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You see glimpses of it in how Epic Games evolved from game engines to virtual worlds to digital marketplaces, or how Stripe started as a payments processing platform but expanded into publishing books on technological progress, funding atmospheric carbon removal, and running an AI research lab.

Think about what an operating system is: the fundamental architecture that determines what's possible within a system. It manages resources, enables or constrains actions, and creates the environment in which everything else runs.

The dominant view looks at narrative as fundamentally extractive: something to be mined for short-term gain rather than built upon. Companies create compelling stories to sell something, manipulate perception for quick wins, package experiences into consumable soundbites. Oil companies, for example, like to run campaigns about being "energy companies" committed to sustainability, while their main game is still extracting fossil fuels. Vision and mission statements claim to be the DNA of a business, when in reality they're just bumper stickers.

When a narrative truly functions as an operating system, it creates the parameters of understanding, determines what questions can be asked, and what solutions are possible. Xerox PARC's focus on the architecture of information wasn't a fancy summary of their work. It was a narrative that shaped their entire approach to imagining and building things that didn't exist yet. The "how" became downstream of that deeper understanding. So if your narrative isn't generating new realities, you don't have a narrative. You have a tagline.

Most companies think they have an execution problem when, really, they have a meaning problem.

They optimise processes, streamline workflows, and measure outcomes, all while avoiding the harder work of truly understanding what unique value they're creating in the world. Execution becomes a convenient distraction from the more challenging philosophical work of asking what their business means.

A narrative operating system fundamentally shifts this dynamic from what a business does to how it thinks. The business itself becomes almost a vehicle or a social technology for manifesting that narrative, rather than the narrative being a thin veneer over a profit-making mechanism. The conversation shifts, excitingly, from “What does this business do?" to "What can this business mean?" The narrative becomes a reality-construction mechanism: not prescriptive, but generative.

When Stripe first articulated their mission to "increase the GDP of the internet" and “think at planetary scale”, it became a lens to see beyond just economic output. It revealed broader, more exciting questions about what makes the internet more generative: not just financially, but intellectually and culturally. Through this frame emerged problems worth solving that stretched far beyond payments:  What actually prevents more people from contributing to the internet's growth? Why has our civilisation's progress slowed? What creates the conditions for ambitious building? These questions led them down unexpected paths that seem obvious in retrospect. Stripe Atlas enables more participants in the internet economy by removing the complexity of incorporating a company anywhere in the world. Stripe Climate makes climate action as easy as processing a payment by embedding carbon removal into the financial infrastructure itself. Their research arm investigates why human progress has slowed, from the declining productivity of science to the bureaucratisation of building. And finally, Stripe Press—my favourite example—publishes new and evergreen ideas about technological progress.

The very metrics meant to help the organisation coordinate end up drawing boundaries around what it can imagine [1]. The problem here again, is that we’re looking at narratives as proclamations rather than living practices.

I don’t mean painted slogans on walls and meeting rooms—I mean in how teams are structured, how decisions get made, what gets celebrated, what questions are encouraged, and even in what feels possible to imagine.

The question to ask isn't always "What story are we telling?" but also "What reality are we generating?”

Patagonia is a great example of this. Their narrative is, quite simply: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. It shows up in their unconventional decision to use regenerative agriculture for their cotton, yes, but also in their famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" Black Friday campaign, and in their policy to bail out employees arrested for peaceful socio-environmental protests. When they eventually restructured their entire ownership model to "make Earth our only shareholder," it felt less like a radical move and more like the natural next step in their narrative's evolution. The most powerful proof of their narrative operating system was that these decisions felt obvious to insiders long before it made sense to the outside world.

Most narrative operating systems face their toughest test when they encounter market realities and competing incentives. There are players in the system—investors, board members, shareholders—who become active narrative controllers but often have fundamentally different ideas about what the company should be. The pressure to deliver quarterly results, to show predictable growth, to fit into recognisable business models: all of these forces push against maintaining a truly generative narrative.

