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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>TIMEhttps://time.com/<!\[CDATA\[Breaking news and analysis from TIME.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science and entertainment news.\]\]>Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:44:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1<!\[CDATA\[How Israel Will Choose Its Next Prime Minister, Explained\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/how-israel-will-choose-its-next-prime-minister-explained/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Israel’s election is over, but who will lead its next government remains undecided. Here’s how that decision will be made.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Amir Levy—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, left, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog attend a ceremony marking the formal mandate to form a new government in Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd81c02283fcfb9cb/6af36af2cdd40876124d49d7/GettyImages-2303710471.jpg?branch=production)

Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, left, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog attend a ceremony marking the formal mandate to form a new government in Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 2026\. —Amir Levy—Getty Images

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday tasked [Gadi Eisenkot](https://time.com/article/2026/10/25/gadi-eisenkot-exclusive-interview/), a former military chief and the leader of the center-right Yashar party, with forming the country’s next government. It’s the first of several steps necessary to determine the next Prime Minister—but a potentially months-long process could leave [Benjamin Netanyahu](https://time.com/article/2026/10/19/trump-netanyahu-israel-election-endorsement/) in power for the foreseeable future. 

**Read more:**[_Israel's Choice_](https://time.com/article/2026/10/26/israel-election/)

With Herzog’s nod, Eisenkot was given 28 days, through Dec. 6, with a possible 14-day extension, to assemble a government that can win the confidence of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Once he notifies the President and the Knesset that he has formed a government, the lawmakers must meet within seven days for a confidence vote. The government takes office if it wins that vote.

First, Eisenkot would need to bring together rival political parties with disparate policy views and governing priorities in order to form a voting majority. By joining his coalition, parties are effectively endorsing Eisenkot as the next Prime Minister. But he has several obstacles to overcome before he can get the number of seats that he needs.

Here’s everything to know about the process Israel will undertake in its efforts to name its next Prime Minister.

## What did Israel’s election results decide?

In last month’s election, no party bloc secured the 61 seats needed to form a majority in the 120-seat parliament. This means that little has been decided about future leadership. But the process is still in motion.

Knesset elections are scheduled to occur [every four years](https://www.gov.il/apps/elections/elections-knesset-15/heb/lexicon/esystem.html), with the most recent taking place Oct. 27.

Voters must be physically present on Election Day, with extremely rare absentee exceptions, and it is a public holiday. According to [_The Atlantic_](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/10/israeli-expat-vote/689172/?utm%5Fsource=facebook&utm%5Fcampaign=the-atlantic&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcontent=edit-promo), an estimated 67,000 Israeli citizens living outside of the country traveled back this year in order to cast their ballots.

Israeli citizens vote for the political parties that they want to govern—not specific candidates. 

Based on the percentage of votes cast, each party is then allotted a certain number of representatives in the Knesset.

Despite Netanyahu's [poor approval rating](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/despite-israeli-firepower-netanyahu-struggles-political-gains-iran-war-2026-04-14/), his Likud party and its far-right and ultra-Orthodox allies, such as Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), secured the most votes and won 53 seats. The four Jewish-led parties of the Knesset backing Eisenkot—his Yashar party, in addition to the B'Yachad, the Democrats, and Yisrael Beytenu parties—earned 48\. Two Arab-led parties hold the remaining 19—a record high.

“If you just count the number of votes for each party, Netanyahu's party got the most votes, but because it's a parliamentary system, and you need a simple majority to form a government, he was far away from actually establishing a government,” Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME.

To form a government, the parties must now negotiate an alliance that can secure enough support to win a confidence vote in the Knesset. Typically, this requires meeting or exceeding 61 seats, but it can also be fewer if some parties abstain.

Either Netanyahu’s bloc or Eisenkot’s bloc could reach a majority by joining forces with both Arab-led parties, giving them 72 or 67 seats, respectively. Alternatively, the two rival blocs would hold 101 seats if they joined together—but any such agreement would require negotiations over who would serve as Prime Minister. 

Netanyahu would likely press to stay on. Rival leaders can also agree to take turns as Prime Minister, as [Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir](https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/lexicon/pages/unity-government.aspx) did between 1984 and 1988\. Netanyahu has shown willingness in the past, [extending such an offer](https://www.axios.com/2020/12/22/israels-government-collapses-elections-march-23) to Benny Gantz in 2020, though it did not go through. The decision would need to be reached before a proposition for the new government could be submitted to the Knesset. 

Parties within an electoral bloc can also negotiate separately. For example, either Eisenkot or Netanyahu could court one of the Arab-led parties without needing to necessarily sway the other. However, parties within a bloc tend to share similar outlooks on policy and representation.

The election results can also shift control of parliament before a new government is formed.

Shira Efron, a senior fellow at Rand, a global policy think tank, says that voters should take note of Tuesday’s announcement that the opposition bloc agreed to appoint Matan Kahana, who belongs to Eisenkot’s Yashar party, as the next Knesset Speaker and Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beytenu, as Head of Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, reflecting a distinct vision for parliament and a willingness to begin the work.

 “They have already been able to enact a few things already, fulfilling promises in terms of taking over the Knesset agenda,” Efron says. “This is weakening Netanyahu already, before a government is even formed, and while he is still Prime Minister. So this is a positive thing for anyone who wants to see a change in government.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2914fc3a661d4c44/6af369267ce30bc2231eb9cf/GettyImages-2304018965.jpg?branch=production)

Caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks on during a speech at the Israeli parliament (Knesset) during the opening day of the new parliament in Jerusalem on Nov. 10, 2026\. —Ilia Yefimovich—AFP via Getty Images

## Why was Eisenkot chosen to form Israel’s next government?

While the presidency is largely ceremonial in Israel, their power is particularly pronounced in the aftermath of an Israeli election. They consult with the leaders of each political party and pick the person who they believe is most likely to successfully bring together disparate parties to form a governing coalition.

