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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) The Problem With Martin Luther King Jr.’s Origin Story
By Lerone Martin and Jonathan Eig, May 31, 2026
Dr. Martin and Mr. Eig are biographers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
For years, we’ve been trying, with some frustration, to identify the white boy who introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to racism.
Dr. King told the story himself, first in a college essay, and then again in interviews, until it formed the core of his origin story. It went like this: He was 3 years old and still known as Mike, the name on his birth certificate, when he made friends with a white boy whose family owned a store across the street from the King family’s home in Atlanta. They played together almost every day. In 1935, when they turned 6 and entered school — “separate schools of course,” Dr. King later wrote — the parents of the white boy told their son he was no longer permitted to play with Mike.
Shocked, Mike asked his parents to explain. They sat at the family’s dinner table where “for the first time I was made aware of the existence of a race problem,” he would later write. “I had never been conscious of it before.”
In Dr. King’s account, Alberta Williams King and Martin Luther King Sr. tried to explain to their son the tragedy of American racism. They told him that many people used skin color to define and classify humans, to denigrate them, humiliate them, isolate them, deny them justice and profit from their punishment and penury.
Alberta Williams King reassured her son, “You’re as good as anyone.” Dr. King would say years later his mother’s response to his youthful pain gave him a sense of “somebody-ness.”
The question we are now forced to confront is what happens if we can’t confirm this story. As part of our work as King scholars, we’ve been hunting through archives and public records for seven years in search of Dr. King’s young white friend, and while we have one plausible possibility, we cannot be sure. We experienced disappointment as we hit one dead end after another. We began to wonder if Dr. King’s story could be trusted. We know from history and from human nature that origin stories are often shaped to serve other ends than a literal recounting of events.
Our conclusion is that a core piece of Dr. King’s biography, one that in his own telling propelled him to become his future self, can’t yet be verified. This raises a whole host of problems. What would it mean if he’d confused the details? What would it mean if he’d fabricated the story entirely?
As scholars and biographers of Dr. King, we admit we are prone to obsess about the details of his life. Want to know how many points he had in the Morehouse intramural basketball championship game? “Will Shoot,” the nickname his friends later gave him for his shoot-first-pass-never mentality, scored eight of his team’s 47 points. Want to know what brand of cologne he wore? It was Aramis.
Our search for the identity of the white boy has been driven by more than a fixation over detail. Dr. King told the story to make a larger point about the damage that racism does to all of us. Our history of legal and self-imposed separation continues to sit at the core of some of our nation’s most serious spiritual and political crises. With that in mind, we thought that learning what happened to Mike King’s young friend might provide insight into racism’s long-lasting costs.
There are some things we do know. Dr. King’s older sister, Christine King Farris, told her son she remembered her brother’s story and his playmate, but didn’t remember the name. City directories for 1935 confirm that there was a grocery on Auburn Avenue across from the King home, but city directories and census records indicate that the store’s proprietor, Minnie Smith, was a single woman with no children.
A white family owned the store a few years earlier, and that white family did have a child the same age as young Mike King, named Melvin.
As we investigated, we learned Melvin’s father was a Jewish refugee born in the Russian Empire who arrived in the United States in 1913. Despite having only a seventh-grade education, he assimilated with stunning speed. Within a single generation he had changed his name, presumably to make it sound more American, purchased a home, started a business and sent his children to college. Melvin attended Boys High, a public school where Black students were denied entry. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia, a public college where Black students were also denied entry. He served in the Marine Corps. He married and had two children. He went into the family business, owning and operating a small grocery store in one of Atlanta’s predominantly Black neighborhoods.
In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated and violence erupted in Black neighborhoods all over the country, a grocery store owned by Melvin went up in flames.
If Melvin was the boy who inadvertently opened Dr. King’s eyes to racism, the fire would represent an extraordinary and bitter irony. But we can’t be sure. The facts don’t entirely line up. Urban renewal and decay have transformed Auburn Avenue, erasing most of its original structures. We contacted one of Melvin’s children, who told us that his father, who died in 2003, never mentioned a childhood connection to Dr. King. With no other way to corroborate the story, we are withholding Melvin’s last name.
A new piece of evidence emerged last year: A photo discovered in a Wisconsin archive shows young Mike King kneeling in front of a grocery store, his brother A.D. behind him. There’s a sign on the outer wall of the shop. It appears to say something like “Harriman Grocery.” Alas, we couldn’t find any stores near the King home with a name that began with the letter H.
Where does this leave us? As historians, we’re fond of primary sources and hard, cold facts. If pressed, we would judge Dr. King’s story as “probably true.”
We’re also aware of this hard, cold fact: History isn’t concrete. It moves and changes with us. It’s not even in the past, as Baldwin, Faulkner and others remind us. We shape it as we speak. Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question about Mike King’s white playmate. Perhaps a better question is what the story meant to Dr. King, and what it means to us today.
Origin stories help us make sense of the world. The Greek and Roman columns in Washington and your local county courthouse are vivid reminders of America’s efforts to hitch a new democracy to its ancient antecedents. There are moral lessons we obtain from a hero’s origin story, whether it’s that of George Washington or Luke Skywalker. And those moral lessons can be more important than factual accuracy (in the case of Luke Skywalker, that argument is easy).
In the first recorded instance in which he told the story, Mike King had already changed his name to Martin Luther King Jr., which is also part of his origin story. At 19, he had moved to Pennsylvania to attend Crozer Theological Seminary, living outside the strictures of the Jim Crow South. He told the story of the grocery store owner’s son in a class assignment dedicated to tracing each student’s religious development.
Before he was famous, he used the story to communicate to his teacher and fellow students how he arrived at his faith and then journeyed toward loving his enemies.
His experience with the white grocer’s son was hardly his only exposure to the bruising effects of racism. When he was around 8 years old, he was slapped by a white woman at a department store because she mistakenly believed he had stepped on her foot. He and his father were denied service while shopping for shoes when they declined to sit in the back of the store. And at 15, he suffered the curses and threats of a white bus driver when he momentarily refused to give up his seat for a white passenger.
He didn’t need to be rejected by a white 6-year-old to know that all the schools he attended in Atlanta were segregated by race and inferior to better-funded white schools. Neither did he need that child to understand the menacing intent of the Ku Klux Klansmen who paraded down his street. But he told the story of the grocer’s son over and over, because once he suffered the afflictions of racism, nothing was ever the same.
The structure of Dr. King’s origin story fits into a longer tradition. From Frederick Douglass to Rosa Parks, Black Americans have told similar stories of being evicted from their childhood innocence by early racist encounters — thrown out of the Garden of Eden by no sin except the color of their skin. As the civil rights activist James Farmer once wrote, “Every Black child in the South has an early experience of racism that shafts his soul.”
Dr. King, like his forebears, told his story in the hopes that others might understand his struggle, as well as our struggle as a nation. His parents and Sunday-school teachers told him that his religion compelled him to love the people who enslaved his ancestors and continued to insist on his inferiority. He had to wrestle with a question that struck him forcefully as a child: “How could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?”
His mother’s message — “You’re as good as anyone” — set him on a journey to become one of the most inspiring and transformative leaders in American history. His belief in his own “somebody-ness,” and his hope in the potential of American democracy, pushed him to challenge not only segregation laws but all of racism, all of America’s economic and cultural injustice, all its military aggression and all its hate. It was this commitment that led him to take unpopular stances and confront powerful rivals.
Sometimes, myth matters more than fact, and as historians, we have to respect the power of a great story and see it for what it is. In talking about his personal introduction to racism, Dr. King sought to make a point about our collective journey: that our self-imposed division threatened to rot not only individual souls but the soul of our nation. And that’s a story we still need to tell, even if some of the details remain unknowable.
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2) Americans Want to Read. Give Them Books.
By Brian Bannon, May 31, 2026
Mr. Bannon is the chief librarian of the New York Public Library, where he is also the director of branch libraries and education.
Grade Solomon for The New York Times
Walking up Madison Avenue during January’s polar vortex, I turned the corner onto 39th Street and hit a line of puffy coats, tote bags and young people with wired headphones. I had no idea what they were waiting for until I reached Fifth Avenue and saw that the line ended at the New York Public Library’s front door.
We had opened the library for a large-scale reading party for the first time. A data analyst had come from Queens to read poetry. A teacher had made the trip from the Bronx. More than a thousand people filed in. There weren’t enough chairs, and we ended up turning hundreds of people away. I ended up on the floor with a romance novel involving a barista pining over a beefy hockey player.
This was not an anomaly. More New Yorkers are borrowing books from the New York Public Library today than 15 years ago; borrowing is up 27 percent since 2010. And yet America is facing a book-reading crisis.
A 2025 study in iScience, a research journal focused on the sciences, found that pleasure reading fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2023, and a 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress report showed that the share of 13-year-olds reading for fun almost every day has dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since the federal government began asking the question in 1984. The diagnoses keep coming. Screens. Shrinking attention spans. A culture losing its appetite for books. And nearly every prescription is addressed to individuals: Read more, put your phone down, try harder.
I’m the chief librarian at the New York Public Library. In nearly 30 years of leading libraries across four U.S. cities, I’ve seen this decline up close. To be sure, one part of the solution is finding more effective ways to teach children to read in the first place. But teaching someone to read and building a world where they can do so are different problems. Throwing our phones in the lake can’t bring about that world, but designing the conditions for reading will.
In the 19th century, America began to build a national network of free public libraries in nearly every community. And then almost overnight, Google could answer any question, and Amazon could deliver any book. Who needed a building full of them?
Instead of disappearing, libraries remained indispensable, just not for reading and books. In community after community, local libraries filled society’s gaps. Computer classes, voter registration, literacy programs, social services, job training. It was important work that came with little new money. The first thing to get squeezed was the books.
