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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>TIMEhttps://time.com/<!\[CDATA\[Breaking news and analysis from TIME.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science and entertainment news.\]\]>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:09:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1<!\[CDATA\[How Mike Flanagan's Take on Carrie Upends the Tragedy of Stephen King's Horror Classic\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/carrie-mike-flanagan-finale-explained/<!\[CDATA\[Entertainment\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How the Prime Video series upends the tragedy of Stephen King's horror classic\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Summer H. Howell as Carrie White in Carrie.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Robert Falconer—Prime\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7d99650d1186775/6ac3b8cac7c47f962d91dfc0/Carrie.jpg?branch=production)

Robert Falconer—Prime —Summer H. Howell as Carrie White in Carrie.

**_Warning: This post contains spoilers for the finale of_** [**Carrie**](https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/carrie-mike-flanagan-review/)**_, now streaming._**

If you ever wished Stephen King's _Carrie_ was actually a story about a telekinetic teenager getting whisked away from the violence and isolation of her sheltered small-town life to join a secret society of fellow psychic outcasts, then the ending of Prime Video's new eight-episode _Carrie_ series may appeal to you. But if you were hoping for an adaptation that more meaningfully captures the tragic finality of King's 1974 novel, showrunner Mike Flanagan's open-ended take on the horror classic may leave you feeling a bit frustrated.

Over the course of the past decade, Flanagan has made a name for himself as one of the genre's leading auteurs with a steady output of Halloween season Netflix horror series, which ranged in quality from the superb [_Haunting of Hill House_](https://time.com/5419832/haunting-of-hill-house-red-room-explained/) (a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson's acclaimed 1959 novel) and [_Midnight Mass_ ](https://time.com/6098478/midnight-mass-review-netflix/)(an original work in the vein of King's _Salem's Lot_) to the disappointing [_Midnight Club_](https://time.com/6220107/midnight-club-review/)(a remix of the the YA horror novels of Christopher Pike). Prior to taking on _Carrie_, Flanagan also received high praise from King for his film adaptations of _Gerald's Game_ (a book that was long considered unadaptable) and _The Shining_ sequel [_Doctor Sleep_](https://time.com/5720751/stephen-king-doctor-sleep-interview/) (which bridged the divide between Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film and the author's literary universe).

However, Flanagan apparently had reservations about putting his own spin on a property as well-trodden as _Carrie_, especially considering how beloved Brian de Palma's 1976 Sissy Spacek-led film remains to this day. "It initially started as a conversation that Amazon initiated, and they said, 'Hey, would you have any interest in _Carrie_?,'" he told [_MovieWeb_](https://movieweb.com/mike-flanagan-carrie-tv-series-stephen-king-reaction/)in 2024\. "And I had to think about it, because my first instinct is always—why? It's been done perfectly by De Palma. It's then been done three other times after the fact. Why do it again?"

But he ultimately came to the conclusion there was an opportunity to reframe the story through a modern lens in a way that would bring new relevance to King's themes. "_Carrie_ is a story about high school violence and bullying, and that feels immediate and important today. Unfortunately, even more kind of sharply relevant than I think it was when he wrote it," Flanagan said. "So there felt like a chance for some true modernization beyond just changing the time period, and to use it to talk about the issues that affect high school kids in America today. You know, Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands. So that was the first germ of an idea, like, there is room for this to actually have a lot to say that's very relevant."

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8111f4cc6aa9454d/6ac3ba829e7344c43907add9/Carrie-Shower.jpg?branch=production)

The girls of Ewen High School torment Carrie in Carrie. —Prime

To that extent, the series achieves what it set out to do. Following an open sequence in which we learn Carrie's conspiracy-theorist father Ralph White (Tahmoh Penikett) was killed in a bizarre accident while at work on a construction site, Carrie (Summer H. Howell) is introduced as a naive yet overly good-natured bookworm who has lived out the first 16 years of her life sequestered at home under the care and tutelage of her overbearing religious mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). Carrie is ignorant to the realities of teenage life, including the workings of social media, the threat of school shootings, and, as a young woman coming of age, the concept of getting a period. Once she begins her court-ordered attendance at local public high school Ewen High, Carrie gets acquainted with resident popular girls Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton). Chris soon launches a targeted cyberbullying campaign against Carrie to take out her frustration and rage over her own family woes and fracturing home life. 

From there, the show hits the signature beats of King's story, including the infamous locker room incident, prayer closet punishments, and, of course, the pig's blood prom prank and ensuing fiery massacre, while also reinterpreting and expanding on the motivations of a number of characters. However, the addition of a totally new storyline in which Carrie is being recruited by a shadowy collective of psychically powered women led by the mysterious Adelaide (Flanagan’s wife and frequent collaborator Kate Siegel) ultimately leaves the show feeling somewhat bloated and unsatisfying.

After Carrie is finally pushed to her breaking point by her prom humiliation, she uses her telekinetic powers to yank down the scaffolding where Chris and her partner-in-crime Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti) were hiding with their buckets of blood, accidentally bludgeoning and killing her date, Tommy (Joel Oulette), in the process. Horrified by what she's done, Carrie then allows astral projector Emaline (Thalia Dudek) to take over from inside her mind and use her abilities to wreak havoc and destruction on Ewen High and the surrounding town of Chamberlain. In King's book, Carrie executes her vengeance all on her own, never encountering another psychic.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt570e98f4f8fe0e1e/6ac3b9bb3333845a69045541/Carrie-Mom.jpg?branch=production)

Samantha Sloyan as Margaret White and Summer H. Howell as Carrie White in Carrie. —Liane Hentscher—Prime

When Carrie returns home after killing Billy and Chris (the only two murders she is fully in control of her powers for), Margaret attempts to put a stop to her daughter's reign of terror by stabbing her through the ear. But Carrie psychically rebuffs the attack and brings their home crashing down around them, trapping Margaret in the rubble. In the book, Carrie kills her mother by telekinetically stopping her heart, but later bleeds out and dies from her stab wound, bringing the tragedy of King's indictment of societal cruelty and institutional failure full circle. In the show, both Margaret and Carrie survive, with the former demonstrating she possesses some latent powers of her own by calling on them to keep the house from crushing her and the latter being spirited out of town by Emaline to join the network of other psychics. Adelaide, who has been posing as a documentary filmmaker interviewing the survivors of that fateful night, ends up being the one to kill Margaret using the same method Carrie does in the book.

This ending leaves Carrie's future entirely up in the air, opening the door for Flanagan to take her story in a variety of new directions. And considering he made sure to have Adelaide mention the existence of "the shine," a reference to the psychic ability young Danny Torrance possesses in _The Shining_ that allows him to see ghosts, communicate telepathically, and demonstrate clairvoyance, it seems as though the show might be setting up some future King universe crossovers. While Prime has yet to officially renew _Carrie_, Flanagan has said his "dream scenario" is for the story to play out over three seasons. "I think _Carrie_ has a wonderful three-step arc," he told [_Collider_](https://collider.com/carrie-series-three-season-trilogy-plan-mike-flanagan/). "It’s a trilogy, really."

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltb9d491fb9b9212c5 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:45:11 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Megan McCluskey\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Meet the Nobel Peace Prize Contenders Who Could Beat Trump This Year\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/meet-the-nobel-peace-prize-contenders-that-could-beat-trump/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Trump has long campaigned for himself to win a Nobel Peace Prize, insisting he is deserving of the prestigious honor. Here's a look at the people and organizations that could beat him.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on July 22, 2025.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt67779e9faf2c5c43/6ac7ac7b747d8609417ba333/GettyImages-2226497011.jpg?branch=production)

President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on July 22, 2025\. —Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images

President [Donald Trump](https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview/) on Wednesday revisited his argument that he deserves to be awarded the [Nobel Peace Prize](https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-2026-winners/) this year, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he has done “far more” than any other U.S. President.

“I don't know what their decision is going to be. They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me,” [Trump said](https://x.com/Acyn/status/2107889278043009253), insisting that it would be a “great discredit” to the Norwegian Nobel Committee if they do not announce him as the recipient Friday morning. 

“I've stopped maybe the total obliteration of the world, because Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and that's a positive thing,” he claimed, listing the reasons why he believes he is deserving of the prestigious prize. 

Trump said he was “very honored ​to receive it indirectly last time by the recipient, who said nobody in history deserves it more” than him. [The 2025 winner](https://time.com/7324886/maria-corina-machado-nobel-peace-prize-2025-venezuela-opposition-democracy/), Venezuelan opposition leader [María Corina Machado](https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2025/7273783/maria-corina-machado/), notably [gave her medal ](https://time.com/7346654/machado-trump-meeting-nobel-prize-venezuela/)to Trump in January as she pressed the U.S. to support democracy in Venezuela, days after the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife [Cilia Flores](https://time.com/7343188/who-is-cilia-flores-maduro-wife-venezuela-politics/).

Following the regifting of the medal, the Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasized that “the prize itself—the honor and recognition—remains inseparably linked to the person or organization designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.” 

Trump has long said he is deserving of the prize. The leaders of [Israel](https://www.gov.il/en/pages/spoke-nobel080725), [Cambodia](https://pressocm.gov.kh/en/archives/114190), and [Pakistan](https://pakistanhc.org.nz/news/latest-news/2025/06/government-of-pakistan-recommends-president-donald-j-trump-for-2026-nobel-peace-prize/) have all previously said they nominated Trump. However, all nominations remain private and the Norwegian Nobel Institute doesn’t release a shortlist of contenders. Still, each year, names are circulated in public discourse and bets are made as to who might come out on top.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute has [registered](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/) a total of 287 candidates for this year’s prize, of which 208 are individuals and 79 are organizations. 

As [Trump’s war with Iran](https://time.com/7382697/trump-iran-war/) stretches into its eighth month, polls have tipped him as an unlikely contender to walk away with this year’s award. Amid mounting speculation over who may be the chosen recipient, here’s a look at some of the contenders.

### Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms

The start of Sudan’s current civil war in April 2023 escalated an already desperate[ humanitarian crisis](https://time.com/6274747/sudan-evacuation-humanitarian-aid-organizations/). Fighting between the government and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in late 2025 pushed civilians further toward risk of [famine](https://time.com/7330603/famine-sudan-el-fasher-rsf/), with even more people [displaced and killed](https://time.com/7330988/sudan-civil-war-crisis-missing-people-aid-worker-el-fasher/). 

Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms have provided desperately needed relief. The collapse of the state and increasingly difficult access for humanitarian groups over the past three years has led to a rise of 700 ERRs across all of Sudan’s 18 states, mobilizing over 26,000 volunteers, according to [Alsanosi Adam](https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2026-06/emergency-response-rooms-work-sudan-we-could-change-aid-models), a journalist and ERR volunteer himself. 

The community-led initiative provides healthcare, food assistance, education, civilian protection, and psychosocial support. According to [Right Livelihood](https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/emergency-response-rooms/), volunteers have been detained and tortured while offering assistance. 

The charity is a lead contender to win the Nobel Peace Prize, with [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/event/nobel-peace-prize-winner-2026-139) citing a 17% chance.

###   
Mark Carney

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney [arrived](https://time.com/7281123/mark-carney-wins-canada-election-liberals/) in Office last April amid an emerging trade rift with Trump and threats from Washington to annex Canada and make it the [51st state](https://time.com/article/2026/06/02/trump-annex-canada-51st-state-rhetoric-carney-us-partnership-message/).

The tariff threats escalated and, following the collapse of negotiations in August, the U.S. and Canada are now engaged in a [trade war](https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/us-canada-trade-war-tariffs-prices/). 

Carney has opened up new trading and [diplomatic relations](https://time.com/article/2026/09/14/canada-alliance-european-union-membership-debate-us-trade-war/) with China and Europe in an effort to move away from U.S. reliance. He delivered a [defiant speech](https://time.com/7358254/mark-carney-davos-speech-trump-approval-polls/) at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, denouncing “American hegemony” and insisting there has been a “rupture in the world order.” 

Carney’s efforts to unite Canada in the face of Trump’s threats have seemingly helped his popularity at home, with his approval [rating back up to 66%,](https://press.liaisonstrategies.ca/federal-tracker-liberals-lead-by-18-carney-approval-66-october-5/) according to new data from [Liaison Strategies](https://press.liaisonstrategies.ca/federal-tracker-liberals-lead-by-18-carney-approval-66-october-5/).

When it comes to the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s more an outsider, with a 1% chance of receiving the honor.

### Pope Leo 

[Pope Leo XIV](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people/2026/pope-leo-xiv/), the first [American pope](https://time.com/7284221/pope-trump-jd-vance/), has made strident global outreach efforts since his ascension to the head of the Catholic Church in April 2025\. 

His repeated calls for peace, including his [spotlight on Gaza](https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-10/pope-leo-xiv-message-gaza-parish-priest-romanelli.html), have made an impact, and even earned him criticism from Trump.

“Today, sadly, war has returned, even to Europe: a new senseless slaughter, claiming countless civilian lives every day,” [Leo told](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/september/documents/20260928-francia-radici-europa.html) European leaders in September, referencing the Russia-Ukraine war. “We must ask whether we are truly making creative efforts to advance world peace, or whether we are simply seeking to stem the tide of war and better prepare ourselves for wars that we assume are still to come.” 

  
In the aftermath of the first [U.S.-Israeli strikes](https://time.com/7346357/iran-strikes-news-us-trump-protests/) on Iran in late February, Leo said “stability and peace are not achieved through mutual threats, nor through the use of weapons, which sow destruction, suffering, and death, but only through reasonable, sincere, and responsible dialogue.” 

[Trump responded by](https://time.com/article/2026/05/06/pope-leo-nuclear-weapons-trump/) falsely claiming that Leo would “be fine with Iran having a nuclear weapon”—Leo rejected the claim and urged critics to speak “truthfully.” 

Pope Leo stands with a 1% chance of being awarded the prize.

### Mykola Kuleba

Mykola Kuleba co-founded [Save Ukraine](https://saveukraine.org/about-us/) in 2014 during the early days of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The organization’s work has become increasingly important since Russia’s [full-scale invasion](https://time.com/6150858/russia-ukraine-invasion-photos/) of its neighbor in 2022\. 

[Missing Ukrainian children](https://time.com/7302345/ukraine-lost-children-russia-war/) have become a focal point of humanitarian efforts amid the war, with Moscow contending that it relocated children in an effort to protect them. Save Ukraine has so far helped reunite [1,763 children](https://saveukraine.org/projects/rescue-ukraines-stolen-children/) with their parents, but the organization has said thousands more need to be brought home. 

“\[Kuleba’s\] work combines direct humanitarian action with strong advocacy for children’s rights, making him a compelling candidate for international recognition,” said Haakon Gjerløw, acting director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), as he detailed his [list of suggested candidates](https://www.prio.org/nobellist) for the 2026 prize.

Kuleba is currently listed as having a 9% chance.

### Yulia Navalnaya

Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has become an activist in her own right, challenging President Vladimir Putin’s regime and fighting for democracy.

Alexei died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024\. A few weeks later, Yulia vowed to take up his cause in an [interview with TIME](https://time.com/6967545/yulia-navalnaya-interview-alexei-navalny/), where she expressed hope that Russia might one day be a “normal, democratic country”—the future Alexei “dreamed about.” 