“More often than not, it's been the leader of the party with the most votes,” says Cook. “In this case, that's Netanyahu.” 

Another factor, however, was taken into account: 67 out of 120 Knesset members endorsed Eisenkot to Herzog during consultations last week, while only 46 endorsed Netanyahu. 

“President Herzog came to the conclusion that although Netanyahu has the most votes of any party, Gadi Eisenkot had a better chance to form the necessary coalition,” Cook says.

Herzog’s tapping of Eisenkot is not an endorsement. Rather, it signifies that Herzog sees Eisenkot as the clearest path to forming a government.

Cook says it boils down to a simple point: “More Israelis voted for parties that oppose Netanyahu than voted for parties that support Netanyahu.” A majority of voters backed parties seeking to replace Netanyahu, even if those parties disagree on what should come next.

“Obviously, there's a range of complications associated with that,” he says, “which is what is making coalition-building difficult.”

## What barriers stand in the way of forming a government?

Even though Eisenkot received the endorsement of 67 Knesset members, that does not mean it’s smooth sailing for him to create a government.

The clearest path to government for Eisenkot would be securing support from the two Arab-led parties—the Joint List and Ra’am—to gain their 19 seats. 

This is complicated by the fact that some of his backing parties are opposed to forming a governing coalition with Arab-led parties. 

According to the [_Times of Israel_](https://www.timesofisrael.com/opposition-chiefs-meet-agree-to-launch-coalition-talks-but-path-remains-unclear)_,_ Yair Golan, Chairman of the Democrats, is the only leader of the four Jewish-led parties backing Eisenkot to publicly support a coalition with the Joint List and Ra’am. Naftali Bennett, leader of the B'Yachad party, and Lieberman are both nationalist leaders who oppose the idea of becoming reliant on Arab partners.

Arab-led parties have historically avoided formal participation in governing coalitions—aside from 2021, when Ra’am [joined](https://time.com/6073019/mansour-abbas-arab-israel-coalition-government/) a coalition seeking to oust Netanyahu. 

Cook points out that they can still pledge support from “the outside,” which means voting alongside Eisenkot, and giving him the majority in parliament, without joining his coalition.

“There’s examples of that happening in the past, and it has not been very stable, but that's one possibility,” Cook says.

The Joint List has said it would support an alternative government from outside the coalition, but Lieberman has rejected outright a government [reliant on outside support](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liberman-to-back-eisenkot-for-pm-but-rules-out-minority-government-with-arab-support/) from Arab-led parties.

Another possibility, Cook adds, would be if Eisenkot invited the ultra-Orthodox parties, with a combined 13 seats, to join his coalition. 

But that would likely be even more difficult, given that the ultra-Orthodox parties oppose compulsory military service for yeshiva students. On Oct. 31, Eisenkot [shared a post on social media that outlined his](https://x.com/gadi%5Feisenkot/status/2116586741289148433) four core demands for any political faction looking to join his upcoming “national emergency government,” including a mandate of national service for all Israelis.

## Can Netanyahu stay in power?

In the coming weeks, as Eisenkot works to form a suitable coalition, Netanyahu will remain by default at the head of the outgoing government. 

He is also free to make outreach efforts in the attempt to form his own coalition, which might involve swaying those who did not endorse him in their initial conversations with Herzog.

If Eisenkot is unable to form a coalition in the allotted time, with all potential extensions tapped, Herzog can choose another member of the Knesset to try—such as Netanyahu—or tell the parliament that he does not see a path forward. 

If someone else is named, they would be given 28 days to make an attempt, without the possibility of an extension. 

If a second candidate fails, or Herzog informs the Knesset that he sees no possibility of forming a government, lawmakers have 21 days to request, by majority, that a willing Knesset member be given the task. That candidate would then have 14 days to form a government.

If no candidate receives the required backing, or that final attempt fails, the Knesset is automatically dissolved and elections must take place within 90 days. 

Netanyahu would continue heading the outgoing government until a replacement is established.

This kind of deadlock would not be new for Israel: Between 2019 and 2022, the country held five elections as parties struggled to find common ground.

Failing to form a coalition now could be seen as a setback for the opposition, Efron says, because another election in a few months does not “mean necessarily they're going to fare any better.” A prolonged cycle of elections—and the uncertainty it would bring—would likely be unpopular with Israeli voters and lawmakers, as well, she adds.

If given the chance to form his own government, Netanyahu would face an uphill battle: Eisenkot and his allies have vowed not to sit in government with him and have accused him of [ignoring warnings](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-910966) ahead of Hamas’s attacks on [Oct. 7, 2023](https://time.com/article/2026/10/07/how-oct-7-changed-israel/).

In an effort to lead, Netanyahu would likely reach out to more right-leaning members of the four parties that have pledged support to Eisenkot. Bennett and Lieberman have worked with him in the past. If Netanyahu is able to convince them that supporting him is less objectionable than collaborating with the Arab-led parties, then their seats would give him the majority needed to govern.