Then came a harder truth. Libraries themselves were throwing up barriers to reading. In 2019 the Chicago Public Library found that its overdue fine policy had created a two-tiered system. In the city’s lower-income South District, one-third of cardholders were barred from borrowing because they owed $10 or more in fines and fees. On the more affluent North District, that share dropped to roughly one-sixth. A few dollars could lock an 8-year-old out of the library.
That October, Chicago became the largest city in America to eliminate fines for overdue materials. Three weeks later, returns of overdue books were up 240 percent. Within a year, 111,000 patrons renewed or replaced their library cards. From 2019 to 2021, major library systems across the country — including those of Dallas, Denver, San Francisco and New York City went late-fee-free.
When the Covid pandemic closed library doors, we told ourselves that reading would simply move online. For wealthier communities with home broadband, it did. For communities where people have slower internet service or none at all, it didn’t. Only when libraries reopened, when people could walk in and pull a spine off a shelf, did the numbers start recovering.
When libraries reinvested in books, the gains were larger. The Harris County Public Library in Texas invested early in digital lending when many systems had not. Checkouts grew from one million to seven million in seven years. At the New York Public Library, as part of a special, limited-time program this past January, we turned on unlimited digital access for Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, including the best seller “Heated Rivalry.” Normally, readers would have had to wait months for such a popular title to be available for their e-readers. Instead, 40,000 people downloaded the books in three weeks, and thousands of new patrons registered for library cards.
Other countries have gone further. Last year Denmark’s government announced a plan to eliminate the highest book tax in the world, citing its reading crisis as the reason; Argentina exempts books from tax, alongside bread, milk and medicine; Italy introduced a policy in 2016 that gave every 18-year-old a 500-euro cultural voucher, and 70 percent of it was spent on books; France, Germany and Spain followed with vouchers of their own.
America did not build its library system by accident. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company because he believed a free country required citizens who could think, reason and govern themselves. A century and a half later, Andrew Carnegie (and later his foundation) funded 1,681 libraries across the country, this time as free spaces built on the condition that towns would maintain them. By 2010, there were over 17,000 public library branches and bookmobiles. A democracy needs its people to read, and it is society’s job to make that possible — the same reason we have public schools, water systems and the electric grid.
The reading crisis is real. But we don’t need new inventions to build a reading city. Exempt books from sales taxes the way we exempt prescription medicine. Invest in library collections and reduce wait lists for books. Open nonprofit and hybrid bookstores when the market alone cannot sustain them. Build on the models that already work: reading in laundromats, libraries in transit systems, books in barbershops, classrooms, homes and pediatric offices.
None of this is theoretical. Every time someone designs the conditions for reading, people read. A data analyst from Queens. A teacher from the Bronx. The thousand New Yorkers who showed up on a freezing January night for a library reading party.
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3) N.J. Governor Calls for Calm After Protesters Clash With Police at Delaney Hall
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around the immigration detention center after a second consecutive night of unrest over living conditions there.
By Maia Coleman and Mark Bonamo, Published May 30, 2026, Updated May 31, 2026
Demonstrators and police officers outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark on Saturday. Vincent Alban for The New York Times
Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey again urged demonstrators to remain peaceful early Sunday after a second straight night of clashes between protesters and law enforcement outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around the facility, where demonstrators threw projectiles, fought over barricades, set fires and scuffled with officers from the New Jersey State Police and the Newark Police Department on Saturday evening and overnight. The detention center has, for the past week, been the site of tense protests over concerns about living conditions at the facility.
“I do not know why these individuals attacked or what they wanted to accomplish, but I refuse to let these dangerous actions detract from New Jersey’s dedication to ensuring public safety, keeping people safe from ICE, and that the people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity,” Ms. Sherrill said in a statement early Sunday.
Hours earlier, Ms. Sherrill made a similar plea, urging demonstrators to “bring the temperature down” to avoid escalating immigration enforcement operations and endangering the lives of detainees and other immigrants in the state.
Ms. Sherrill criticized the intrusion of “extremist groups” and demonstrators from outside the state, who she said had been interfering in the protests and distracting from the ultimate goal of improving conditions inside the detention center and eventually closing it.
A standoff on Friday night resulted in the arrest of six demonstrators, four of whom had traveled from New York and one from Pennsylvania. The state police had assumed control of the area after negotiating the withdrawal of federal agents in hopes of restoring order.
“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be here,” Ms. Sherrill said. “You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you are not helping detainee families and you’re certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”
Despite the calls for calm, clashes continued.
Late Saturday, protesters pressed against police barricades and shields, wielded makeshift shields of their own and at times struggled with officers for control of metal fencing. Police later deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades as they sought to disperse the crowd.
Officers in riot gear formed shield lines outside the detention center, while mounted troopers and officers on foot worked to push demonstrators back.
Around midnight, dozens of state troopers and Newark police officers sealed off Doremus Avenue at the detention center. Officers set up metal barricades, some wearing combat boots and riot helmets, and carrying sidearms and zip-tie handcuffs.
Just after midnight, Mr. Baraka, the Newark mayor, issued a curfew covering a half-mile area around the detention center. The restrictions remain in effect nightly from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. until further notice.
A public safety alert announcing the curfew was sent to residents’ cellphones at 12:30 a.m.
The groups have clashed frequently over the past week, with protesters sometimes taunting federal agents. The agents, in turn, have tackled demonstrators, spraying chemical irritants and, in at least one case, beating a protester with a baton across the torso, thighs, knee and calves as he tried to flee.
On Wednesday, some members of a group of demonstrators were arrested, and on Thursday night, a 26-year-old man from Morris County bit two agents who were trying to remove him during a scuffle outside the facility, the authorities said. The man, Brendan John Geier, was charged in New Jersey federal court on Friday with assaulting federal officers and causing bodily injury. He was later released with limitations and barred from returning to Delaney Hall.
A lawyer for Mr. Geier could not immediately be reached on Saturday.
Relatives of detainees and immigrant advocates have said that detainees inside the facility were beaten and doused with pepper spray this week after some inmates began a hunger strike.
The Department of Homeland Security has denied that there was a hunger strike. The agency also said that there had been a fight involving detainees inside the detention center and that jail staff had broken it up. Officials said that detainees who had been affected had been evaluated by medical workers and that no one had been seriously hurt.
Ms. Sherrill said her focus remained on gaining full access to Delaney Hall for the members of her administration, restoring visitation for families and ensuring that detainees received proper medical care.
“We can’t let what’s happening outside Delaney Hall take us away from that mission,” she said.
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4) For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry
By Maria DeLiberato, June 1, 2026
Ms. DeLiberato has represented defendants in death penalty cases for nearly 20 years.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; source photograph by J Studios/Getty Images
Last month, I walked into Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to watch the State of Tennessee kill my client, Tony Carruthers.
Nothing prepared me to witness the agony that Mr. Carruthers experienced in the execution chamber. Not the nearly 20 years I had spent as a capital defense lawyer. Not the thousands of hours building cases to keep people alive. Not even having stood in a Florida witness room just five months earlier, watching the state kill another one of my clients, Frank Walls, even though he had an intellectual disability.
I first met Mr. Carruthers in March, nearly 30 years to the day that he was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of three people in Memphis. He arrived at our first meeting carrying a stack of legal papers. He shook my hand and immediately started talking about his case.
He wasn’t wearing shackles, and the guards permitted him to walk back and forth to his cell to grab more paperwork. The guards treated him with respect, and he showed them the same. Mr. Carruthers was genuine. I believed him. We got to work.
From the moment I reviewed his case, I recognized the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction: the absence of physical evidence connecting Mr. Carruthers to the crime, forensic evidence that had never been linked to anyone and testimony from a jailhouse snitch who later recanted. I was also shocked to learn that Mr. Carruthers was forced to represent himself at trial after several lawyers asked to be removed from his case, claiming that he was too difficult to work with.
With just two months until Mr. Carruthers’s execution date, we went to court to demand that the state test fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene that do not match Mr. Carruthers’s or the victims’. Despite the signs that Tennessee was preparing to execute a wrongfully convicted man, our efforts were unsuccessful. The state fought us at every turn.
When the morning of the execution arrived, my work changed entirely. I became a witness. My responsibility was to remain present while the state killed my client, and to refuse the comfort of looking away.
My job, as the anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean once told me, was to be a face of love in the room. I carried her words with me into the prison that morning. I knew that if every legal avenue failed, I could still give this to my client. I could remain with him until the end.
I arrived at the prison with full knowledge of Tennessee’s history of procedural failures in its execution chamber. An independent investigation commissioned by Tennessee’s governor found that, between 2018 and 2022, the state repeatedly failed to follow its own protocols while carrying out executions.
The state faced renewed scrutiny last year when prisoners filed a lawsuit challenging its lethal injection protocol. A few months later, the state executed a prisoner without deactivating his heart device, which medical experts warned could cause the device to repeatedly shock him during the lethal injection. Witnesses reported that the prisoner groaned and said, “it’s hurting so bad” during the execution.
Corrections officers met me in the prison’s lobby and walked me to Mr. Carruthers’s cell. Mr. Carruthers was seated on his bunk in his prayer shawl. On the count of three, guards lifted him onto a gurney while his cuffed hands remained in prayer. Then, the guards wheeled Mr. Carruthers into the execution chamber.
Inside, I started furiously taking notes. Tennessee bars journalists from witnessing the intravenous line insertion process, the first major step of the lethal injection protocol. I noted the time we entered the chamber. After about seven minutes of searching for a vein, they were able to insert an IV into his right arm. Then, following protocol, they also tried to set an IV in his left arm. That failed, so they moved on to his left hand, poking him over and over again. Cycling through needles, the executioners communicated mostly through tense glances and head shakes. The used needles were dropped one by one into a small plastic receptacle.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
About 30 minutes in, a doctor entered and began directing increasingly desperate efforts to tap into Mr. Carruthers’s veins. He told the executioners to remove Mr. Carruthers’s socks and search for veins in his feet. They stuck at least one needle into his foot. He winced, clearly in pain. After that didn’t work, the doctor asked whether anyone in the room knew how to gain access to Mr. Carruthers’s jugular vein.