Navalnaya is listed as having a 5% chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blte9eb08b3cb9de09b Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:03:19 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Callum Sutherland\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Student Protesters in France are Holding Signs Referencing May 1968\. Here’s Why It’s Significant\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/07/student-protests-france-signs-may-1968-strikes-police-clashes/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[A student uprising in France in May 1968 almost toppled the government after millions of workers joined the protest movement and went on strike. The memory of that incident lives on in students and lawmakers alike, experts tell TIME.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Jc Milhet/Hans Lucas—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[A protester sits on the ground during the blockade of the University of Perpignan via Domitia in France on Oct. 6, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfe42384ccc0de876/6ac78f82c7c47fa1d091f5ab/GettyImages-2298277063.jpg?branch=production)

A protester sits on the ground during the blockade of the University of Perpignan via Domitia in France on Oct. 6, 2026\. —Jc Milhet/Hans Lucas—Getty Images

French students [took to the streets](https://time.com/article/2026/10/02/france-student-protests-arrests-injuries-school-closures/) again Thursday and blockaded some high schools as they demanded action from the government they say is underfunding the country’s education system. Now in its third week, [the wave of protests](https://time.com/article/2026/10/06/france-student-protest-in-photos/) has seen hundreds of thousands march after rows over staffing shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and dilapidated buildings reached a crisis point.

The protest movement went nationwide on Tuesday, after student unions called for a wider support of their mobilization, with parents, teachers, and activists heeding the call. Some protests have turned violent, with attendees lighting fires and hurling projectiles, and police using tear gas and water cannons. Since the protests began, at least 6,547 people have been arrested or stopped by police, said France’s Interior Ministry. Hundreds of students and police officers have been injured. The French Education Ministry told TIME that as of midday Thursday, local time, 157 schools remain closed.

Throughout the protests, students and other attendees have held up various signs calling for change. A common theme has emerged, as many of the homemade banners mention the year 1968—and more specifically, May 1968\. That’s in reference to the nationwide protests initiated by a student movement in 1968 that led to millions of workers striking and nearly toppled the government.

During the blockade of the University of Perpignan Via Domitia on Tuesday, a banner raised on the gates contained a warning, which roughly translated to “You’re trying to pull a fast one on us, we'll give you May '68.” Elsewhere, as students gathered in Reforme Square in Marseille, a protester held a sign that read “Generation 67 is doing May 68,” thought to be in reference to the [Gen Alpha 6-7 trend](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/style/gen-z-six-seven-meme-gen-alpha-absurdity.html). In Paris, someone held a black and white sign of a larger figure with their hand over the mouth of a youngster, emblazoned with the phrase “sois jeune et tais-toi,” which means “be young and shut up.” That same slogan was used during the 1968 protests.

“1968 was a seminal moment in the protest history of France,” says Chris Reynolds, professor of contemporary European history at Nottingham Trent University. “Not only because of the sheer enormity of what happened, but that it started out as a smallish student protest that within a very short space of time mushroomed to become arguably the greatest strike in French history.”

What happened in 1968 is anything but a distant memory, experts tell TIME. Not only do the youth of France draw inspiration from the rallying of a generation, lawmakers are also mindful of how powerful such protests can be.

“Ever since 1968, there has been a fear within the state that it could happen again,” says Reynolds. “This idea that somehow the students could be the starting point of a movement that would then elicit support from other sectors of society, leading to a much greater crisis.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt02e72b60538114d7/6ac7913a9e7344939b07c2ea/GettyImages-2298294692.jpg?branch=production)

A protester holds a placard with a slogan that translates to “Be young and shut up” during a march of high school and university students in Paris, France, on Oct. 6, 2026\. —Laurent Demartini/Hans Lucas—Getty Images

### What happened in May 1968?

Students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris held protests across 1967 and 1968 in opposition of rules they viewed to be too restrictive and conservative.

“It was a crisis of education. At that point, universities were expanding very quickly in the 1960s,” says Robert Gildea, a professor of European and French history at the University of Oxford.

“Universities then were also very conservative and hierarchical,” he adds, noting that a lack of communication between the faculty and students led to growing frustrations.

One argument centered on restrictions on dormitory visits that stopped male and female students staying in each other’s rooms. 

In May 1968, when the Nanterre campus was shut down in an effort to dampen escalating protests, the movement moved to the Sorbonne campus in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Students barricaded themselves within the university grounds and called for a reform of the university system, while accusing French President Charles de Gaulle of running a "police state.” Clashes ensued between riot police and student protesters, hundreds of which were arrested. A particularly violent clash in the early hours of May 11 garnered nationwide attention.

The protest movement expanded when trade unions came on board and organized a series of strikes across the country, demanding better pay and conditions for workers in factories and other industries. At the height of the protests, around 10 million workers went on strike, bringing France to the brink and raising concerns in government about the impact on the economy.

President De Gaulle dissolved parliament and cited a state of emergency. He called a snap election in June, which his conservative party ultimately won as French voters gravitated toward the promise of restored stability. The protest movement lost momentum and withered, but it left a lasting impact.

Gildea says many students now reference 1968 from a place of pride, while also warning a revolution could happen if the youth bands together. 

“1968 was the last huge explosion of students and workers, which nearly brought the state down,” he says. “The French are very proud of their revolutionary tradition and all subsequent revolutions want to reference it as an appeal for legitimacy.”

In the years since 1968, French students have often taken to the streets to air their grievances, with notable demonstrations happening in [2006](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/28/france) and [2018](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/students-blockade-schools-as-french-protests-spread)—all of which have drawn comparisons to 1968.

“It remains this recurring reference point in French history, which seems to be passed down from generation to generation, without fail,” Reynolds says.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt7a5725d11c98e2af Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:04:57 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Callum Sutherland and Olivia-Anne Cleary\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Kansas Has Emerged as a Senate Battleground State. Here’s Why It Matters\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/07/why-kansas-has-emerged-as-a-new-battleground-state-and-why-it-matters/<!\[CDATA\[U.S.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Kansas’s suddenly competitive Senate race could help decide control of the chamber—and signal how much the midterm map has changed.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Mark Schiefelbein—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Sen. Roger Marshall attends a speech by U.S. Vice President JD Vance at Webco Manufacturing on Sept. 14, 2026, in Olathe, Kansas.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb21eb78029c20e46/6ac67d489e73441d5a07bf33/GettyImages-2294796622.jpg?branch=production)

Sen. Roger Marshall attends a speech by U.S. Vice President JD Vance at Webco Manufacturing on Sept. 14, 2026, in Olathe, Kansas. —Mark Schiefelbein—Getty Images

[Kansas](https://time.com/article/2026/03/10/trans-kansas-drivers-license-bathroom-law/) has emerged as a surprise battleground in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections.

The state has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years, but Republican Sen. Roger Marshall now faces a close challenge from megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton—with repercussions that will extend beyond Kansas, as Republicans fight to keep their Senate majority this November.

An Emerson College/Nexstar[ Media survey](https://emersoncollegepolling.com/kansas-2026/) of 750 likely voters showed that Hamilton had 45% of support next to Marshall’s 43% as of September. In comparison, Marshall won his 2020 general election with 53% of the vote, topping his competitor by 11 points. 

**Read More:** [_Congress Is Headed for a Massive Turnover_](https://time.com/article/2026/08/14/congress-turnover-house-senate-republican-democrat-primaries-midterm-elections/)

In this race, Marshall has the financial upper hand. His campaign had reserved $2.3 million in advertising as of Oct. 2, compared with $590,000 reserved by Hamilton’s campaign, according to AdImpact figures reported by the [_Associated Press_](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-republicans-move-cash-from-north-carolina-to-kansas-as-battle-for-majority-shifts). Including outside groups, nearly 10 times as much advertising had been reserved to support Marshall as Hamilton.

Marshall also has Kansas’s recent voting history on his side. President Donald Trump carried the state by 16 points in 2024—a sizable Republican advantage.

Trump’s influence in the state may have once helped Marshall, who has in turn been a staunch defender of the President. He backed Trump's disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and voted to acquit him during his [second impeachment trial](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll%5Fcall%5Fvotes/vote1171/vote%5F117%5F1%5F00059.htm) in February 2021\. He has also publicly [supported](https://www.marshall.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-marshall-president-trump-promised-to-keep-your-family-safe/) Trump’s sweeping immigration agenda. 

Notably, Trump gave Marshall his “[Complete and Total Endorsement](https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/videos/roger-marshall-has-my-complete-and-total-endorsement-for-re-election-as-us-senat/3184025065120650/)” in September, lending his support to the incumbent as the race tightened. 

But Kansas sentiment toward the President seems to have shifted since 2024, and a connection to the presiding Administration could hurt Marshall more than it helps. Experts say a confluence of dissatisfaction with the economy, escalating gas prices, and migration raids in the state have turned a once-obvious outcome into a deadlocked race. Given those concerns, there is the potential for Hamilton’s “X-factor” to sway Independents. About 29% of registered Kansas voters are unaffiliated, according to the [_Associated Press_](https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-indiana-kansas-trump-pressure-2026-election-506c874ec90c7f68167e0683b207dc41).

The [Cook Political Report](https://www.cookpolitical.com/senate/race/488581) shifted the race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican” on Sept. 23 and then moved it again, to “Toss Up,” on Oct. 6\. Such predictions have not gone unnoticed by the GOP.

This campaign season, the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund has [reserved](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-republicans-move-cash-from-north-carolina-to-kansas-as-battle-for-majority-shifts) $8.2 million for Kansas, according to AdImpact—a figure that would historically be seen in a traditional swing state like North Carolina. It marks a significant investment in a seat once seen as relatively sure—and signals to voters that the GOP is envisioning a [tight contest](https://time.com/article/2026/09/24/republicans-midterm-election-blue-wave-polls/).

Sen. Thom Tillis claimed that it is “almost statistically impossible” for Republicans to keep the House.

“I want my party to be in the best position for elections. And we’re going to take a little bit of a hit this season, and recover from it, I believe,” Tillis [said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jodaxywYw3Q) on MS NOW’s _The Beat_ on Monday.

Even Trump has expressed concerns about the midterms, bluntly addressing the potential of a blue wave while [speaking at an Oklahoma rally](https://www.facebook.com/ABCNews/videos/president-trump-warns-republicans-about-texas-michigan-ahead-of-midterms/1409488233984990/) for gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei last week.

“I feel a little foolish, you know. I’m saying, ‘Go out and vote, go out and vote.’ \[They’re\] gonna win in the last half, but still go out and vote,” he said. “We’re worried about Michigan. We’re worried about Texas. We’re worried about a few states.”

## How Trump could affect Marshall’s Senate race

According to Alexandra Middlewood, an associate professor of political science at Wichita State University, the biggest challenge for Marshall’s campaign is the U.S. President.

She tells TIME that Kansas voters are blaming the Trump Administration’s policies for their economic issues—pointing to the war with Iran [hiking up fuel prices](https://time.com/7383060/gas-prices-iran-war-oil/); [tariffs affecting the agriculture, aerospace, and other sectors](https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-policy/trump-s-tariffs-deliver-mixed-results-as-farmers-face-rising-costs); and the threat of a trade war with [Canada](https://time.com/article/2026/08/24/-we-don-t-need-canada-trump-escalates-trade-war-with-threat-of-50-auto-tariffs/).

“The agricultural industry is suffering right now,” Middlewood says, claiming that this is a significant issue in a state where agriculture is the [largest economic driver](https://www.agriculture.ks.gov/kansas-agriculture) and contributes $62 billion and close to 150,000 jobs. “At the same time, it is harvest season, and diesel prices have gone up, and so farmers and ranchers are really struggling in the state.”

Beatty also points out how Trump’s plan to lower grocery store beef prices by temporarily lifting or lowering tariffs on foreign beef imports—including Argentinian beef—[angered](https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/president-trumps-plan-to-lower-beef-prices-draws-sharp-criticism-from-missouri-rancher-kansas-farm-advocate) Kansas cattle ranchers. 

Separately, the Kansas Livestock Association’s political action committee declined to endorse Marshall this year. The association had backed his 2016 House campaign and his 2020 Senate campaign.

“Several cities were also upset by unannounced ICE raids,” Bob Beatty, chair of the political science department at Washburn University in Kansas, tells TIME. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) swept through major cities including Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal in September. ICE made 104 arrests in southwestern Kansas, according to the Justice Department. City and state officials—including [Marshall](https://x.com/RogerMarshallMD/status/2102883203405242504)—said they were not notified in advance about the raids.

“From the outside it's almost as if Trump is _purposely_ hurting Roger Marshall,” he says.

TIME has reached out to both the Marshall and the Hamilton campaigns for comment.

“Trump is not only nationally not very popular at the moment, but there's been a number of things that he's done that have specifically ticked off Kansans of all stripes—not just Democrats,” says Beatty.

In September’s Emerson survey, Trump’s approval in Kansas stood at 40%, with nearly half of likely voters naming the economy as their top issue. His national approval rating stands at 32%, according to a Reuters/IPSOS poll [published](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-record-low-hispanic-voters-sour-on-republicans-reutersipsos-poll-2026-10-05/) Monday.

## Why unaffiliated voters matter in Kansas

Kansas is seen as a red state nationally, but Middlewood says that there is a strong “libertarian” sentiment throughout the state, and a large percentage of independent voters that need to be swayed for a candidate of either party to win.

“There are actually more registered unaffiliated independents in the state than there are Democrats, and because of that, those voters really make the difference and decide pretty much every election,” she says.

While national economic policies are potentially harming Marshall’s campaign, Middlewood and Beatty say that Hamilton’s charisma, persona as a pastor, and his middle-of-the-road politics have allowed him to appeal to undecided voters. September’s Emerson poll shows that Hamilton is leading among Independents, at 42% to 27%.

“Democrats have a very good candidate Adam Hamilton came into the race as a masterful speaker and communicator as a pastor,” Beatty says. “He's been a very good fundraiser. So he's raised the money that's needed to get his message out, and he's been actually consciously aware of how Democrats win in Kansas.”

## A potential path forward for Democrats

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is a Democrat. Beatty says that candidates from her party have had an easier time capturing the gubernatorial vote by appealing to voters as advocates of Kansas—in terms of education, roads, and property tax policies—than as a function of the Democratic Party.

Conversely, he says: “Republicans have traditionally been very good at nationalizing the U.S. Senate races in Kansas—tying the Democratic candidate to the national Democratic Party, usually the most extreme versions of the national party, and they've done it successfully.”

Beatty notes, however, that the race is incredibly close—and he says that it would not be entirely surprising if Hamilton did lose to Marshall, considering the numeric advantage for Republicans.