While the contest may appear to hinge on the persuasive powers of Eisenkot and Netanyahu, leaders like Bennett and Lieberman could ultimately decide who governs Israel. Their choice may come down to which compromise they are more willing to make.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blta2f5199096bd78aa Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:26:41 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Rebecca Schneid\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Hegseth Could Be the Third Cabinet Secretary to be Impeached. What Happened to the Others?\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/hegseth-could-be-the-third-cabinet-secretary-to-be-impeached/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Hegseth has dismissed the impeachment effort as a "political spectacle."\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Chip Somodevilla––Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon on Nov. 10, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e3ce4a9922e033e/6af33f693c8cbecbbcefc6f5/Pete_Hegseth.jpg?branch=production)

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon on Nov. 10, 2026\. —Chip Somodevilla––Getty Images

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could become the third Cabinet secretary to be[ impeached](https://time.com/5477435/impeachment-clinton/) in U.S. history after a Republican lawmaker[ reintroduced a resolution ](https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/trump-defends-hegseth-as-republican-led-impeachment-vote-looms/)forcing the House to take up the vote.

Rep.[ Thomas Massie](https://time.com/article/2026/05/19/massie-trump-kentucky-house-republican-primary-gallrein/) of Kentucky filed[ eight articles of impeachment](https://massie.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hegseth%5Farticles%5Fof%5Fimpeachment.pdf) Monday, accusing Hegseth of violating the [War Powers Resolution of 1973](https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-joint-resolution/542), citing the lack of congressional oversight on the[ Iran war ](https://time.com/7382697/trump-iran-war/)which Massie argues was “unlawful from its inception.” Another charge accuses Hegseth of “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties.” The charges also allege the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” in reference to the U.S.’ capture of former Venezuelan President [Nicolás Maduro](https://time.com/7342941/venezuela-maduro-bombing-trump-delta-force/) in January.

Hegseth has dismissed the impeachment effort as a “political spectacle,” referring to the resolutions put forward by Massie as a “farce” that “mock the Constitution.” Addressing reporters during a press conference at the Pentagon Tuesday morning, Hegseth said that “Iran, the[ cartels](https://time.com/7338857/hegseth-confirms-another-boat-strike-controversy-war-crime-debate/), Maduro,[ Yemen](https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/trump-defends-hegseth-as-republican-led-impeachment-vote-looms/google.com/search?q=yemen+strikes+time.com+2025&sca%5Fesv=2a1971bd37c7a5a8&rlz=1C5GCCM%5Fen&biw=1633&bih=755&sxsrf=AKL5yDj8vZ-Uxe0J5c6TOqLLNPP%5F1qYtAw%3A1794317589329&ei=FR3zar7AE9-M7NYPnYSjoQM&uact=5&oq=yemen+strikes+time.com+2025&gs%5Flp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiG3llbWVuIHN0cmlrZXMgdGltZS5jb20gMjAyNTIFEAAY7wUyCBAAGIkFGKIEMggQABiJBRiiBDIIEAAYiQUYogQyBRAAGO8FSIMGULcDWLcDcAJ4AZABAJgBX6ABX6oBATG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgOgAmzCAgoQABhHGNYEGLADwgIOEAAY5AIY1gQYsAPYAQHCAhcQLhjcBhi4BhjaBhjYAhjIAxiwA9gBAZgDAIgGAZAGD7oGBggBEAEYCZIHATOgB-ECsgcBMbgHY8IHBTAuMS4yyAcIgAgB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp), every one was a lawful operation ordered by the Commander in Chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress, and executed by American warriors who did their jobs.”

While Hegseth has the support of President [Donald Trump](https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview-transcript/), who vowed to “stand by” him even if an impeachment vote is successful, the embattled Defense Secretary is facing mounting scrutiny elsewhere. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is among those to throw his weight behind the impeachment effort, which was initially filed in September, but was never voted on as the House went into recess.

It’s unclear exactly how the current impeachment effort will affect the five-week lame-duck session, as government funding runs out after Dec. 11 and lawmakers still need to make a deal to avert a government shutdown. Even if the measure passes the House, it’s unlikely to obtain the two-thirds majority needed to pass the current Senate, where Republicans still hold 53 out ⁠of 100 seats. Following the midterm results, Democrats will take control of both chambers in January. “If the Senate doesn't deal with this before the end of this Senate, they're turning it over to a Democrat Senate, who can then have the trials and deal with it,” Massie told reporters Monday.

“If you wanted to draw an analogy to criminal law: an impeachment vote by the House of Representatives is like an indictment. It doesn't mean the person has been found guilty, but it means that the House thinks there's enough evidence of high crime or misdemeanor that there should be a trial,” says Thomas Berry, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. 

While impeachment itself carries[ no immediate legal consequences](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S4-1/ALDE%5F00000282/), a conviction in the Senate can also result in disqualification from holding future federal office.

The House has initiated impeachment proceedings[ over 60 times](https://www.usa.gov/impeachment), but only[ 22 cases](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-HPRACTICE-118/pdf/GPO-HPRACTICE-118-28.pdf#page=2), involving 21 people, have resulted in formal impeachment by the House. Trump was[ impeached twice](https://time.com/5939232/senate-acquits-donald-trump-second-impeachment-trial/) by the House during his first term. He was accused of abusing the power of his office for domestic political advantage and obstructing Congress’ abilities to hold him accountable in the [first impeachment](https://time.com/5751699/donald-trump-impeached/), while the [second impeachment](https://time.com/5928988/donald-trump-impeached-second-time/) saw him accused of incitement of insurrection, in relation to the events of Jan. 6, 2021\. He was acquitted by the Senate in [February 2020](https://time.com/5778572/donald-trump-acquitted-impeachment/) and again in [February 2021](https://time.com/5939232/senate-acquits-donald-trump-second-impeachment-trial/).