Then, the doctor decided to attempt to establish a central line. This is an invasive procedure that requires puncturing the neck, chest or groin. I immediately objected to the warden. The doctor admitted in a deposition last year that he hadn’t performed one in over a decade and didn’t have privileges to perform one in any hospital in the country. My objection changed nothing.
That moment revealed something deeply unsettling about the machinery of executions in America. The states that still execute people insist that executions are controlled, humane and medically precise. Yet a significant number of executions have gone awry in the past decade, causing agony for prisoners across the country.
When I saw the process unraveling with my own eyes, it became clear that the overriding imperative was not competence or even the appearance of professionalism. It was completion.
The executioners draped Mr. Carruthers in a blue surgical cloth with a hole for his face. The doctor gave him a shot of lidocaine in his chest and told him it would feel like a bee sting. Before the doctor did that, he asked whether “the patient” was allergic to the drug. He referred to Mr. Carruthers as the patient, as though this room existed to heal.
Lethal injection relies on clinical and carefully sanitized language, intended to create emotional distance. The state cloaks killing in the vocabulary of medicine because acknowledging the reality plainly would force us to confront what executions truly are: acts of deliberate violence carried out in the name of justice.
When the doctor prodded Mr. Carruthers’s chest with a scalpel or large needle, Mr. Carruthers cried out in pain. But the doctor continued to push into his chest. Mr. Carruthers started groaning. I told him that his legal team was calling the courts and the governor. I told him that I was sorry. Mostly, I tried to hold his gaze and reassure him that we were still fighting for him.
Eventually, the doctor said he was not able to set a central line. Mr. Carruthers was in agony. By then, an hour had passed. Still, the execution team continued probing his body for another access point.
The room no longer resembled anything clinical or controlled. I could see blood coming out of the puncture wounds. Mr. Carruthers moaned while the executioners moved frantically around him. The state’s constructed illusion of precision had collapsed, revealing something far more chaotic and brutal.
Then, the phone in the execution chamber rang. The warden answered, listened, then hung up and said we weren’t doing this. I almost collapsed right there.
Mr. Carruthers was pale, trembling and drenched in sweat.
About 90 minutes after the execution attempt began, I walked out into the sunlight and spoke to reporters, who had been kept in the dark about what Tennessee had done. This is when I learned that Gov. Bill Lee had just postponed Mr. Carruthers’s execution for at least a year. I called his sister to deliver the news and she wailed with relief.
When I went back to see Mr. Carruthers, he was exhausted and shaken. He could barely keep his balance. He said of the doctor, “He was hurting me and he knew he was hurting me.”
All of the words I could use to describe what I saw and what the State of Tennessee did and failed to do pale in comparison with that simple observation. The state works hard to wrap executions in clinical language, but inside that room, there was no escaping the reality of what was happening.
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5) The Return of Blaming and Shaming in Public Health
For years, medicine has tried to eliminate stigma. Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is bringing back the language of personal responsibility.
By Simar Bajaj, June 1, 2026
Claire Merchlinsky/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty
In a CBS News interview last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, offered a little parable about American sickness. “If you want to eat doughnuts all day or drink sodas, that’s your choice,” Mr. Kennedy said, before musing, “Should you then expect society to care for you when you predictably get very sick?”
This was not an isolated flourish. In an event in West Virginia last March, Mr. Kennedy mocked the governor’s weight and asked the crowd whether the governor should do a monthly “public weigh-in” until he lost 30 pounds. Mr. Kennedy has suggested that the obesity epidemic could be solved with three good meals a day, while disparaging evidence-based interventions like GLP-1s, suggesting that the company behind Ozempic and Wegovy is “counting on selling it to Americans because we are so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”
Mr. Kennedy’s remarks hark back to a time when obesity was treated less as a chronic disease and more as a failure of willpower. Gone was any notion of body positivity or “health at every size”; back in was a language of blame, discipline and deservedness.
To Mr. Kennedy’s admirers, this is not cruelty but moral clarity. To most public health officials, though, it is a dangerous anachronism.
“We’re seeing an impressive resurgence of some of the stigmas that we felt perhaps we were doing better about,” said Allan Brandt, a historian at Harvard Medical School.
Over the past few decades, public health has grown suspicious of and moved away from harsh, virtue-laden messaging. But Mr. Kennedy’s leadership suggests that the turn toward destigmatization has provoked its own backlash — a belief that compassion has become coddling and that structural explanations — food deserts, for example — have crowded out personal responsibility.
At the center is an old assumption: Stigma, however harsh, is a form of medicine. Is it?
How Public Health Shunned Stigma
In 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman put forward one of the most influential definitions of stigma. He called it a mark of social disgrace, reducing someone “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”
Researchers have since refined this idea, framing stigma as a complex, multilevel process. It begins when some difference is labeled and loaded with stereotypes, eventually hardening into a distinction between “us” and “them.” The result can’t just be hurt feelings; stigma, by definition, must lead to status loss and discrimination, said Mark Hatzenbuehler, a psychologist at Harvard University and director of the Biopsychosocial Effects of Stigma laboratory. In other words, stigma is an exercise of power.
For much of the 20th century, public health employed stigma liberally in the United States, Dr. Brandt said. Women suspected of having venereal disease, for example, were arrested, forcibly examined and confined in reformatories, as if infection proved sexual corruption. In the 1950s, fatness was described as a mental illness, and people with obesity were cast as undisciplined and burdensome.
And with the anti-smoking campaign, stigma seemed to have its big success story. People who used tobacco were increasingly depicted as selfish and dangerous to others, and smoking rates fell. In 1964, 42 percent of people in the United States smoked. In 2024, 10 percent did. To many, the lesson was obvious: Stigma works.
The reality was more complicated. Rising taxes and indoor smoking bans shifted the practical calculus, while people who successfully quit pointed to concern for their health and a desire to set a better example for their children.
Because there was a lethal, addictive product and a clear corporate villain, fear campaigns played an important role in warning people about the dangers but then offering a way out through cessation support, said Amy Fairchild, a historian of public health at the University of Minnesota. But when this fear tipped into stigma, going so far as to disparage smokers, it undermined the public health effort, Dr. Brandt added. Later research, for example, shows that stigma is tied to more attempts to stop smoking but less success actually quitting.
That made tobacco a blurry lesson about the efficacy of stigma, but AIDS made the dangers far harder to mistake. A mysterious, often fatal disease was spreading through sex, blood and needles — particularly among gay men and people who used drugs — and Americans needed to know the risks.
But in many cases, public health turned this truth into images of contamination, intensifying the marginalization of already vulnerable groups, said Lawrence Yang, a psychologist at Duke University. For example, in 1990, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran ads like “If you shoot drugs, stay away from me” — not warning against shared needles, but casting the person who injected drugs as a source of danger.
People with AIDS, in turn, were abandoned by families, fired from jobs, refused medical care and, in many states, criminalized for having this disease. By the late 1980s, about half of Americans surveyed by Gallup believed people with AIDS were to blame for their own illness, and many thought the disease was “God’s punishment.”
Over time, public health authorities learned that stigma wasn’t containing the epidemic but helping conceal it. Some people avoided testing to avoid the shame of a positive result. Others, fearing rejection and discrimination, kept their diagnosis secret and avoided health care. Public health campaigns that tried to bring risk into the open taught people to go underground instead.
By the end of the 20th century, stigma had lost much of its legitimacy, Dr. Fairchild said, and anti-stigma work started to become a public health project of its own. There were education campaigns for mental illness, substance use and disability, as well as language guides, bias trainings and an emphasis on social determinants.
This shift took longer for obesity, said Rebecca Puhl, a psychologist who studies weight stigma at the University of Connecticut. But in 2013, the American Medical Association recognized obesity as a disease, while the C.D.C. encouraged person-first language (“adults with obesity” rather than “obese adults”) in 2020.
Stigma had become a problem to eliminate, rather than a tool to deploy.
Beyond Blame and Coddling
But the evidence against stigma’s efficacy, Dr. Hatzenbuehler said, should not be mistaken for evidence that destigmatization has generally succeeded. Perhaps at some level, the backlash that Mr. Kennedy represents is responding to a real weakness in anti-stigma work.
Dr. Puhl argues for a framework of “constructive responsibility,” which acknowledges that individuals do have responsibilities but insists that industries, policies, and environments must also be held accountable. That way, the “burden of sole responsibility” does not fall on the individual.
This framework resists a simple binary. Of course, people can lose weight by changing what they eat, moving more and going into a calorie deficit. But it’s also true that a vast majority of people who lose weight this way regain it over time in the face of biological and environmental factors beyond their control. Constructive responsibility does not discount the importance of choice, but rather recognizes that choices are made within systems that either support or impede change.
Americans seem to hold both truths at once. According to a February poll, they see obesity as a disease and recognize the role of ultraprocessed foods, while still wanting solutions that leave room for personal effort.
Stigma, though, may not be the right tool to strike this balance. Research has consistently found that stigma strips people of social support and drives them to conceal their illness and avoid care. As stigma becomes internalized, it turns a person “into his own jailer, his own chorus of denunciation,” wrote Scott Burris, director of Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research. People often assume that shame pushes someone toward better choices; however, research suggests that it more often loads people with stress, Dr. Puhl said, making them less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.
But if stigma individualizes responsibility, much of anti-stigma work to date has made a mirror-like mistake, addressing the problem at the individual level, Dr. Hatzenbuehler said. In general, this work has treated prejudice as something lodged inside a person’s mind, even though stigma is socially and culturally inculcated. “You’re pulled into a training and told that you personally are responsible, or this is a moral failing, when, in fact, this is water that you’ve been swimming in,” said Betsy Paluck, a psychologist at Princeton University.
