viewers on a cliffhanger which will be resolved when the trilogy ends with Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse, slated for release in March 2024.

Are you bored by being alone with your thoughts? Does the thought of cooking a meal, brushing your teeth, or taking a walk without a podcast, TV show, or music playing send you into a cold sweat? If so—according to a trend circulating on social media—you’re a great candidate for something called a “dopamine detox.”

It involves identifying behaviors that you turn to too frequently for a quick boost—mainly things like social media, gaming, and watching TV—then taking a break from them for a few days to a week. The goal is to recalibrate your brain’s reward pathways.
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Though some evidence suggests that taking a break from certain unhealthy behaviors can prove transformative, most research focuses on clinical addictions, not the daily temptations we all face. That hasn’t stopped content creators from overstating the science to promise unmatched happiness, productivity, academic success, and lots of money from a digital detox—all unrealistic claims. It’s just a temporary break, and while that can be nice, it won’t change your life. Real change takes more active work.

But if you keep your expectations in check, you may find that a digital detox is a useful tool for self-reflection.

Dopamine’s role in the brain

A “dopamine detox” focuses on that particular brain chemical because it’s sensitive to stimuli like social media. Temporarily depriving yourself of such triggers should theoretically recalibrate your brain’s stores of dopamine and therefore make your pleasure centers more balanced, the claims go.

Of course, brain chemistry is more complicated than that. Dopamine is just one neurochemical that contributes to happiness, and unplugging for a few days won’t rewire your mind. But it might help you recognize the triggers you’re leaning on, says Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatry professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of the book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. “When we’re consuming digital media,” she says—like TV shows, TikTok, podcasts, and music—“it releases a lot of dopamine in a specific part of the brain called the reward pathway.” When dopamine is sent hurtling down this pathway, it sets off a good feeling in the brain. Any rewarding stimulus—a piece of candy, a “like” on a post, or the start to your favorite song—can give you this little hit.

This pathway works best when it gets to hum at a natural level and spike at different points throughout the day, like at mealtimes. But most of the content on our phones, says Lembke, is designed to activate the reward pathway as strongly as possible, meaning that frequent use theoretically releases a “firehose of dopamine stimulation.”

Our understanding of how the brain responds to ceaseless stimulation from our gadgets comes primarily from research on drug addiction, which commandeers the same reward pathways. “In order to compensate,” says Lembke, “our brain starts to downregulate our own dopamine production and transmission, to bring it back to baseline.” A dopamine deficit, which can result from the extremes of all forms of addiction, can lead to feelings of depression and anxiety. “Now we need to keep engaging in these behaviors—ingesting digital media—not to feel good and happy, but just to feel normal,” explains Lembke. That’s where a detox can be helpful.

Can a “dopamine detox” really reset your reward pathways?

“Detox” is a misleading term in this context. The word describes the removal of something harmful and unnatural, but dopamine, made in the brain, is neither of those things—nor is it being removed. The practice is also sometimes called a dopamine “fast,” and while the goal is to starve that dopamine-specific reward pathway of constant activation, the chemical is still present and active throughout the brain.

What’s actually being cut out during this practice is whatever stimulus a person is hoping to feel less dependent on. A more apt (but less catchy) name for the routine might be “dopamine recalibration.” Really, it’s a commitment to breaking bad habits.

Attempting this recalibration isn’t just for people who feel like compulsive media use is taking over their lives, says Lembke. “I love that the younger generation is exploring digital detox and trying to experiment with how they feel when they’re not constantly engaged with our digital devices,” she says. “It’s only by stopping for a period of time that we can really see how this technology is impacting our mental health.”

Read More: How to Get Healthier Dopamine Highs

The most effective “dopamine detox” will be a personalized one, says Lembke. Cutting down on the tech you use most often is an obvious place to start, but dopamine hits can come from lots of places. Lembke, for instance, says that the most powerful break she’s ever taken was from reading romance novels. Even though they weren’t on a screen, the compulsive way she’d churn through their predictable plot points indicated to her that the hobby had hijacked her reward system. Even after four weeks—which is generally long enough to change a habit —she still craved the books. After taking inventory of her habits, she says, she “was finally able to trace it to listening to pop music, because almost all pop music is love songs. So I stopped listening to pop music, and that really helped me stop craving romance novels, which helped heal my brain to the point where now I can listen to all kinds of music and not crave reading.”

If there’s a habit or device that you feel has too strong a hold over you (maybe, for instance, going to the bathroom without your phone makes you feel antsy), it might be a good target for this approach.

What to expect during a “fast”

Aside from scientific studies about drug addiction, there’s not clear research on what happens when you quit your brain’s favorite reward cold turkey. When it comes to how the brain interacts with social media, “all we really have is our clinical experience,” says Lembke.

“When we’re working with patients who have actually become pathologically addicted to digital media, they usually feel pretty bad for 10 to 14 days” when they first cut it out, she says. After that, she says, patients begin to be able to focus again, to slow down and enjoy activities that may have seemed boring before, like taking a quiet walk or cooking a meal. Gradually, because it’s not being used, the association between the problem behavior and the dopamine reward becomes weaker, making it easier for people to resume using their devices in a less problematic way.

A lot of the self-help content circulating about dopamine detoxes leans into what we know from clinical treatment of true behavioral addiction, but we know less about how more minor behavioral tweaks—like cutting down on social media for a week—affects the dopamine reward pathway. For people without an addiction, a stimulus fast doesn’t need to be methodological; there’s no real right or wrong length of time to try it. What’s more important is paying close attention to how you feel while doing it, which may help you notice automatic behaviors that may not have registered before, like Lembke’s pop-song habit.

Even a temporary step back can teach us a lot. “We’re constantly reacting to external stimuli, which means that we’re not really giving our brains a chance to form a continuous thought or staying quiet long enough to have spontaneous thoughts,” says Lembke.

Tracy Chou launched the Twitter app Block Party in 2021 to help users escape targeted harassment campaigns that she—as an Asian American woman—knew from personal experience could ostracize vulnerable voices from the public conversation. But on Wednesday Block Party closed its doors, becoming the latest victim of soaring new bills imposed by a struggling Twitter under new owner Elon Musk.

Under Twitter’s former ownership, Chou struck a deal with the company for free access to data—a win-win arrangement that would allow Block Party to grow and provide Twitter with a valuable anti-harassment tool to which it didn’t have to devote expensive engineering time.
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But Chou tells TIME that following the recent expiration of that contract, Twitter wanted Block Party to pay $42,000 per month for access to enough data to keep the app running. There was no way Block Party could afford the figure, she says.

“We’re heartbroken that we won’t be able to help protect you from harassers and spammers on the platform, at least for now,” Block Party said in a blog post on its site.

More from TIME

Read More: Social Media Platforms Failed to Tackle Abuse. So Tracy Chou Stepped In

Block Party is just the latest victim of Musk’s drive to monetize Twitter’s API, or application programming interface, a service that lets third-party developers and researchers access Twitter data. The move, some have speculated, is part of efforts to stop the company hemorrhaging money. The company is not profitable, and its revenue has reportedly dropped more than two thirds since Musk took over in October 2022, mainly driven by advertisers deserting the platform. The value of the company has similarly fallen by more than two thirds since Musk’s $44 billion takeover, according to one asset manager.

Musk’s move to monetize access to Twitter’s data may also be a reaction to large language models—artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have boomed in popularity this year. To build models like ChatGPT, companies like its creator OpenAI need large quantities of data, which is often scraped from the internet, including sites like Twitter and Reddit. Musk has sparred with Microsoft, OpenAI’s chief funder, over what he suggested was Microsoft’s “illegal” use of Twitter data for AI training purposes. “I’m open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution,” Musk said in a follow-up tweet.

“People want lots of data to train things, and they [Twitter] thought there was an opportunity to monetize better there,” says Block Party’s Chou. “Unfortunately for us, the data volume that we need in order to provide safety services to people is on the larger side. And so when the pricing model is potentially more geared around extracting money from people who want to do [AI] training on large datasets, it also impacts companies like us.”

Twitter isn’t the only company jacking up its API prices. Reddit, which has struggled to turn a profit, said in April that it would change its rules around how third parties could use its data, including introducing new pricing tiers, in reaction to the rise of large language models.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told the New York Times in April. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Like with Twitter and Block Party, the victims of those price changes included independent developers who had built free apps popular with users. Reddit reportedly told developers last month that it planned to increase its API charges to $12,000 per 50 million requests, a figure the developer of Apollo, Reddit’s most popular third-party app, said this week was “far more than I ever could have imagined.” The increase would mean Apollo would need to pay Reddit $20 million per year to maintain its features. “I don’t see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable,” Christian Selig, Apollo’s developer, wrote on the Apollo subreddit. “I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.”

“It’s a bummer,” says Chou, the Block Party founder, of the changes to Twitter’s API. “My guess is that it’s a business play to try to extract as much money as possible in the short term. But it’s short sighted because it cuts out a lot of value in the ecosystem that might not be cash value. But it is still value.”

Toward the end of the A24 romantic drama Past Lives, there comes a scene in which silence speaks louder than words. For 45 long seconds on-screen—written as two minutes in the script—Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) stand, at first facing the street, then gradually, almost imperceptibly, shifting to face each other.

They’re waiting for an Uber to arrive to take one of them to the airport. The actors, just like their characters, didn’t know when the car was going to arrive. The director, Celine Song, made a tiny gesture to cue the car when she was ready.
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“The way that I could decide when that was, is knowing what those two minutes have to be, which is that it has to feel—just like the movie—like eternity and decades and a person’s whole life,” Song says between sips of a green smoothie in a coffee shop in Manhattan’s East Village. “But also [it has] to feel too short.”

Past Lives, which opens in limited release on June 2 before expanding nationwide June 23, is a grown-up love story about, among other things, time and the way it moves. Twice, the words “12 years pass” appear on-screen. That really is how life feels, says Song: Sometimes 12 years flash by in the blink of an eye, other times one minute can feel like a hellish decade, and still other times a magical moment can feel like a welcome eternity.