Only two Cabinet secretaries have been impeached by the House in U.S. history—here’s what to know about them, and what happened after the measures were brought forward.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt34fde751e326c14a/6af386ca62c30620f04bb330/William-W-Belknap.webp?branch=production)

Secretary of War William W. Belknap is seen here —Heritage Art/Heritage Images—Getty Images

### How William Belknap became the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached

[William Belknap](https://time.com/6691749/impeachment-mayorkas-cabinet-member-history/) served under Republican President Ulysses S. Grant from[ 1869 to 1876](https://history.army.mil/Portals/143/Images/Publications/Publication%20By%20Title%20Images/S%20PDF/CMH%5FPub%5F70-12.pdf) as Secretary of War, a predecessor to the modern-day Secretary of Defense. (Although the Trump Administration has since revived the term after [rebranding](https://time.com/7314840/department-of-defense-name-change-department-of-war-pete-hegseth-trump/) the “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War” last year.)

Belknap, a Civil War veteran, came under scrutiny after Democrats regained the[ House majority in 1875](https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-Impeachment-of-Secretary-William-Belknap/) and began investigating the Grant Administration amid a series of scandals and allegations of financial corruption.

“The Grant presidency was particularly [corrupt](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/scandals-grant-administration/). It was a situation where Grant himself was an honest man, a beloved war hero, turned two-term President,” says Thomas Balcerski, a professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University. “Yet he had a flaw in his character in that he was too trusting of the men around him, many of whom were military figures from the Civil War.”

In January 1876, the House passed a resolution directing committees with oversight of the executive branch to investigate government spending across all departments.

The investigations turned to Belknap’s appointment of[ post-traders](https://www.nps.gov/places/post-trader-s-house-foundation.htm), civilian merchants licensed by the government to conduct business at military forts. These positions could be highly profitable, making the appointments a valuable source of patronage controlled by the secretary.

Belknap was “accused of bribery, corruption, and taking kickbacks in exchange for essentially providing contracts,” says Balcerski. “These were basically kickback schemes. In the case of Belknap, he gave an exclusive contract, what we would call a ‘no-bid contract’ in our language today, specifically to trading posts in \[modern day\] Oklahoma.”

While testifying in front of the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, a [wheeler-dealer named Caleb Marsh](https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/this-day-in-politics-may-4-1876-237816), who alongside Belknap handpicked associates to operate the lucrative military trading post at Fort Sill, alleged that Belknap had received payments in exchange for the appointments. Estimates placed the amount between $20,000 and $40,000, equivalent to approximately[ $630,000](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1876?amount=20000) to[ $1.26 million](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1876?amount=40000) today.

Belknap learned of Marsh’s testimony on March 1, 1876, and resigned the following day, just hours before the House unanimously voted to impeach him.

His resignation, however, did not stop the impeachment proceedings from moving to the Senate, raising the constitutional question of whether an official could still face a trial after leaving office.

“The only real dispute was whether the Senate could do anything about it, because Belknap had actually resigned hours before the House impeached him,” says Berry. “Much of the trial was not about whether he had been corrupt, but about whether the Senate could convict him, given the fact that he had already resigned.”

Although the Senate could have voted to disqualify Belknap from holding future federal office, it ultimately did[ not reach the two-thirds majority](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment/impeachment-belknap.htm) necessary to convict him, and he was acquitted.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt21b5743913d3c7e8/6af381a2d52f49300c03940c/GettyImages-2175940828.jpg?branch=production)

Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at the White House on Oct. 1, 2024\. —Kent Nishimura—Getty Images

### The impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024—and what came next

[Alejandro Mayorkas](https://time.com/6048061/alejandro-mayorkas-dhs-profile/) served as Secretary of Homeland Security under former President Joe Biden from[ 2021 to 2025](https://www.dhs.gov/alejandro-mayorkas). He was [impeached by House Republicans](https://time.com/6590641/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-gop/) in 2024 over the Administration’s handling of the southern border, as federal officials during the Biden Administration had been overwhelmed by a [surge in migrant crossings](https://time.com/6553088/venezuelan-migrant-crisis-collective-trauma-essay/).

The House of Representatives narrowly voted to impeach Mayorkas in February 2024\. Republicans accused Mayorkas of failing to properly enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Balcerski says that, compared with Belknap, “there wasn't a similar signature scandal” surrounding Mayorkas’ impeachment. Instead, the case raised questions about the boundaries of impeachment and whether disagreements over how an official carries out government policy should constitute impeachable offenses.

“That was[ pushing the boundaries](https://time.com/6554103/mayorkas-impeachment-hearing-criticized/) of what is an impeachable offense,” argues Berry. “There has been much debate since the Constitution was ratified about what is a legitimately impeachable offense versus what is simply a disagreement in policy.”

The[ Constitution](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S4-1/ALDE%5F00000282/) identifies “conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” as grounds for removal from office, but the scope of what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors lacks a formal definition, experts tell TIME.

Ultimately, the Democrat-majority Senate dismissed Mayorkas’[ articles of impeachment as unconstitutional](https://time.com/6968262/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-trial-over/) in a single afternoon, two months after they were filed. Senate Democrats[ argued](https://www.democrats.senate.gov/news/press-releases/majority-leader-schumer-floor-remarks-on-the-transmission-of-articles-of-impeachment-for-secretary-of-homeland-security-alejandro-mayorkas) that allowing Cabinet officials to be impeached over disagreements with an Administration’s policies could set a dangerous precedent.

The Biden Administration at the time [denounced](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SAP-HRes-863.pdf) the move as “baseless” and "unconstitutional.” The DHS Office of the General Counsel also sent a [38-page response](https://democrats-homeland.house.gov/imo/media/doc/dhs%5Fletter%5Fto%5Frules.pdf) to the House Rules Committee, arguing that impeachment was being used to punish good-faith policy and enforcement decisions. 