In a 2021 review of more than 400 experiments to reduce prejudice, Dr. Paluck found that, on average, they had little effect. Most approaches were “light touch,” like brief trainings, videos and perspective-taking exercises, and the largest, most robust ones reduced prejudice by just four points on a 100-point scale. “It’s not going to result in a noticeable behavioral change,” Dr. Paluck said, adding, “our solution has not fit the problem.” In fact, when anti-stigma interventions treat prejudice as a personal defect rather than a social pattern, invoking guilt or shame, they can backfire, increasing bias compared with doing nothing at all.
The alternative is to move from instruction to infrastructure. With H.I.V., for example, advocates and public health officials changed the meaning of the disease, transforming it from a death sentence into a condition managed with medication, and pushing legal and policy changes that improved access to care and reduced discrimination, Dr. Yang said.
Obesity has not seen the same move from attitudes to rules. In almost every state, for example, you can be denied work or fired because of your weight, aside from Michigan, which has banned weight discrimination, and Washington, which protects obesity under disability law. Anti-stigma work shouldn’t just ask people to be kinder but change the laws and institutional practices that keep stigma in place, Dr. Puhl said.
Similarly, it should change where the blame lands. Researchers found that antismoking messages focused on industry deception — like how Big Tobacco targets teens or manipulates the public — were some of the most effective at reducing cigarette consumption.
One could imagine a similar re-orientation for the anti-obesity campaign, focusing on the companies that flood the food chain with cheap, addictive products. In fact, research has found that the most motivating anti-obesity messages did not mention body weight at all, Dr. Puhl said, but focused on eating behaviors and the food environment — what people were being sold, served and surrounded by.
In that sense, Mr. Kennedy is pointing to something real when he attacks the food industry and other commercial drivers of the chronic disease epidemic. For example, he has said that the obesity crisis didn’t happen because Americans suddenly became lazy or developed large appetites, and he’s noted Big Tobacco’s role in steering the food companies in the 1980s and ’90s, engineering their products to be addictive. “Everybody has the capacity to be thin, to not smoke, to exercise extensively, to eat the right foods. Given the fact that you have agency and you’ve failed, you are to blame,” Dr. Brandt said, sketching out that logic.Mr. Kennedy has condemned the system but has also cast the people shaped by that system as irresponsible.
Public health has long struggled to navigate between undermining people’s agency and shaming them for failing to overcome rigged conditions. That tension hasn’t gone away.
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6) What It’s Like to Be a Student at the First A.I.-Powered University
California’s public university system spent $16.9 million on A.I. The result has been chaos.
By Linda Kinstler, June 1, 2026
Linda Kinstler spoke with over 60 students, faculty members and administrators at several campuses over the course of a year, as well as with several technology executives involved in the A.I. Initiative.
Illustration by Maxime Mouysset
Last spring, newly admitted students to San Jose State University received an unusual video message from the institution’s president, Cynthia Teniente-Matson. Her caramel curls were tucked behind her shoulders, her hands clasped neatly at her torso. Dressed down in a royal blue hoodie, she appeared composed and approachable. “Congratulations on your admission,” she said. “At S.J.S.U., you’ll have opportunities to dive into the technologies shaping the world today, and redefine what’s possible for tomorrow.”
This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar. “I’m thrilled to share this special moment with you,” the avatar said. “It’s only fitting, isn’t it? After all, technology is a cornerstone of what makes San Jose State University such an incredible place to learn, innovate and grow.”
The avatar is one feature of S.J.S.U.’s A.I. Everywhere strategy, which was formally announced in the fall of 2025 and aims to integrate the technology across campus life. Teniente-Matson devised A.I. Everywhere as part of the California State University system’s broader A.I. Initiative, introduced in February 2025. Anchored by a $16.9 million deal with OpenAI, the initiative provides a total of 500,000 licenses of ChatGPT.edu to be issued to all students, faculty and administrators. At the time, this was the largest single-institution deployment of ChatGPT in the world, billed as an attempt to turn C.S.U. — the biggest four-year public higher education system in the United States, comprising 22 distinct campuses and educating 1 out of every 10 workers in the state — into “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-powered public university system.” (The terms of the deal stipulate that OpenAI may not train its model on data from the C.S.U.)
At San Jose State — the oldest public university in the California State University system — evidence of the shift toward A.I. is evident across campus. The university now has an A.I. librarian, and its main library features a new A.I. Center for Civic and Social Good. The business school runs an A.I. boot camp for high school students; the campus career hub is sponsored by Adobe; A.I. literacy training is an orientation requirement and, last year, an A.I. agent helped coordinate commencement logistics.
Teniente-Matson, who arrived at San Jose in 2023 after eight years at the helm of Texas A&M University-San Antonio, is leading the school’s A.I. charge. In person, she is affable and eccentric, and often power-dresses in bright primary colors. When we met, she was wearing green rhinestone-studded high heels in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. She frequently refers to herself as the “C.E.O.” of the university and compares herself to tech leaders in Silicon Valley: “We’re all trying to do the same thing,” she told me, “which is to mobilize our entire work force in this rapidly changing environment to adapt, create, innovate and be more productive.”
In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same. “We are pioneering new ways to integrate technology into learning, research and student success,” her avatar says in a video posted to the university website. “From A.I. coursework to industry partnership, S.J.S.U. is helping to shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
Because the world’s largest tech firms are headquartered in California, the state has generally become a petri dish for A.I. experiments in education. In early August, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed education agreements with Nvidia, Adobe, Google, IBM and Microsoft; each company agreed to provide free A.I. resources to California schools. The goal is to create the “A.I. work force of the future” by training high school, community college and C.S.U. students to use the technology.
In this spirit, C.S.U.’s A.I. Initiative has been marketed as simple progress — a way to ensure that the state’s working-class students are buoyed by the A.I. economy rather than left behind. After all, many students in the C.S.U. system are first-generation immigrants or the first in their families to go to college; roughly half identify as Hispanic, and many commute to campus and work alongside their studies. With A.I.’s looming reorganization of the job market, many of these students might graduate into jobs that will no longer exist in five years. Already, recent reports estimate that roughly 40 percent of recent college graduates nationwide are underemployed.
C.S.U. is promising that the A.I. Initiative will prepare its students to be workers of the future. The only issue is that, at this moment of technological acceleration and flux, we don’t yet know what the workplace of the future will look like. A year into this experiment, no one can tell how it will end. Will these graduates be ahead of the curve in the new A.I. economy, or robbed of a chance to hone their critical thinking skills? If adopting A.I. eases their entry into the work force, might it also hinder their intellectual development in unforeseen ways?
On campuses across the university system, the initiative has stoked backlash. The C.S.U. faculty union has organized against the contract with OpenAI, which is set to expire in June. Against the backdrop of a systemwide financial crisis that has driven California’s public universities to the breaking point, many professors find the initiative incoherent and unsettling. Though they’ve been encouraged to use the technology to support their research and teaching, there is no clear sense of what exactly that means. They look around and see the infrastructure that once supported public education in California crumbling, while next door, the world’s richest companies are reaping record returns.
Students, meanwhile, are caught in the middle as everyone around them struggles to figure out what becoming “the first A.I.-powered university” actually means. “Faculty are feeling anxious,” Nik Janos, a sociology professor at Chico State, told me. “Students don’t know how to behave. What are we doing here?”
The oldest structure on the San Jose State University campus is an imposing stucco, brick and terra-cotta building known as Tower Hall. It was originally built to house California’s first public institution of higher learning, which the State Legislature established in 1862 to educate future primary school teachers. Tower Hall became the foundation of the California State University, which to this day is the largest producer of K-12 teachers in the state.
C.S.U. eventually broadened its goals beyond creating teachers to supplying workers for a range of jobs deemed useful to California’s economy. In 1960, the economist Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California, implemented the California Master Plan for higher education. It established the tripartite state system that still exists today, with research universities like Berkeley and U.C.L.A. at the top, the C.S.U. system of “mass education” in the middle and community colleges at the bottom.
Each level of the system had a distinct purpose. The universities received the most state funding and produced new knowledge; the state colleges educated skilled workers; and the community colleges, built within reasonable driving distance of almost every Californian, offered a critical pathway to social mobility. The California system, which was then tuition-free, served an essential purpose, educating workers who would go on to staff its national laboratories, build out its nuclear programs, develop the state’s industrial agriculture and lay the groundwork for its emerging technology sector. It equipped students with skills to succeed in the new technological economy and also gave them a critical, humanistic training that primed them to protest their own instrumentalization. Eventually, the student protest movements of the 1960s and ’70s pushed universities to pioneer new disciplines in the liberal arts, like ethnic studies.
Today, economic pressures have prompted C.S.U. to redefine what it means to train useful workers. In December 2024, Newsom’s office encouraged the C.S.U. system to create the A.I. Workforce Acceleration Board, which would “guide the equitable development of a highly skilled, diverse work force that can drive California’s A.I.-powered economy.” In January, C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI, and C.S.U.’s chancellor, Mildred García, announced both developments as flagship elements of the A.I. Initiative at a news conference shortly afterward. In April, Newsom released a new Master Plan for Career Education, a revision of Kerr’s model that responds to “rapidly changing work force needs, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence.” The statewide push to incorporate A.I. into every level of education is an integral part of this plan.
A.I. tools were rolled out across the C.S.U. system late last spring, right as students and faculty were preparing for finals. “We didn’t know it was coming,” says Andrew Taylor Scott, a machine-learning researcher and lecturer at San Francisco State University. The university didn’t explicitly mandate that teachers use A.I. in the classroom, but the message was clear: Refusing to integrate A.I. into their courses was to swim against the current.
To make matters worse, the A.I. Initiative coincided with a $2.3 billion deficit that resulted in mass layoffs of tenured faculty, the shuttering of entire academic departments and a 6 percent tuition increase. In that context, many professors felt pressure to adopt for fear of losing their jobs. Classroom by classroom, they were left to figure out how to adapt. Some embraced the chancellor’s guidance; some refused on principle to incorporate A.I. into their teaching at all.