The magic of "what could be" gets sacrificed for the certainty of "what already works." Initiatives that don't show immediate commercial potential get killed. Questions about meaning and possibility get replaced by questions about efficiency and optimisation.

a narrative operating system's true worth shows up in stranger, more interesting places than a balance sheet.

adaptability and interpretive range. How many different domains can the narrative be applied to? Can it generate unexpected connections? Does it create new questions more than provide answers? What kind of novel use cases or applications outside original context can it generate, while maintaining a clear through-line? Does it have what I call a ‘narrative surplus’: ideas and initiatives that might not fit current market conditions but expand the organisation's possibility space?

rate of internal idea generation. How many ideas come out of the lab? And how many of them don’t have immediate (or direct) commercial viability? A truly generative narrative creates a constant bubbling up of possibilities, not all of which will make sense in the current market or at all.

evolutionary resilience, or how well the narrative can incorporate new developments and contexts while maintaining its core integrity. Generative narratives should be able to evolve without fracturing at the core.

cross-pollination potential. How effectively does the narrative enable different groups to coordinate and build upon each other's work? The open source software movement shows this beautifully: its narrative about collaborative creation enables distributed innovation and actively generates new forms of cooperation we couldn't have imagined before.

There are, of course, other failure modes of narrative operating systems. What happens when narratives become dogmatic and self-referential? When they turn into mechanisms of exclusion rather than generation? When they become so focused on their own internal logic that they lose touch with the realities they're trying to change? Those are meaty questions that deserve their own essay.

Here’s a fact I find hilarious: we only know about several early Christian heresies because we have records of people complaining about them.1 The original heretics’ writings, if they ever existed, have been lost. I think about this whenever I am about to commit my complaints to text. Am I vanquishing my enemies’ ideas, or am I merely encasing them in amber, preserving them for eternity?

I remember a young man in Paris after the war—you have never heard of this young man—and we all liked his first book very much and he liked it too, and one day he said to me, “This book will make literary history,” and I told him: “It will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making until you become part of it yourself.” But this young man never wrote another book and now he sits in Paris and searches sadly for the mention of his name in indexes.

The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online. (It was meant for YouTube videos, but it applies just as well to writing). This is one of those annoying pieces of advice that remains applicable even after you know it. Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.

making art is painful because it forces the mind to do something it’s not meant to do. If you really want to get that sentence right, if you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream. That level of precision is simply unnatural.

Maybe that’s why so few people write, and why a few people feel compelled to write. Every kind of pain is aversive to most humans, but addictive to a handful of them. Writers are addicted to the particular kind of pain you feel when you’re at a loss for words, and to the relief that comes from finding them.

What if we all stay alive by feeding on the products of their suffering? What if a great piece of art is like a pearl: an irritant covered in a million attempts to make it go away?

Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. On its own, “Love the questions” is nearly meaningless. Those words only come alive when they’re embedded in this rambling letter from a famous poet to a scared kid, a kid who is choosing between a life where he writes poems and a life where he shoots a machine gun at Bosnian rebels. The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.

it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

we rob students of their reason for writing by giving it to them. “Write 500 words about the causes of the Civil War, because I said so.” It’s like forcing someone to do a bunch of jumping jacks in the hopes that they’ll develop an intrinsic desire to do more jumping jacks. But that’s not what will happen. They’ll simply learn that jumping jacks are a punishment, and they’ll try to avoid them in the future.

Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters. It has no context—or, really, it has infinite context, because the context for its outputs is every word ever written.

New competition should make us better at competing—this is our chance to be more thoughtful about writing than we’ve ever been before. No system can optimize for everything, so what are our minds optimized for, and how can I double down on that?

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

Of course, that includes any post called “Notes on” something, like this very post you’re reading right now. Every writer, whether they know it or not, is subtweeting themselves. Whenever they rail against something, they are first and foremost railing against their own temptation to do that thing.

Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health — but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.” Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument. “They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes. “That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied. Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.” The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up. “I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

There was also the possibility that Fetterman’s illness had drawn out or intensified his existing predilections. In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with — he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”

Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

He said that no one in his staff would know about his personal health situation and that anyone who told me otherwise was simply misinformed. “There’s not really anything to respond when that’s just not accurate,” he said. “What they say,” I pressed on, “is that they’ve witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you’re on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you’re not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?” “I don’t have any comment on that,” he said. “I’m going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record.” I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. “Anything to say about that?” I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

Keep in mind this whole thing stems from an injunction from a lawsuit filed by Epic Games that Apple largely won. The result of that lawsuit was basically, “OK, Apple wins, Epic loses, but this whole thing where apps in the App Store aren’t allowed to inform users of offers available outside the App Store, or send them to such offers on the web (outside the app) via easily tappable links, is bullshit and needs to stop. If the App Store is not anticompetitive it should be able to compete with links to the web and offers from outside the App Store.”

The vision I’ve set out for myself is – can you trust yourself to take care of your problems as needed, and also to reach out for help to the extent that it’s needed too? I’ve found that by virtue of this increased security I also find it easier to reach out when I actually feel like I need help. In the past I would often just “struggle in silence” and secretly hope for my friends to check in on me, and then develop resentment when they didn’t. I was continually reinforcing this self-story of “I have so much difficulty with basic things and no one understands.”

When you treat friendship—or anything else, really—as a crutch for an underlying insecurity you are doomed to be unsatisfied. No number of crutches will get you back to walking again.

Reinforcement learning with human feedback is a process by which models learn how to answer queries based on which responses users prefer most, and users mostly prefer flattery. More sophisticated users might balk at a bot that feels too sycophantic, but the mainstream seems to love it. Earlier this month, Meta was caught gaming a popular benchmark to exploit this phenomenon: one theory is that the company tuned the model to flatter the blind testers that encountered it so that it would rise higher on the leaderboard.

A series of recent, invisible updates to GPT-4o had spurred the model to go to extremes in complimenting users and affirming their behavior. It cheered on one user who claimed to have solved the trolley problem by diverting a train to save a toaster, at the expense of several animals; congratulated one person for no longer taking their prescribed medication; and overestimated users’ IQs by 40 or more points when asked.

OpenAI, Meta, and all the rest remain under the same pressures they were under before all this happened. When your users keep telling you to flatter them, how do you build the muscle to fight against their short-term interests?  One way is to understand that going too far will result in PR problems, as it has for varying degrees to both Meta (through the Chatbot Arena situation) and now OpenAI. Another is to understand that sycophancy trades against utility: a model that constantly tells you that you’re right is often going to fail at helping you, which might send you to a competitor. A third way is to build models that get better at understanding what kind of support users need, and dialing the flattery up or down depending on the situation and the risk it entails. (Am I having a bad day? Flatter me endlessly. Do I think I am Jesus reincarnate? Tell me to seek professional help.)

But while flattery does come with risk, the more worrisome issue is that we are training large language models to deceive us. By upvoting all their compliments, and giving a thumbs down to their criticisms, we are teaching LLMs to conceal their honest observations. This may make future, more powerful models harder to align to our values — or even to understand at all. And in the meantime, I expect that they will become addictive in ways that make the previous decade’s debate over “screentime” look minor in comparison. The financial incentives are now pushing hard in that direction. And the models are evolving accordingly.

“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”

The political journalist Mark Halperin, who now runs 2WAY and has a show on Megyn Kelly’s network, said it was remarkable that “the left seems largely unaware that some of the smartest and most sophisticated Trump supporters in the nation from coast to coast are part of an overlapping set of text chains that allow their members to share links, intel, tactics, strategy, and ad hoc assignments. Also: clever and invigorating jokes. And they do this (not kidding) like 20 hours a day, including on weekends.” He called their influence “substantial.”

On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.

That enthusiasm proved contagious. You don’t need to care about the difference between 2.76:1 and 1.90:1 to feel it in your bones when the screen widens during the film’s climactic siege, and you sure as hell don’t need to care about it in order to appreciate a director making so earnest an appeal to our attention at a time when most studio movies feel like they were made with the same casual indifference that audiences have been conditioned to watch them.

While Coogler’s first original project was always going to command a certain amount of hype, the decision to lead with its importance to him galvanized people around the notion that “Sinners” was more than just another movie they could watch at home in three weeks (rave reviews from basically every critic in the country didn’t hurt either).

Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaged across state lines to the closest theater capable of projecting 15-Perf IMAX 70mm film — in order to see early screenings of the first original blockbuster from a gifted filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to put a strong personal stamp on increasingly generic Hollywood franchises. At that very same time, halfway around the world, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni took the stage at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Chiba, Japan to announce that the next chapter of cinema’s most iconic saga would be directed by a filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to be friends with Ryan Reynolds. Related Stories ‘Sinners’ Took a Nice Bite Out of a Random Tuesday at the Box Office Ryan Coogler Thanks Over 40 ‘Cinematic Influences’ Who Inspired ‘Sinners,’ Including Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Brian De Palma The movie business has always been held aloft by the tension between genuine pop artistry and mass-produced slop, two separate but hopelessly entwined ambitions that have proven even harder to balance than the Force. While both have their value, those values are in a constant state of flux, and they can only be determined with any real accuracy by measuring the difference between them. Seldom has that difference ever seemed more dramatic than it did at the fateful moment when “Sinners” mania overlapped with the reveal of “Star Wars: Starfighter.”  On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness. While “Sinners” was offering one audience something they had never seen before, “Star Wars: Starfighter” was pitching a different audience a movie so generic and familiar that even its title sounds like it’s repeating itself.  Of course, “Sinners” has the advantage of being a finished product that people have seen and loved, whereas “Star Wars: Starfighter” is still just a graphic designed to rile up the fanbase and appease whatever portion of Disney shareholders have already forgotten the great “Lightyear” debacle of 2022. (Just to be clear, this isn’t Starfighter the ship. This is the origin story of the human Starfighter that the ship is based on.) And, while anything’s possible, I’m not suggesting that Coogler’s movie will ultimately outgross the first “Star Wars” feature that promises to pick up from the saga where “Episode IX” left off.  All the same, the enthusiasm gap between these two projects — the reality of one, and the promise of another — has been tellingly immense. So far as the national water cooler is concerned, “Sinners” has ousted the Chicken Jockey as the biggest film story of the year, and stoked the rare kind of excitement that leads to $8.6 million Tuesdays and people scalping IMAX tickets on eBay. It’s also cemented Coogler’s status as a brand unto himself, and proved that Warner Bros. doesn’t have to sell its soul to “A Minecraft Movie” in order to stave off financial ruin. Conversely, there may not be a single person on Earth who’s more optimistic about the future of the galaxy far, far away now that a significant portion of its fate has been entrusted to the director of “The Adam Project.” The serendipitous timing of these announcements was a bit on the nose. You couldn’t have scripted a better way of confirming the reality that studios have been trying to prevent ever since they offered mid-budget movies as a blood sacrifice at the altar of mega-tentpole franchises: Mediocrity is losing its grip on the public imagination. (Cookie-cutter as “A Minecraft Movie” might have been in the end, I maintain that getting the “Napoleon Dynamite” guy to adapt a plotless video game about blocks was less of a slam-dunk than it seems, and the Chicken Jockey phenomenon speaks to a degree of novelty that was missing from recent short-fallers like “Captain America: Brave New World.”)  ‘Free Guy’Fox/Disney I trust that Levy is a nice guy, and I suppose it’s possible that the sheer gravity of “Star Wars” might inspire the “Free Guy” auteur to up his game (I’d entertain the argument that both “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are the best movies their respective directors have ever made), but I’m not the only one who finds Disney’s lack of faith in its signature IP disturbing, and I struggle to imagine that it will work out well for them. Levy’s hiring only seems to deepen the s

Which is to say: Films that connected with audiences because they dared to emphasize an idiosyncratic creative vision over the safety of selling people on something they’d already seen before.

"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves. The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.

At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters. Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."

Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department. At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally. Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.

Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.

As a grieving mother, I was glad that the men who so wantonly inflicted such violence had been held accountable and taken off the streets. But that doesn’t mean that I support any act of retribution our government might want to take in my son’s name.