Some Republicans raised doubts over the proceedings, also. Rep. Tom McClintock of California [said that](https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/speeches/house-floor-remarks-case-against-impeachment-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas) although he believed Mayorkas was “guilty of maladministration” of immigration laws, he did not view the matter as grounds for impeachment. 

“Many people thought that what Mayorkas had done did not rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor. That it was simply a political disagreement. That he was choosing to enforce immigration law with different priorities than a Republican DHS Secretary would, but that this was not objectively criminal or illegal,” says Berry.

Mayorkas, who called the impeachment proceedings “[baseless](https://abcnews.com/Politics/dhs-sec-mayorkas-calls-impeachment-baseless/story?id=106780640),” continued to lead the DHS until the transition to the second Trump Administration in January 2025.

### **How the effort to impeach Hegseth compares**

An impeachment of Hegseth, if it were to happen, could resemble Mayorkas’ case from 2024, according to experts. 

“The impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas is much closer in form and content to the possible impeachment of Hegseth than the impeachment of Belknap,” says Balcerski. “The Mayorkas impeachment set a precedent, where impeachment became one of the tools of oversight of the Congress.”

There are, however, two key differences between Mayorkas’ impeachment and the current effort against Hegseth.

The first is that, unlike Mayorkas, the push to impeach Hegseth is being led by Massie, a member of the same party as the Administration.

The second, Berry explains, is that there could be a stronger legal argument for impeaching Hegseth over potential violations of the[ War Powers Resolution](https://time.com/article/2026/07/31/republicans-break-ranks-attempt-to-limit-trump-iran-war-powers/) (which Hegseth denies) rather than simply a disagreement over the Administration’s policies.

“Several articles Massie brought forward are about the War Powers Act, which essentially places limits on the extent to which the executive branch can wage war, and how long it can without congressional authorization,” he says.

The[ War Powers Resolution](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13134) (often called the War Powers Act) is a 1973 federal law designed to reassert congressional authority over U.S. military operations abroad. It generally requires the President to end unauthorized hostilities within 60 days of reporting them to Congress—or being required to do so—with a limited 30-day extension for safe withdrawal.

Massie [argued](https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/2120181881006096488) on Tuesday that Hegseth should be impeached on grounds that the military operation in Iran has continued without congressional authorization past the 60-day deadline.

When questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the eve of the 60-day mark of the war in April, Hegseth argued that as a temporary cease-fire had been reached, then any such clock for congressional approval would be paused—[a position Senators contested](https://www.facebook.com/reel/3457140127772132).

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt12c27957b454787f Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:12:04 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Tiago Ventura\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Trump Says 'You Should've Had Stock' to Build Net Worth. Here's How He's Increased His by Billions in His Second Term\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/trump-net-worth-second-term/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[In the two years since President Donald Trump was elected, his reported net worth has spiked by more than $2 billion. What's behind the rise?\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Tierney L. Cross—The Washington Post/Bloomberg/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[President Donald Trump during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d05c2c33870dc10/6af37f95d52f495d1c039404/Trump-Net-Worth.jpg?branch=production)

President Donald Trump during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, 2026\. —Tierney L. Cross—The Washington Post/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In the two years since President [Donald Trump ](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/trump-lame-duck-era/)was re-elected to the White House, his reported [net worth](https://time.com/6589369/donald-trump-net-worth-estimations/) has [spiked](https://time.com/7342470/trump-net-worth-wealth-crypto/) by billions of dollars.

Between 2024—during his presidential campaign—and 2025, Trump’s net worth rose from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion, according to a [_Forbes_](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/presidency-boosts-trumps-net-worth-by-3-billion-in-a-year/)report published in September 2025.

The President’s total net worth has dipped somewhat since then, with [_Forbes_](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-definitive-networth-of-donaldtrump/)reporting this September that it had fallen to $7 billion in 2026\. As of Tuesday, the outlet [estimates](https://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump/) that the figure has dropped still further, to roughly $6.3 billion. But it remains notably higher—to the tune of about $2 billion—than it was two years ago.

Trump addressed the steep reported increase in his wealth in an [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2aC8lAOQbg) with “60 Minutes” that was released on Sunday.

“There’s a _Forbes_’ story that said that your net worth—maybe it’s changed with the stock market recently—but your net worth went up by $3 billion since you—” “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat asked Trump during the interview.

“Well, so did everyone,” the President replied.

“My net worth did not go up by $3 billion,” Douthat said.

“Well, you should’ve had stock,” Trump said.

Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at Campaign Legal Center, says that it’s “unusual … for any person to increase their wealth in one year” by the amount Trump’s did following his return to office, let alone the President. Since Presidents began disclosing their personal finances,“we have not seen any Presidents’ wealth increase that dramatically,” Payne says.

“Typically, the Presidents don’t … have financial interest in businesses that could generate that amount of wealth,” he adds.

## What has driven the increase in Trump’s net worth during his second term?

Much of the growth in Trump’s net worth between 2024 and 2025 stemmed from dealings in the cryptocurrency industry, according to _Forbes_’ reporting last year, including an increase of about $710 million from memecoin, $240 million from [stablecoin](https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/what-is-a-stablecoin)—a type of cryptocurrency that has a value that is linked to a fiat currency or another asset— and $340 million from tokens sold by the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial.