Some were ahead of the curve. In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, Janos noticed that his students, most of whom are remote learners, seemed even more reticent to speak up in class, let alone request office-hours appointments. “What is historical materialism?” he says. “No one is knocking on my door to ask me that.” When ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, he found himself wondering if this could be one way to help them ask questions and engage with philosophy more directly. So he started tinkering with it, eventually using ChatGPT to create chatbots that imitate three major thinkers in his field: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. If Max Weber, the person, once wrote that universities existed to produce “convivial capitalists,” Janos hoped that Max Weber, the bot, might have something like the opposite effect.
When Janos realized that he needed to adapt all of his courses to include A.I., he called on those chatbots as a teaching tool. He also reduced the number of writing assignments longer than a paragraph and developed ones that required students to hand in their A.I. chat logs instead. One summer afternoon, he let me observe how one of the bots, MarxGPT, works in practice. I watched as he pulled the chat window up on his screen and typed in a simple prompt: “Tell me about your theory of exploitation under capitalism.” The chatbot responded almost instantaneously, in conspicuously crisp prose. “Ah, welcome, comrade,” it responded. “In my critique of capitalism, the theory of exploitation is central. … The worker, who has no property of their own, must sell their labor power — their capacity to work — in order to survive.”
After I pointed out to Janos that Marx himself would have had a field day with MarxGPT, he laughed. “Yes — this is historical materialism in action.” Each time he engaged with the machine, he further embedded himself in a complicated thicket of labor relations: The A.I. was meant to augment his job, but it also threatened to replace it; by interacting with ChatGPT, he and his students solidified its role in the public education ecosystem; and their ability to do so was the result of the transfer of almost $17 million of worker-generated public funds to a private, for-profit company whose main product, in turn, could eliminate many of those very same taxpayers’ jobs. Janos understood that the technology could not be wished away, and was cleareyed about its limitations and dangers. “At what point are we making ourselves obsolete? What is it that we need to hold on to?”
These are questions that employees across the C.S.U. system have been asking themselves over the past year as A.I. has penetrated university life. “Would we go out of business if we didn’t adopt these technologies?” Ed Clark, the system’s chief information officer, wonders. “Sitting out this conversation and then criticizing the outcome,” he continued, “would be like refusing to vote and then complaining about the election.”
Faculty members I spoke with opted for different metaphors to describe the effect of A.I. on higher education, and their varied analogies captured the range of sentiments on campus. John Sullins, a computer ethics professor, likened it to handing every student a machine gun, while Niel Shahrasbi, an information systems professor, compared it to giving them a magic wand. Robert Ovetz, a lecturer in political science at S.J.S.U., told me he views A.I. as “an ‘intelligent’ steam shovel” that students are being trained to use. Jeremy Murray, a historian at Cal State San Bernardino, described the integration of A.I. as a “smash and grab situation” akin to a bank robbery.
Some of the most vocal, full-throated opposition to the A.I. Initiative has come from one particular C.S.U. campus: San Francisco State University. S.F.S.U., a cluster of California modernist buildings, sits just above Lake Merced in San Francisco’s southwestern corner. The university is among the most liberal C.S.U.s, with a venerable tradition of protest and radicalism — in 1968, it was where the Third World Liberation Front movement first emerged.
The week I visited, a handful of students lazed on the grass, played volleyball and wandered around the student center, but the campus still felt relatively empty. “This is more or less what it’s like these days,” said Martha Lincoln, a professor of anthropology, as we passed the main library. Demographic decline and the rise of remote learning has meant that there are fewer students physically on campus than ever before. It is impossible to traverse S.F.S.U.’s lush walkways and pass through its mazelike halls without realizing that it was built to serve thousands of students more than it currently hosts.
For Lincoln’s colleague Martha Kenney, a professor at S.F.S.U.’s women and gender studies department, A.I. is intensifying an existing crisis. Falling enrollment and an 8 percent state budget cut led S.F.S.U. to declare a fiscal emergency last year, fire many faculty members and make plans to shutter multiple departments. “We see A.I. entering an ecosystem of education that is already weakened by austerity measures,” she said. “To use the Silicon Valley parlance, it’s a force multiplier.” Over the past year, Lincoln and Kenney have publicly criticized the OpenAI deal and rallied fellow faculty members to their cause. Their union colleagues have begun referring to them simply as “the Marthas.” (“You don’t need to be named Martha to be a Martha,” Kenney told me. “We take all comers.”) “We feel like a guinea pig for what A.I. is going to do to higher education,” Kenney said. The embrace of generative A.I., she went on, is “a step down the path of creating a really different kind of future citizen and worker.” This kind of student would be intellectually passive, less likely to see themselves as agents of their own lives.
This winter, the Marthas circulated a petition asking the chancellor’s office to invest in protecting faculty jobs and academic programs rather than renew the OpenAI contract. So far, almost 4,000 people, including nearly 1,000 faculty members, have signed. One historian did so because she believed that the A.I. Initiative had “damaged our students and our ability to teach them.” A marine biologist wrote that it “works against the teaching and learning of science.” A professor of civil engineering signed because she had polled her students on their feelings about the technology; most did not want it. “We’re kind of in a doom loop,” Kenney said. “The soul of higher education is at stake, and the classroom has become a site of struggle.”
Inside the classroom, the uneven deployment of ChatGPT has left students scrambling to make sense of what the A.I. Initiative portends for their own educations and job prospects. Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it. A vast majority, however, are just trying to find their place in the new economy.
When I visited a political theory class on anarchy at S.F.S.U. in March (a classroom where A.I. is strictly banned), students from a wide array of concentrations — economics, merchandising, art history and communications — shared vastly different experiences with A.I. in their courses. A fine arts major I met told me that one of her instructors encouraged students to use A.I. for the final project, which was to come up with an advertising concept and rollout plan. She chose not to do so because she is ethically opposed to A.I.’s environmental cost and found that the assignment took her five times longer than her peers. Her professor’s insistence that his students use the technology, she said, “conveyed contempt for people who did not want to use A.I.” A journalism major told me that the standards for acceptable work had changed over the past year. “Our professors were pretty anti-A.I., and then C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI and things changed,” he said.
Some students have embraced the initiative as an opportunity to turn themselves into early-career entrepreneurs, if only to ensure they don’t become part of the A.I. underclass. Keith Curry, a 33-year-old computer science and biology double major at S.F.S.U., is in many ways a archetypal C.S.U. student. He grew up in Ohio and dropped out of Kent State in 2015; he spent several years working as a UPS driver and lice-clinic worker in San Francisco before going back to school in 2023, when he realized that he could finally afford to complete his degree. In 2024, he went to an A.I. conference and began to understand how transformative the technology could be. “C.E.O.s were talking about how you never need to hire again,” he says. “I was like, I haven’t even been hired yet. That was the moment when I realized this was serious.”
Spurred by what he called a daunting sense of “negative motivation,” Curry applied to roughly 100 internships the following semester, mostly in the software industry. He started using A.I. to help him find jobs to apply to and to tailor his résumé for each position; when he was invited to join OpenAI’s “student A.I. lab,” a focus group meant to help the company learn about student engagement with ChatGPT, he seized the opportunity. At the same time, he saw his own professors struggling to integrate the newly available technology into their courses — some more successfully than others.
He was impressed by one programming professor who plainly told students that he “didn’t want to become an obstacle to a skill you may need in the future,” Curry recalls. If students chose to use A.I. on their homework for the class, they had to submit two versions of every assignment — one completed without A.I., even if it was unfinished, and one done with it, accompanied by a written explanation of how the chatbot was used. For Curry, this approach struck a reasonable middle ground. He has created his own company, a start-up specializing in 3-D-printed lab equipment.
At the same time, OpenAI itself has been working to foment enthusiasm on campus. Last fall, OpenAI started a ChatGPT Campus Ambassador program for C.S.U. undergraduates, inviting applications from students interested in telling their peers about “how ChatGPT is making a difference in your classes.” The program was designed to encourage student adoption of the technology by, in effect, using their own peers as marketing agents. (Adobe and Anthropic have similar programs.) Aniruddha Dhir, an international student from India majoring in computer science, is one of S.F.S.U.’s ambassadors. He told me that he has spent every summer interning for an A.I. firm; a silver OpenAI pin flashed from his backpack as we spoke. He tries to hold two ChatGPT events per semester. At past meetings, he has taught other students how to use it to jazz up their LinkedIn profiles and to prepare for exams.
For Curry and Dhir, the A.I. Initiative is a potentially lucrative ticket to a job in the tech industry and the class mobility it brings. But many of their peers instead perceived it as a threat not only to their education, but also to the kinds of jobs they had arrived at S.F.S.U. hoping to pursue. Vi Lee, a political science and Asian American studies double major, helped organize a student union protest demanding that the contract with OpenAI not be renewed “until students and faculty have control over A.I. policies and funding on campus.” The students also want assurances that no course will require the use of A.I. In April, 11 campuses signed on for a systemwide day of action. For now, roughly half of the university system’s ChatGPT licenses have been activated, suggesting that at the very least C.S.U. paid for tens of thousands of logins that have gone entirely unused. “It’s ridiculous that that’s what you would spend your money on when you have allegedly have no money,” Lee says.
CSU’s A.I. Initiative has set off an institutional identity crisis: The debate about A.I. on campus is also a debate about exactly what public education in California is for. What does it mean to train the next generation of Californian workers and citizens when neither students nor faculty nor administrators have a solid grasp on what that requires, or what the “A.I. economy” will be in even four years? “No one knows what it’s going to look like,” Brian Johnsrud, a leader on Adobe’s education team, told me in a small library at the company’s headquarters. “And if they say they do, they are highly overconfident.” Even Teniente-Matson admitted that despite all the fanfare, the university’s A.I. Everywhere approach should not be taken literally. “I don’t know that ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, or any of these are tools that should be teaching a 17-year-old to write,” she said. A.I. might be used to help students learn how to outline and edit their thoughts, she suggested, but only with faculty guidance and supervision.