In the film, which premiered at Sundance to raves, we first meet Nora as a kid (played by Moon Seung-ah), before she changes her name from Na Young to Nora and immigrates with her family from Seoul to Canada—but not before she develops a crush on her friend Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) at school. Before her family leaves, her mom arranges a chaperoned “date” between Nora and Hae Sung in a Seoul park to help her file away good memories of Korea.

Twelve years later, Nora has immigrated again to New York City, where she is pursuing a bright career as a playwright. Hae Sung, now finishing mandatory military service in South Korea, finds her on Facebook, the two reconnect, and Skype hangouts ensue. But Nora wants to fully commit to her life in New York, so she ends the fledgling relationship and heads to an artist residency in Montauk, where she meets and falls for another writer, this one a white American man, Arthur (John Magaro). Another 12 years later, Nora and Arthur are married, and Hae Sung is coming to visit New York, their first meeting in 20 years.

The movie is a work of autofiction: It follows the broad brushstrokes of Song’s own life. At age 12, she too immigrated from Seoul to Canada. She studied theater at Columbia University in New York City, reconnected with her childhood sweetheart over Skype, then met her now-husband, the writer Justin Kuritzkes, at a fellowship retreat (from the Edward F. Albee Foundation) in Montauk. They got married four years later. Two years after that, her childhood sweetheart came to visit New York.

Song clarifies that there is the truth at the heart of the story, and then there are the facts. The director, wearing a navy blue baseball tee with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album cover on the front, her bob tucked under a dark green baseball cap, explains that in making her debut film, she was less interested in recreating exact replicas of characters and places, and more invested in the best way to tell the story.

“The main thing that I believe as an artist is that I cannot let other people’s limitations of imagination dictate my imagination,” Song says. “All I can do is hope that there are people who can meet the movie as alive as I have made it.”

One could read a summary of the movie’s plot and conclude that it’s a story about a lost woman trying to carve out her own identity through her relationships with men. But for Song, and for Lee, it is about a happily married woman who knows what she wants out of life, both personally and professionally. She’s ambitious, she’s clear, and she’s on the cusp of a reunion with someone important from her past.

“What I loved from the jump with this movie was it wasn’t in service of any sort of gaze: white gaze, male gaze,” Lee says in a video interview from a parked car, greenery behind her. “It was really liberated from the certain systems and infrastructures in place.”

“It really is all in service of this universal idea of love,” she continues. “Love not as some sort of neat construct, but something that exists on its own.”

In separate conversations, both the director and the actor who plays a version of her talked about the concept of faith as integral to the movie. For Song, it was an act of faith to believe that if a story feels true and compelling and important to her, then it will feel the same to the audience. She trusts that this very specific story will read as universal, “because I know that I’m a part of this universe in a pretty fundamental way.” For Lee, the faith came from an approach Song used in the making of the film: she kept the two leading men completely separate until their characters met on-screen to make the meeting feel genuine. Lee felt like she was in two different movies with them, but she had to trust that “that was the essence of the movie that we were after.”

Song and Lee speak like they’re in conversation with each other even when they’re not—which makes sense, given each one’s connection to the character of Nora. Unlike Nora, Lee was born in Los Angeles to Korean parents, but she understands the shared experience of having “this part of my identity that, at different points in my life, [has] been—not closed off, but let go—in order to make space for something else.”

There’s a scene that bookends the film in which Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur sit at an East Village bar, inspired by the speakeasy Please Don’t Tell in Song’s real life. Song felt a visceral power sitting in the middle of her husband and her childhood sweetheart, the only reason why both of them were in that bar on that night, the bridge for language between them. Lee portrays that quiet power and self-assurance masterfully, cool and calm in a complicated situation.

Lee’s Nora is grounded, and she accepts the Korean concept of in-yun in its passivity. Earlier in the movie, Nora explains in-yun to Arthur as providence or fate: “If two strangers walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, that means there have been 8,000 layers of in-yun between them.”

It’s easy to think about fate or destiny as something you go get, sometimes you run toward, Song says.

“But the truth is, in Eastern philosophy, where in-yun comes from, it is something that comes to you, and you cannot stop it,” she says. “It’s something that you have to learn how to accept.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to use off-brand versions of the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy because they might not contain the same ingredients as the prescription products and may not be safe or effective.

Agency officials said this week that they have received reports of problems after patients used versions of semaglutide, the active ingredient in the brand-name medications, which have been compounded, or mixed in pharmacies. Officials didn’t say what the problems were.

The trouble is that those versions, often sold online, contain a version of semaglutide that is used in lab research and has not been approved for use in people.

“Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved, and the agency does not verify the safety or effectiveness of compounded drugs,” the notice said.

Sales of semaglutide products have soared in the past few years after the drug was shown to spur fast and significant weight loss. The drugs manufactured by Novo Nordisk include brands Ozempic and Rybelsus, used to treat diabetes, and Wegovy, approved to treat obesity.

Demand for the medications has outstripped supply. As of May, Ozempic and Wegovy remain on the FDA’s list of drug shortages. When drugs are in short supply, compounding pharmacies are permitted to produce versions of those medications.

Consumers should only use drugs containing semaglutide with a prescription from a licensed health care provider and obtained from a state-licensed pharmacy or other facilities registered with the FDA, the agency said.

NEW YORK — Racial bias built into a common medical test for lung function is likely leading to fewer Black patients getting care for breathing problems, a study published Thursday suggests.

As many as 40% more Black male patients in the study might have been diagnosed with breathing problems if current diagnosis-assisting computer software was changed, the study said.

Doctors have long discussed the potential problems caused by race-based assumptions that are built into diagnostic software. This study, published in JAMA Network Open, offers one of the first real-world examples of how the the issue may affect diagnosis and care for lung patients, said Dr. Darshali Vyas, a pulmonary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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The results are “exciting” to see published but it’s also “what we’d expect” from setting aside race-based calculations, said Vyas, who was an author of an influential 2020 New England Journal of Medicine article that catalogued examples of how race-based assumptions are used in making doctors’ decisions about patient care.

For centuries, some doctors and others have held beliefs that there are natural racial differences in health, including one that Black people’s lungs were innately worse than those of white people. That assumption ended up in modern guidelines and algorithms for assessing risk and deciding on further care. Test results were adjusted to account for—or “correct” for—a patient’s race or ethnicity.

One example beyond lung function is a heart failure risk-scoring system that categorizes Black patients as being at lower risk and less likely to need referral for special cardiac care. Another is an equation used in determining kidney function that creates estimates of higher kidney function in Black patients.

The new study focused on a test to determine how much and how quickly a person can inhale and exhale. It’s often done using a spirometer — a device with a mouthpiece connected to a small machine.

After the test, doctors get a report that has been run through computer software and scores the patient’s ability breathe. It helps indicate whether a patient has restrictions and needs further testing or care for things like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or lung scarring due to air pollutant exposure.

Algorithms that adjust for race raise the threshold for diagnosing a problem in Black patients and may make them less likely to get started on certain medications or to be referred for medical procedures or even lung transplants, Vyas said.

While physicians also look at symptoms, lab work, X-rays and family histories of breathing problems, the pulmonary function testing can be an important part of diagnoses, “especially when patients are borderline,” said Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer at the American Lung Association.

The new study looked at more than 2,700 Black men and 5,700 white men tested by University of Pennsylvania Health System doctors between 2010 and 2020. The researchers looked at spirometry and lung volume measurements and assessed how many were deemed to have breathing impairments under the race-based algorithm as compared to under a new algorithm.

Researchers concluded there would be nearly 400 additional cases of lung obstruction or impairment in Black men with the new algorithm.

Earlier this year, the American Thoracic Society, which represents lung-care doctors, issued a statement recommending replacement of race-focused adjustments. But the organization also put a call out for more research, including into the best way to modify software and whether making a change might inadvertently lead to overdiagnosis of lung problems in some patients.

Vyas noted some other algorithms have already been changed to drop race-based assumptions, including one for pregnant women that predicts risks of vaginal delivery if the mom previously had a cesarean section.

Changing the lung-testing algorithm may take longer, Vyas said, especially if different hospitals use different versions of race-adjusting procedures and software.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

After nearly two and a half hours of web slinging, villain battling, and multiverse jumping, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers a climactic final scene that seems designed to leave audiences reeling. Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson from a screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callaham, the highly-anticipated sequel to 2018’s Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ends on a massive cliffhanger.

“Our contract with the audience is to bring them something they’ve never seen before,” Miller told Empire ahead of Across the Spider-Verse‘s June 2 release. “The first film was about bringing characters into Miles’ dimension. This is about Miles heading off into others.”
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The movie’s conclusion sets up a forthcoming third installment, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, in the hit animated film series. But before we get into what’s next, let’s break down what leads to those tense closing moments.

How does Across the Spider-Verse expand the multiverse?

Across the Spider-Verse picks up around a year after the events of Into the Spider-Verse, with Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) staying busy on her home world of Earth-65 trying to keep her dad, Captain George Stacy (Shea Wigham), and the rest of the New York police force from figuring out that she’s Spider-Woman.

When an anachronistic version of the Vulture (Jorma Taccone) is suddenly transported to Earth-65 from an alternate dimension, the villain’s mysterious appearance is quickly followed by the arrival of Spider-Man 99, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), and another Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew (Issa Rae). The pair joins forces with Gwen to capture the Vulture, and ultimately ends up taking Gwen back with them to another universe after she’s forced to reveal her secret identity to her father. We later learn that Miguel is the leader of the Spider-Society, a task force of Spider-People charged with wrangling “anomalies” across the Spider-Verse who have ended up in universes other than their own.

Meanwhile, on Earth-1610, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is fighting crime as Brooklyn’s full–time, friendly neighborhood Spider–Man when he finds himself facing off with a seemingly silly but actually formidable new foe, the Spot (Jason Schwartzman). Originally introduced in Into the Spider-Verse as Dr. Jonathan Ohnn, a research scientist who worked for Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber) a.k.a. Kingpin, Ohnn’s body was transformed into a jumble of portals when Miles destroyed Kingpin’s super collider. Prior to this, Ohnn conducted an experiment on the super collider that transported the radioactive spider that bit Miles and turned him into Spider-Man from Earth-42 to Earth-1610.