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48165b1e54015b89/6af236fed52f491067038e01/Trump-net-worth-increase.jpg?branch=production)

 —Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Trump [announced](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/technology/donald-trump-cryptocurrency-business.html) the creation of World Liberty Financial in September 2024, weeks before he won re-election. The [New York _Times_](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/business/binance-trump-crypto.html) reported that the President "effectively controls a stake" in the business, but that his sons, along with U.S. envoy [Steve Witkoff](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people/2026/steve-witkoff/)’s family, manage its operations. World Liberty Financial [started selling](https://docs.worldlibertyfinancial.com/wlfi-token/tokenomics) its $WLFI tokens in October 2024, and [unveiled](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/25/trumps-world-liberty-financial-jumps-into-stablecoin-game-with-usd1-reveal.html) a stablecoin linked to the value of the U.S. dollar, USD1, the following March.

Shortly before Trump was inaugurated for a second term, he also separately unveiled a memecoin called $TRUMP; a few days later, his wife launched one called $MELANIA.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure for 2025 [revealed](https://time.com/article/2026/07/01/trump-2025-financial-disclosure-crypto-world-liberty-financial/) that he earned over $1 billion that year as a result of his family’s cryptocurrency dealings.

As of 2026, _Forbes_ reported in September, Trump’s memecoin tokens accounted for about $183 million of his roughly $7 billion net worth, while World Liberty Financial tokens accounted for about $78 million and Stablecoin for about $233 million. 

His liquid assets—meaning cash or other assets that can be rapidly converted into cash—made up another $1.9 billion of his total net worth, according to _Forbes,_ which attributed part of that figure to hundreds of millions of dollars that stemmed from cryptocurrency sales. _Forbes_ previously reported in 2025 that the value of the President’s liquid assets grew by about $660 million during his first year back in the White House. 

**Read More:** [_3 Ways Trump’s Wealth Has Soared Since He Returned to Office_](https://time.com/7342470/trump-net-worth-wealth-crypto/)

Trump’s licensing and management business, meanwhile, added about $410 million to his net worth between 2024 and 2025, according to the outlet.

_Forbes_ attributed part of the growth in the President’s net worth related to his licensing and management business to international real estate deals, including in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.[_TIME_](https://time.com/7342470/trump-net-worth-wealth-crypto/)has also previously reported on licensing deals that the President unveiled shortly before his second inauguration, including selling items such as Bibles and fragrances.

Trump’s licensing and management business accounted for about $655 million of his total net worth as of 2026, according to _Forbes_’ tally from September. The news outlet reported that his golf clubs and resorts accounted for another $1.8 billion of his total net worth, and his real estate investments for $1.1 billion.

Also contributing to the President’s rising net worth in his first year back in the White House was a legal victory: appellate judges in 2025 tossed out a fraud penalty that a previous court ruling had levied against Trump, boosting his net worth by about $470 million, according to _Forbes’_ reporting from last year.

## How does Trump’s handling of his finances differ from other Presidents?

According to Payne, past Presidents have typically tried “to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest and the appearance that they are using public office for private gain,” including by divesting their interests in businesses and placing their assets in what’s called a [“blind trust,”](https://www.trustlaw.com/resources/blog/blind-trust-matter/) an arrangement in which another individual is tasked with managing the assets and the trustor—as well as the beneficiaries—are not informed of the details. This arrangement is [often used](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/strengthening-presidential-ethics-law) by politicians to avoid a possible conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict.

Trump’s assets, as well as his business interests and investments, are in a type of trust, but it is not a blind one, the _Times_ has [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/trump-money-crypto-financial-gains.html). Trump has said that two of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., manage the family business.

Payne says that this, and “the large amount of money that \[Trump\] has made in just one year in office” has raised concerns and sparked conflict of interest allegations.

Among the actions that have given rise to such [allegations](https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-seeks-answers-from-key-financial-regulator-on-trumps-crypto-conflicts-of-interest), the federal government has made moves during Trump’s second term to embrace the crypto industry. 

In February 2025—about a month after Trump was sworn into office for his second term**—**the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance [announced](https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/staff-statement-meme-coins) that “It is the Division’s view that transactions in the types of meme coins described in this statement, do not involve the offer and sale of securities under the federal securities laws,”meaning that its view is that memecoins do not need to be subjected to the same oversight and regulation as a security. 

A few months later, Trump signed the [GENIUS Act](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-signs-genius-act-into-law/) into law, which the White House said would help protect “consumers from nefarious actors in financial markets” and aims to promote the use of stablecoins in the country. The White House [said](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-signs-genius-act-into-law/) on its website that the “legislation creates the first-ever Federal regulatory system for stablecoins, ensuring their stability and trust through strong reserve requirements.”

“It just comes down to the fact that the President’s policies are very favorable to the same industry where he is heavily invested,” Payne says.

The White House has denied that Trump’s cryptocurrency-related assets present any conflict of interest. In a statement to [media](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo) [outlets](https://www.newsweek.com/everything-trump-has-done-to-boost-crypto-12147371) in July, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly praised Trump for making the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world” while insisting that “neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.”

When Douthat asked the President how his net worth increased following the 2024 election, Trump said, “I devote almost no time to my net worth.” He went on to say that his son “watches over money.”