The one thing proponents and detractors of the A.I. Initiative agree on is that it has prompted a near-universal reckoning over labor relations on campus. The omnipresence of ChatGPT has forced a conversation about the value of academic work, the role of public universities and the perils of partnerships with private industry. Even among the most fervent members of C.S.U.’s pro-A.I. crowd, OpenAI’s entanglement with the university has raised eyebrows.
For OpenAI, after all, C.S.U. is an important element of its global expansion, a model for the company’s countrywide programs in, among other places, Greece, Estonia and the United Arab Emirates. In the United States, Arizona State University, the University of South Carolina and the University of Colorado have all signed similar deals with the company, though none as large as the C.S.U. partnership. Shahrasbi, who is currently working on developing a new A.I.-for-business minor, told me that he hoped the administration would exercise more caution before renewing the partnership. “I wish and I hope that they had done more research about it,” he says. “All of these companies need to show revenue, and where is better for that than public school systems?”
But despite the confusion and uncertainty, some students have found that A.I. has shaped their educations in surprising ways. Roxanna Medina, 38, who was a student in Janos’s classical social theory course, never intended to seek out a job at OpenAI or Nvidia or Adobe. After spending several years at home caring for her young son, she returned to school hoping to earn her degree so that she could one day re-enter the work force. “I come from immigrant parents, from the hustle-bustle kind of life,” she said. She told me that interacting with Janos’s chatbots had fundamentally altered how she thinks about her life and work.
When she started having conversations with the bot, she said, she felt as if she had unlocked another layer of understanding. For one assignment, Medina asked the bot if it thought Marxist theory had anything to say about the acceleration of technology, if it was still a relevant framework for the present day. In response, MarxGPT said that the workers of the world were still struggling, and that “capitalism has found a new way of hiding things,” she recalls. The exchange led her to think more critically about the value of her own labor. Medina graduated this spring; her son is now 6 years old, and she plans to spend some time caring for him before she decides on her next steps. But her interactions with MarxGPT continue to influence how she speaks to him about his own value and the balance of work and life. “It’s helped me with my son,” she said. “You’re worth this, remember that.”
In mid-May, all C.S.U. faculty received a message announcing that the university system would continue its partnership with OpenAI. The new, $13 million agreement will provide more licenses for the next three years, and is subject to annual renewal. As part of the deal, new graduates will be able to retain access to ChatGPT.edu for one year after earning their degrees, to help with their entry into the work force. The chancellor’s office also said it would expand its A.I. offerings so that students had more ready access to platforms other than ChatGPT and maintain some degree of freedom in how they interacted with the technology. For many students and faculty members, the ability to choose which A.I. platform they engage with, and on what terms, is a meaningful step. Yet what it means to use these tools ethically and responsibly in the classroom — and what their long-term effects on student learning will be — remains an open question.
Not long before the OpenAI deal was first announced, John Sullins, a tenured professor of philosophy at Sonoma State, was told that his department was closing down and that much of the humanities faculty had been let go. After more than 25 years of teaching, he suddenly found himself out of a job. He spent a few weeks coming to terms with his newfound unemployment.
But then he got a call informing him that he had been rehired into the computer science department, where he now teaches courses on A.I. ethics and the philosophy of technology. “With the decimation will always come the return,” Sullins says. C.S.U. prides itself on its history of rebuilding in the aftermath of disaster — Tower Hall, at S.J.S.U., was built from the rubble after earthquakes and fires destroyed the school’s original structures. “The question is,” Sullins says, “how far does the decimation go?”
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7) Prominent Nicaraguan Indigenous Leader Dies in Government Custody
Brooklyn Rivera, 73, one of the most prominent Miskito political leaders in recent history, was arrested by the government in 2023. His family and other groups dispute the circumstances surrounding his death.
By James Wagner, Reporting from Mexico City, June 1, 2026
The Miskito rebel leader Brooklyn Rivera, right, speaking during a news conference in Managua, Nicaragua, as his fellow leader Steadman Fagoth Müller looked on, in 1988. Lou Dematteis/Reuters
Brooklyn Rivera, a prominent Nicaraguan Indigenous leader swept up and imprisoned three years ago as part of the country’s crackdown on political dissent and Indigenous autonomy, died over the weekend in state custody. He was 73.
Mr. Rivera, a former lawmaker and leader of the Miskito people, the largest Indigenous group in the Central American country, passed away on Saturday, according to his family, fellow activists and local media reports — only three days after the government published photos of him bedridden, intubated and emaciated that prompted outrage from human rights groups.
The health ministry, part of the government run by the co-presidents Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, did not announce Mr. Rivera’s death until Sunday afternoon. It said that despite “enormous and intense efforts,” he died of “a bacteria generated” by Covid.
Some family members, along with some human rights and Indigenous groups, lamented his death, while airing their grievances over his treatment in custody and the government’s narrative.
“I express my profound grief and concern regarding the circumstances under which his death occurred,” his daughter Tininiska Rivera said in a statement.
When the government, which had previously concealed Mr. Rivera’s whereabouts, released photos of her father at a hospital in the capital of Managua and an update of his condition on Wednesday following international pressure, Ms. Rivera called his care into question. (The authorities said that Mr. Rivera had “longstanding conditions” and that one of his sons had been visiting him every two weeks.)
His daughter said in another statement then that her father was in “optimal health, walking and fully self-sufficient” when he was detained in September 2023. She added, “So the regime cannot now attempt to blame pre-existing conditions for the physical deterioration of a man who has remained in state custody for nearly three years.”
Various groups, including the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, had also denounced the images of Mr. Rivera and called for his release.
“The dictatorship released a statement through its state-controlled media only now that Rivera is critically ill, attempting to conceal their singular role in his cruel treatment and current condition,” the State Department said on Friday.
Mr. Ortega and Ms. Murillo have been in power since 2007 and have overseen the elimination of opposition to their power since anti-government protests in 2018. Ms. Murillo, who also serves as the government’s spokeswoman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Sunday, Mr. Rivera’s daughter also refuted some of the government’s account that family members were present at her father’s bedside during his final moments.
She called for the Nicaraguan authorities to hand over her father’s remains so that her family could mark his death in accordance with their Miskito traditions. She said she had promised her father that she would bury him alongside her grandmother. Because she is in exile, his daughter also asked the international community for help in returning safely to Nicaragua.
She added that her father had “an unwavering commitment to the defense of the rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples.”
Mr. Rivera’s niece, Dina Carolina Fagoth Rivera, said by telephone that her family and Indigenous communities wanted to bury him in his native region, the northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. She also insisted on an independent investigation of his death.
“We do not, for one moment, think that any of what they’re telling us is true,” said Ms. Fagoth Rivera, whose father, Steadman Fagoth Müller, a fellow Miskito leader, was detained by the Nicaraguan government in 2024.
She added about her uncle, “He was a light for our people. He meant freedom for our people.”
Reed Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Right Experts on Nicaragua, said in an interview that Mr. Rivera, who was first elected to the country’s legislature in 2007, was probably the most important Miskito political leader of the last 40 years and one of the most prominent activists to die in Nicaraguan government detention.
He said that the U.N. group has documented 124 cases of the arbitrary detention of Indigenous leaders and that at least 46 have been killed in violence on the Caribbean coast since 2018. Mr. Rivera’s death “encapsulates the broader dismantling of Indigenous autonomy and it also illustrates the problem of enforced disappearances in Nicaragua,” Mr. Brody said.
An estimated 500,000 Miskito people live in Nicaragua, mostly along the northern Caribbean coast.
Mr. Rivera fought against the first Sandinista government, of which Mr. Ortega was a part, alongside the Contra rebels in the 1980s. His political party, Yatama, eventually became an ally of Mr. Ortega after he returned to power in 2007, but later fell out over what it said was an infringement of Indigenous lands and rights.
In 2023, Mr. Ortega’s government barred Mr. Rivera’s political party from running for elected office. Mr. Rivera was also barred from returning to Nicaragua after criticizing the government while abroad early that year, but he slipped back in and was later arrested.
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8) Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
The $368 million network of instruments collecting data in both the Atlantic and Pacific has been critical to climate and ocean research.
By Eric Niiler, June 1, 2026
A mooring that was used in the Ocean Observatories Initiative was recovered after operating for a year in the Gulf of Alaska. Rebecca Travis/WHOI
The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.
The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.
Scientists have used data from the system to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how changes in ocean temperature such as marine heat waves might affect fisheries or signal bigger shifts in the climate, and coastal flooding along the East Coast.
The station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, a global conveyor belt of water that some scientists are concerned may be weakening as a result of climate warming. A collapse of the current could have severe weather effects.
The Irminger Sea moorings are fixed to seafloor 9,200 feet below the surface and are part of an international collaboration among scientists who are studying the overturning current.
Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”
Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump term, said the move was part of a pattern in the Trump administration.
“This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit,” Dr. McLean said. “By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”
The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.” When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028.
Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water’s surface down thousands of feet.
The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the network was coordinated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in collaboration with Rutgers University, the University of Washington and Oregon State University. A Woods Hole spokeswoman referred questions to the N.S.F.
It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.
To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists.
Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.
Hilary Palevsky, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Boston College, has been using data from the Irminger instruments for the past decade to better understand how the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Scientists have benefited from downloading data from remote ocean instruments, rather than making difficult, dangerous and expensive trips to sea each year. Pulling up the instruments without a plan to store them or to continue collecting data “is very hasty,” she said.
“One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
The $48 million annual budget for the observation network was small compared with the value of the data it collected for understanding the oceans and the climate, Dr. McLean said.
The observation station off Cape Hatteras, N.C., collected data about coastal currents that influence the weather and commercial fisheries along the U.S. East Coast.