When the Spot begins using his portals to travel to other universes and enhance his powers by recreating the super collider explosion, Gwen is sent to Earth-1610 to check on the situation and Miles is drawn into the Spider-Society’s multiverse fray.

What are canon events?

After Miles follows Gwen to the alternate universe of Earth-50101 and they arrive in the Mumbai-Manhattan hybrid of Mumbattan, Miles ends up disrupting what is known as a “canon event” by rescuing the city’s police captain from near-certain death. Back at Spider-Society headquarters, Miguel informs Miles that canon events are key experiences that happen to every Spider-Person in every universe and maintain the stability of the multiverse.

One of these events is a loved one—like Miles’ Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), a.k.a. the Prowler—dying in a way that pushes them to become a hero. Another is a police captain who’s close to them sacrificing their life to save a child during a big fight between the Spider-Person and a supervillain. With his dad days away from becoming police captain in his own universe, Miles realizes that the Spot is planning to bring about Miles’ dad’s death in order to claim his place as Miles’ nemesis. Miguel tells him that he needs to let his dad’s death happen or risk catastrophic consequences.

Unable to accept his dad’s fate, Miles slips the Spider-Society’s clutches and a high-speed chase ensues during which Miguel informs Miles that because the spider that bit him wasn’t from his universe, he is the “original anomaly” that set in motion all the multiverse madness. This disruption resulted in the death of Earth-1610’s Peter Parker and Earth-42 spiraling into disarray without a Spider-Person of their own. Miles was never meant to be Spider-Man, a secret that Gwen and Miles’ old mentor, Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), knew.

How does Across the Spider-Verse end?

Miles escapes Spider-Society headquarters by sneaking into their interdimensional teleporter after programming it to send him back to his home universe. Once there, he ends up confessing his identity as Spider-Man to his mother—only for his Uncle Aaron to walk in the door movements later. We realize at the same time Miles does that the Spider-Society’s teleportation device, which operates based on the origin of a Spider-Person’s spider DNA, sent him to Earth-42 rather than his home world of Earth-1610.

On Earth-1610, Miles’ father is dead rather than his uncle, and it doesn’t take long for his uncle to realize something is off about this Miles. He knocks him out and Miles wakes up tied to a punching bag in what appears to be a villain’s lair. Believing his uncle became the Prowler in this universe as well, Miles tries to convince him that he doesn’t have to be evil. That’s when the real Prowler walks in, Earth-42’s Miles.

Luckily for captive Miles, Gwen is busy gathering his remaining allies to help him in the fight against both the Spider-Society and the Spot—and realizes Miles ended up in the wrong universe in the process.

What’s next for the Spider-Verse saga?

As confirmed by a closing title card, Miles’ story will continue in a third chapter in the series titled Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse that’s currently set to be released March 29, 2024. Spider-Verse producers have also said that there is a live-action Miles Morales movie in the works in addition to a stand-alone animated Spider-Woman movie.

People pair off for so many reasons: convenience or habit, great sexual chemistry, the desire to have children, or simply what they see as true love. There are always those people who advertise loudly that they’ve found their soul mate, holding their good fortune high like a victory flag. But is it possible that there are different kinds of right for any one human being? Is it normal to wonder what might have been—to ponder what your life might be like if you’d chosen another partner—or is it a betrayal of the person who sleeps beside you every night?

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Those are questions writer-director Celine Song’s extraordinary debut film Past Lives doesn’t so much answer as brush against, like the flutter of moth wings. Uncertainty is a kind of shadow character in this film, floating through it like a ghost. The movie’s opening shot shows us a woman sitting at a bar, flanked by two men. She seems more engaged in talking with one of them, while the other sits a bit awkwardly, aware he’s being left out but trying to be cool about it. An unseen observer, surveying this scene from across the bar, wonders aloud what their story is: Are the intensely connected man and woman siblings? Is the left-out dude the woman’s boyfriend? These are the types of things we ask ourselves when we play the game of piecing together strangers’ stories, making up lives for them like amateur dramatists.

But the real story of these characters is more complex than anything we could surmise from that first scene. Song begins to unravel that story by taking us back 24 years to begin at the beginning: A preteen girl named Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) is getting ready to emigrate to Canada from South Korea with her parents. There’s a boy she likes at school, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim); the feeling is mutual. These two are smart kids, competing with one another in their classes, though their healthy competitiveness is part of the electricity between them. Na Young’s mother, knowing how much they like each other, sets up a chaperoned date for them, explaining to a friend that she wants her daughter to have good memories from the place she’ll soon leave behind.

Read more: The 10 Best Movies of 2022

Song then moves the story 12 years forward: Na Young now calls herself Nora—as a grownup, she’s played by Greta Lee—having left her old name behind long ago. She’s just moved to New York, hoping to launch a career as a playwright. Googling old friends from home to see what they’re up to, she’s reminded of the boy she used to be so close to, though she at first struggles to remember his name. They manage to connect on social media; she types a short message to him in her rusty, hunt-and-peck Korean. Eventually, they communicate by Skype. Nora and Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) peer at one another through their respective computer screens, at times just blinking, not talking, as if trying to map the contours of the lost years. Their faces are lovely, luminous with curiosity and mutual discovery. In their adult guises, they’re new to each other, and yet not.

They spend more and more time on Skype, and a possible romance takes shape. But circumstances prevent them from reconnecting in real life. Eager to make the most of her life in New York, Nora tells Hae Sung she thinks it’s best if they don’t talk for a while. Soon after, at a writing retreat, she meets Arthur (John Magaro), a scruffy young novelist. They strike up an affair that at first seems off-handed, a thing they’re just doing for kicks. Twelve more years pass, by which time they’re married, living in the East Village and chipping away, with slow but steady success, at their parallel careers.

Then Hae Sung comes to New York for a visit.

Song has said the story she tells in Past Lives is semiautobiographical, and that’s easy to believe. The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world. Song—herself a playwright—has clearly put her trust in the faces of her actors, and they wholly fulfill it. Yoo’s Hae Sung has a searching gravitas. When he’s speaking Korean with Nora, he has a boyish, confident sweetness. But his English, limited to a few words and phrases, makes him an outsider in her world, and Yoo’s eyes alone transmit how keenly he feels that alienation; this is, among other things, a story of how languages can both divide and unite. Magaro, a consistently wonderful actor (as proven in Kelly Reichardt’s two most recent films, First Cow and Showing Up), works a kind of shambling magic with the character of Arthur. As Nora prattles on about her impressions of Hae Sung and their recently revived friendship, he tries, with zero success, to feign both supportiveness and indifference. In one of the movie’s most gently resonant scenes, he tells Nora what he loves about living with her. To him, she makes the world seem bigger. “I’m wondering if I do the same for you,” he says in a faraway voice that makes the other side of the bed seem like another continent.

Read more: The 30 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2023

There are no villains in this story; no one lashes out or behaves badly. At one point Arthur makes a joke about being the overbearing white guy who’s standing in the way of true love, but that’s hardly the truth. Nora is intensely practical, a bit unyielding. You can tell she’s a person who arranges things rather than just letting them happen. And the way Lee plays her helplessness in the face of feelings she can’t control is what gives Past Lives its delicate, bittersweet kick. As Nora, Lee—probably best known for her role in Russian Doll—has the demeanor of someone who just wants to get on with life, not realizing that a whole new set of possibilities can sometimes present itself between one breath and another. Once that recognition hits, Nora realizes how lost she is—but then, paradoxically, being lost may be the only true way to ever be found. The ending of Past Lives faces that double-edged truth with the most tender gaze imaginable. Somewhere between the right and the wrong decision is the choice we learn to live with, a sea of joy and sadness and everything in between.

At first, getting laid off from her job at a marketing tech firm in June of 2022 was shocking and depressing for Sam Popp, 33, who had also been furloughed from a different company briefly in 2020.

But then she looked around and realized she was in okay shape. She’d saved money during the pandemic. She’d been running a side photography business on weekends that she wanted to spend more time on. And best of all, if she worked for herself, she wouldn’t have to worry about being laid off again.

“What gives me comfort right now is that my well-being doesn’t depend on anyone else but myself,” says Popp, a Manhattan resident who launched a career as a freelance photographer and marketing consultant shortly after getting laid off and says she doesn’t want to go back to the old ways.
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Despite the downsides of foregoing a traditional 40-hour-a-week job, more Americans are embracing part-time and freelance work as they emerge from the pandemic era seeking more flexibility in a job market where workers still have the upper hand. The number of people who say they’re working part-time for non-economic reasons—in other words, by choice—reached 21.8 million in May, according to government data released June 2, which is up 5% from a year ago and 15% from a decade ago. The number of people working part-time for economic reasons—3.7 million—has declined over the past year. The ratio of people working part-time voluntarily to those who want more work is nearly six to one, the highest it’s been in two decades, a sign of a strong labor market that is enabling workers to set more flexible hours. U.S. employers added 339,000 jobs to the overall labor market in May, more than analysts had expected.

Some of the rise in part-time workers is driven by Baby Boomers who are still doing some work but are mostly retired. Older workers don’t account for the entirety of the trend, though. “There’s this reevaluation of how people are spending their time,” says Lonnie Golden, an economist at Penn State Abington who studies the part-time workforce. “People are more happy when they choose how to allocate their time, and the things that drive their happiness are recreation and time with friends and family.”

Some weeks, Popp says she works 50 hours and others, she works 20. But it’s the option of setting their own schedules and not working the traditional 9-to-5 job that appeals to Popp, and to so many other people, Golden says. Some workers eschewing traditional jobs because they took on caregiving duties for children or aging parents during the pandemic and don’t want to give up that time, Golden says. In 2021, the amount of time Americans spent caring for household children and adults per day rose 9% and 14%, respectively, from 2019, according to the American Time Use Survey.

The extremely tight labor market has also helped independent workers demand the working conditions and hours they want; there were 10.1 million job openings in April, the Labor Department said on May 31, which means there are nearly two openings for every worker seeking a job.