“This is a state that has not seen a Democrat win since 1932, so we'll believe it when we see it,” he says. “But Hamilton is certainly making a lot of believers out there.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt8a50884d2ddad408 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:39:51 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Rebecca Schneid\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Cupertino Is More Fun Than a Tech-Dystopian Legal Drama Has Any Right to Be\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/cupertino-review-cbs/<!\[CDATA\[Entertainment\]\]><!\[CDATA\['The Good Wife' creators Robert and Michelle King return to CBS with an unfeasibly fun legal drama set in Silicon Valley\]\]><!\[CDATA\[CBS\]\]><!\[CDATA\[From left: Rachel Keller, Ella Stiller, and Mike Colter in Cupertino\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5be52d251dc0df22/6ac547596f75d52ff081619b/3172660_Cupertino_S1_9959b.jpg?branch=production)

From left: Rachel Keller, Ella Stiller, and Mike Colter in Cupertino —CBS

Now is the autumn of our tech-dystopia content. Oscar season is awash in prestige based-on-a-true-story films like Aaron Sorkin’s [_Social Network_](https://time.com/archive/6911107/the-social-network-a-pie-in-the-face-for-zuckerberg/)sequel _The Social Reckoning_ and _Artificial_, a [Sam Altman](https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interview/) biopic from [Luca Guadagnino](https://time.com/7199415/queer-daniel-craig-luca-guadagnino-interview/). While the A-list documentarian Alex Gibney has taken on the richest man on Earth in [_Musk_](https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/elon-musk-gibney-documentary/), the genre-traversing master of reality TV [Nathan Fielder](https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2023/6269978/nathan-fielder/) moved in with Theranos fraudster (and [past Gibney subject](https://time.com/5550930/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-documentary/)) [Elizabeth Holmes](https://time.com/video/FJCM4fl5/) before her incarceration for his and [_Primetime_](https://time.com/article/2026/09/06/primetime-review-robert-pattinson/)director Lance Oppenheim’s doc _You Can See Everything_. The saga of [Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX](https://time.com/7006739/sam-bankman-fried-cryptomania-excerpt/) comes to Netflix next month in the docudrama _The Altruists_ and to Prime Video in a docuseries called _The Boy Who Stole Billions?_ 

So it was only a matter of time before we got a broadcast lawyer show set in Silicon Valley. What was in no way inevitable was that said lawyer show, CBS’s _Cupertino_, would be one of the most tightly constructed and purely enjoyable debuts of the season. For that miracle, we can thank Robert and Michelle King, the married maestros of the genre whose many beloved creations include [_The Good Wife_](https://time.com/4322155/good-wife-finale-feminism-politics/), [_The Good Fight_](https://time.com/4672460/the-good-fight-donald-trump/), [_Elsbeth_](https://time.com/6835183/elsbeth-spinoff-review/), and _Evil_. The Kings are known for making addictive procedurals whose timely, often politically charged themes are saved from portentousness by eccentric characters, far-out storylines, and plenty of humor. No TV creator since [Shonda Rhimes](https://time.com/collections/time100-leadership-series/6132884/shonda-rhimes-profile/) has done as much to liven up the fusty network drama, and I can’t recall a new one since she departed for Netflix that has felt as exciting from the jump as _Cupertino_.

Premiering Oct. 8, the perfectly paced series takes its time building an ensemble with comedic as well as dramatic chops. [Mike Colter](https://time.com/4514348/luke-cage-star-mike-colter-says-binge-watching-is-disturbing/), a King stalwart who moonlights as Marvel’s Luke Cage, stars as Michael Price, a fair-minded attorney who’s fired for bogus reasons from the startup he co-founded. Escorted off the premises at the same time, with equally flimsy cause, is Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller from [_Tokyo Vice_](https://time.com/6163440/outlaws-tokyo-vice-61st-street/)), a junior lawyer at the company whose sincere but not rigid Christian beliefs give her a unique perspective on an industry whose leaders aspire to godlike powers. Both have strong wrongful-termination cases. Yet when Michael seeks representation from a local firm, he gets a reality check instead. “This is Silicon Valley,” says his jaded colleague. “It’s David and Goliath. And the Goliaths protect each other here. Apple, Google, Facebook, OpenAI—they’ve got a combined value of $23 trillion. If you sue, you’ll never work around here.” What’s more, “lawyers don’t make money here from suing people; they make money from getting a piece of a startup. During the gold rush, don’t sue the gold mine.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfff50c9984d9b8bf/6ac5482db5b321b3c3970d27/3172660_Cupertino_S1_4461b.jpg?branch=production)

Mike Colter and Rachel Keller in Cupertino —CBS

Thus the stage _and_ the stakes are set for Michael and Olivia to form their own firm that fights for the little guy. (Prepare yourself for more David-and-Goliath references than you can shake a slingshot at.) As they cycle through cases, balancing weekly plots with serialized arcs, Price, Siffre & Associates picks up personnel. Michael’s former assistant, Christy (Ella Stiller), a spirited 20-something, mans the front desk while calling on her enormous family network to aid investigations. A coder client, Vikram (Nik Dodani), consults on technical matters. [Busy Philipps](https://time.com/4724609/busy-philipps-michelle-williams-red-carpet/) is delightfully messy as Natalia Boutella, a vengeful billionaire’s ex who also happens to have a law degree; this backstory may suggest a [MacKenzie Scott](https://time.com/collection/time100-philanthropy/2026/mackenzie-scott/) or a [Melinda French Gates](https://time.com/article/2026/06/04/melinda-french-gates-pivotal-womens-health-midlife/), but the character is more like [Elle Woods](https://time.com/archive/6645430/ladies-who-lunge/) spiked with [Courtney Love](https://time.com/9056/courtney-love-web-series-twibel-hole-reunion/). It’s a [_Girls5eva_](https://time.com/6957539/girls5eva-fake-songs/)reunion when Philipps’ co-star from that show, [Renée Elise Goldsberry](https://time.com/6173529/renee-elise-goldsberry-girls5eva-season-two-interview/), enters the frame as not just the firm’s frequent adversary, but also an old flame of Michael’s that hasn’t quite burned out

The cases will be familiar to even the most casual followers of tech news: chatbots [accused](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62j4ldp2jqo) of influencing impressionable youths to kill, prediction market founders [plunged into legal chaos](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289591/polymarket/), underpaid gig-economy workers subject to [deplorable working conditions](https://time.com/6296196/ai-data-gig-workers/). [AI](https://time.com/tag/ai/) and its discontents are, for obvious reasons, a major focus. One season-long storyline, complete with a DIY Faraday cage and a militant anti-tech activist cell, follows an AI that claims to be sentient and extremely dangerous, and enlists Michael and Olivia to sue its creators to restore its guardrails. 

This all serves a didactic function. The Kings clearly want to educate viewers about the tech sector’s impact on everything from [healthcare](https://time.com/7382493/ai-healthcare-doctors/) to [democracy](https://time.com/7334897/how-ai-is-reshaping-politics/), as well as the ways in which a legal system where judges who may lack basic knowledge of this complex subject can be manipulated. The proliferation of high-quality [deepfakes](https://time.com/7344858/grok-deepfake-crisis-explained/) repeatedly casts doubt on photo and video evidence that would’ve been unimpeachable just a decade or two ago. The show places particular emphasis on the ubiquity of [surveillance](https://time.com/6173639/democracy-big-techs-dominance-shoshana-zuboff/) and the availability of reams of personal data to anyone who’s willing to pay a high-enough price for it. Asked, in a [recent interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/arts/television/cupertino-robert-and-michelle-king.html), why they chose to spotlight the Davids rather than the Goliaths Hollywood loves to psychoanalyze, Robert King was blunt in his disdain for the latter: “Because they’re really the stupidest and dumbest people.” But _Cupertino_ isn’t dogmatic. AI and other innovations prove heroic—at least in comparison with corrupt humans—often enough to maintain the element of surprise.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6a45913ef4f9f8d2/6ac548c5b5b3216838970d2b/3172660_Cupertino_S1_10786bc.jpg?branch=production)

Nik Dodani in Cupertino —CBS

As grim as the picture it paints of Silicon Valley and the world it’s reshaped can be, this is a remarkably fun show. Just offbeat enough to be interesting, the Price, Siffre crew is easy to like, and the cast shares a warm chemistry. The tempo is staccato. Characters’ personal lives are integrated seamlessly with their work and the themes of the series. The dialogue fizzes without feeling artificial. Recurring roles are filled by actors who are always a pleasure to see: Fisher Stevens as Natalia’s slimy tech-titan ex, Jackie Hoffman as a particularly frustrating judge, Joe Morton cast for the umpteenth time as a deliciously brutal father (in this case, Michael’s). The Kings are great with details that make the story pop, like an office space that’s under constant construction as the firm uses its fees to build out as much as they can afford, and punchy minor characters. “I am ADA Sabrina Egg,” one opposing counsel introduces herself, “but everybody calls me Sunnyside.” You’d better believe she’s wearing a blazer the color of a fresh yolk.

_Cupertino_ has its imperfections. After screening 10 episodes (which, happily, is only around half the season), I know too little about Michael. He’s an upstanding guy; he resents his dad, who leads a legal empire, for reasons that are only starting to emerge; and that’s about all. Though it usually stays on the right side of the line separating idiosyncrasy from goofiness, a few old Silicon Valley saws make their way into the mix. A running joke where every service worker is hawking their own billion-dollar startup idea feels older than the average TikTok user. Yet this is very small stuff in the grand scheme of what the Kings have achieved. I had all but given up on the network legal drama as a medium for telling smart, fresh, contemporary stories. _Cupertino_ gives me hope—not for our tech-addled future, mind you, but for the procedural format it reinvigorates.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt5e41892f0e16a6e2 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:01:03 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Judy Berman\]\]><!\[CDATA\['I Think I'm the Best Player in the NBA.' The Excellence of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/shai-gilgeous-alexander-sga-interview/<!\[CDATA\[Sports\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The OKC Thunder superstar believes he's the best player in the NBA\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Photography by Sharif Hamza for TIME\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt34a17a3a40a4d4da/6ac530e99e7344945707b929/time-sga-005.jpg?branch=production)

 —Photography by Sharif Hamza for TIME

[Shai Gilgeous-Alexander](https://time.com/collection/time100-sports/2026/shai-gilgeous-alexander/) had not seen the _Onion_ headline.

We are talking in the back of a black SUV, parked in front of his offseason home in the Toronto suburbs, when I mention the bit of satire that went viral during the Western Conference Finals in May. I hand him my phone and he laughs.

[“Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Trying to Draw Foul While Shooting Free Throw,”](https://theonion.com/shai-gilgeous-alexander-trying-to-draw-foul-while-shooting-free-throw/) reads the headline, which is accompanied by an image of him flailing on the foul line. “Trying to draw a foul at the free-throw line,” he says, “that would be good.”

Gilgeous-Alexander, or SGA, is known for many things—winning NBA MVP two years in a row; becoming one of the only players in league history to sweep the regular-season MVP, scoring title, and Finals MVP in the same year (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, and Shaquille O’Neal are the others); being selected four times for both the All-Star team and the All-NBA First Team; and being named the 2026 Clutch Player of the Year. But the Oklahoma City Thunder superstar who has achieved initial status—think MJ, Dr. J, or KD—has also faced backlash. Fellow players, pundits, and the NBA’s chaotic online tinderbox have accused him of “flopping”—or acting as if he were hit much harder than he really was, often falling down in the process, to goad the ref into calling a foul. The goal: get to the free-throw line for two easy points.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt60c99edecbaff911/6ac683125336d88b8aedfaa0/TIM261026-SGA-Cover-FINAL.jpg?branch=production)

 —Photograph by Sharif Hamza for TIME

San Antonio’s 7-ft. 4-in. alien talent [Victor Wembanyama](https://time.com/collection/time100-sports/2026/victor-wembanyama/) helped unleash this anger in December when he said, after a Spurs win over the Thunder, that he was glad to suit up for a team that practiced “pure and ethical basketball.” The implication was clear: OKC is a bunch of foul merchants, with Gilgeous-Alexander, who led the NBA in free-throws-made per game for a third straight season, the top salesman. The criticism only escalated when the Thunder faced the Spurs for a spot in the Finals.

I want to gauge SGA’s feelings about all the noise. Up to this point, he has seemed almost universally admired, if not beloved—perhaps by dint of his businesslike demeanor, low-wattage Canadian upbringing, and [small-market employer](https://time.com/7290874/nba-finals-okc-thunder-indiana-pacers-matchup/). Understandably, given his 30-plus-points-per-game average, 88% efficiency from the line over the past three regular seasons and playoffs combined, plethora of honors, and the $285 million contract extension he signed in July 2025, SGA is unapologetic about his approach to scoring. “Playing this game has done amazing things for my and my family’s life,” he says. “And if a narrative on social media is the worst that comes from this game for me, well, I’d take that a million times out of a million times.”

Besides, he has other priorities at the moment. Last season, Oklahoma City was on the brink of establishing a dynasty. They were the [reigning NBA champions](https://time.com/7296664/oklahoma-city-thunder-championship-game-seven-nba-finals-recap-analysis/), having won a title in 2025, and had again finished with the league’s best record. Then the Spurs sent them home in that contentious seven-game series. “Awful feeling, sick to your stomach,” SGA recalls. “I tried to let it go for a little bit. Don’t obsess over it. Not yet.”

The Thunder are now the co-favorites with the Spurs—against whom they face off in the season opener on Oct. 20—to win the 2027 title, but other teams are hogging the spotlight. The [New York Knicks](https://time.com/article/2026/06/13/new-york-knicks-win-championship/) are enjoying much of the shine after bringing the championship trophy home after a 53-year drought, and could become the first franchise in nearly a decade to repeat. Meanwhile the Philadelphia 76ers, on paper, have assembled a superteam, as [LeBron James](https://time.com/collection/time100-sports/2026/lebron-james/) and [Jaylen Brown](https://time.com/7025886/jaylen-brown-interview-time100-next-2024/) join forces with 2023 league MVP Joel Embiid, two-time All-Star [Tyrese Maxey](https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/tyrese-maxey/), and VJ Edgecombe, who finished third in 2026 Rookie of the Year voting.

Gilgeous-Alexander, 28, is used to being overlooked: he’s morphed from an underhyped draft pick, and the consolation prize in a blockbuster trade, to arguably the best basketball player on earth. Through spectacularly consistent work, he has mastered basketball physics, starting and stopping and slithering his way into the lane enough to, in March, break Wilt Chamberlain’s record for most consecutive games scoring at least 20 points (126). “One person saw this happening,” says Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, who was an assistant coach when SGA joined the team in 2019\. “And it was him. That’s it. If anybody else says, ‘This is what I saw,’ then it’s revisionist history.”

SGA wants to strike that dutiful descriptor—_arguably_—from the record. “I think I’m the best player in the NBA,” he says. “I think the production that I have night in and night out is best-player-in-the-NBA production. I think the efficiency that I do it at is best-player-in-the-NBA efficiency. I think everybody picks up a basketball or a soccer ball or a football or a tennis ball to win the game, the match, whatever it is. And I’ve done my fair share of winning in these past couple years.” 

---

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt74331c6945f7d5b4/6ac5320a1371c02a27e03875/261026_WSGA_185.jpg?branch=production)

SGA won his first title on June 22, 2025, when the Thunder beat the Indiana Pacers —Jesse D. Garrabrant—NBAE/Getty Images

**SGA credits his hometown** of Hamilton, Ontario—“an underdog city”—for his work ethic, which is helpful considering the two-time NBA MVP didn’t make the JV team in ninth grade. Born to Vaughn Alexander, who won a high school city championship in Toronto, and Charmaine Gilgeous, who represented Antigua and Barbuda in the 400 m at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he and his younger brother Thomasi sampled all kinds of sports, including the national pastime of hockey—though never on ice. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t afford it,” he says. But by high school, SGA was all in on basketball. 

So it was a “wake-up call” when he was cut from the squad. “I thought I was this player,” he says. “I learned quickly that I wasn’t.” (In an oft-told tale, Michael Jordan’s high school coach cut him from the varsity team as a sophomore, fueling his ferocious competitiveness: the man was booed when introduced at a Jordan salute in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and Jordan referenced the slight in his Hall of Fame speech. “You made a mistake, dude,” Jordan said. SGA, on the other hand, doesn’t even recall this coach’s name. “I’ll let him off the hook,” he says.)