Mike Muglia, professor of coastal studies at East Carolina University, used the data to understand waves, currents and sea life for a marine renewable energy test site in Nags Head, N.C., that was funded by the Energy Department.
Moorings that stretch west off the coast of Newport, Ore., and Grays Harbor, Wash., captured temperature, acidity, and oxygen content data that is key to predicting climate-related environmental changes as well as the health of the region’s commercial fishing industry. Another station is anchored 620 miles offshore in the central Gulf of Alaska.
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9) Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline
Doctors nationwide are encountering more children with whooping cough, bacterial infections and other serious illnesses, as well as more adults refusing tetanus shots.
By Maggie Astor and Dani Blum, June 2, 2026
Deanna Donegan/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty
Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.
The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.
For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.
While most children recover, these diseases aren’t benign. Many children endure extended hospitalizations. Some infections can be fatal.
Dr. Meghan Hofto, a pediatric hospitalist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one of the doctors who said she is seeing more illnesses that she used to encounter only rarely. This year, she and her colleagues have treated more children than usual with persistent diarrhea. A child with a run-of-the-mill stomach virus might need a day or so of IV fluids, but these patients were being hospitalized for three or four days.
The culprit: Rotavirus, which once caused tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year in the United States but was largely swept away by vaccines introduced 20 years ago. These vaccines were so effective that Dr. Hofto could recall treating only four or five children with rotavirus in the past decade. Now, she said she had treated about that many already this year, and none of them were vaccinated.
Dr. Jessica Kirk, a pediatric hospitalist in Fairhope, Ala., recently treated an unvaccinated toddler who was hospitalized with pneumonia from two simultaneous infections, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Routine childhood vaccines can protect against both S. pneumoniae and a common form of H. influenzae, but vaccinations against both illnesses have declined in recent years.
The child that Dr. Kirk treated for both infections needed antibiotics and oxygen to get through the illness.
Some of these conditions can lead to serious complications. H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae infections can cause sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. Dr. Hofto said she had treated 4- to 6-week-old infants with whooping cough, or pertussis, who seemed fine at times but then stopped breathing after a coughing fit. “It’s hard to know when they’re safe to go home,” she said.
Many children with whooping cough don’t have anti-vaccine parents, she said. They are just too young to have been vaccinated yet, and the disease has been circulating more in recent years as overall vaccination rates have declined. There were more than 28,000 cases reported last year, compared with around 7,000 in 2023.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement, “We reject the premise that providing Americans with transparent information about the benefits and risks of medical products undermines public health.”
Even when the worst doesn’t happen, emergency room doctors are having to subject some unvaccinated children with high fevers to more invasive testing, including spinal taps, to rule out life-threatening infections that vaccinated children are protected from. Infections like H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae can be hard to recognize because they can resemble less serious illnesses before rapidly leading to complications. And because near-universal vaccination prevented them for so long, many doctors have little experience diagnosing them.
The alternative to invasive testing, in some cases, is to start unvaccinated children on stronger antibiotics than doctors might otherwise use, which can have more side effects, said Dr. Robin Harrison and Dr. Taylor Rosenbaum, pediatric hospitalists in Miami.
Several doctors also said they had seen a growing number of adults refuse tetanus shots for themselves, and parents refuse them for their children, after injuries such as dog bites or lacerations from dirty objects. Roughly 1 in 10 people infected with tetanus die; a full course of vaccination is very effective at preventing infection.
Dr. Sonali Meyer, an emergency medicine physician in Minnesota, said she had treated a patient last year who refused a tetanus shot after slicing his hand open.
“Big pharma doesn’t need my money,” she recalled the patient telling her. She said another patient refused a tetanus shot by saying, “I know you get paid more the more shots you give, but no thanks.”
With each passing year, doctors said, the hesitation around vaccines seems to expand to new frontiers.
Two anesthesiologists said that, starting around 2022 or 2023, they had occasionally seen patients who refused to consent to blood transfusions before surgery because they didn’t want blood from vaccinated donors. And a growing number of parents are refusing to allow their newborns to receive vitamin K injections, which help prevent bleeding. Until recently, neonatologists said, these shots were accepted even by many families that rejected vaccines.
Five doctors said they had seen brain or abdominal hemorrhages in infants whose parents had turned down vitamin K, including one who died and another who was partly paralyzed.
The onslaught of preventable illness and other health risks can feel overwhelming, doctors said. So can navigating the medical misinformation some patients recite.
“It just feels like you’re a tiny little boat with a giant tidal wave coming at you,” said Dr. Erin Charles, a regional pediatric hospitalist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “And you might convince one family here and there.”
Many parents continue to refuse vaccines even after their child has been hospitalized with a vaccine-preventable illness, doctors said. Dr. Kirk said she had never had a parent in that situation tell her they had changed their mind and would have their child vaccinated on the standard schedule. Dr. Hofto said she could sometimes persuade families, but often not.
Some “may view the illness as an isolated experience, especially if their child ultimately recovers,” Dr. Hofto said.
Doctors said they feared that, as vaccination rates decline more, illnesses now popping up sporadically would become more common.
Dr. Rosenbaum said she had been telling the medical residents training under her that they might have to learn together how to treat illnesses she’d never encountered during her own training because of vaccines.
For many such illnesses, “it’s going to be probably a low uptick,” she said. “Until it’s very fast.”
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10) What Ireland and Germany Can Teach Us About Birthright Citizenship
President Trump has argued that the United States is “stupid” for granting citizenship at birth. Most countries don’t do so, but that can create problems.
By Lydia DePillis, Megan Specia and Tatiana Firsova, June 2, 2026
Mariam Sobayo was born in Dublin in February 2005, a few weeks after the country halted its longstanding practice of granting citizenship to all children born on Irish soil. Ellius Grace for The New York Times
Mariam Sobayo came achingly close to feeling like she belonged in Ireland.
She was born in Dublin on Feb. 10, 2005, just a few weeks after the country halted its longstanding practice of granting citizenship to all children born on Irish soil. Her parents immigrated to Ireland from Nigeria in 2001, and she is the youngest of five children. Two of her older sisters were born in Ireland in 2002 and 2004.
Because of the timing, they were automatically Irish citizens. For Ms. Sobayo, it would take years of filing paperwork and waiting for answers to finally obtain her citizenship at 18.
“I was born in Dublin, I never left Dublin,” she said of growing up in the Irish capital, and described getting exceptional grades in Irish language studies in school. “It’s like, ‘Oh, here’s this new citizenship.’ Where I’m like, I’ve been here since Day 1.”
Without a passport, she could not travel outside the country, even as classmates went on school trips. When her Irish naturalization was approved, she felt a mix of relief and anger. “I feel like it was carrying a heavy weight that wasn’t supposed to be mine,” Ms. Sobayo said. She is now a social worker, caring for children seeking international protection.
In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue its decision in a landmark case through which the White House has sought to end the 157-year-old legal standard of birthright citizenship.
When President Trump talks about this issue, he calls America “STUPID” for automatically granting citizenship to U.S.-born children of immigrants. The policy does stand out for its permissiveness: Although many countries in Central and South America have similar laws, most nations require that at least one parent be a citizen for a child to qualify.
But research has shown that more restrictive policies can diminish the potential of children who are born and raised in a country as noncitizens — and that loosening the policy can improve the prospects of the generations born with the benefit.
For example, a study by an international team of researchers last year found that the children of immigrants to the United States excelled further past similarly aged children of citizens than did second-generation immigrants in other developed countries. Across the 12 nations studied, birthright citizenship was correlated with higher economic mobility for the children of immigrants.
“Of all the developed economies in the world, the U.S. is the most successful at integrating immigrants, and you might wonder why,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California, Merced. “Maybe that access to citizenship from very early on is important.”
The ‘Sins of the Parents’
It is difficult to tease out the effect of different immigration policies across countries because there are so many variables and few natural experiments that allow researchers to compare one set of people with another. Ireland’s shift away from birthright citizenship provides such an experiment.
For much of Ireland’s history, anyone born there had a right to citizenship. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which forged peace in Northern Ireland, enshrined it in Ireland’s Constitution. That changed in 2005, after 79 percent of voters supported a referendum to remove the constitutional amendment on birthright citizenship.
The vote came during a period when Ireland’s economy was booming and the quality of life was improving, making the country an immigration destination rather than an exporter of people, as it had been for centuries. Ireland also faced some pressure from the still-young European Union, since it was the only member country to offer birthright citizenship, and citizens of all E.U. countries were now entitled to live and work anywhere within the bloc.
But the public debate largely centered on claims that “birth tourism” was leaving maternity hospitals overcrowded. In reality, most non-Irish mothers giving birth were European nationals already entitled to residency, and hospital strains stemmed from underfunding. One study found that immigrants who arrived in Ireland from 1999 to 2004 had more education and fewer children than those who came before or after.
After the referendum, citizenship for anyone born in Ireland on or after Jan. 1, 2005, would depend on their parents’ nationality and residence history.
Even though the Constitution no longer protected automatic birthright citizenship, other generous provisions were introduced, explained Samantha Arnold, a senior manager with the immigration consultancy Fragomen.
Children born in Ireland with at least one parent legally residing on the island for three out of the four years before their birth can still qualify for citizenship. Children born in Ireland and not entitled to citizenship of another country are also eligible, preventing them from becoming stateless.
“There are a lot of things to try to catch people, but of course people are going to fall through the cracks,” Ms. Arnold said, adding that those most at risk of not having access to citizenship are the children of parents who did not have permission to live in the state.
Ebun Joseph, the special rapporteur for Ireland’s National Action Plan Against Racism, recently produced a documentary about the young people born in Ireland to non-Irish parents shortly after the referendum who have been left in limbo.
“It created a huge policy gap that is impacting young people particularly in their education and mental health,” Ms. Joseph said. “The sins of the parents are visited on the children. If a parent is criminal, or for whatever reason doesn’t get citizenship, then the children are locked out of citizenship.”