“I don’t even talk to him about it,” Trump said. “He watches. He gives—they gave my money, I have a lotta cash, had a lotta cash long before I came in here.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt4fca09f1e8c72d36 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:08:16 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Chantelle Lee\]\]><!\[CDATA\[House Republicans Select Jim Jordan as Their New Leader After Sweeping Midterm Losses\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/jim-jordan-house-minority-leader-republicans-congress/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Jordan beat out Majority Leader Steve Scalise for the top House GOP position in the next Congress after Speaker Mike Johnson said he would not seek the role.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Mark Felix—Bloomberg/Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, speaks to members of the media during the second day of the Republican Midterm Convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, on Sept. 10, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt795cb7032ff507bd/6af372f73c8cbec1b1efc7ea/jim-jordan-house-minority-leader-congress.jpg?branch=production)

Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, speaks to members of the media during the second day of the Republican Midterm Convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, on Sept. 10, 2026\. —Mark Felix—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Rep. [Jim Jordan](https://time.com/6324703/jim-jordan-house-speakers-history/) of Ohio will become the next House Minority Leader after beating out the party’s current Majority Leader Rep. [Steve Scalise](https://time.com/6322674/steve-scalise-nominated-speaker/) of Louisiana for the position. 

Jordan, a hard-line conservative and Trump ally who’s served in Congress for nearly two decades and currently chairs the House Judiciary Committee, secured the role in a secret ballot vote of 106-73.

The Ohio lawmaker announced his bid for the top Republican position in the lower chamber in the next Congress after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson [said](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28866315-johnson-letter-minority-leader-2026/) that he would not run for the role in the aftermath of a blue wave that [shifted control of both chambers](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/democrats-win-control-of-senate-in-blue-wave-election/) to Democrats.

“In these next two years, our job cannot be merely to spotlight how radical this new Democrat party is—offense, not defense, wins elections,” Jordan said in a [letter](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=000001a1-a75c-def8-a5f7-f75c06580000) to colleagues a day after Democrats scored a series of sweeping victories in the midterms. “Republican policies prioritize making Americans' neighborhoods safer, keeping more money in their pockets, and protecting enduring American values and freedoms. To restore our majority, we must restore voters' faith in our ability to deliver on these principles.” 

He warned that Democrats would “wreak havoc on every sector of our economy” and “turn their full attention to investigating every facet of the Administration and private entities across the country.” 

Jordan called himself “battle-tested on the oversight front,” adding, “I know the Democrats' playbook.”

**Read More:** [_Inside the Democrats' Plans to Take On Trump_](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/democrats-power-midterms/)

Scalise announced that he would run for House Minority Leader on the same day as Jordan. 

“It is more important now than ever for us to emerge from this stronger and united because the stakes couldn’t be higher,” Scalise wrote in a [letter](https://www.majorityleader.gov/uploadedfiles/scalise%5Fdearcolleague%5F11.4.2026.pdf) to colleagues. “The socialists are coming to Washington with a radical agenda that threatens the America we hold dear … The House Republican Conference must be the first line of defense in this crucial battle, and we must fight like our way of life depends on it—because it does.”

Scalise, who has has served in Congress for nearly 20 years and held positions as the No. 2 or No. 3 Republican in the House for over a decade, similarly warned his party of what he called Democrats “radical ‘oversight’ agenda,” which he said will target key White House officials, President Donald Trump, and “extend far beyond the Oval Office. He vowed to in turn “discredit their ‘investigations’ and put them on defense.”

To pick the House leaders for each party, returning and newly elected members of the Democratic and Republican conferences in the lower chamber gather privately and vote via secret ballot for their preferred candidate.

Minority leaders must only secure a simple majority within their own party’s House membership. To become Speaker of the House, meanwhile, a candidate must secure the backing of a majority of all those voting in the full lower chamber.

Both Scalise and Jordan previously ran for Speaker in 2023 after Kevin McCarthy became the first person holding the position to be [ousted by a House vote](https://time.com/6320197/in-dramatic-vote-mccarthy-becomes-first-house-speaker-to-be-ousted-in-u-s-history/). 

Scalise originally secured the House Republican conference’s nomination for the role at the time, beating Jordan, but later withdrew after failing to get enough support for a successful full House vote. Jordan, whose bid had been endorsed by Trump, then became the conference’s nominee, but he also failed to garner the needed backing on the House floor after three votes. Republicans ultimately rallied around Johnson, who gained both Scalise and Johnson’s votes en route to securing the position. 

Johnson, who won reelection in Louisiana’s Fourth District last week, said a day after Election Day that “while the outcome of this midterm is not what we’d hoped and fought for, a new battle is just beginning,” in a [post](https://x.com/MikeJohnson/status/2117865506778628338) on X. 

“This Democrat House majority will be led by the most radical and extreme leftists in American history,” he continued, adding, “We will continue pressing forward with our agenda of common sense, and our vision to make America great again—and come 2028, we WILL take back the House and we will finish the job.”

The same day, however, Johnson informed his staff that he would not seek a leadership position in the next Congress.

In the wake of the midterm elections, Trump, who said he had not asked Johnson to step down, lauded the Speaker’s leadership, calling him “fantastic.” The President also said that “we’ll stay out of it” when asked about the race for Congress’ next Minority Leader. 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt9c0ba9946b6f824e Tue, 10 Nov 2026 19:49:39 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Connor Greene\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Trump and Venezuela’s Elusive Elections\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/trump-machado-venezuela-elections/<!\[CDATA\[Ideas\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Opposition leader María Corina Machado is back in Venezuela, but the Trump Administration will control her country’s road back to democracy.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Jonathan Lanza-NurPhoto-Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado greets her supporters upon her arrival in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 25, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt39b56343d06c08e2/6af3480362c30633234bb200/GettyImages-2301602975.jpg?branch=production)

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado greets her supporters upon her arrival in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 25, 2026\. —Jonathan Lanza-NurPhoto-Getty Images

When will Venezuela hold elections? More than nine months after the [capture and extraction](https://time.com/7345310/trump-venezuela-maduro-machado/) of the country’s strongman,Nicolás Maduro in a military raid ordered by President Donald Trump, there are still no clear answers**.** On Oct. 27, María Corina Machado, the country’s most prominent opposition leader, returned to Caracas after about a year in exile, thanked the Trump Administration for removing Maduro, and expressed faith that an election would be held in Venezuela in 2027\. 