Rafael Espinal, the executive director of the Freelancers’ Union, says that many people who were laid off during the pandemic, like Popp, took time to reflect on their careers and decided to explore freelance work. Many have found that they can earn more than they did at their traditional jobs, and women and people of color find that they can make greater wage gains because they aren’t going through a boss or HR department to ask for a raise; they can make more money by finding more clients who are willing to pay.

Read more: Return-to-Office Full Time Is Losing. Hybrid Work Is On the Rise

Eric Dai’re, 49, is one person who has found he will be able to get ahead in his career if he’s not a permanent employee. Dai’re uses Instawork, an app that connects business to hourly workers, to find odd jobs as a line cook, a site captain, and a general laborer. His favorite Instawork jobs are at stadiums; he’s taken a road trip from Texas to work at Dodger Stadium and explore Los Angeles, for example and has had gigs at NRG Stadium, home to the Houston Texans. Dai’re is now an Instawork supervisor, and says that employers sometimes ask him to come on full-time after they see how effective he is while running cleanup or setup for events. He’s thinking about taking one of them up on the offer—but so far, no one can match the $60,000 a year or the independent life he has as an Instaworker.

There were 6.7 million “independent professionals” in the U.S. in 2022, up 2.2% from 2021, according to a report from the Freelancers’ Union and Fiverr, a global marketplace for freelancers, which found that a growing share of women are switching from traditional full-time jobs to independent work. About 73% of these independent workers are “highly satisfied” with their work-life balance, according to a survey of 815 skilled workers conducted for the report.

The growth of the flexible workforce even during a time of high inflation suggests that this could be a long-term, permanent shift, says Golden. Workers can choose between finding a more stable job or staying a part of the flexible workforce and cutting back on some expenses. Right now, he says, they appear to be adjusting to higher prices by giving up on spending more, not by giving up their free time.

Of course, there are some notable downsides to being an independent or part-time worker, especially since health insurance and retirement accounts are commonly tied to employment in the U.S. And the quality of part-time jobs can vary tremendously based on a worker’s education level. Some part-time workers are employed by staffing firms and temp agencies in warehouses, construction, and factories, where they make less than full-time employees, are less likely to receive health insurance, and have little guarantee of stability, according to Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney of the National Employment Law Project. For these workers, who have less education than the professional freelancers, the decline of full-time jobs is a dangerous proposition that has led to instability for some. And that doesn’t even take into account the gig workers who make money through apps such as Uber, DoorDash, and Lyft who have long tried to survive off gig work alone and found it a difficult proposition.

But the era of worker power is helping these workers too; both New Jersey and Illinois passed laws in 2023 that make it easier for temporary workers to get hired permanently and that otherwise allow them to complain about dangerous working conditions, after more than a decade of worker advocacy.

Read more: Companies Are Finally Designing Offices for the New Work Reality

Educated workers looking for part-time and freelance work have also seen a few developments that makes the lifestyle a little easier, says Espinosa. The passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 created a marketplace where people could buy health insurance. And the Freelancers’ Union, which grew 300% during the pandemic to 500,000 members, has helped pass laws in New York City, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles that allow freelancers to reach out to their municipality if they’re not getting paid for their work in a timely fashion.

Of course, flexible work may become less appealing in an economic downturn, and as workers age and have children, they may not be able to resist the appeal of a full-time job with health benefits and paid time off. But many workers are discovering that the flexible workforce allows them to do jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Marnie Kunz, for example, ran her own fitness business until the pandemic shut it down. She panicked and applied for 200 jobs, and didn’t find anything, so went on Fiverr and other sites to work as a freelance writer, helping sites with search engine optimization (SEO) and blogs.

She says she makes the same amount of money as she did before the pandemic, but has a lot more flexibility in her hours. She’s also launched a fitness blog, and can apply her search engine optimization strategies to promote that blog, where she also earns ad revenue. She knows that the role of fitness blogger and SEO consultant isn’t likely one that existed before she made it up out of necessity. Now, she says, she can’t imagine doing anything else.

Apologies to the dudes who packed away their Allbirds and Crocs in order to parade around town with nothing but sweet air between their feet and the ground. “Barefoot boy summer” has been canceled.

That’s according to podiatrists alarmed at recent reports that people (men in particular) are losing their shoes and hitting the streets—heading to coffee shops, hiking trails, airports, and anywhere else their hearts and soles might lead them. Social-media users on platforms like TikTok are sharing videos of themselves (and others) barefoot in the wild. (“Be that primal, hard-to-kill man you know you are, and start walking barefoot outside,” one urges.) The trend is even infiltrating popular media: In a recent episode of Succession, Lukas Matsson (played by Alexander Skarsgard) walks barefoot on the tarmac before boarding his private plane.
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“I cringed,” says Dr. Priya Parthasarathy, a podiatrist with Foot and Ankle Specialists of Mid-Atlantic in Silver Spring, Md., describing her reaction when she learned going barefoot was in vogue. “You’re pretty much asking for trouble, and I 100% do not recommend it for a lot of different reasons.”

The risks aren’t worth it

Research suggests that humans began wearing sandals or moccasins more than 40,000 years ago—and there’s a good reason for that. Footwear provides important structural support, comfort, and protection from a wide variety of threats, including sharp objects on the ground, pests, heat, and invisible germs.

This seems obvious. So what’s the appeal of ditching shoes? “For me, and for most people, it’s getting more in touch with our feet as the foundation of our bodies,” says Eric Cohen, 60, who lives in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He’s been going barefoot in certain situations, like on the beach and while exercising, since the barefoot running boom about 15 years ago—which surely qualifies him as one of the original barefoot boys. “This is what connects us to the ground. Everything starts from the bottom and works up.” He’s not worried about potential harms, and says the rewards outweigh the occasional splinter.

The movement isn’t coming out of nowhere: “Grounding,” an alternative medicine practice that involves putting your feet in direct contact with the earth, has been linked to benefits like stress relief and better sleep. And walking barefoot on carpeted floors can increase circulation and strengthen the muscles in the feet, says Dr. Miguel Cunha, a podiatrist who owns Gotham Footcare in New York. But he doesn’t recommend going shoeless at the gym, communal bathing facilities, or outdoors, especially for prolonged periods of time.

Experts speculate that people are trotting down city streets sans shoes more in an effort to look cool or edgy, and to show off on social media, than to reap any real health benefits. They advise caution to those intrigued by the trend. One of the biggest concerns is stepping on something painful or dangerous, says Dr. Jane Pontious, a clinical professor in the department of podiatric surgery at the Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine. When she first heard about the barefoot renaissance, she smiled, because it reminded her of childhood days spent near a lake, enjoying freedom of the feet and spirit. “With that said, did I have problems? Yeah, I did,” she says. “I had splinters several times. I had glass in my foot. I had a fishhook in my foot. Even being healthy and young, it wasn’t the safest thing to do.”

Throughout her career, Pontious has removed many things from people’s feet: wood splinters, glass, sewing needles, pieces of shells from the beach, even chihuahua hair (which is “very strong, like a tough fishing string,” she says. “It’s sharp.”) She worries about hypodermic needles on city streets, stinging pests in the grass, and rocks and sticks on trails. If you step on something dangerous while barefoot, see a doctor right away, she urges.

Tiny cuts in your feet can let in bacteria

There are also less obvious threats lurking beneath your feet: You can’t see them, but bacteria, fungi, and viruses are common in showers, locker rooms, pools, and anywhere else with a lot of water or moisture. (That’s why experts suggest always wearing shoes before and after you get in the pool, even though it’s a nuisance, and shower shoes if you’re in a dorm or gym.) These microorganisms can lead to infections that change your foot’s appearance and smell. If you have any small breaks in your skin, you’re at an increased risk of developing an infection. “When you go out in public outdoors, you’re walking on surfaces that hundreds of people have walked on,” Parthasarathy says. “You have no idea what you’re coming into contact with.”

Most people will detect signs that something is wrong within a few days. If you have athlete’s foot, for example—a fungal skin infection that affects the skin on the feet, including between the toes—you might notice dry, scaly, or cracked skin; inflammation that’s red, purple, or gray; blisters; or itchiness. It sometimes evolves into nail fungus, which causes toenails to become discolored, cracked, or even separated from the nail bed. Or you might develop plantar warts, small growths caused by the human papillomavirus. In that case, “you would look for calluses with black dots that aren’t going away,” Parthasarathy says. “They could be painful” and are often difficult to treat.

Ditching shoes leaves your poor feet defenseless

Going barefoot also presents a heightened risk of injury. Every year, people who mow their lawn barefoot run over their feet while cutting the grass, one of the “most devastating” injuries podiatrists see, Parthasarathy says. Another risk—falling down—might be less dramatic, but it’s still unpleasant, and shoes provide important traction and protection from slippery areas. That’s especially true if you’re considering going barefoot hiking, an idea that experts universally pan. Pontious has treated people who twisted their ankle or suffered a ligament sprain from walking barefoot on uneven surfaces.

Plus, going shoeless for an extended amount of time can alter the biomechanics of your feet for the worse, Cunha says. Over the long run, this could accelerate the formation of bunions and hammertoes, or lead to conditions such as plantar fasciitis, shin splints, and Achilles tendonitis. “The main issue with walking barefoot is that you put a tremendous amount of stress on the foot, allowing it to collapse,” he says.

Another summertime hazard: sunburn. Our feet aren’t used to being exposed to the outdoors, and we often forget to put sunscreen on the tops and bottoms, Parthasarathy says. Walking across hot concrete can lead to burns that are difficult to heal—a particular danger for people with diabetes, who might have neuropathy, which means they won’t feel their feet burning. They’ll also take longer to recover, she notes.

Are there any barefoot-safe spaces?

Not exactly, but there are safer spaces, Pontious says. For healthy people who are not immunocompromised and don’t have underlying foot problems, the ideal environment is somewhere debris-free and freshly cleaned. The problem is that even indoors, we can never be certain of what’s on the floor. “I have people who live in what they claim is a very clean home, and they’ll step on a staple that got into the rug,” she says. “It’s so small that you don’t see it until it’s in your foot.” That’s also why it’s ideal to wear water shoes on the beach. Tiny pieces of shells or coral, jellyfish that have washed ashore, super-hot sand, and shards of glass bottles can all ruin an otherwise sunny day. If you’re determined to go barefoot, keep an eye on the sand and pay close attention to potential hazards.