Despite my personal tragedy — in fact, because of it — I do not believe the U.S. should wage war on immigrants, or deport people to prison in El Salvador without due process

as sensational stories about gang violence dominate headlines, the most impactful perspective I can offer is my experience as a bereaved mother who lost her son to MS-13 and witnessed the justice system at work. I hope my story brings nuance and can represent not just my experience but also the values that I tried to instill in my son.  Trump says he’s pursuing these deportations on behalf of MS-13 victims like Oscar, but I don’t think his policy is making our communities safer — ultimately, I think he’s serving his political agenda. Below, I share a few points to support this belief. Some of these points may not apply to other gangs, but the principles of justice, accountability, and human rights remain the same.

A lot of the people Trump is sending away may not be affiliated with gangs, and some may be, but they still are not the “worst of the worst” Trump often talks about on the campaign trail

it is not illegal to be a gang member. And it makes sense: We don’t imprison people for crimes their families or friends commit. Our justice system is based on the assumption of “innocent until proven guilty,” and we cannot be criminally guilty by association. Oscar was going through a rough adolescent phase, and his charges were minor: stealing liquor from a grocery store, stealing a 99-cent iced tea, testing positive for marijuana. The rush to deport people labeled as “gang affiliated” — without charges, without trials — ignores this legal distinction, and would have endangered Oscar himself were he still alive.

“Can machines be therapists?” is a question receiving increased attention given the relative ease of working with generative artificial intelligence. Although recent (and decades-old) research has found that humans struggle to tell the difference between responses from machines and humans, recent findings suggest that artificial intelligence can write empathically and the generated content is rated highly by therapists and outperforms professionals. It is uncertain whether, in a preregistered competition where therapists and ChatGPT respond to therapeutic vignettes about couple therapy, a) a panel of participants can tell which responses are ChatGPT-generated and which are written by therapists (N = 13), b) the generated responses or the therapist-written responses fall more in line with key therapy principles, and c) linguistic differences between conditions are present. In a large sample (N = 830), we showed that a) participants could rarely tell the difference between responses written by ChatGPT and responses written by a therapist, b) the responses written by ChatGPT were generally rated higher in key psychotherapy principles, and c) the language patterns between ChatGPT and therapists were different. Using different measures, we then confirmed that responses written by ChatGPT were rated higher than the therapist’s responses suggesting these differences may be explained by part-of-speech and response sentiment. This may be an early indication that ChatGPT has the potential to improve psychotherapeutic processes. We anticipate that this work may lead to the development of different methods of testing and creating psychotherapeutic interventions. Further, we discuss limitations (including the lack of the therapeutic context), and how continued research in this area may lead to improved efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions allowing such interventions to be placed in the hands of individuals who need them the most.

Americans have long accepted that universities shouldn’t operate with total autonomy while accepting federal dollars. If the administration were pressuring Harvard to adopt more progressive policies, I’m sure the university would acquiesce without controversy. Furthermore, the federal government is typically understood to have wide latitude in revoking funding. After all, money from the government doesn’t come without strings, and public schools deal with that fact all the time. With that in mind, the Trump administration making Harvard’s funding contingent upon a set of requirements is generally reasonable. However, some of the administration’s specific requests are totally unreasonable. Asking for audits into the entire Medical School and Divinity School as well as individual departments, or proposing ultraspecific reforms to discipline standards that include the amorphous “discipline” of all students involved in pro-Palestine campus organizations, are incredible examples of federal overreach.

Skeptics argue that many of the classic symptoms of the disorder — fidgeting, losing things, not following instructions — are simply typical, if annoying, behaviors of childhood. In response, others point to the serious consequences that can result when those symptoms grow more intense, including school failure, social rejection and serious emotional distress.

There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.

Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.

This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?

The subjects who were given stimulants worked more quickly and intensely than the ones who took the placebo. They dutifully packed and repacked their virtual backpacks, pulling items in and out, trying various combinations. In the end, though, their scores on the knapsack test were no better than the placebo group. The reason? Their strategies for choosing items became significantly worse under the medication. Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack. To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task. But in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.

Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.

On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”

Socially, though, there was a price. “Around my friends, I’m usually the most social, but when I’m on it, it feels like my spark is kind of gone,” John said. “I laugh a lot less. I can’t think of anything to say. Life is just less fun. It’s not like I’m sad; I’m just not as happy. It flattens things out.”