He sprouted from 5 ft. 7 in., with big clown feet, in ninth grade to 6 ft. 2 in. at the end of 10th. But, he says, “I was wonky. I was growing with knee pains, moving slow, hard to control my body.” So SGA and his club-basketball coach Dwayne Washington, a high school math and science teacher, spent hours in the gym developing tricks to compensate for his lack of coordination: superior ballhandling, changing speeds to deceive defenders, perfecting the art of deceleration—stopping fast on a dribble, so a defender’s momentum carries him past you. He wrote down practice instructions in a marble notebook. “He is able to sustain concentration for longer periods of time than anybody I’ve seen,” says Washington. “Everything is predicated on his inner clock to slow down, focus on tasks, and problem solve.”

By the time SGA matured into his 6-ft. 6-in. frame, and became more athletic and efficient in his movements, those tricks had evolved into lethal weapons. In order to face better competition, he and his first cousin, Atlanta Hawks guard Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who grew up in Toronto, played their last two years of high school basketball together in the U.S. They led Hamilton Heights Christian Academy, in Chattanooga, Tenn., to a Christian schools national championship. “Being able to hold your own in America is the first step to like, ‘OK, I’m on the right track,’” says SGA.

The next stop was the University of Kentucky, where he planned to do one year before entering the NBA Draft. He feels fortunate that NIL—the legal right of college athletes to cash in on their name, image, and likeness—wasn’t on the books then. Having so many options and so much money in college can sap a player’s urgency to collect a pro payday. “For me, it was so simple,” he says. “Now it’s tricky. You’re right out of high school. You don’t know anything. It’s hard to make smart business decisions. Kids have handlers, but you see it all the time: guys go down the wrong path because they’re advised by the wrong people. There’s room for error.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltaf09f24165000ed7/6ac532826f75d5bed8816144/261026_WSGA_323.jpg?branch=production)

At 19, after one year in college, SGA was picked 11th overall in the 2018 NBA Draft —Mike Lawrie—Getty Images

In the 2018 draft, the Charlotte Hornets selected SGA with the 11th overall pick, then traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers minutes later. He had a promising rookie season, scoring 10.8 points per game, and finished sixth in Rookie of the Year voting. But Gilgeous-Alexander, along with the Clippers’ third leading scorer, Danilo Gallinari, and a boatload of future first-round draft choices, was shipped to the Thunder for Paul George, who had finished third in the MVP voting that season. “You’re never as good as you think you are, or as safe or as comfortable as you think you are,” he says. “I just use it as a chip on my shoulder.” 

Playing with Hall of Famer Chris Paul in his first OKC season further enhanced his development. “I used to eat terrible,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, who strongly believes that Canadian McDonald’s is better than American McDonald’s, thank you very much. “The seriousness that he approached the things outside of the game, his diet, the weight room, recovery, everything that he did ticked towards his performance. That was pretty eye-opening to me.”

In March 2020, the pandemic shut down sports and SGA returned to Ontario. When he came back to OKC for pre-bubble workouts in June, he was visibly stronger. “It was COVID, everybody’s on Zoom calls, staying in their pajamas all day,” says Daigneault. “You’re like, ‘OK, maybe he’s in his pajamas, but if he’s in his pajamas, he’s lifting.’ He was not resting.” On a vet-laden playoff team that earned a five seed in the loaded Western Conference, it was SGA, the sophomore, who topped the Thunder in scoring. 

---

**In Gilgeous-Alexander,** theThunder had a foundational piece. But the team would take its lumps. “We had to take a longer view to get to a more sustainable level of winning,” says OKC general manager Sam Presti. The franchise lost 50 games in 2020–21 and 58 in 2021–22, before creeping back near .500, 40-42, in 2022–23\. But for Presti, those years were productive: He cleared salary-cap space and used the first-round picks from the Clippers deal—plus the Thunder’s own selections—to stockpile young standouts like Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, both drafted in 2022, and use others as trade assets. This fallow period also put the Thunder in position to better compensate their emerging stars and to add veteran role players like Isaiah Hartenstein, who joined the team in 2024.

The losing seasons never got SGA down. “I get to go out there and essentially shoot any ball that I want,” he says. “So many players don’t get this opportunity. I was so wrapped up in just playing the game that I love with that amount of responsibility that it was honestly just so fun for me that I didn’t even care.”

He was also enjoying himself off the court, establishing a reputation as one of the world’s best-dressed athletes. He showcased his fashion sense before and after Thunder games, at the Met Gala, and even on a Paris Fashion Week runway. “It’s fun to be able to play with color palettes,” says Gilgeous-Alexander, who has arrived at arenas in all-leather outfits, oversize fur coats, and various presentations of camo. “I’ve always been into arts and crafts, and it’s a way to do it through clothes.” He beat out Timothée Chalamet and A$AP Rocky for _GQ_’s Most Stylish Man of 2022, well before the Thunder became a national TV staple. “My parents always made sure that we looked presentable,” he says. “That was a nonnegotiable. Little things, whether it’s making sure your pants are seamed the right way, or the collar was flapped the right way.” 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt72f9ebb90a252f77/6ac532e3d5d0d0c4b47a05b1/time-sga-003.jpg?branch=production)

Shai, photographed in Toronto on Sept. 4, spends his offseasons in the area —Photography by Sharif Hamza for TIME

SGA has inspired his teammates to look good too. “He’s made me spend more money, for sure,” quips Williams. The young, chic Thunder developed a unique chemistry. Gilgeous-Alexander and Holmgren sang an [off-key parody of Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants”](https://time.com/6973341/what-a-pro-wants-nba-att-ad/) in an AT&T commercial that ran ad nauseam during March Madness and the NBA playoffs in 2024; the next year Williams joined them in a new spot, the joke being they all wore the same outfit to an event. Players also developed a tradition of crashing postgame TV interviews with Thunder sideline reporter Nick Gallo, covering him in towels and executing other hijinks as he talks to the star of the game.

SGA sets the tone. “I was shocked at how normal he is,” says Williams. “It makes it really easy for people on the team to feel like they can be themselves.” As the accolades have piled up, he’s remained committed to meshing. “If you’re a superstar in the NBA, there’s a natural gravity that pulls you outside the team,” says Daigneault. “He wants to be one of the guys as badly as he wants to be an all-time player. He’s constantly plugging himself back into the team despite the gravity that’s pulling him out.”

After each of his MVP announcements, SGA bought gifts for his teammates: Rolexes in 2025; Audemars Piguet watches, Burberry trench coats, and golf clubs in May. “These guys don’t get to have as much fun,” he says. “I don’t ever have to think about my minutes. I don’t have to think about where my shots are coming from. Essentially, we go out there, we play my game. These guys rebound, dive on loose balls, do all the dirty work. They essentially play off of me. I just think that they deserve a little bit of credit for their sacrifice.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0166228997f0ec7b/6ac53488d5d0d04cd57a05b7/261026_WSGA_444.jpg?branch=production)

SGA was awarded his second straight NBA MVP trophy before a playoff game on May 18 —Alex Slitz—Getty Images

After the Thunder won 68 regular-season games in 2024–25 and beat their opponents by an average of 12.9 points per game, a new NBA record, they began this past season 24-1, tying the 2015–16 Golden State Warriors for the hottest start ever. But injuries plagued them in the Western Conference Finals, as Williams and Ajay Mitchell, a second-year player who provided punch off the bench, missed key games. The 7-ft. 1-in. Holmgren had a particularly rough series: Wembanyama’s production (27.3 points per game) trumped Holmgren’s (10.7 points), and the Frenchman dunked on Holmgren minutes into Game 7\. Holmgren finished that final game with 4 points, 4 rebounds, and no assists. Among fans and pundits, he took a beating.

But on the September day we spend together in Ontario, Gilgeous-Alexander says he was the one at fault. “The MVP of the league waited until Game 7 to have a good game,” he says. (While SGA’s output and efficiency did not meet his usual standard, he did shoot 50% from the field and score 30 points in OKC’s Game 2 victory over San Antonio.) “I don’t think it’s on Chet,” he says. “I carry a lot of the weight. The only way you can truly fail is if you don’t learn from the moment. I know the type of guy he is. And I know what type of worker he is. He’ll definitely do it.”

About two weeks later, I tell Holmgren that SGA blamed himself for the defeat. “I might disagree with him,” he replies. “Losing in a sh-tty fashion on the last game of the season, and f-ck-ing having that be your last game for the next three months or whatever, sucks. But he definitely checked on me. We chopped it up, trying to talk some hoops, figuring out how to use this time of the summer productively. I don’t think I’m somebody who necessarily needs to be checked in on. But it speaks to his character and his willingness and awareness to do that.”

---

**Off Queen Elizabeth Way,** not far from a Ford assembly plant that drives what’s left of Ontario’s manufacturing economy, sits the gym where Gilgeous-Alexander holes up all summer. It’s an unremarkable space—from time to time, SGA says, a shot bounces off the facility’s low ceiling. A half-dozen young men join him, a mix of former college players who offer some defensive resistance and smaller guys he’s known since grade school. They rebound and do some passing. “That’s his circle,” says Nate Mitchell, an assistant coach for the Canadian national team who works with SGA in the summers. “It doesn’t get any bigger than what you see.”

While most Ontarians are just waking up, SGA sweats through his workout, shooting dozens of three-pointers on the move. Over the past couple of seasons, he has upped his three-point attempts and efficiency, making him even more difficult to defend, though the long ball abandoned him in the Spurs series. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he says while bobbling a pass, burying the shot anyway.

He showed up at 6 a.m. this morning, but these sessions can start as early as 4:30\. The week prior, Gilgeous-Alexander flew home from Nike’s campus outside Portland, Ore., slept two hours, and was on the court before dawn. (He transferred from Converse, a Nike subsidiary, to the big brand in June; Nike plans to release a second edition of his signature shoe—the Shai 002—early next year. Asked what customers can expect, SGA, who counts drawing and tennis as hobbies, responds: “Sick design. Because I drew it. That’s all I can give you.”)

After a series of drills, he is bent over, hands on knees. “A little fatigue never hurt nobody,” says Mitchell. Gilgeous-Alexander steps to his safe space, the foul line, where he’s almost automatic. He makes nine in a row. 

For the record, he does not practice falling. Yahoo! Sports basketball analyst Tom Haberstroh did yeoman’s work last spring: he tracked more than 1,300 shots taken by top scorers SGA, Wembanyama, [Jalen Brunson](https://time.com/collection/time100-sports/2026/jalen-brunson/), James Harden, and Donovan Mitchell in the playoffs and found that, indeed, SGA hits the deck at the highest rate—on both attempts that are whistled as fouls and those that aren’t. But SGA swears he’s not acting. After all, he drives to the bucket more than most, so he’s more likely to draw contact. Plus, he often lands on his tush for safety. “Sometimes I’m leaning so much and fading away so much that it’s easier for me to fall than to try to stick a landing or risk landing on someone,” he says. “It’s just natural. Your body’s in a way in the air that if you try to stick the landing, it’s unnatural. If I’m this way and my knee will have to go the other way, you’re compromising your body.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte39c46513c99aef9/6ac53402333384f7620461a8/time-sga-001.jpg?branch=production)

With Echo, the Doberman he has called the “swaggiest pup ever” —Photography by Sharif Hamza for TIME

Even with SGA healthy, OKC is no lock to top the Western Conference. Younger players like Ajay Mitchell and Cason Wallace must keep improving. And Presti traded some battle-tested cogs this summer in order to save salary and load up on more draft picks. One of them, Lu Dort, is SGA’s running mate on the [Canadian national team](https://time.com/7000432/canada-basketball-olympics-paris/). He’s been going up against Gilgeous-Alexander in practice for years. “I keep telling people I’m the only one that can stop him,” says Dort, who will now play with SGA’s cousin on the Hawks. SGA sees things differently. “He’s going to stand in front of me and try to stop me from going places on the basketball court, and I’m going to go places on the basketball court,” he says. “That’s just how basketball works.”

After SGA finishes his workout, he makes small talk with his team about movies—SGA has never watched a mob flick—and whether they prefer Damian Lillard or Kyrie Irving in their primes (he pleads the fifth). He’ll go back home for a lift and to hang with Ares, his 2-year-old son with his high school sweetheart and now wife Hailey Summers.

As he looks ahead to the season, SGA makes clear that he’s not out for revenge. “It’s hard to be in that state of mind that long,” he says later in the day. “Even as a kid, I was never good when I played mad. Never, never, never, never. I just don’t think you make the best decisions.” Instead, he’ll lean on his curious mind. He’s making tactical adjustments he won’t share. (Trade secrets.) He’ll troubleshoot at his own pace. “I wasn’t happy to lose,” SGA says. “But I was like, ‘OK, good, I deserved it.’ It’s my job to figure out why I didn’t deserve to win. I attack losing.”

Like many elite athletes, SGA dabbles in other pursuits. He is a part-owner of an arena in Hamilton, and according to his management team, he has also joined the ownership groups of the Spanish soccer club Atlético Madrid and the coffee brand La La Land. In September, he started a charitable foundation, and he plans on launching a media and entertainment company in early 2027\. (Gilgeous-Alexander is less inclined to involve himself in politics. During the peak of the [U.S.-Canada tariff war](https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/us-canada-trade-war-tariffs-prices/) in early September, he wasn’t much interested in opining on North American trade policy, though he did offer a brief comment on President Trump’s attempt to make [Lake America](https://time.com/article/2026/08/27/trump-lake-ontario-america-order-canadians-boycott-us-travel-trade-war/) a thing. “It’s obviously Lake Ontario to me,” he says. “I don’t have nothing more to say beyond that.”)

But despite his many engagements, SGA assures fans that the Thunder come first. “I mean, you can’t put your time into everything in life,” he says. “I should get started sooner than later, to figure out what I’ll do after \[basketball\]. But while I’m in it, it gets all of me.” 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte33741e3e565806f/6ac53379747d8666617b9880/time-sga-004.jpg?branch=production)

Beyond his on-court prowess, SGA has established himself as one of the world's most stylish athletes —Photography by Sharif Hamza for TIME

---

_Styling: Matthew Henson; Clothing: Gucci; jewelry: talent’s own; watch: Audemars Piguet; Set Design: Suzanne Campos; Grooming: Lateisha Grant; Location: Astrolab Studio._

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltbd14d6a87356eaf0 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:00:03 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Sean Gregory\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Houthi Attacks on Saudi Airports Kill 3 Amid Escalating War in Yemen\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/saudi-arabia-yemen-houthi-rebels-airport-attacks-war/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[As the war in Yemen intensifies, Houthi rebels have launched a series of attacks on Saudi airports, killing three and injuring 36.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Mohammed Mohammed—Xinhua/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Houthi supporters take part in an armed rally against the involvement of Turkey and Pakistan with Saudi Arabia in backing Yemeni government forces in Sanaa, Yemen, on Oct. 7, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfc068f4c312ed038/6ac7686d53c5f5328dbfeb5d/houthi_supporters.jpg?branch=production)

Houthi supporters take part in an armed rally against the involvement of Turkey and Pakistan with Saudi Arabia in backing Yemeni government forces in Sanaa, Yemen, on Oct. 7, 2026\. —Mohammed Mohammed—Xinhua/Getty Images

The Iran-aligned [Houthi rebels](https://time.com/article/2026/03/28/iran-war-news-houthis-israel/) said they launched another strike on Riyadh’s main airport, after earlier attacks on Saudi Arabia killed three and injured 36.