Pontious advises that everyone practice foot-healthy habits, including checking daily that there aren’t any cuts, sores, blisters, or other changes to the skin or nails. If you sweat a lot, bring an extra pair of socks with you to work or outdoor activities. Halfway through the sweaty activity, wash your feet with a cleansing wipe and some sweat-absorbing powder, and change your socks (and don’t forget to put your shoes back on).

A final word of advice for those still tempted by the podiatric version of going commando: “If you embrace this trend, you better have your podiatrist on speed dial,” Parthasarathy says. “Because I guarantee you will need it.”

Congratulations, graduates. And congratulations to all those who love and support you and have helped you reach this milestone.

When I asked for advice on what to say today, someone replied: “Just tell the truth. Kids love that shit.” Another person chimed in, “You know who else needs to hear the truth? Their parents.” So this is for you too.

Here we go. The only way out is through.

In the past four years, even if you didn’t do all the readings (same, don’t worry), you’ve learned a lot about the crumbling systems of nature, of government, and of justice. An intertwined morass of crises. Now, you must use those truths to keep a fire in your belly, to fuel all the good you must do in the world.
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Moments like today’s celebration are not a foregone conclusion, even for the most fortunate among us. The future is not guaranteed. And, most importantly, the future is not yet written. Every single person here—you—can help shape it.

So, what I want you to hold on to today are two words: transformation and possibility.

To address the climate crisis, the all-encompassing challenge that will touch whatever life and work you will go on to, requires that we not just change or adapt, but that we transform society, from extractive to regenerative. This is a monumental task. And it requires that we focus not on endless analysis of the problem, but on summoning an expansive sense of possibility, on harnessing our imaginations and our creativity. This is not to sugarcoat the horrific scientific projections. I am a scientist; I know what we are up against. And I will spare you that litany on this, your graduation day, and just say: it’s going to hit 89 degrees today, in Vermont, in May.

What this moment in history requires is a tenacious focus on solutions, and a vision of what we are working toward, of what is possible.

Much of college is about parsing literature, pondering details, and wallowing in the sweet mud of nuance. I am here to encourage you to enter this next phase of your life with as much simplicity and moral clarity as you can muster. Some things are simply right and some things are simply wrong. And the devil does not need an advocate.

It is right to steward life and justice on this magnificent planet. It is right to quickly transition to renewable energy. It is right to protect and restore habitats and species. It is right to hold corporations accountable. It is right to ensure a just transition, leaving no one behind. And it is right to enact strong government policies that will accelerate all of this.

On the other hand, it is wrong to make this magnificent planet unlivable. It is wrong for the corporations who got us into this mess to continue to profit while they set the world on fire. It is wrong to drive one million species extinct by changing the climate, destroying habitats, and dousing the planet with pesticides. And it is wrong to leave the most vulnerable to bear the heaviest climate impacts.

Some people might tell you that seeing stark right and wrong is naïve. As you age, it will be tempting to succumb to endless compromise as the norm. Resist. And let’s be clear: moral clarity is not the same thing as naïveté. It is naive to expect that governments and corporations will do the right thing, or that someone else will handle it. It is naive to think we can “solve” or “stop” climate change. It is also naive to give up, when every tenth of a degree of warming we prevent, every centimeter of sea level rise we avoid, every species we save, and every increasingly unnatural disaster we avert all matter so very much.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King gave a speech against the Vietnam War, and those remarks could not be more apt five decades later:

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time…. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect…. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world.”

There is one big question that drives my work: What if we get it right? What if we behave as if we love the future?

The truly excellent news is that we already have the solutions we need. We don’t need to wait for some jazzy new technology to save us. We are at the moment where each of us must find our best role in getting it right. So, what can you do? First, let’s reframe that question: What can we do? How can you contribute to an important effort? (As an aside: The absolute last option should be to start your own nonprofit! A lack of nonprofits is not what’s holding us back. Join something, and improve it.)

Here’s one way to think about what you can do. Think about a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles.

• In the first circle is, what are you good at? What are your areas of expertise? What can you bring to the table? Think about your skills, resources, and networks. You have a lot to offer.
• The second circle is, what is the work that needs doing? Are there particular climate and justice solutions that you’re keen on? Think about system-level changes and things that can replicate or scale. Things like composting initiatives, building retrofitting, wetland protection, adaptations for heat waves, energy conservation, and getting climate candidates elected. There are heaps of options.
• And the third circle is what brings you joy? Or perhaps a better word is satisfaction. What gets you out of bed in the morning? There are so many things that need to be done – please do not pick something that makes you miserable! This is the work of our lifetimes, so it’s imperative to avoid burnout. Find things that energize and enliven you.

The goal is to be in the heart of this climate action Venn diagram, where these three circles overlap, for as much of your life as you can. If you’re familiar with the Japanese concept of Ikigai for finding your purpose, you can consider this a simplified version of that.

The quest for this sweet spot is how I ended up co-founding Urban Ocean Lab, a policy think tank for the future of coastal cities—as a marine biologist and Brooklyn native, who is worried about sea level rise, and finds joy in policy change. (Yes, I co-founded a nonprofit—with Jean Flemma, a Middlebury alum—but it was the last resort after years of trying to figure out another way to do that work.) It’s also how I ended up co-editing the feminist climate anthology All We Can Save—I’m a word nerd who knows a lot of phenomenal people who are doing critical work we all need to hear about. It’s how I ended up co-hosting the podcast How to Save a Planet, seeing a need for journalism on climate solutions. And how I ended up co-creating the Blue New Deal when the Green New Deal all but left out the ocean.

In all of these examples, the word “co” is key. Co-founding, co-editing, co-hosting, co-creating. Good collaboration is the exponential. Especially so because the complex challenges we face are inherently interdisciplinary.

A lesson I learned early on was: don’t work with jerks. The positive inversion of that is: find your people. Someone asked me the other day, “Who are your people?” And somehow, without a moment of hesitation, directly from my soul came the words: My people are conjurers. They dream things up, make something where there was nothing, something the world needs. They don’t stop at dreaming, they make magic in the real world.

It gives me goosebumps to think how lucky I am to get to say that sincerely. It may take time to find your people, and those people will probably change over the decades. But when you find them, hold on. Support them and love them. Lean into possibility together. Have a blast together doing big things that make the world better. Help reel a new world into existence.

The thing at the center of your Venn diagram can also change. It certainly has for me. And you can have multiple diagrams at once. I certainly take a portfolio approach to my work. But keep going toward where you see a need, where there are gaps you can fill. Keep conjuring.

My resume only seems like a reasonable path in hindsight—there was a lot of bushwhacking and a lot of trial and error. Trial and error is a very valid way to approach life and career! But you have to really try, and then really learn from the errors.

I have a feeling a lot of you will end up as trailblazers, not because you went to a great school and should be showing others the way, but because the natural world is changing so fast that a lot of the work that needs doing involves career paths that are unpaved at best.

As climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis puts it: Because of climate change, we are stepping into the unknown. So, yes, study the past, and learn from it, so you can avoid reinventing the wheel, but recognize that more than ever the past is an imperfect template for what we are facing.

An anecdote for those of you going on to graduate school, now or later. When I went off for my marine biology Ph.D, I told my mother it would take five or six years, and she said “Oh no!” Because the world did not have 5 years for me to hang out and take classes—it was important to be doing real things out in the world ASAP. I ended up designing a dissertation in collaboration with the fisheries department of the Caribbean Island of Curaçao. I did hundreds of SCUBA dives. I drove around for months with a cooler full of beer in my trunk, conducting hundreds of stakeholder interviews. (Basically, I have a PhD in drinking beer with fishermen.) And I collected data the government then used to put in place new regulations to make fishing more sustainable, data they otherwise would not have had. Escape gaps are now required in fish traps, and gill nets are banned.

Another way to put all this is: be a problem solver. Regardless of the field you choose, whether it’s climate finance, engineering, urban planning, environmental law, teaching, or transportation. There is nothing sexier than a problem solver. And be an influencer—not in the sexy Instagram model way, but in leading by example. There is a soft power in how you spend your time and money, how you look out for each other, how you contribute to making solutions happen.

I did not use AI to help me write these remarks. But I did ask social media what I should say to you, and got some excellent replies. Let this be a lesson in the wisdom of the human collective.

• The people in power do not always do the important work. Often, important work is left to regular people like us.
• There is no “formula” for what your life or career path looks like. Failures are your fertilizer.
• Be kind, to yourself and others. Give a shit. Always vote.
• Every job can be a climate job! No matter if you studied econ or were premed.
• You do not need an opinion on every topic. If you don’t know enough to form one, have humility. And ask questions.
• Go outside, and don’t come back in until you’ve fallen in love with the Earth.
• From Middlebury distinguished scholar Bill McKibben, who co-founded climate organization 350.org with Middlebury students. It’s actually more fun to try to change things than just to go along.
• And last: Don’t graduate, commence.

Excellent advice. And there were a hundred more. People are so excited to welcome you into the “real world.”

There’s a piece of advice I’m not going to give you. I’m not going to tell you to follow your heart. In part because I have no idea what’s in your heart, so that feels a bit reckless, to be honest. But also because we live in a pivotal time for preserving life on this magnificent planet. So I can’t in good conscience tell you to “follow your passions and then everything will magically fall into place”—I mean, who comes up with that stuff­?! Instead, I suggest: go where there is need and where your heart can find a home.

Honestly, it feels much conventional wisdom doesn’t apply. Like, it’s okay to sweat the small stuff. Details matter. Especially early in my career, much of my success was due to being assiduous about the quality of anything I put my name on. And, FYI, you may have gotten good grades in college, but no one will care about your GPA after today. You will have to earn your professional reputation from scratch.

For the last four years, you’ve had a gorgeous liberal arts education, you’ve been training your mind and your social abilities. Maybe it’s been individualistic, and today is about celebrating your achievements. But even today, you are part of a whole. So when the dust settles on this big occasion, thank the people who got you here today. Actually go write thank you notes, on paper, or pick up the phone. It will be cherished. Sometimes a text simply will not do.