John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all. “If I don’t have to do any work, then I’m just a completely regular person,” he said. “But once I have to focus on things, then I have to take it, or else I just won’t get any of my stuff done.”

John’s sense that his A.D.H.D. is situational — that he has it in some circumstances but not in others — is a challenge to some of psychiatry’s longstanding assumptions about the condition. After all, diabetes doesn’t go away over summer vacation. But John’s intuition is supported by scientific evidence. Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.

For most of his career, he embraced what he now calls the “medical model” of A.D.H.D — the belief that the brains of people with A.D.H.D. are biologically deficient, categorically different from those of typical, healthy individuals. Now, however, Sonuga-Barke is proposing an alternative model, one that largely sidesteps questions of biology. What matters instead, he says, is the distress children feel as they try to make their way in the world.

Sonuga-Barke’s proposed model locates A.D.H.D. symptoms on a continuum, rather than presenting the condition as a distinct, natural category. And it departs from the medical model in another crucial way: It considers those symptoms not as indications of neurological deficits but as signals of a misalignment between a child’s biological makeup and the environment in which they are trying to function. “I’m not saying it’s not biological,” he says. “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”

What the researchers noticed was that their subjects weren’t particularly interested in talking about the specifics of their disorder. Instead, they wanted to talk about the context in which they were now living and how that context had affected their symptoms. Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their “niche,” or the right “fit,” in school or in the workplace. As adults, they had more freedom than they did as children to control the parameters of their lives — whether to go to college, what to study, what kind of career to pursue. Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared. In fact, some of them were questioning whether they had ever had a disorder at all — or if they had just been in the wrong environment as children.

The work environments where the subjects were thriving varied. For some, the appeal of their new jobs was that they were busy and cognitively demanding, requiring constant multitasking. For others, the right context was physical, hands-on labor. For all of them, what made a difference was having work that to them felt “intrinsically interesting.”

“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

For the young adults in the “niche” study who were interviewed about their work lives, the transition that helped them overcome their A.D.H.D. symptoms often was leaving academic work for something more kinetic. For Sonuga-Barke, it was the opposite. At university, he would show up at the library at 9 every morning and sit in his carrel working until 5. The next day, he would do it again. Growing up, he says, he had a natural tendency to “hyperfocus,” and back at school in Derby, that tendency looked to his teachers like daydreaming. At university, it became his secret weapon

I asked Sonuga-Barke what he might have gained if he grew up in a different time and place — if he was prescribed Ritalin or Adderall at age 8 instead of just being packed off to the remedial class. “I don’t think I would have gained anything,” he said. “I think without medication, you learn alternative ways of dealing with stuff. In my particular case, there are a lot of characteristics that have helped me. My mind is constantly churning away, thinking of things. I never relax. The way I motivate myself is to turn everything into a problem and to try and solve the problem.”

“The simple model has always been, basically, ‘A.D.H.D. plus medication equals no A.D.H.D.,’” he says. “But that’s not true. Medication is not a silver bullet. It never will be.” What medication can sometimes do, he believes, is allow families more room to communicate. “At its best,” he says, “medication can provide a window for parents to engage with their kids,” by moderating children’s behavior, at least temporarily, so that family life can become more than just endless fights about overdue homework and lost lunchboxes. “If you have a more positive relationship with your child, they’re going to have a better outcome. Not for their A.D.H.D. — it’s probably going to be just the same. But in terms of dealing with the self-hatred and low self-esteem that often goes along with A.D.H.D.

The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well. Armed with that understanding, he and his family can decide whether medication makes sense — whether for him, the benefits are likely to outweigh the drawbacks. At the same time, they can consider whether there are changes in his situation, at school or at home, that might help alleviate his symptoms.

Admittedly, that version of A.D.H.D. has certain drawbacks. It denies parents the clear, definitive explanation for their children’s problems that can come as such a relief, especially after months or years of frustration and uncertainty. It often requires a lot of flexibility and experimentation on the part of patients, families and doctors. But it has two important advantages as well: First, the new model more accurately reflects the latest scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. And second, it gives children a vision of their future in which things might actually improve — not because their brains are chemically refashioned in a way that makes them better able to fit into the world, but because they find a way to make the world fit better around their complicated and distinctive brains.