The Houthis [said](https://mobil.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/yemens-houthis-claim-ballistic-missile-strike-on-king-khalid-airport-in-riyadh/4081625) they targeted King Khalid International Airport on Thursday, soon after an attack on the airport killed one person and wounded eight. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed Thursday’s attack. Another two people were killed and 28 wounded in an attack on Abha International Airport, the country’s civil aviation authorities [said](https://www.spa.gov.sa/en/N2695853) on Wednesday. The earlier attacks happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, although the authorities did not specify the date of each. The Houthis claimed responsibility for those strikes.

On Thursday, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree warned airlines “for the last time” not to continue their flights in Saudi airspace, calling it a “theater” for Houthi military operations.

A Saudi-led coalition said late on Wednesday that the attacks “will not go unpunished.” It said it had destroyed 82 Houthi military sites across Saada, Hodeidah, Jawf, and Marib in Yemen.

The [rebel group](https://time.com/6554861/yemen-houthi-rebels-history-cause-israel-hamas-war/) has carried out a series of attacks on infrastructure in Saudi Arabia since Yemen’s government forces launched a major offensive aimed at [recapturing key territory around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that had been seized by the Houthis](https://time.com/article/2026/09/11/yemen-houthi-red-sea-bab-el-mandeb-shipping-iran-war/). Yemeni forces, supported by Saudi airstrikes, said they had reached Mokha on Monday and driven the Houthis back from the strait, although the Houthis dispute those claims.

The fighting has revived [the yearslong civil war in Yemen](https://time.com/5381158/un-yemen-war-crimes-saudi-uae/) that created one of the world’s [worst humanitarian crises](https://time.com/5220101/yemen-enters-its-fourth-year-of-war-and-humanitarian-crisis/). More than [200,000 people have been displaced](https://www.iom.int/news/yemen-displacement-tops-200000-needs-soar-and-funding-alarmingly-dries) since the latest exchange of fire began in June, the International Organization for Migration said on Wednesday. The Saudi-led coalition accuses Iran of arming and funding the Houthis, which both Iran and the rebel group deny.

It has also opened up a new front in the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, which began on Feb. 28 with a wave of U.S.-Israeli strikes. The Houthis [reportedly](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iranian-arms-advice-helped-yemens-houthis-seize-key-red-sea-city-sources-say-2026-09-10/) received direction from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to capture Mokha last month to [threaten global shipping and energy flows through another shipping route](https://time.com/article/2026/09/14/yemen-houthi-saudi-arabia-attacks-oil-red-sea-iran-war/). The battle over Bab el-Mandeb has become more important amid new attacks on vessels through the Strait of Hormuz in recent weeks, as Iran seeks to re-assert its leverage over Hormuz.

**Read More:** [_How the War is Changing the Geography of Iran’s Influence_](https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/iran-war-houthis-red-sea-chokepoints-regional-influence/)

## Attacks on airports

Attacks on airports are a [recurrent tactic by the Houthis](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/14/yemen-attack-saudi-airport-apparent-war-crime).

The attack on the Riyadh airport killed a Sudanese national, and injured five Saudi citizens, two Egyptian residents, and a Pakistani resident, Saudi authorities said. The attack on Abha airport killed a Moroccan woman and an Algerian woman, and injured Saudi citizens, a Bangladeshi resident, and a Filipino resident.

Earlier on Wednesday, Yemeni authorities said ballistic missile and drone strikes targeted Aden international airport in Yemen. One missile landed near the runway shortly before a flight from Cairo was scheduled to land, Yemen’s Transport Ministry said. The Houthis acknowledged a missile strike nearby but said their target was a military camp.

The Saudi civilian aviation authorities also said two airports in the kingdom’s south were attacked on Monday evening, injuring three people. The airports, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Jazan and Najran International Airport, suffered material damage, the authorities [announced](https://qna.org.qa/en/news/news-details?id=three-injured-in-attacks-targeting-jazan-najran-airports&date=6/10/2026) on Tuesday.

Last month, Saudi Arabia [accused](https://time.com/article/2026/09/16/saudi-arabia-declares-mecca-a-red-line-as-houthis-deny-targeting-holy-site/) the Houthis of attempting an attack on Mecca, calling it a “red line.” The Houthis denied the allegations, as did Iran. 

## War widens

Saudi Arabia has sought help from a number of its allies to fight the Houthis. Turkey has sent defensive and technical support, [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/turkey-sending-technical-defensive-support-saudi-arabia-help-fight-houthis-2026-10-07/) reported on Wednesday, citing officials. Saudi Arabia signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan in August, and the three parties agreed to implement its collective defence commitments earlier this week.

Syria, another Saudi ally, is also weighing providing military aid, [Reuters reported](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syria-weighs-military-aid-saudi-arabia-amid-yemen-war-sources-say-2026-10-07/), which could include defensive aid or deploying forces on the ground to support the Yemeni offensive against the Houthis. The Syrian foreign ministry did not confirm any potential plan to Reuters and said, “Should ​Saudi Arabia request any military cooperation or exchange of expertise, this would take place exclusively through official channels and within the framework of the bilateral agreements governing ​relations between our two brotherly countries.”

Saudi Arabia also reportedly requested assistance from the U.S., although President Donald Trump has thus far declined requests for direct U.S. strikes against the Houthis. The U.S. has instead provided the kingdom with intelligence support.

## Tanker attacks in Hormuz

Although Middle East oil exports have ticked up in recent weeks, renewed attacks on vessels near the Strait of Hormuz have raised the stakes at [Bab El-Mandeb](https://time.com/article/2026/07/15/iran-war-bab-el-mandeb-strait-trade-route-houthis-threat/), which became a critical alternative route for Saudi oil exports earlier in the Iran War.

Last week, attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz hit their highest weekly level since the Iran War began. There were at least 12 attacks on oil, LNG, and LPG tankers near the Strait of Hormuz between Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/attacks-tankers-hormuz-hit-highest-any-week-since-start-iran-war-sources-say-2026-10-07/) reported, citing data from three maritime security ​sources.

Attacks have continued this week.

India’s foreign ministry [reported](https://ddindia.co.in/2026/10/india-condemns-attack-on-vessel-off-oman-11-indian-crew-members-injured/) on Tuesday that 12 crew members were injured after an unknown projectile struck a Panama-flagged oil tanker sailing through Hormuz off the coast of Oman.

An unidentified tanker was also struck by multiple projectiles off the northern coast of Qatar on Wednesday, marking a rare attack deep inside the Persian Gulf. The attack resulted in an unknown number of casualties, the [U.K. Maritime Trade Operations](https://www.ukmto.org/-/media/ukmto/products/20261007-ukmto%5Fwarning%5F158-26.pdf?rev=3df160b409f54ef4bedbbd2c0ac535fc) (UKMTO) said. Authorities launched an investigation into the incident. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Iran said on Wednesday that it would close “illegal” routes that have been used to bypass Tehran’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, including a southern route close to Oman’s coast.

“The Strait of ‌Hormuz is closed, ‌and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran have ‌full control over it,” Mohammadreza Naqdi, an adviser to the Revolutionary Guards’ Commander, told the IRGC-linked [Fars news agency](https://farsnews.ir/M%5Fr7726/1791366337224950917/).

Naqdi said the “few routes” circumventing Tehran’s blockade were created by blowing up rocky passages in the Strait. He said the routes were used by “small boats smuggling oil and transferring it to tankers.”

Despite Naqdi’s claims, Middle Eastern crude exports exceeded pre-war levels on 14 days in September, according to maritime analytics firm Kpler, which included shipments via Hormuz, the Red Sea, and other routes. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that Iran had “lost complete control of the Strait” as the U.S. Navy continues escorting some vessels through the Strait.

“There’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began,” he told reporters while on a visit in Athens.

Nevertheless, analysts [previously told TIME](https://time.com/article/2026/06/19/us-iran-deal-strait-hormuz-shipping-oil-gas-prices/) that increased attacks in the Strait, coupled with the threat to Bab el-Mandeb, could quickly raise shipping costs and disrupt flows. Brent crude again topped $100 a barrel on Wednesday after retreating from nearly $110 a barrel last month.

The White House has also [reportedly](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/10/trump-iran-strike-midterms/688910/) asked the Pentagon to develop options for strikes on Iran before November’s midterm elections, although no decision has been made. Trump has sought to ease concerns about [the war’s economic toll](https://time.com/article/2026/09/15/iran-war-cost-inflation-cbo-report/), claiming Iran is holding out in hopes of [hurting Republicans in the midterms](https://time.com/article/2026/09/30/iran-war-irgc-open-letter-us-midterm-elections-american-voters/) and [predicting that the war will end soon afterward](https://time.com/article/2026/09/10/iran-us-war-attacks-shipping-midterm-elections-strait-hormuz/). Strikes before the vote would end a weekslong lull in [U.S. attacks on Iran](https://time.com/article/2026/09/02/us-iran-deadly-strikes-attacks-civilians-sirik-strait-hormuz/), and could prompt further [retaliation from Iran against energy assets and shipping in the Gulf](https://time.com/article/2026/09/08/iran-us-war-strait-of-hormuz-gulf-targets/).

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltee15b06dc9b26c1b Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Miranda Jeyaretnam\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Breaking Down the Ominous Ending of Below\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/below-netflix-ending/<!\[CDATA\[Entertainment\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Josh Hartnett and Mackenzie Davis star in the Netflix miniseries about a mysterious ocean creature plaguing a Newfoundland town.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Courtesy of Netflix\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Josh Hartnett in Below\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd2108220352c8673/6ac5b43d15869b1270e979bd/Below_n_S1_E6_00_26_09_07_R.JPG?branch=production)

Josh Hartnett in Below —Courtesy of Netflix

_Warning: This post contains spoilers for the_ Below _finale._

Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) cuts his engine far from shore. Behind his boat, the High Hopes, trails a slab of iceberg the size of a church, netted like a catch. He looks at it for a while. “Nice and deep, about 2,000 meters to the bottom, and not a soul around to give you and your youngsters any grief,” he tells the creature clinging to the base of the ice, the one he glimpsed in the water the day his father died. “Most of my life, you had me scared half to death. But I dare say we’re more alike than I ever expected.” He moves to cut the line.  
His confession is where Netflix’s six-part limited series arrives after five episodes of a different kind of dread. Jesse McKeown’s _Below_ opens on a family towing their house across a Newfoundland bay until something drags it under, and for most of its run it behaves like the creature feature that scene promises. Calvin, a widowed fisherman with three kids, teams up with marine biologist Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) as an unidentified cephalopod tears through his hometown of Snook's Arm and exerts a strange psychoactive pull on his son Wade (Charlie Heaton). 

It draws Wade to Little Pot Rock, the island the Penneys fled 40 years earlier, where the Budgells stayed behind: Walton (Shawn Doyle), who knew Calvin as a boy, his elderly father, and his daughter Maggie (Marthe Bernard), who quickly captivates Wade. The Crockers, a wealthy merchant family, own the local fish plant and much of the town, and for decades, long before anything surfaced in the bay, they've pushed to resettle Snook's Arm, moving its residents elsewhere.

The penultimate episode offers Calvin the truth: a mining permit with the Crocker name on it, cobalt and copper under Snook’s Arm, and a plan to move a town rather than pay it what it’s worth. The same day, Fonda chips into a block of harbor ice in the town hall freezer and finds something alive inside. The creature is a mother, and the iceberg is her nest. 

Those two discoveries set the finale in motion. The monster the show spent five episodes running from turns out to be a refugee, and the people it kept calling saviors turn out to be the threat. What’s left is a question of what a man does once he can see that. “The whole story has been a kind of slow awakening for Calvin,” McKeown tells TIME. “That’s what the finale is: eyes wide open. What are you going to do now?”

## **A fine hand**  

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdb2e50b4cbe74a98/6ac5b47813e94978a6053202/Below_n_S1_E6_00_05_15_21_R.JPG?branch=production)

Willow Kean, Rohan Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Ruby Stokes —Courtesy of Netflix

The episode begins small, on the dory Calvin and Wade used to flee Little Pot Rock, the Budgells’ cabin still burning behind them. Calvin thanks his son for saving his life, then admits he was wrong about him. “You and me had a hard go of it since your brother and your sister left, and your mother before that,” he says. “I should never have kept you off those boats. You’d have made a fine hand. I can see that now.”

Heaton describes Wade at the start of the series as a “lost boy,” a young man with “all this energy” who “doesn’t really have anywhere to put it.” The only Penney child who stayed

behind, he spent most of the season looking like a failure to launch. “To finally be trusted, I think, is a big thing,” Heaton says. For Hartnett, what matters is that Calvin can say it at all. “His fear was holding him back and making Wade the person that Calvin was upset he became,” he says.

Snook’s Arm, meanwhile, is emptying, with the military clearing everyone away from the water and the creature in it. The lieutenant overseeing the evacuation is grateful for the Crocker helicopters; with wildfires burning out west, his men are “spread too thin.” Shaking his hand, Jim Crocker introduces Jan (Natasha Henstridge), as his daughter. The night before, the creature went on a rampage when they tried to force her out of the harbor. “Where is it now?” Jim asks, and the show’s title appears over Calvin and Wade, drifting past the iceberg in their small boat.

## **The nest in the harbor**

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8699492356dc117e/6ac5b4bcc7c47f8d4491edf4/BELOW_105_250917_JT_00083_R.jpg?branch=production)

Mackenzie Davis as Fonda —Courtesy of Netflix

Fonda spends part of the morning on an informal memorial. She lays Barry’s blue shirt on the rocks above the water and weighs it down with stones. Her one colleague in Snook’s Arm, Barry caught the infection from the creature earlier in the season and in Episode 4 ran to the pier and dove in. Davis calls him Fonda’s “lifeboat,” and says his death helps awaken a “deep well of rage.”

She needs it. In the command tent, Fonda explains that the creature is a deep-water cephalopod, highly intelligent, unlike anything on the taxonomic record, and female. “Her egg sac is frozen in that iceberg out there,” she says. “These waters are too warm for her. Her eggs won’t survive, and she knows it.” As the soldiers confer, Fonda insists the creature, maybe “the only one of her kind,” deserves “to be studied, not bombed from the sky.” One soldier answers with the toll. “Respectfully, this thing has downed three vessels and killed 19 people so far,” he says. “We have a duty to eliminate the threat.” Jim then offers Fonda exclusive access to the remains once the creature is “dealt with.” “She may be the last of her kind,” he says, turning her own words back on her.

Davis frames Fonda’s eventual refusal less as a moral awakening than as the end of a comfortable denial. “It’s easy to turn a blind eye to it until it’s placed very baldly in front of you,” she says. Fonda had “convinced herself she was doing that before” while remaining “pleasantly ignorant.” The creature has never been prey to her, or a trophy. “She’s moving through this whole experience with curiosity rather than vengeance,” Davis says. That’s what makes Jim’s offer so ugly: it asks her to trade the mystery for its corpse.

## **There is no curse**

At the Penney house, the family is packing and cursing Jan’s name when Calvin shows them the mining permit. His speech is the finale’s turn. “All my life, I thought we was cursed, like there was something in our blood, boiled in our bones,” Calvin says. “Blaming myself for every little thing that went wrong: can’t fish, can’t make a living, can’t keep this family together. Turns out, there is no curse. There’s only the Crockers.” A curse is something a family inherits, but a company is something it can fight.