And then, for the rest of your lives, you must find ways to be part of something meaningful, something beyond yourself. The grand goal, as I see it, is to be useful. Making useful contributions to the world, to solving important problems, is so deeply gratifying—and punctuated with joy and delight!

You have sooooo much more to learn. It’s going to be fascinating. So, respect your elders, they have a lot to teach you. But also, grownups clearly do not have it all figured out. Not by a long shot. So we need your help.

Possibility

Transformation

What you do matters

How you show up matters

That you show up matters

How you live matters

How you love matters

What my parents said to me repeatedly, as I was initially charting my path, I will now say to you: To whom much is given, much is expected. You must give back.

Be tenacious on behalf of life on Earth.

You were made for this moment.

This is a lightly edited version of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s commencement at Middlebury College delivered last week

On May 23, Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb became part of the long list of books authored by Black people to be banned by counties in Florida. Such books include The Black Friend by Fred T. Joseph and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson. In Gorman’s case, a single parent filed a complaint for the book to be removed, erroneously citing Oprah as the author, and the inclusion of “critical race theory” as justification for removal.

Since Gorman performed her poem for President Biden’s Inauguration ceremony two years ago, millions have flocked to her platform, including children. For months on end, photo after photo appeared across social media of kids of all races, genders, and backgrounds sporting Gorman’s iconic yellow coat and bold red headband. Black children especially saw themselves in her braided updo, gleaming eyes, and infectious smile. She was their ordinary, and extraordinary. She was mine, too.
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When I was five years old, I graduated from Head Start, a government program for children of low-income working families, and attended a newly-created, local private school on full scholarship. As one of the few Black children in the school, and the only Black girl in my grade, I became keenly aware that my classmates, who were white and wealthier, did not go home to an affordable housing neighborhood like me. They did not eat the same food as me. Their parents did not work the jobs my parents did. Rather, they lived in detached, single-family houses with green lawns and white picket fences. Their pantries were stocked with snacks I could only dream of.

Navigating these realities led me to books. At least there, I thought, I could begin to understand the two worlds I stood between.

As I began to write at the age of seven, I drew inspiration from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Where the Wild Things Are, which eventually led to The Babysitters Club, Nancy Drew, and Junie B. Jones. I loved these stories. They made me laugh, cry, and think. Yet, the harsh reality was that all of these characters shared more similarities with my classmates than ordinary Black girls like me—or like Amanda.

Books are windows into the ordinary. We read them to see ourselves, to comprehend our lived reality, and sometimes to envision something better. But, as has always been the case, imagination is a privilege, popular narratives often only reflect the few, and any increase in representation is, more often than not, met with backlash. At the onset of Halle Bailey being announced as the new Little Mermaid, the hashtag #NotmyAriel trended online. As more roles in science fiction and fantasy are cast with people from underrepresented groups, more hate seemingly follows.

Read More: New Report Finds That Book Bans Have Reached Their Highest Levels Yet

A recent study conducted by economists Anjali Adukia, Alex Eble, Emileigh Harrison, Hakizumwami Birali Runesha, and Teodora Szasz found that popular children’s books published in the past century consistently depict characters with lighter skin color, even when they aren’t white. Additionally, the study highlights the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx characters, while white characters are disproportionately overrepresented. Among 495 mainstream children’s books analyzed, 88% of the depicted faces were identified as white, and 92% of the famous figures mentioned were also classified as white. In contrast, the faces of Asian, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous characters collectively accounted for only about 12%. Surprisingly, even books designed to promote diversity still featured over 50% white faces and famous figures among 635 titles.

These findings are compounded by the fact that books with diverse characters are less likely to receive mainstream children’s book awards – which boost sales more than diversity book awards– had lower library checkout rates, and were consistently more expensive on average than all other children’s books. Not to mention that at least through 2019, Black and Brown people only made up approximately 6% of the publishing industry while white people made up 86%. The added insult to injury is that navigating the industry is notoriously difficult for Black authors, literary agents, bookstore owners, and editors.

There is a real cost when the stories of ordinary Black children, which are already limited, are ignored by publishing houses or silenced by book bans. By allowing a single bad faith request like that of The Hill We Climb to usurp children from a vibrant rendition of hope and promise, opponents of diverse storytelling are robbing the next generation of an opportunity to be unabashedly curious about the world around them. The question is at what cost?

We lose so much when Black children cannot be ordinary. That is why we must be intentional in our efforts to protect and preserve Black stories and storytellers. This insight is exactly what professors of early childhood education S. Mia Obiwo and Francheska Starks respectively discuss in The Black Agenda, which I edited. In their essay, “The Immeasurable Value of Black Children’s Books”, they argue that Black children’s books offer young readers the chance to examine the past, question the present, and ponder future actions through affirming stories of exhilaration and triumph. As cultural artifacts, children’s books present models through which readers can come to understand themselves and the world in which they live.”

If we believe that Black people are human, then we must also believe that Black children can be ordinary, too. Black children’s literature reflects the world in which we live by centering the histories of Black people and providing commentary on the current state of social affairs. Black stories inspire hope, joy, and reflection—oftentimes demonstrating what is possible and what could be. The optimism Black stories elicit may be one of the most important functions of how we can use our imaginations to materialize a more equitable world. One that leaves no one behind.

It is not enough to buy a book with Black and Brown children as characters. PEN America and Penguin Random House’s recent legal action against the book bans in Florida is just the beginning. We must be intentional in our efforts to challenge those who think that ordinary stories are only relegated to children who look like them. And like Amanda Gorman, we must be brave enough to hear, honor, and exalt the Black children and those who dare to tell their stories.

When I asked my girlfriend to marry me, I had just finished staunching a pretty serious nosebleed. It was Christmas morning, still early. Frost bleaching the window panes. We were staying at her parents’ house in Richmond, Va., for the holidays. It was incredibly cold and the heat had been running nonstop throughout the night. I’m third-generation Floridian; I’ve seen snow only a handful of times and often joke that I’m a bona fide swamp creature that needs humidity to survive. Subsequently, my dried-out nasal passages had decided to mutiny right before she unearthed the ring “box” from her stocking (a glittering geode with a clasp; my girlfriend has always claimed to love “cool rocks”). As she pried it open and the ring tumbled out, I was still furiously swabbing at my nostrils, heart beating like it wanted to smash open my ribs and escape.
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This will make a great engagement story, I thought, blood-stained tissue still wadded in my fist. I stumbled through the proposal, barely able to form a coherent sentence. “Do you like it?” I finally asked, instead of the all-important engagement question: “Will you marry me?” For someone who calls herself a writer, this was not my most eloquent moment. But throughout all of it – the spontaneous nosebleed, my frazzled nerves – I wasn’t worried that my girlfriend would turn me down. I knew she would say yes, and she did, sweetly taking over for me when I lost all my carefully planned-out words. I knew we would get married. I knew we would be happy.

What I did worry about? What would happen when we got back to Florida, which over the past few weeks (months? years?) has become an increasingly hostile and inhospitable place for queer and trans people to live.

Read More: The Bittersweet Experience of Celebrating Pride in Florida

I’ve spent much of my adult life writing about Florida. Essays, novels, tweets. My entire body of work is an homage to my home state. Everything I create is saturated with it, the sunshine and the rot and the thunder thumping hard as a bass drum in my chest. I’ve always said that Florida is embedded in my work because it lives inside me. How could it not? I was born here, grew up here, loved and cried and ached here. Gave birth to my son here. Received both of my degrees here, working full-time days in libraries while I went to school at night. I’ve spent my entire adult life in Florida, building friendship and lasting community. Making art. I have become an unofficial brand ambassador for the state, someone willing to talk about Florida as it actually exists because otherwise someone else, usually not from here, will open the conversation with misinformation and hysteria.

But in asking my girlfriend to spend the rest of her life with me, and with no plans to live elsewhere, I am once again reminded that this place I love dearly has not always loved me back. As a queer person living in a conservative state, I have long been subject to laws denying my rights. Other LGBTQ+ people have chosen to move away, rightfully worried by the lack of care and concern from our lawmakers. It is a precarious and destabilizing way to live. To ask my future wife to live here indefinitely – bound with me, in sickness and in health – requires that I consider her safety as well as my own. I am white and she is not; that means that things are different for her than they are for me. It’s the nature of our country.

My fiancée – who had never been to Florida before dating me – understands how much this state means to me. She’s seen the sunsets sink sherbet-stained behind a long row of palm scrub, swum in the Atlantic and dusted sand from the car for days afterward, watched raccoons and possums and bees and cardinals drink from the birdbath in our yard, eaten sandwiches from the place near my old house that’s been open since 1967, befriended booksellers and writers and artists and attended dozens of their events, become close with the bartenders at our local cocktail place, The Courtesy, where everyone knows our name like it’s Cheers. Florida has become important to her, too; her compassion toward the people here has deepened my love for her immeasurably.

Read More: The Most Fun, Romantic Songs to Play at Your Wedding

As I prepare to marry the person I love in Florida, I vacillate between excitement and dread. Though our wedding will be a day to celebrate our love, it will also be a time to show off my hometown. To offer up recommendations for our favorite restaurants and shops, day trips out to botanical parks and walks along the lakeshore. To introduce our real community, the people who live and work here alongside us, the very best parts of Florida presented to our out-of-town guests, because the rhetoric around where we live is often dictated by people who don’t know us at all.

But there are also plenty of things to fear in the Sunshine State. Log onto the internet and you’re inundated with an avalanche of Florida problems: hurricanes and flooding and climate change. Poisonous animals and humongous insects. Sharks and alligators (though in my personal opinion, these last two are nothing to be afraid of). And, of course, the source of almost all of my anxiety: our current governor, an individual who has worked ceaselessly to take away rights from trans and queer individuals, using anti-LGBTQ bills to score political points off people’s lives. This deluge of legislation is meant to layer harm. “Don’t Say Gay,” first enacted, then later expanded. Drag bills that sneakily work to undermine the rights of trans folk. Transgender bathroom bans and bans on affirming care. Stacking school boards. Refusing to allow CRT into schools. Attempting to remove college majors in gender studies. Book bans; ways to take crucial information away from the public. Allowing medical practitioners to refuse care to LGBTQ+ patients based on moral concerns. It can overwhelm you if you let it. How can I best advocate for this place when I’m sometimes afraid to hold my fiancée’s hand in public?