Oluchi Okoli was born in Ireland on Jan. 30, 2005. She is still waiting for her Irish citizenship after completing naturalization papers in 2022. Her mother immigrated from South Africa and was living legally in the country when her daughter was born, but she had a chronic illness and stopped updating her residency papers.
When her mother died in 2019, Ms. Okoli realized that her mother’s residency permit was out of date and that she had never applied for citizenship for her children.
That kicked off a long process of proving that she was entitled to citizenship by naturalization through her mother’s legal residency. In her third year of college, it’s still dragging on.
“It takes a lot out of somebody,” Ms. Okoli said. She believes the referendum to end birthright citizenship was driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, something she said she still felt.
“I still get asked, ‘When did you come here?’ And I’m not going to let it affect me that much,” she said. “But why am I fighting to prove that I’ve been in this country my whole life?”
More Citizenship, More Integration
The change in Ireland is still too recent to have generated much data about how young adults born after 2005 are faring compared with their slightly older peers. But there is more research on a similar change in Germany — one that moved in the opposite direction.
On Jan. 1, 2000, Germany began extending citizenship at birth as long as at least one parent had been living in the country legally for eight years, a period later shortened to five years. It created an opening for many children of immigrants, who at that time were generally guest workers from Turkey and Eastern Europe. In 2024, about 47,500 babies born to foreign parents qualified for citizenship, while 100,000 did not, according to Germany’s statistical office.
Research has found that boys born just after the cutoff who were eligible for citizenship integrated better with their peers. Both boys and girls enrolled in preschool at higher rates, progressed faster in primary school and were more likely to pursue more rigorous academics in secondary school. They committed 70 percent fewer crimes than those who were not granted citizenship at birth, and their parents were more likely to speak German and integrate with their local community.
Simone Schüller, a research fellow at the German Youth Institute, said the effect of citizenship was likely subconscious — young adults may not fully understand how it shapes their lives.
“We see it in how they behave, how they make decisions, how they make educational choices and whether they choose to engage in criminal behavior or not,” Ms. Schüller said. “I’m not sure if the individuals themselves are that aware of it.”
Nevertheless, having a parent with legal residence for five years is still a high bar. According to Magdalena Benavente, a legal adviser for the Berlin Migration Council who counsels families with immigration issues, lacking citizenship can have a major effect on children who are born in Germany without eligibility.
For example, immigration authorities often ask parents about their children’s school attendance and grades as indicators of how well the family has integrated into German society when their residency permits are up for renewal.
“This means the children pretty soon feel this pressure that they could be deported at any time,” Ms. Benavente said, in German. “This fear is completely breaking them.”
Christina Felfe, an economist at the University of Konstanz, said that despite the benefits of birthright citizenship, it had not erased disparities with children whose parents are German.
“We see huge issues of when there is a high share of immigrants and natives, and in particular if they’re culturally distant, we do have a large share of discrimination, a lack of trust,” she said. “It’s just one policy that could contribute to integrating, but it’s not enough.”
There are many differences between Europe and the United States, which has been an engine of assimilation for its entire existence.
But even within the United States, access to citizenship tends to increase immigrants’ contributions to their new home country. Research has found that new European arrivals during the age of mass migration, before 1924, were more successful if they gained citizenship — and so were their progeny. Conversely, the lack of legal status depresses immigrants’ earnings and even the birth weight of their children.
If birthright citizenship were revoked, children born to immigrants on U.S. soil might be worse off than those in countries with more avenues to naturalization over time, like Ireland and Germany. In the United States, without an American family member, young people would have few options to gain legal status.
“What we’re talking about in the U.S. is going from a situation where kids are citizens to being effectively undocumented. That is extreme,” said Elizabeth Cascio, an economics professor at Dartmouth. The prospects for children without status would also depend on whether they had access to public benefits that the Trump administration and Republican-led states have begun to pull back. “That gap has widened in recent years,” Ms. Cascio said.
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11) Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon After Pulling Back From Threat to Beirut
Under pressure from President Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel held off from attacking Beirut. But he vowed to continue Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, which could threaten peace talks with Iran.
By Aaron Boxerman, Christina Goldbaum, Farnaz Fassihi and Hari Raj, June 2. 2026
People fleeing the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, on Monday, after the Israeli military was ordered to attack targets there. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Israel launched fresh strikes in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to pull back from a threat to strike Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, under pressure from President Trump and the United Nations.
Mr. Netanyahu paused the attacks on Beirut but made no mention of a cease-fire in Lebanon and vowed to maintain the military offensive in the south. Iran has said that among its conditions for a peace agreement with the United States is an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon.
The Israeli military issued a new evacuation order on Tuesday for Nabatieh, one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, which has been heavily bombarded in recent days.
Hours later, officials from the Lebanese government and Israel met for a new round of U.S.-mediated talks in Washington aimed at defusing the conflict.
On Monday, diplomats at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council were nearly unanimous — with the exception of the United States — in calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and refrain from launching more attacks.
Israel had warned earlier on Monday that it would strike Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Mr. Trump later said on social media that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop their attacks on each other, while the Lebanese government — which does not include or control Hezbollah — said a new truce was taking shape.
Mr. Netanyahu then issued a statement that appeared to move away from his immediate threat to attack Beirut, suggesting it would depend on Hezbollah’s actions.
“I spoke with President Trump tonight, and told him that if Hezbollah doesn’t cease its attacks on our cities and civilians — Israel will strike terror targets in Beirut,” he said. He added that the Israeli military would “continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.”
There was no direct comment from Hezbollah. Lebanon’s government said it had “received confirmation that Hezbollah had agreed to the U.S. proposal for a mutual cessation of attacks.”
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12) Kenyan Court Deals New Blow to Plans for U.S. Ebola Unit
The court further delayed the Trump administration’s proposed quarantine unit for Americans exposed to the virus. The plan has sparked angry protests in Kenya.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Brian O. Otieno, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, June 2, 2026
Demonstrators in Nanyuki, Kenya, on Monday, protesting plans to create an Ebola quarantine center for Americans. Andrew Kasuku/Associated Press
Kenya’s high court on Tuesday effectively delayed by three more weeks the Trump administration’s plan to set up a quarantine unit in the country for Americans exposed to Ebola, dealing a new setback to a project that has sparked angry protests among Kenyans.
A judge at the court, the Hon. Lady Justice Patricia Nyaundi, said in a ruling that the next proceedings in the case would not take place until June 23, at which point a date for a full hearing would be set — delaying any action on the matter until then. The court suspended the plan for the facility last week, after the Katiba Institute, a Kenyan civil society group, filed a petition challenging its constitutionality.
The court on Monday also ordered Kenya’s government to provide, within seven days, full details of the agreement it struck with the United States to set up the facility, including any financial arrangements and measures to protect the Kenyan population.
As part of its response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Trump administration announced last week that it would prevent any American citizens exposed to the virus from returning to the United States for observation and treatment. That decision, a departure from U.S. policy during previous Ebola outbreaks, has shocked many health experts.
U.S. officials also said that a 50-bed quarantine unit would be set up at Laikipia Air Base in central Kenya, for Americans exposed to Ebola.
That proposal has become a political headache for President William Ruto of Kenya. His opponents have accused him of bowing to U.S. pressure and risking the spread of Ebola in Kenya, which has never registered a case of the virus.
Critics are particularly incensed because U.S. officials said last week that the unit would only treat Americans. The top civil servant in Kenya’s health ministry, Dr. Ouma Oluga, said on Monday that the facility would also be open to Kenyans. U.S. officials did not immediately comment on that statement.
Mr. Ruto has defended his decision to agree to the facility, arguing that Kenya is well prepared should it have to deal with a potential Ebola case, and that Kenya’s health care system has long benefited from U.S. support.
“I gave the OK because it was an agreement and a partnership with friends who have walked with Kenya for 30 or 40 years,” Mr. Ruto told journalists in the northern town of Wajir on Monday.
“The American government has supported us,” he added. “They have deployed huge resources in Kenya to work with us on H.I.V., AIDS, to work with us on other diseases.”
In practice, health experts say any public health risk from the Ebola unit would likely be negligible, because it would follow stringent international health protocols under which any person suspected of being infected is isolated.
But the speed and the scale of the latest outbreak, and images circulating on social media of people sick with Ebola in other African countries, have raised powerful fears in Kenya. The World Health Organization on Tuesday confirmed 330 cases and 49 deaths from the outbreak, and many more cases are suspected. Almost all of the cases and deaths have been in Congo, with a handful in Uganda.
On Monday in Kenya, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base, protesting against the plan to build the quarantine unit. The police fired tear gas, and the military deployed an armored personnel carrier to prevent demonstrators from approaching the base.
Patrick Wahome, the community leader who organized the protest, said in an interview on Tuesday that two people had been shot and killed, apparently by the police, in the hours after the demonstration ended, under circumstances that he said were unclear.
A spokesman for Kenya’s police, Muchiri Nyaga, said that it had no record of the shootings.
Criticism of the Ebola unit proposal reflects broader voter antipathy toward Mr. Ruto, who faces a tough re-election battle next year for a second and final term. His government has faced a series of corruption scandals and protests led by young people in which the security forces killed dozens.
Tom Mboya, a Kenyan political analyst, said a lack of transparency over the deal between Kenya and the United States had fueled suspicion.
“You ask yourself, even objectively, what is the upside for Kenya and it is unclear,” he said.
Still, Mr. Ruto’s decision to set up the Ebola unit reflects a strategic partnership between the two countries that has deepened in recent years.
President Joseph R. Biden designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally in 2024, and Mr. Ruto’s government deployed hundreds of police officers to Haiti that same year, in a U.N.-sanctioned mission largely financed and organized by the United States.
The Kenyan decision also shows how African leaders have tried to cultivate ties with the Trump administration, even at the risk of domestic blowback. Several African countries have participated in the administration's so-called third-country deportation policy, in which countries take in immigrants deported from the United States even though they are not nationals of the receiving country.
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