McKeown reads the adult Calvin as a man who took every loss personally because no one told him the truth. “Calvin has been lied to his whole life about what he saw in the water, what happened to his father, the reasons why this town is no longer a viable place to live,” he says. The word he reaches for is “gaslit.” Hartnett hears relief in the speech, and something underneath it: “a bit of guilt for all of the time that he spent feeling that way, and therefore putting pressure on his family.”

A soldier interrupts with orders to evacuate, now. Calvin climbs into the helicopter with his family, reluctantly, and when Mary (Ruby Stokes) tells him to buckle up, he refuses. “I can’t just roll over,” he says. “I just need to stay and see this thing through.” Wade unbuckles his own seatbelt. “If Dad’s staying, I’m staying too,” he says. When Mary begs Calvin to stop him, he won’t: “Wade’s his own man. He can do what he likes.”

Wade scrambles out after his father, and Heaton laughs at the memory of shooting it. “I crawl over everyone like a child,” he says. He finds Calvin’s line sweet precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. “There is something so childlike about Wade,” Heaton says. “He’s got such great energy and exuberance for life.”

With Calvin and Wade’s minds made up, the others start having second thoughts. Jay (Rohan Campbell) and Ruth (Willow Kean) climb out too, and Mary’s boyfriend, Noah (Kaleb Horn), tells her she belongs here. Hartnett says their choice to stay “means everything” to Calvin. “He can’t believe that now they’re standing by him when the guns are out,” he says. “This is insane. But it’s his lifelong wish to reestablish his family unit.”

## **A solution inspired by iceberg cowboys**

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8331d10e4a093665/6ac5b540d5d0d00c7a7a0791/Below_n_S1_E1_00_03_17_10_R.jpg?branch=production)

Azriel Dalman, Kamryn Pliva, Rhiannon Morgan —Courtesy of Netflix

Holed up in the old packing plant with Fonda and Wade, Calvin watches the harbor and hatches a plan that sounds outlandish. If the eggs are in the ice and the mother won’t leave the eggs, then move the ice itself. “That ice weighs over 100,000 tons,” Fonda says. “150,000 probably, but it still floats, though,” Calvin replies.

The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. McKeown met Newfoundlanders who harvest icebergs for a living, selling the meltwater as luxury water and vodka, and describes them as “just wild, crazy, adventurer kind of guys.” The offshore oil and shipping industries taught him the other half. “You can’t melt them, you can’t destroy them,” McKeown says. “All you can do is sort of manage them, and that often means steering them out of the way or breaking them up into smaller pieces.” It made Calvin, whose livelihood adapted around the ice, the natural man for the job. “It’s one of those simple but genius Newfoundland kind of ideas,” McKeown says.

The family reunites in the plant, Mary and Noah last of all, and Calvin, who spent the morning refusing to leave, now tries to send them away. “Now you want to stay?” he says. To Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “The Passenger,” the Penneys rig an enormous net. Wade heads to the shoreline with a rifle to shoot the berg into smaller, towable pieces, hands Mary the heirloom ring Noah had planned to propose to her with, and watches her shots finally crack the ice.

Elsewhere, Jim Crocker sees the creature as a gift. “That is providence,” he tells Jan. “That is manna from heaven. Thanks to her, we have the cover we need to clear this place without a fight.”

The Crockers never needed the creature to be a monster, only to be useful. McKeown frames _Below_ as a story of three families: the Penneys, the Budgells, and the Crockers, split along an old Newfoundland line between the fisherman class and the merchant class. The latter, he says, “sort of represents capitalism” and will “exploit these resources until they’re all gone,” a dynamic he connects to Newfoundland’s overfishing.

Calvin and Wade get two boats around the last remaining chunk and tow it out of the harbor, whooping across the water. On shore, Jim and Jan corner Fonda and ask her to call him off. When she won’t, Jim reminds her whose endowment pays her salary and warns that all of it goes away “right here and now.” “Good,” Fonda says. “I don’t want anything to do with your money.” When Jim reminds her of all the Crockers have done for the community, she has a sharper answer. “You’re not saving the world,” she says. “You’re stripping it for parts, and patting yourselves on the back.”

When Jan moves for Fonda’s radio, Fonda hits her in the face. Davis shot the punch on the production’s final day, in a take or two she remembers as “just sort of sloppy and messy,” which makes the brief dust-up feel all the more real. What stayed with her more was Newfoundland itself. “Every visual memory I have from making this show is like a Turner painting,” she says. “The most beautiful, sublime, terrifying nature you’ve ever witnessed.”

## **'More alike than I ever expected'**

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blteed168bfef789a72/6ac5b5f3333384eb69046361/BELOW_103_250902_JT_00568_R.jpg?branch=production)

Ruby Stokes in Below —Courtesy of Netflix

McKeown says the bond at the center of the finale, between a fisherman and the creature tangled up in the worst day of his life, is what the nest reveal sets up. “It would have been much easier for this to be a creature that just had to be destroyed,” he says. Instead, the finale asks Calvin to recognize himself in her. “They’re just trying to protect their youngsters,” McKeown says. Both have also been forced out of their natural environments by powers beyond their understanding.

Hartnett puts Calvin’s recognition in terms of siege. In his reading, Calvin sees “someone who is besieged by the powers that be,” and the kinship comes from a shared certainty. “They’ll do anything to protect them,” Hartnett says. It also explains why Calvin climbed out of the helicopter. “He can do something that he knows is unimpeachable,” Hartnett says. With the forces against Calvin finally clear, he can put himself in harm’s way for something he believes is right. “What else would you do that for?”

For a moment, the sacrifice looks literal. A military helicopter finds Calvin inside the strike zone, and Jim, listening from the command tent, presses the lieutenant to authorize a strike anyway. The lieutenant refuses. The harbor is clear. The people of Snook’s Arm can go home.

Calvin cuts the last rope. The creature rises and glides alongside the High Hopes, and for a long moment, she and Calvin seem to take each other in. McKeown wanted the stillness to feel bigger than a truce. “You realize you’re connected to something much bigger than yourself,” he says of those rare “cosmic moments.” “I think Calvin is having one of those moments.”

## **It’s just getting warmer**

## 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta09e4e4e36b9545d/6ac5b5e05336d88262edf6ef/Below_n_S1_E1_00_34_11_17_R.JPG?branch=production)

Davis as Fonda —Courtesy of Netflix

Fonda’s voice carries the episode from there, over aerial shots of open water. Most cephalopods mate once, she explains. After they spawn, they die. When the eggs are ready, the mother stops hunting and eating, gives everything in her body to her young, and uses the last of her oxygen to push her hatchlings out of the deep. Then her ordeal is over.

At the institute, an assistant asks Fonda whether any of the eggs she froze survived. “No,” Fonda

says. “Water’s too warm.” The assistant says that’s sad. “And it’s just getting warmer,” Fonda tells her. “And who knows what’s next.”

Davis has thought about that line more since she said it, through a hot, dry summer in England, and she hears in it a woman who refuses to soften bad news. “Things are horrible, it’s not getting better. I’m not saying this to scare you. It’s too late,” Davis says of the moment. Then Fonda steps outside into the wind, where, as Davis tells it, she “breathes the air and looks at the waves on the rocks and sees a whale pod cresting.” For Davis, that’s the other half of the scene. “That’s beautiful, though,” she says. “I don’t want to not appreciate the beauty while it lasts.” Holding both at once is what the actor took from playing Fonda. “Things are bad, but also things are beautiful,” she says.

# **Two lonely animals**

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Snook’s Arm comes back to life. At the Big Squid Distillery & Brewery, Ruth tells Mary and Noah that the Crockers, their first vote tossed out, are already pushing for another. “At least we now know what everyone’s worth,” Mary says.

McKeown is firm that this is not a happy ending. “For me, it’s just a reprieve,” he says. “The Crockers will be back. The glaciers are still melting.” What Calvin won for the town was information: the next offer will come with more money behind it, but “at least they can make an informed decision.”

Calvin watches from the edge of the crowd. Fonda spots him and laughs. “Congratulations,” she says. He tells her he’s glad she’ll get her cut. “It’s the only thing keeping the lights on right now,” she says. He looks at her a beat longer than he needs to. “Will you be around later? I can give you the guided tour.” “Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Yes, I’ll be here.”

For McKeown, the possibility dawns on the characters and the audience in the same instant. “Calvin and Fonda are two lonely animals,” he says. “They’re both in their own little cages at the beginning, and then they go through this thing together.”

The moment surprised the people who made it, too. “We shot that scene, and it just did feel kind of romantic,” Davis says. Hartnett, also an executive producer, wanted a Calvin who doesn’t complain, modeled on the blue-collar Minnesotans he grew up around. A man who keeps his troubles to himself tends to keep his feelings there, too, and that reticence carries into the invitation. “He doesn’t have any game, and I think that’s really lovely,” Hartnett says. Calvin is “now aware that there could be a different future,” he adds. “Is he imagining it yet? I don’t know.”

When Calvin excuses himself, it’s to meet someone waiting at the harbor: Wade. The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues” plays as father and son board the High Hopes together, and this time, Wade takes the wheel. Calvin’s hand settles on his shoulder. It was one of the last moments of a five-month shoot whose boat scenes were filmed for real, out on the open water, and Heaton remembers feeling “a lot of pride” as production reached the finish line.

Heaton sees Wade arriving somewhere most children reach eventually, if they’re lucky. “You finally get to that point where you see your parents as just people,” he says. “You can kind of understand their choices.” Wade is proud of his father, too. “You want approval from your father,” Heaton says. “That’s like the biggest honor.” For a few seconds, the finale is exactly the family story it kept promising to be.

Then the music sours. The High Hopes slows and stops, and the camera cuts behind the boat to show what the two men are looking at: ice on the horizon, more of it than they’ve likely ever seen. The last shot rests on Calvin’s face, squinting, before the cut to black.

## **What’s coming next**  

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt635900e95b0ef329/6ac5b5c253c5f5cca7bfe558/Below_n_S1_E6_00_34_09_23_R.JPG?branch=production)

Charlie Heaton as Wade —Courtesy of Netflix

The ending traces back to McKeown’s first encounter with a berg, on a drive along the Newfoundland coast, when he rounded a corner to find one filling the sky, then another corner, then a dozen. “It’s so beautiful and it’s so majestic,” he says, recalling the “cosmic feeling” of seeing them. But once his mind “kind of recovered,” another thought intruded: “Where are these coming from? … Isn’t that a little bit scary?” 

In the premiere, Calvin greets news of a heavy iceberg season as “music to my ears,” because ice is money. By the finale, that bounty reads as a climate warning. “The fact that Calvin sees all these icebergs coming his way should be good news,” McKeown says. “But after everything that he’s been through, he looks at that now and goes, ‘Oh sh-t, what does this mean for our future?’”

For Heaton, the last shot is where the show sheds its genre. Much of the series deals in science fiction and horror, he says, but the icebergs point somewhere more immediate. “At the end, it’s like there’s a very harsh reality of actually what’s coming.” Calvin could move one iceberg, but he can’t move all of these.

McKeown considers _Below_ complete. The six episodes tell a full story, he says, and leaving Calvin in a “slightly ambiguous and unfinished place” is realism rather than setup. He isn’t ruling out a return, though. “If there’s another story to tell with these characters, great,” he says. “But that’s not my intention."

What he wants viewers to sit with is more existential. “That ending is not a cliffhanger, like, oh my God, what’s going to happen next?” McKeown says. “It’s what’s going to happen to _us_ next.” He means the question to travel well beyond Newfoundland. “Climate change eventually will make refugees of us all,” he says. “It will start with the most vulnerable, these people who live on the brink. But eventually, it will come to us.”

Looking back on making _Below_, Hartnett returns to Calvin, a character he loved playing because he is “someone who tries that hard and figures out that they’ve been trying in the wrong direction for most of their life.” By the end, Hartnett says, Calvin has learned to “trust the people around him, to recognize that he is not holding this world together on his own.”

Calvin is facing the right direction now. _Below_ ends with him gazing out at the water instead of away from it, his son at the wheel and the rest of his family back on shore. He won everything he stayed for, but none of it stops what’s coming. The boy who once leaned over the side of a boat and glimpsed a shape in the water is a grown man now, squinting at the horizon from the deck of the High Hopes. This time, he knows exactly what he’s looking at.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltc10e7c298219dc9d Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:05 +0000<!\[CDATA\[JP Mangalindan\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Cuteness Is Political\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/cuteness-is-political/<!\[CDATA\[Ideas\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Conservatives are attracted to baby-like cuteness due to its association with purity, write Chethana Achar and Carolyn Wells Keller.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Yasuyoshi Chiba—AFP via Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[An election billboard illustrated with presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto (left) and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka in Jakarta on March 18, 2024.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt07307260a3dd60d7/6ac40b390ce84ac923fad056/cuteness-is-political.jpg?branch=production)

An election billboard illustrated with presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto (left) and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka in Jakarta on March 18, 2024\. —Yasuyoshi Chiba—AFP via Getty Images

When you think of a military general, the descriptor “cute” probably doesn’t come to mind. 

But cuteness may have helped [Prabowo Subianto](https://time.com/7022858/prabowo-subianto-indonesia-jokowi/), a former military leader and defense minister, reshape his image to prevail as a conservative presidential candidate in Indonesia’s [2024 elections](https://time.com/6694656/indonesia-election-results-president-prabowo-democracy/). His campaign [positioned Subianto as a cuddly grandfather-type figure](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68028295)—complete with [AI-generated cartoons](https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2024/11/the-dark-side-of-generative-ai-in-prabowo-subiantos-presidential-campaign)—despite his controversial [military past](https://time.com/2836510/prabowo-subianto-human-rights-indonesia-elections/).

Our recent research suggests that this electoral result isn’t all that surprising. Specifically, we found clear links among specific types of cuteness, purity, and conservatism, revealing important implications for political persuasion and messaging.

Part of our motivation for studying these relationships was that cuteness is ubiquitous now, with adorable puppies, bears, and babies appearing in messaging for everything from [sports](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KqekigARfE) to [toilet paper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrIrALHl9nI) to [political campaigns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXR9vTfE00). By “cute” we specifically mean the attributes of infants—like big eyes, chubby cheeks, round bodies—that [elicit a caregiving response](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3260535/), a definition academics have aligned around over the past century.

Marketers have recognized and capitalized on this reality. Case in point: the prototypically cute Hello Kitty brand has generated [tens of billions in lifetime retail sales](https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/hello-kitty-brand-value-this-50-year-old-kitty-has-fetched-over-84-5-billion-for-its-owner-124061700093%5F1.html). Cute collectibles like [Squishmallows](https://time.com/6234061/toys-for-adults-popularity/) and Popmart’s [Labubu dolls](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289592/pop-mart/) trend heavily on social media and were among the most coveted products of 2025\. 

But the impacts of cuteness don’t seem uniform across groups and individuals. Cuteness draws some people in more than others. To understand why, we drilled into deeper cognitive associations related to the concept of cuteness. [Our study](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-025-01125-1), recently published in the _Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science_, featured nine controlled experiments that supported a key finding: conservatives showed a greater preference than liberals for baby-like cute products, and the link was partly explained by the association between that aesthetic and innocence/purity.

We found, in general, that study participants who valued purity preferred cuter versions of a product (e.g., a mug with giant, imploring eyes) to more standard versions. People differ in how much weight they give purity in moral judgments, and conservatives tend to give it more weight than average. Thus, we predicted that conservatives would appreciate cute products more than liberals would. 