Maybe it can be as simple as taking direct action, no matter how small that act might feel in the moment. If the bad can layer and expand, then so can the good. Living here so many years as an out gay person has meant creating a found family in lieu of my biological one. My fiancée and I have made it a point to hire queer people to work at our wedding: a gay friend’s catering company will provide the food and drinks for our reception; a queer local DJ will handle the music. Why not pay other LGBTQ+ people in our community to help with our event, supporting their businesses in the process? In lieu of wedding gifts, we’re donating money to Zebra Youth, the local LGBTQ+ initiative for young people. We want to bolster and sustain the next generation of Floridians; this is a way we can do that.

Hope is a thing with wings, I’m told, and this state is chock-full of birds as well as mosquitoes. We experience the pleasure and the pain simultaneously. I want to fight for the home that I love, and that means staying here, regardless of my exhaustion. Clinging and sticking like a sandspur into Florida’s side. I don’t see this as a burden, but rather a chance to wake up every day and work on our collective future. It’s also a privilege; not everyone can afford to take this kind of stance.

After my girlfriend said yes to my proposal, we woke up her family and shared our good news. And there was champagne, and there was celebration, and then there was breakfast. As we enjoyed our meal – Norwegian waffles with jam and powdered sugar, another of her family’s many beautiful traditions – I joked about the fact that I’m very serious about orange juice. “I only like the real stuff,” I said, shrugging. “It must be the Florida in me.”

The Florida in me wants you to know that I’m not giving up. I’m just as hardy as this state. Just as grasping and tenacious and hopeful, despite all the people and the laws that might try to tear us down. And it’s more than just me. There are plenty of us. All wanting to show you that we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not leaving.

My future wife also feels this way. And God, I love her for that.

Look at this place, we’ll say. We fought for it. It’s our home. And yes, it’s messy, but isn’t it beautiful, too?

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Both Mike Pence and Chris Christie are set to jump into the 2024 race next week, joining Ron DeSantis in vying for the role of leading Republican not named Donald Trump. It goes without saying that all three men are hoping to not end up the Jeb! of 2024. Anything but that!

And yet, each member of the trio appears to be taking a distinctly Jeb!-ian approach to funding and running his campaign, despite the questionable track record when contenders have adopted such a tactic.
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The plan seemed like a smart one back in 2015, at least at its inception. Rather than have the former Florida Governor chase headlines or start to chop at his 2016 rivals, he held off on all of that while Bush’s Miami headquarters focused on one thing and one alone: picking up massive checks to seed a nominally separate super PAC. To bide time, Bush would filibuster when asked about politics: “10-yard penalty, loss of down,” he would tell reporters when we asked about news of the day.

The thinking was rational. Eventually, when things got rough, the super PAC and its unmatched resources could build a wall of sorts around the bookish Bush, who could meanwhile run the campaign of his own making, one focused on footnotes, wonks, and actual deliverables.

Among the biggest problems in this thesis: Jeb! Inc. had not anticipated the dominance of Trump, against whom no amount of super PAC spending or fact-based logic could matter. The other big problem: The more voters got to know Bush, the worse he did. He was the Cousin Greg of 2016. It was as clear an example as exists in the super PAC era about the limits of money and its proximity to truly reorient the political environment—and one that many of the 2024 contenders these days are loath to learn.

In Iowa, where Trump spoke at a Fox News town hall Thursday evening, DeSantis and his super PAC are working to plant seeds of doubt about Trump’s true conservatism. Pence and Christie are both readying announcements next week now that they have similar deep-pocketed fixers watching over them.

Those outside super PACs, nominally independent and legally barred from coordinating strategy with the candidate or his official team, are still seen as heaven-sent answers to fundraising challenges. Because super PACs can legally accept unlimited—and often ungodly—sums of money, they are perceived as a way to keep the candidates focused on the things that only candidates can do, like headline events, make policy speeches, and answer voters’ questions directly. The super PAC, the thinking goes, can handle the routine things that voters only passively notice, like advertising, polling, voter-registration and get-out-the-vote operations. And from the looks of it, both Pence and Christie are going to lean heavily on their super PACs to do a good chunk of the skullduggery that is campaign infrastructure.

It’s a tempting proposition, but one that has never proven terribly successful. In fact, only Barack Obama’s 2012 victory stands as an example of a super PAC really making a difference in the race, having spent $66 million on negative ads against Mitt Romney. Hillary Clinton’s use of the Democratic Party’s primary super PACs in 2016 proved insufficient and too narrowly focused on hitting Trump, whose image never seemed to flake; Joe Biden’s outside pals at the same group raised about one-quarter less in 2020 than in 2016 to focus almost exclusively on digital advertising in an environment teed up for Biden.

As much as super PACs are heralded as a financial answer for candidates, they are often a source of troubles. They breed competition for donors, build confusion in voters’ minds, spark conflicts between competing camps that ostensibly back the same candidates, and feed terrible inefficiencies. They can create their own legal woes. If done poorly—as is commonly the case—the super PAC builds a shadow campaign in duplicate.

Because super PACs have unchecked ability to raise money, they often have far more lax checks on spending. To sketch a specific case for the uninitiated, that consultant’s $25,000 bill can be covered by one super PAC call to a sugar daddy while a campaign would have to find eight brand new donors who haven’t opened their checkbooks and are willing to max-out their contributions, right?

In practice, it gets even tougher. The donors who max-out with $3,300 checks to candidates are rare; roughly two-thirds of Biden’s fundraising in 2020 came in increments under $200, while less than one-fifth came in chunks of $2,000 or more. It seems a lot easier for a candidate’s loose orbit to collect checks in huge sums, but there are huge complications incumbent in that system once the money comes across the table.

All of this, of course, is limited to the official super PAC spending. In campaign finance circles, so-called “dark money” groups also are operating. Unlike super PACs, which have to disclose their donors in regular reports to the Federal Elections Commission, the “dark money” operators are technically organized under the tax code as social-service or nonprofit groups that can hide their patrons. A must-read New York Times analysis of the top 15 Democratic-aligned nonprofits spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 to the $900 million unleashed by the top 15 GOP-aligned nonprofits. (For the sake of a comparison, Biden’s official effort that year raised $1 billion and Trump pulled in $810 million. The median household income last year was about $71,000.)

Yes, these are absolutely insane sums of money in politics. In a time not that long ago, general election campaigns ran on a public financing system that ensured ideas, not checkbooks, fueled the presidential campaigns. George W. Bush and John Kerry each had about $150 million in public financing to run their post-nominating convention march to Election Day 2004.

Fast-forward a little more than a decade. The pro-Jeb Bush super PAC Right to Rise wrangled $118 million and spent $87 million on advertising—a line-item that was almost triple the official campaign’s total budget. And yet, it turns out, for all the hyping of the super PAC strategy, it didn’t matter. Bush finished sixth in lead-off Iowa, ended up fourth in New Hampshire and South Carolina alike, and flew home from Columbia, S.C., as a former candidate.

Even Bush himself was frustrated with the super PAC’s work, asking a Des Moines Register reporter trailing him for a day in January 2016 who was behind billboards publishing Bush’s own words. “What the hell is that?” he asked. “Is that Right to Rise?” As the campaign got closer to counting voting, the pro-Bush donors were in open revolt about the efficacy of spending, including a 15-minute documentary on New England Sports Network that seemed more suited for Pyongyang than Portsmouth, N.H. Outside his events, you could differentiate the campaign signs from those planted by the Super PAC by punctuation: the ones with Jeb branding were from the super PAC, and the ones with Jeb! came from the campaign. Bush didn’t seem fully comfortable with the super PAC by the end. “It’s a weird system where you’re, you know, you can’t have any coordination,” he said.

As I chased Bush around the fields of Iowa, the wedding halls of New Hampshire, and the convention centers of South Carolina, it was like watching a candidate that seemed unable to look around and see Trump had changed the rules, perhaps permanently and most likely not for good. Writing from his extremely deflated—and, as time marched on, increasingly drunk—campaign headquarters on the night he ended a White House march plotted for years, I posited that Bush’s problem was he was running in “a year that saw bluster overtake substance, and Bush refused to shift.” He was merely an early canary in the coal mine that America would become.

“You cannot insult your way to the presidency,” Bush repeated time and again. He believed it. Well, it turns out Trump could. He did. And no one has proven that his talent for cruelty has abated—or that any amount of money on its own can dent his standing, be it from a donor to a candidate or a super PAC.

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News of a recent alleged assassination attempt on Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, raises the question: what kind of Russia might emerge after him? It is tempting to believe that, if Putin were killed, or otherwise removed from power, for example in a palace coup, Russia would shake off its dictatorial shackles, normalize its relations with the West, and advance down the democratic road. Such thinking is mistaken. History suggests there are slim prospects of Russia doing so.

The surest guarantee that Russia will not reform along democratic lines is the power of its security and intelligence services. At key junctures in Soviet and post-Soviet history, amid coups, near-coups, reforms, and revolutions, the KGB and its successors have always acted as kingmaker. Their power has remained consistent as Kremlin leaders came and went. There is little reason to believe they will not do so again.
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Russia is effectively a security service with a state attached. Its intelligence services—the FSB, SVR, and GRU—wield vast influence. For the last two decades, Putin has ruled Russia by relying on “men of force,” siloviki, who have KGB or military backgrounds. By some estimates, 77 percent of Putin’s government were siloviki in 2019. According to one recent CIA chief of station in Moscow, the “overwhelming majority” of technocrats in his government come from this background. And Putin is not necessarily the most hardline among them.

If Putin were eliminated, and someone like Nikolai Patrushev, on Russia’s Security Council, were to take power, little would change. The same goes for another silovik, Putin’s minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, or Alexander Bortnikov, old KGB hand and FSB director. With one of them at the helm, the situation may be worse. They may have clearer heads than Putin. The West may be better off with Putin than his alternatives. Better the devil you know.