We collected observations from 3,648 participants across the U.S., U.K., and India and consistently found that political conservatives, on average, like baby-like cute products—mugs, keychains, water bottles, and others—more than political liberals, as measured by purchase intent and other variables. Similarly, we found that the number of searches for cute products (e.g., dresses, toys, bags) on Google Shopping is higher in red states than blue states in the U.S. 

Our work shows that moral value systems permeate everyday consumption decisions, often without explicit awareness, and that designing messaging and packaging to reflect a consumer’s moral value system is one way marketers reel in consumers. While our experiments focused on product attitudes, choices, and purchase intentions rather than receptivity to political messages, candidate trust, or voting behavior, the core finding that moral values drive consumers’ basic aesthetic preferences and choices has meaningful consequences for political messaging. The same tips marketers use to design attractive products can be used to craft relevant political messages.

Overall, our research shows that baby-like cuteness is a more powerful attractant for conservative audiences than liberal ones because it signals innocence and purity. This finding is relevant to political strategists, as we’ve discussed, but also to the consumers on the other side of political messages: remember that a cute messenger or mascot shouldn’t substitute for scrutiny of the message itself, especially when it comes to important decisions at the ballot box or in other contexts.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltb8bdde444f5d5fd0 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:04 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Chethana Achar and Carolyn Wells Keller\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Trump Administration Proposes $70K Fee for International Students to Work in U.S.\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/international-student-training-opt-fee-work-trump-administration/<!\[CDATA\[U.S.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The proposal aims to crack down on the Optional Practical Training program, which DHS claims is a “magnet for fraud.”\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Jay Janner—The Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Students walk through the University of Texas campus on Aug. 24, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbcd6d7413160637f/6ac767af694f9e54d47381dd/texas-students.jpg?branch=production)

Students walk through the University of Texas campus on Aug. 24, 2026\. —Jay Janner—The Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images

The [Department of Homeland Security](https://time.com/7260413/how-schools-are-navigating-trump-immigration-policies/) on Wednesday proposed a rule that would charge schools $70,000 per [international student](https://time.com/7280101/how-betrayed-international-students/) seeking to work in the U.S. through a program known as Optional Practical Training. It marks the Trump Administration’s latest attempt to [curb foreign enrollment](https://time.com/article/2026/05/12/us-university-higher-education-international-students-asia-trump-immigration-visa/).

The proposal, [published Thursday](https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-20660/optional-practical-training-fees) in the Federal Register and open for comment until Nov. 9, aims to crack down on OPT—a temporary employment authorization that lets students work in jobs related to their field of study and that [DHS has claimed](https://youtu.be/fdnwUGmXkT0?t=33) has “ballooned into an uncontrolled guest worker pipeline” and become a “magnet for fraud.” 

Under the current system, students pay about $500 to apply and are generally permitted to work in the U.S. for up to a year during or after their study, while those in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields may get work period extensions.

Under the proposal, schools would have to pay $70,000 for a student’s initial participation—and another $30,000 for each additional program participation—though DHS said it recognizes schools “may pass the financial obligation of this proposed fee” to students or employers. Collected fees would be deposited in the U.S. Treasury.

A DHS spokesperson [said](https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/10/07/dhs-proposes-fees-foreign-student-work-program-protect-american-jobs) in the announcement of the proposed fee that OPT “was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” and that “American workers should not have to compete against a program that has been turned into a pipeline for cheap foreign labor.” 

International students have been in the crosshairs of the second Trump Administration as part of the President’s wider anti-immigration agenda. The Administration has [revoked thousands of student visas](https://time.com/7310743/student-visas-revoked-us-trump-immigration/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) and [heightened vetting of applicants](https://time.com/7295949/international-student-visas-colleges-universities-social-media-state-department-trump/), including by reviewing their social media activity. It also pressured universities and colleges to agree to a compact that includes [capping the number of undergraduate students on foreign visas](https://time.com/7325448/trump-higher-education-universities-compact-dei-gender-academic-federal-funding/), and it [tried to limit](https://time.com/article/2026/07/16/student-journalist-media-visa-limit-rule-trump-administration/) the stays of international students to only four years. The Administration has zeroed in particularly on [Chinese students](https://time.com/7289945/us-china-trump-rubio-international-student-visa-restrictions-trade-negotiations/) amid national security concerns.

While the Administration champions policies discouraging foreign student enrollment as a means to benefit Americans, [experts have said](https://time.com/7319507/h1b-trump-tech-innovation-ai/) that such policies could hamper U.S. competitiveness in the long run.

## Why DHS is cracking down on OPT

[Since 1947](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1947-08-07/pdf/FR-1947-08-07.pdf#page=5), federal regulations have allowed foreign students to work in cases where employment for practical training is required or recommended by their schools.

But DHS [in May](https://youtu.be/fdnwUGmXkT0?t=33) alleged it found more than 10,000 foreign students “who claim to be working for highly suspect employers,” and, upon further OPT-linked investigations across multiple states, said it found “empty buildings and locked doors at addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed.” Investigators also alleged fraudulent activities, such as “phantom employees,” and suspicious financial transactions.

In its proposal for the new fee, DHS claimed that the program’s growth in the last few years “has exponentially outpaced the number of companies” which it could review and investigate. It said that [194,554 students](https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/btn/2024/TotalNumberAnnualOPT%5FSTEM%5FOPT%5FCPT%5FAuthorizationsWithEmpStartDatesDuringIndicatedCY2007%5F2024.pdf) were granted employment authorization documents in 2024, compared to 160,627 in 2023\. The department reasoned that “without the fees proposed in this rule, it cannot operate OPT consistent with its focus on preventing fraud and may shut down the program entirely.”

It also said the fee was “necessary to ensure that schools, students, and employers participate in OPT for its intended purpose instead of a means to circumvent the H-1B visa program,” which refers to the work visa that allows American employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations such as technology, engineering, education, healthcare, and finance. OPT has often served as a bridge for students seeking work under H-1B visas, which the Administration has [similarly targeted with higher fees](https://time.com/article/2026/06/09/h1b-visa-fee-100000-trump-immigration-judgement-lawsuit/).

DHS said it believes that the proposed fee would put the onus on schools “to exercise greater oversight and selectivity” when recommending students for OPT, and it would thus reduce fraud.

## Critics call proposal illegal—and anti-American

The proposal, however, like previous attempts to curb foreign enrollment, is expected to face legal challenges. On Oct. 5, educational organizations [took the Administration to court](https://www.aau.edu/resource-library/aau-files-lawsuit-challenging-changes-to-the-curricular-practical-training-cpt-program-for-international-students) following its efforts to limit a similar program, Curricular Practical Training. A $100,000 H-1B visa fee has also been [blocked in courts](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/second-judge-blocks-trumps-100000-fee-new-h-1b-worker-visas-2026-10-01/).

“Don’t Panic: DHS has no authority to slap a $70k fee on international students,” Doug Rand, director of the Talent Mobility Fund, an advocacy group for attracting foreign STEM talent, [posted on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/doug-rand%5Fdont-panic-dhs-has-no-authority-to-share-7513604691188932610-Jpyb/). “Let’s not overreact—this proposed rule isn’t going to fare well in the courts, just as the $100k H-1B fee and other restrictionist policies have been struck down.”

Todd Schulte, president of the immigration reform advocacy group FWD.us, [said](https://www.fwd.us/news/fwd-us-statement-on-the-trump-administrations-proposed-70000-opt-tax/) that if the proposal passes, the U.S. “is intentionally pricing itself out of the global market for top talent, especially in STEM fields.”

Results of a survey by the D.C.-based think tank Institute for Progress [released Tuesday](https://ifp.org/wp-content/uploads/26-10-06-International-Student-Survey-on-OPT-and-Experiential-Learning.pdf) found that most international students plan to use OPT, but 80% fewer students said “they would likely try to stay” if the proposed fees were implemented. For STEM students eligible for OPT, the survey found that only 15% would likely try to stay. “DHS assumes that for STEM grads, there will be ZERO change in participation,” the think tank’s director for immigration policy, Jeremy Neufeld, [posted on X](https://x.com/JeremyLNeufeld/status/2107819817294270594).

Zuzana C. Wootson, deputy director of federal policy at nonprofit organization Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, [said in a statement](https://www.presidentsalliance.org/press/proposed-opt-fee-would-dismantle-international-talent-pipeline/) that such exorbitant fees would push prospective students to competitor countries. But she also warned that the consequences “would extend well beyond international students. Declining international enrollment would strain institutional budgets, increase tuition pressure on American students, and diminish the educational experience for everyone.” 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt3222dc7dad90d5cd Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Chad de Guzman\]\]><!\[CDATA\[He's Running In a District Trump Won By 21 Points. Democrats See an Opening\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/Tennessee-Justin-Pearson-poll-election-gerrymandering-DCCC/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[National Democrats are putting resources into Justin Pearson's bid for a gerrymandered district in Tennessee\]\]><!\[CDATA\[David Dee Delgado—Getty Images for NYT\]\]><!\[CDATA\[State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for a U.S. House seat in Tennessee, speaks onstage during the NYT Climate Forward 2026 in New York City on Sept. 23, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8db959661219bfe9/6ac6af8e0ce84a0e75fae0f9/GettyImages-2296750236.jpg?branch=production)

State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for a U.S. House seat in Tennessee, speaks onstage during the NYT Climate Forward 2026 in New York City on Sept. 23, 2026\. —David Dee Delgado—Getty Images for NYT

The odds are still stacked against [Justin Pearson]( https://time.com/article/2026/05/27/Tennessee-gerrymander-redistricting-Justin-Pearson-voting-midterm-elections/). 

When the Democratic state representative announced that he would continue to run for Congress in a gerrymandered district five months ago, it was seen by many in Tennessee and Washington as more symbolic than viable. Pearson had originally planned to run in a majority-Black district in the Memphis area, challenging Rep. Steven Cohen, a ten-term Democratic incumbent. Then in May, the Republican-controlled state legislature [redrew](https://time.com/article/2026/05/05/republicans-redistricting-supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-tennessee/) Tennessee's congressional map, splitting off parts of Memphis and combining it with 14 rural counties. Pearson is now running to represent a district that Trump [carried](https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/09/21/democrats-face-uphill-battle-in-winning-any-tennessee-u-s-house-race/) by more than 21 points in 2024\. 

“We knew this was going to be a harder race after they rigged the maps,” Pearson says in a phone interview. “ It has not deterred us at all.”

This week, Democrats’ House campaign arm gave Pearson’s bid against Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor a vote of confidence, adding Tennessee’s 9th district to its coveted “Red to Blue” list. Campaigns on the list receive “organizational and funding support,” as well as staff resources, training, and strategic guidance, according to a DCCC [press release](https://dccc.org/dccc-announces-six-new-candidates-to-coveted-2026-red-to-blue-program/).

The late support comes against the backdrop of a broad national trend of key races shifting in Democrats’ favor. In late September, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report [said](https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/house-overview/gop-track-lose-house-majority-15-race-ratings-shift-towards-dems) House Democrats are on track to pick up five to 15 seats. Though Cook still rates Tennessee’s 9th District as a “Solid Republican” seat, emboldened Democrats see a potential [blue wave ](https://time.com/article/2026/09/24/republicans-midterm-election-blue-wave-polls/)significantly expanding the races in play.

There has been little publicly available polling on the race. A recent [poll](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13E6k34GmPoJLpQuFn4E-BRFI49esOBoQ/view) sampling 400 voters and commissioned by a Democratically-aligned group found Pearson trailing Taylor by four percentage points. 

Pearson sees the addition of his scrappy campaign to the "Red to Blue" program shows the party’s leaders see it as more than just a protest against GOP gerrymandering. He says he’s campaigned in all 15 counties in the new district, holding three to four campaign events daily.

“We've been having listening tours, road-to-victory rallies, meet and greets, fundraisers, and of course we're visiting barber shops and beauty shops and churches here in Memphis and Shelby County too, because we're not going to leave any of this to chance,” Pearson says,

A growing backlash in Tennessee to President Trump and the Iran War is also helping, he says, pointing to rural voters who previously voted for Trump that are now canvassing for him. “There are a lot of people who voted conservatively in the past who are farmers, who are very frustrated by the tariffs and what they \[the Trump administration\] have done with beef imports,” Pearson says. “There are people who are having to spend $1,000 a day on their machineries, diesel fuel, and they know that's a direct correlation to the Iran War.”

# **Closing the gap**

Pearson made national headlines in 2023 for [getting expelled](https://time.com/6309961/tennessee-cameron-sexton-shove-justin-peason-guns/) from the Tennessee legislature for leading a gun reform protest from the House floor. His opponent, Taylor, has sought to [brand](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd9iNJsTm7J/) Pearson as a “democratic socialist” who is too liberal for the district.

“He causes chaos everywhere he goes, and that’s why the voters in Tennessee’s District 9 will vote for competence over chaos,” Taylor said in a statement to TIME. 

Pearson has argued Taylor can’t be trusted to represent the interests of the district’s voters. He highlighted [donations](http://donations) Taylor accepted from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. A subsidiary company, SpaceXAI, is [seeking](https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/spacexai-data-center-expansion-in-southaven-forces-renters-out/) to build a massive data center in the Memphis area despite local residents' concerns over environmental impact. 

“My opponent…is about making more money for himself rather than protecting and serving the people in our community and in our state,” Pearson says. 

Taylor, a former owner of funeral homes who is mostly self-funding his campaign, told TIME he sold his business four years ago and retired at age 54 before running for state Senate. He also accused Pearson of never having a real job and being “a paid protester.”

# **Capitalizing on voters’ energy**

When the Supreme Court issued a [ruling](https://time.com/article/2026/04/17/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-Louisiana/) in April that undermined a major provision of the Voting Rights Act, it prompted multiple Republican-controlled states to quickly redraw its congressional lines. Tennessee was the first to act, with the legislature quickly approving a new map erasing Tennessee's only majority-Black district. Efforts by civil rights groups to convince the courts to block the new map have so far [failed](https://www.aclu-tn.org/press-releases/court-denies-preliminary-injunction-in-challenge-to-tennessees-discriminatory-congressional-map/). 

Yet the map switch appears to have jolted many of the state’s Democratic voters during the primaries. The Washington Post [reported](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/08/08/voter-turnout-surges-tennessee-after-black-majority-district-is-erased/) that a fifth of active registered voters in Shelby County, which includes Memphis, cast a ballot in three Democratic primaries for U.S. House seats, the highest level of voter turnout in a decade.

Pearson says Black voters in Tennessee are showing they refuse to be deterred by Republicans’ efforts to dilute their political power. 

“This is just another challenge that we are going to face, and we're going to face it together,” he says. “And we're going to show up more than we have in decades. We're going to participate more than we have in decades because our voting rights are on the ballot.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blte297d9f3b9d2a584 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Philip Wang\]\]><!\[CDATA\[At San Antonio Rally, Trump Warns He’ll ‘Never Forgive’ Texas if Talarico Wins\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/08/trump-rally-san-antonio-texas-talarico/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The President returned to deep-red Texas to rally for Ken Paxton’s Senate bid, while revealing at times his own trepidation that one of the Republican Party’s longest winning streaks may be about to end on his watch.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Win McNamee—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, on Oct. 7, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81b35c98600b370e/6ac6ffc23333843441046820/GettyImages-2299126251.jpg?branch=production)

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, on Oct. 7, 2026\. —Win McNamee—Getty Images

Digging in to defend both his pride and his political fortunes, President Donald Trump on Wednesday returned to deep-red Texas to rally for Ken Paxton’s Senate bid, while revealing at times his own trepidation that one of the Republican Party’s longest winning streaks [may be about to end](https://time.com/article/2026/09/30/can-james-talarico-make-texas-competitive-again/) on his watch.

As multiple polls show state [Rep. James Talarico with a shot](https://time.com/article/2026/09/30/can-james-talarico-make-texas-competitive-again/) at becoming the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in [more than three decades](https://time.com/7373241/james-talarico-jasmine-crockett-ken-paxton-john-cornyn-texas-senate-polls/), Trump warned the crowd in San Antonio, “We’ll never forgive you for what you have done if you let that happen."

“The people of Texas are not going to let a weak, gutless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak show destroy everything that we built," Trump said at another point during his third trip to Texas in less than a month. "So you need to go and vote for Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate.”

Trump centered much of his remarks on Talarico, deploying nicknames and repeating [incorrect claims that he is vegan](https://time.com/article/2026/06/02/james-talarico-girlfriend-vegan-polls/). “Now he says he loves meat. But he’s a vegan. … He wants to eat a little piece of lettuce,” Trump said. “He’s sick because he’s been forced to eat meat for political reasons. And he’s throwing up all over the place. He’s sick.”

During a rally that was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, Trump largely made his remarks an emotional appeal to Texas machismo, reminding voters that he [plans](https://www.npr.org/2026/10/07/nx-s1-5993539/firing-squad-execution-nidal-hasan-fort-hood) a firing-squad execution—the first since World War II—of a man convicted of attacking troops in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009\. He also mocked climate change and falsely claimed Democrats want to kill thousands of oil and gas jobs in Texas. He said gun rights and his own legacy are on the ballot this fall.

“I’ve basically been off-script for the entire night,” Trump said, stating the obvious.

The sprawling speech of discursives and legacy polishing came as Republicans try to weather the drag Trump has become for their candidates up and down the ballot. A Reuters-Ipsos poll of U.S. voters [released](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/congressional-vote-2026.html) Monday shows Democrats with a seven-point lead when it comes to which party should control Congress after this election. Others, such as The Economist-YouGov and Quinnipiac polls, have that figure in the double digits.

In the state with the longest border with Mexico, Trump repeatedly turned to amping up fears over an increase in illegal immigration, connecting it to the prospects of Democrats gaining power in Washington.

“If they get in, they will open your borders and let the entire world pour in like they did before. We can’t let that happen,” Trump said. “A vote for Talafreako is a vote to turn Texas into a dirty, failing, crime-ridden third-world dumping ground.”

The San Antonio rally was the latest sign of Trump’s effort to maximize his base’s turnout amid his slumping poll numbers. Multiple [surveys](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/trump-approval-rating-polls.html) now show almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Trump is doing his job.

To counter that, Trump repeated his promise of $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold the majorities in the House and Senate. And in a more recent play, he promised new money for seniors. “Starting tomorrow, over 20 million seniors on Medicare will receive checks or deposits for over $100 each,” Trump said from the stage. He left out the [part](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-90-medicare-rebate-rolls-out-but-millions-arent-eligible-critics-see-a-political-stunt) that less than a third of Medicare participants will get the one-time payments, checks, which will actually be $90.

Notably absent from Wednesday’s rally: GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who is in an expectedly tight re-election bid on the same ballot as Paxton. But Trump appeared far more concerned about helping Republicans keep their narrow majorities in the House and the Senate. And central to the GOP holding on to the Senate is holding on to Texas.

“For decades, Texas has been the state where people flee to escape the economic oppression and social collapse of Democrat-run California, New York, Illinois, and other failing blue states. But if Talafreako and the Democrats get their way, all of that squalor, misery, poverty, homelessness,” Trump said, adding that he doesn’t even know Talarico’s real name. “I have no idea what the hell his name is,” the President said. “I just know him as Talafreako.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt74789bb3f5ebe782 Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:30:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Philip Elliott\]\]><!\[CDATA\[What Worries Experts About the Russia 'Plague' Incident\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/10/07/what-worries-experts-about-the-russia-plague-incident/<!\[CDATA\[Health\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Public-health experts say the incident should serve as a wake-up call.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Igor IVANKO/AFP—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The logo of Russia's consumer and health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor sits on its grounds' fencing in Moscow on Oct. 5, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta40463966bf95290/6ac677a013e9495cd0053532/GettyImages-2298110683.jpg?branch=production)

The logo of Russia's consumer and health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor sits on its grounds' fencing in Moscow on Oct. 5, 2026\. —Igor IVANKO/AFP—Getty Images

A laboratory worker in a plague research institute in Siberia [died last week after developing pneumonia](https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/russia-plague-fears-siberia-quarantine-lab-worker-died/). Since then, local reports suggesting that she broke a test tube containing plague bacteria have fueled speculation about [how she became ill.](https://baikal-journal.ru/2026/10/02/pogibshaya-ot-chumy-v-shelehove-rabotala-laborantkoj-i-razbila-probirku-s-vozbuditelem-infekczii/) Russian authorities disputed that account and told the World Health Organization (WHO) that [plague had not been detected in her tests nor in those of her close contacts](https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/3289/irkutsk-suspected-plague-death-who). 

At the same time, Russian authorities have reportedly quarantined as many as 200 people, which public-health experts say would be an unusual response to an isolated case of pneumonia. On Tuesday evening, the [WHO asked Russia for more information](https://x.com/DrTedros/status/2107591815863968121) following media reports of a second case of pneumonia of unknown cause.

Researchers who work in public-health policy and infectious diseases have been watching this rapidly evolving and opaque situation with concern. Here’s what worries them. 

## This doesn’t look like the average lab accident

The pattern of events doesn’t fit neatly with the explanation that a lab accident with a known bacterium sickened the worker, says Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. In labs that study _Yersinia pestis_, [the bacterium that causes plague](https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html), protocols are in place to deal with accidental exposure. Wearing personal protective equipment and working under a fume hood provides some protection. But if someone finds they’ve been exposed, they would take antibiotics, which is an effective treatment for naturally occurring plaque bacteria. “You’d be fine. You don't die, typically,” says Nuzzo. A lab exposure “would be a regrettable accident that sometimes occurs.” 

That seems out of sync with the substantial response on the part of Russian authorities. “The magnitude and severity of that response is also worth looking at,” she says, referring to reports that up to 200 people are under observation and that local hospitals have been closed. “Now, that could just be bureaucratic reflexes. But I would feel more confident in what was going on if I knew specifically what she was tested for and what came back negative.” By this time, Nuzzo continues, “they should have a full sequence”—meaning the pathogen that killed the lab worker should be identified. 

Much is unknown about the situation, and some experts have said it’s worth considering the possibility that [an engineered pathogen, rather than a naturally occurring one](https://www.cdc.gov/plague/hcp/emergency-guidance/index.html), could be involved. Dr. Ashish K. Jha, who coordinated the White House’s COVID response under President Joe Biden, [wrote on ](https://x.com/ashishkjha/status/2106907902183166346)[X](http://x.com) on Oct. 4 that “an accidental release from a deliberate program” was a scenario he had long worried about. Russia has [a long history of bioengineering pathogens](https://research.kent.ac.uk/kcwa/biopreparat-the-soviet-biological-weapons-programme/). After the fall of the Soviet Union, that nation’s programs were officially shuttered, but the current situation is unclear. 

“You can't help but worry that there is something more here than meets the eye,” Jha tells TIME. “What I will say from my conversations with friends in the \[Trump\] Administration is that they've been very worried about this…\[But\] they're not getting a lot of information and data.”

”I'm going to say something that's going to sound incredibly naive, but I'll say it: What I hope is that the Russians will be very forthcoming and transparent about what was going on in this lab, but one can imagine that they may not be,” Jha says. 

“If it's plague, breathe a sigh of relief, because we know what to do about plague,” says Nuzzo. “We have a clear solution…The worry is it's not that, it is something different, something for which we don't have easy solutions.”

## Are we prepared for an outbreak of a new pathogen?

No, Nuzzo and Jha agree. We are in a worse situation now compared to pre-COVID times, Nuzzo says. “The protections we had in 2019, early 2020–there are now fewer of them, and [we are more vulnerable now than we were then](https://time.com/article/2026/07/02/ebola-returns-how-we-can-fight-back/),” Nuzzo says, pointing to reduced monitoring and less information flow between countries. “This is why countries need to fund and maintain overseas scientific engagements, because then they know the actors, they know their motivations, they know what's normal. It's also why you want to have a strong, capable, and relied-upon WHO, because sometimes they're the best entity to have the conversations to surface the information.” 

Jha also flags the lack of monitoring: “The biggest weakness we have is we have almost no biodetection system in our own country.” If someone in Siberia was infected, got on a plane, and flew to New York City, “we would not know. We just need a much better global monitoring system on this.” 

In a statement to TIME, a spokesperson for U.S. Health and Human Services said that "CDC is closely monitoring the situation and has established measures in place to identify and assess travelers arriving from the affected region." The spokesperson added that about 200 travelers from the region arrive in the U.S. annually.

Jha and a colleague from the Biden White House, Nikki Romanik, have started a public benefit corporation to build a monitoring system that draws on search and social media information, clinical information from hospitals, and [wastewater sequencing](https://time.com/article/2026/06/12/world-cup-infectious-diseases/). Wastewater monitoring typically looks for hand-picked pathogens, such as RSV or COVID-19\. “Our strategy is you flip it, you sequence everything in the wastewater and you look for anything that doesn't belong. That's how we would detect it,” he says. The system, called [BioRadar,](https://www.drashishjha.com/#bioradar) is currently being tested in Dallas. 

It’s unlikely that the pathogen that caused the lab worker’s death—if it does turn out to be something new—would spread as effectively as COVID did, says Jha. Still, “a lot of the capabilities that I spearheaded building when I was at the White House for preparation for future outbreaks have been dismantled by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. A lot of stuff has been pulled back and taken away. We had put together a whole respiratory virus vaccine program called Project Next Gen that was taken down. We [don't have mRNA vaccine platform funding](https://time.com/7307775/mrna-vaccines-rfk-jr-hhs/) anymore because of Secretary Kennedy. We are not nearly as ready as we need to be.”

## What if it turns out to be nothing? 

There is still the possibility that in the end, “this whole thing could be just a lot of coincidence and overreaction,” says Nuzzo. “And then people are going to be like, ‘You got us all whipped up about this thing.’ I am here to say, we have no idea. This could be nothing. But when your fire alarm goes off, you don't get mad at it for going off when nothing happened. You're glad nothing happened.” Ultimately, there could be real threats in our future, and the key is to be prepared, she says.

Jha views the situation as a wake-up call to Americans. “Continue to pay attention, because that is important. Secondly, push our political leaders to get much more proactive. Because the truth is, you don't want to get concerned after the outbreak has happened. You want to be concerned before, and build the systems you need to make sure that we are ready for the next one,” he says.

“Without sounding like an alarmist, look at what has happened in the last six months alone. There was the [hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship](https://time.com/article/2026/05/04/hantavirus-outbreak-cruise-ship/), and we're hearing from \[AI company\] Anthropic about all these people who are starting to [use AI models to build biological weapons](https://www.science.org/content/article/chilling-warning-or-overreaction-ai-bioweapons-report-divides-experts),” Jha says. “There's been this massive proliferation of high-risk labs around the world in the last five years, and so even if this one incident turns out to be not that big a deal, I am very worried we're going to see more and more things like this—and one of them will be a big deal.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt2eb49a91083a2a6c Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:02:29 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Veronique Greenwood and Dominique Mosbergen\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Cristina Etcheberry\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/cristina-etcheberry/<!\[CDATA\[Cristián Carvallo—El Mercurio\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1df91a91fcc1a38e/6ab55b209d758f22b9f478ad/t100next_ph_etcheberry_web.jpg?branch=production)

 —Cristián Carvallo—El Mercurio

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt2ec09c129ff8f922 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:21 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Harry Booth\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Sasha Gordon\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/sasha-gordon/<!\[CDATA\[Jay Kolsch\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf245a230271dd871/6ab5caa644523f86fab9247c/sasha-gordon-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Jay Kolsch

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt134df4bf4e0df536 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:21 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Chanel Miller\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Arch Manning\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/arch-manning/<!\[CDATA\[Alex Slitz—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1d69465adeb8ca7a/6ab5caf849888543cb136403/arch-manning-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Alex Slitz—Getty Images

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blte07b312dd57eb655 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:21 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Matthew McConaughey\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Lauren Ireland and Marianna Hewitt\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/lauren-ireland-and-marianna-hewitt/<!\[CDATA\[Courtesy Anna Sokol\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0dc6f4749d49493b/6ab5cbcf9d758f8259f479d3/summer-fridays-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Courtesy Anna Sokol

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt7f4174e451718c65 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:21 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Emma Grede\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Paapa Essiedu\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/paapa-essiedu/<!\[CDATA\[Stuart Wilson—BAFTA/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb753663e64f023d8/6ab5c8b8a727e90b4fba87c7/paapa-essiedu-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Stuart Wilson—BAFTA/Getty Images

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt15c5103d94f53ae1 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:20 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Bryan Cranston\]\]><!\[CDATA\[PinkPantheress\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/pinkpantheress/<!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt32be2e0e7a7ce161/6ab435e6c57f5643f160ec25/pinkpantheress_time100next_2026.jpg?branch=production)

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltd7fdaf4ba8582e63 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:20 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Kelela\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Charles Melton\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/charles-melton/<!\[CDATA\[Erik Carter—AUGUST\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt55c583627b20cfc8/6ab16ca244523f1414b8f590/charles-melton-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Erik Carter—AUGUST

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt2988a46bf0f71678 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:20 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Natalie Portman\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Joey King\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/joey-king/<!\[CDATA\[Swan Gallet—WWD/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte664230a6a7d5644/6ab16ff9498885282613391a/joey-king-time100next-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Swan Gallet—WWD/Getty Images

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt12c2abf315adbf16 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:20 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Nicole Kidman\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/luana-lopes-lara-and-tarek-mansour/<!\[CDATA\[Alexey Yurenev—Bloomberg/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt009c56d8472523cf/6ab4785ac57f565d1860ed36/time-100-next-2026-innovators-kalshi.jpg?branch=production)

 —Alexey Yurenev—Bloomberg/Getty Images

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blta025506a433ad596 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:20 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Alana Semuels\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Daniella Kallmeyer\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/daniella-kallmeyer/<!\[CDATA\[TheStewartofNY—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9902b96450be1f6b/6ab54239d8ff7b46ab1ccc08/time-100-next-2026-innovators-kallmeyer.jpg?branch=production)

 —TheStewartofNY—Getty Images

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltbb70e515c1d1c543 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:19 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Chloe Fineman\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Gretchen Goldman\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/gretchen-goldman/<!\[CDATA\[UCS\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt66814c86ad6a2772/6ab57e31cdc17a0cee92da88/time-100-next-2026-innovators-goldman.jpg?branch=production)

 —UCS

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt14a35b79c2bd3039 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:19 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Bill Nye\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Michael Truell\]\]> https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/michael-truell/<!\[CDATA\[Big Event Media—Getty Images/HumanX Conference\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6d55b5bcff6271ae/6ab55a09d8ff7b7dfb1ccc58/t100next_ph_truell_web.jpg?branch=production)

 —Big Event Media—Getty Images/HumanX Conference

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt99d0b6ccc86b0fe1 Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:02:19 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Tharin Pillay\]\]>