In 1991, Russia’s post-Soviet government, led by Boris Yeltsin, hoped to bury the KGB. Fresh light is cast on this moment when the Russian security state got to the point of turning, but failed to turn, in newly opened British foreign office records. MI6’s then head of station in Moscow, John Scarlett, cabled to London that Yeltsin’s government was, for the first time, imposing a degree of political oversight on Russia’ services through legislation. Whether such efforts would be effective, Scarlett noted, would depend on whether Kremlin leaders broke with the past and genuinely refrained from interfering with the services. Scarlett was— correctly— not optimistic.

Read More: Why Putin Is Right to Fear for His Life

Yeltsin’s strategy was to separate the KGB’s functions, which had been responsible for combined domestic and foreign intelligence, into two new services: a security service, later called the FSB, and foreign service, the SVR. By splitting them, Yeltsin hoped to disband the KGB. However, much like the liquid metal T-2000 in Terminator 2, which hit movie screens in 1991, the KGB soon pulled itself back together.

Former KGB officers, its tradecraft, its files, and even its agents in the West, all moved seamlessly into Russia’s new services, the SVR and FSB. One FSB defector explained to me that old KGB training textbooks continued to be used at its headquarters, the Lubyanka, the KGB’s old headquarters, but now with pages about communism ripped out. The SVR’s first director, Yevgeny Primakov, made himself indispensable to Yeltsin’s government, as did the FSB, which in 1998 was led by a former mid-grade KGB officer, Putin.

Putin makes much of his KGB past. He calls himself a “Chekist,” in honor of Lenin’s terrorist secret police, the Cheka, the KGB’s predecessor. While FSB head, Putin kept a statue of the Cheka’s founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Felix,” in his office. But equally important to Putin’s subsequent career is his time in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. That city was the gangland power center of Russia’s mafia. Putin’s job in the city government drew him into the Russian underworld.

At the end of the decade, Yeltsin plucked Putin from relative obscurity at the FSB to be his successor in the Kremlin—Putin’s name does not appear on 1998 British intelligence lists of possible Yeltsin successors. Yeltsin did so because he hoped that Putin would go soft on him once out of power. Yeltsin was right.

With Putin taking over in the Kremlin, Russian intelligence and mafia were fused together. He has run Russia ever since as a security and mafia state. The FSB conducts massive, state-driven, money laundering schemes for Putin’s personal enrichment and that of some of his closest allies, the oligarchs. This is not a question of a few bad FSB apples, but systematic, criminal, pervasive, rot. Before becoming FSB head, Bortnikov was head of its economic division, where he sat at the nexus between the Russian mafia and state extortion.

The grim machine that Putin has created will outlast him. It is bigger than him. To be successful, an assassination, coup, or revolution in Russia, would need to sweep away not just Putin, but also the siloviki. The FSB will not disappear without a fight and it is more likely that, as in 1991, the FSB would metastasize, but remain.

Brave democratic reformers in Russia like Vladimir Kara-Murza are in penal colonies, as is Putin’s nemesis, Alexei Navalny. In these bleak circumstances, the best thing for the U.S. government to do is prepare for a long-term struggle with Russia. Certainly Washington, and its NATO allies, should do everything to help democratic reformists in Russia bring about change from within. But we should be clear-eyed about their prospects of success. Western countries should degrade the ability of Russian intelligence to operate overseas by instigating mass expulsions of its officers posing as Russian diplomats. History shows that expulsions degrade the Kremlin’s clandestine capabilities. Russian embassies and consulates in the West should be reduced to shells.

The U.S. needs a new grand strategy of containment for Russia. That strategy should be based on an uncomfortable truth: the West has a Russia problem, not a Putin problem.

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

In Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, audiences are introduced to a host of new characters. But the most important one is Miguel O’Hara, voiced by Oscar Isaac in an engaging standout performance. Since he was introduced in the comics in 1992, O’Hara is known as Spider-Man 2099 of Earth 928, and he was imbued with superpowers through an accidental merging of his DNA with a spider. He was known to be a crime fighter and had run-ins with different multiversal villains as well as heroes including Doctor Doom, Vulture, and Doctor Strange. O’Hara’s main objective in Across The Spider-Verse is different from his story in the comics.
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Here’s everything you need to know about O’Hara’s origins and his role in Across the Spider-Verse.

Who is Miguel O’Hara in Across the Spider-Verse?

The movie opens on Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld), who is struggling with concealing her identity as a spider person from her father, the NYPD police captain of her dimension. Her father responds to a disturbance at the Guggenheim Museum, and Gwen surreptitiously follows him. When she gets there, she realizes that the Vulture she’s fighting is not from her dimension. As she struggles to apprehend him, O’Hara appears and helps her along with Jessica Drew (voiced by Issa Rae). Audiences learn that O’Hara is the leader of a task force that is wrangling “anomalies” across the Spider-Verse who are in universes other than their own.

Gwen gets a chance to join the group and meets up with Miles Morales, who ends up following her into a different dimension. They land in Mumbattan, a Mumbai/Manhattan hybrid, which is home to Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), this universe’s Spider-Man. While there, Miles disrupts a “canon event,” an event that happens to all of the Spider-Men across the multiverse, by not letting the police captain die in the alternate universe. Miles, Gwen, Pavitr, and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) have to report back to O’Hara, who explains to Miles that what he did put the fate of the Spider-Verse in danger.

Read more: The Definitive Ranking of Every Single Spider-Man Movie

O’Hara explains to Miles that in every iteration of Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse, the police captain has to die—which in turn prompts Miles to remember that his father was just promoted to captain and realize that his dad’s life is in danger. Miles tries to escape but O’Hara and the legion of Spider people try to stop him: if Miles manages to save his father, then the disruption of that “canon event” could have catastrophic consequences.

Who is Miguel O’Hara in the Marvel Comics?

O’Hara was a trailblazing iteration of Spider-Man when he was introduced as the first non-white version of the superhero in a preview of June 1992’s Amazing Spider-Man #365 and received his own title in September of that year. He was the head of the genetics department at Alchemax, the major biomedical corporation that’s mentioned in Across The Spider-Verse as the lab where the main antagonist, The Spot (f.k.a. Dr. Jonathan Ohnn, voiced by Jason Schwartzman), was a scientist. In his work, O’Hara tried to recreate the original Spider-Man’s powers, and in the process, his boss—a man named Tyler Stone—gave him a drug called Rapture that he ended up getting addicted to.

In an effort to curb the addiction, O’Hara became his own test subject for his experiments in replicating Spider-Man’s powers. During an experiment, his coworker messed with the machine and O’Hara’s DNA became 50 percent spider. In story lines that unfolded in the years to come, the newly-minted superhero teamed up with Peter Parker to fight against Alchemax and some of the comic’s most notorious villains, including the Green Goblin. O’Hara’s series ran for 46 issues until the late ‘90s, when Marvel hit a snag with financial troubles. Throughout the years, he made appearances in crossover issues, but Across The Spider-Verse marks his debut on the silver screen.

The Senate voted Thursday night to raise the government’s debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars in spending, concluding a long and fractious political struggle that pushed the nation to the brink of default.

The bill, which passed 63 to 36 and has already cleared the House, will be signed by President Joe Biden with time to spare before the government’s borrowing authority is set to run out on Monday.

“No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: this bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people,” Biden, who negotiated the framework of the bill with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said in a statement immediately after the legislation passed the Senate.
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The legislation’s passage came after a day of tense negotiations in the Senate as a handful of Republicans complained that the deal would underfund the military and threatened to delay the vote unless Senate leaders committed to addressing their concerns before voting. Lawmakers on both sides threw up one last set of hurdles by proposing 11 amendments in exchange for allowing the legislation to pass quickly. Adoption of the amendments would have sent the bill back to the House, but each failed.

In the end, Congress once again managed to clean up a fiscal mess of its own making after a long impasse marked by contentious late-night negotiations and partisan bickering. The compromise was denounced by Democrats as being tilted too heavily toward Republican priorities after Biden went back on his vow not to negotiate with opponents who effectively threatened to tank the U.S. economy in order to extract spending cuts.

Read more: Here’s What’s in the Debt Ceiling Bill.

The final roll call vote laid bare political fissures within both parties, with passage in the Senate relying on the votes of the remaining center of each party. Forty-four Democrats, 17 Republicans and 2 Independents voted in favor.

The legislation suspends the debt ceiling through Jan. 2025 and reduces government deficits by about $1.5 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by effectively freezing some funding that had been projected to increase next year and then limiting spending to 1% growth in 2025. The bill also increases military spending to $886 billion for next year, a 3% raise, though GOP critics felt the package would not keep pace with inflation and on Thursday afternoon demanded a commitment from Senate leaders to pass a supplemental defense spending bill later this year, as well as pledge to take up all 12 annual appropriations bills as a condition for moving forward quickly.

In a rare joint statement released ahead of the vote, Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell agreed to attempt to pass 12 annual spending bills this year in order to avoid the across-the-board spending cuts the debt deal calls for. The agreement paved the way for a quick final vote on the pact. “It does not fix this bill totally, but it is a march in the right direction,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who had openly criticized the bill’s military spending provisions. Congress has not passed all 12 appropriations bills in time since 1996.

The legislation also imposes stricter work requirements for food stamps, claws back some funding for Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement and unspent COVID-19 relief money, accelerates the permitting of new energy projects, and officially ends the Biden Administration’s student loan-repayment freeze.

Read More: House Passes Debt Deal, Setting Up Crucial Senate Vote.

Not all Democrats were on board. Some progressive members of Congress, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, were dismayed that the deal imposed new work requirements on people aged 50 to 54 in order to receive food stamps. Others voiced frustration that Biden had to negotiate with McCarthy at all over the debt ceiling, complained that the White House had ignored them in its negotiations with Republicans, and said the deal would do too little to protect programs for the poor.

Biden said he planned to sign the bill into law as soon as possible. Failure to do so by Monday would have left the government without the ability to borrow for the first time in history, forcing a financing crisis that would have tanked markets and jolted the U.S. economy.