In the predawn hours of Jan. 3, U.S. Special Forces [captured Maduro](https://time.com/7345310/trump-venezuela-maduro-machado/) in Caracas and flew him to the United States. With President Trump’s blessing, Maduro’s vice president and longtime loyalist Delcy Rodríguez took power, and the two governments began negotiations over Venezuela’s future. Would the country finally hold free and fair elections, many wondered? 

Two weeks after the raid, opposition leader Machado, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, presented [Trump with her Nobel medal](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/maria-corina-machado-says-she-presented-trump-with-her-nobel-peace-prize-medal) during a visit to the White House, hoping he would push for early elections that she was widely expected to win. Trump, however, maintained that Venezuela wasn’t ready for elections. “We have to [fix the country](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-us-not-war-venezuela-rcna252427) first,” he insisted. He estimated in January that the process could be completed within 18 months. 

Then on Aug. 28, the U.S. and Venezuela governments announced [an unprecedented agreement](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/28/politics/trump-venezuela-oil-deal) to revive Venezuela’s oil industry. The 100-year deal gave the U.S. an ownership stake in 17 oil fields and access to more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. Departments of State and War will [develop the oil fields](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/venezuela-grants-north-american-blue-energy-partners-100-year-concessions-for-17-oil-fields-white-house-says.html) with North American Blue Energy Partners, a private company owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. The U.S. will have a 35% stake in the venture, with guaranteed access to 20% of the output at cost, giving it an effective share of 55%. 

Trump has called it the “[biggest oil deal in world history](https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/09/president-trump-secures-the-biggest-oil-deal-in-world-history/),” one that would give the U.S. control over an additional 65 billion barrels of crude, more than doubling U.S. reserves. He claimed the additional supply would “substantially lower gas prices for all Americans” and deprive China and Russia of their most important ally in the Western Hemisphere. Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has called the [deal a huge win](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/30/venezuela-delcy-rodriguez-says-oil-deal-with-trump-has-endless-benefits) for the Venezuelan people, promising hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and revenue for a country battered by years of economic stagnation. By reviving oil production and improving the country’s economic prospects, the agreement could also help the Venezuelan government restructure its crippling debt. 

But there was little talk about elections and democracy. Two weeks before her return, Machado offered the strongest signal that she was [running out of patience](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/world/americas/maria-corina-machado-venezuela-trump.html). The Rodriguez government [is negotiating](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuelan-acting-government-opposition-delegation-begin-talks-2026-08-06/) with representatives of the 2015 National Assembly, Venezuela’s last internationally recognized, democratically elected body, but Machado has said she has been marginalized in those talks. On Oct. 15, _The New York Times_ [published an interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/world/americas/maria-corina-machado-venezuela-trump.html) with Machado in which she accused Betancourt, the oil deal’s Venezuelan investment partner, of “obscene corruption” and blamed him for the country’s persistent electricity shortages. She did not criticize Trump or suggest that, if elected president, she would repudiate the oil deal. She made clear, however, that Betancourt would have no part in it. 

The interview marked Machado’s sharpest attempt yet to distance herself from an agreement between a Venezuelan government run by Maduro’s former deputies and a Trump Administration that has become increasingly unpopular in Venezuela. Her dilemma is familiar to leaders around the world: how to remain on good terms with a U.S. president who holds tremendous leverage over their countries’ futures while also exploiting the opportunities created by Trump’s growing unpopularity at home. 

Back in Venezuela, Machado [seems to believe](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/americas/machado-trump-venezuela-return.html) that Washington will push Rodriguez to hold elections next year. She’ll have to tread lightly. After praising her return, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned, without naming Machado, that “[you’re not going to street-protest your way into a democracy](https://www.axios.com/2026/10/27/rubio-venezuela-maria-machado-elections).” Translation: Glad you’re back, but Washington will control the process ahead. Whatever that process turns out to be.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt19fc1282a249a0b0 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Ian Bremmer\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How to Relieve Sciatica Pain—and What Makes It Worse\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/how-to-relieve-sciatica-pain/<!\[CDATA\[Health\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The best exercises and treatments for your sciatica depend on what’s causing it.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Olena Malik—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltec242a2a44bb67bd/6af30e63cdd408cc0e4d47ac/GettyImages-2177146409.jpg?branch=production)

 —Olena Malik—Getty Images

Sciatica can send pain shooting down your leg and make it hard to find a comfortable way to sit, stand, or sleep. Finding relief starts with figuring out [what’s irritating the nerve](https://time.com/7346163/weird-symptoms-neurology-neurologists/). A herniated disc, a spinal canal that’s become too narrow and puts pressure on the nerves, and other problems can cause the pain—and what helps one person may make another feel worse.

Many people get better without surgery. Pain from a herniated disc often eases on its own within about six weeks, though recovery can take longer. Here’s what experts recommend trying, what to avoid, and when to see a doctor.

## **What causes sciatica pain?**

Sciatica is a symptom, not a diagnosis—a distinction that matters when you’re trying to find relief. “Everybody’s like, ‘This is what I have. I have this,’” says Dr. Allen Chen, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at UCLA Health. But the term describes pain traveling down your leg, without explaining what’s causing it.

Typically, irritation or pressure on a nerve root in the lower spine triggers the pain. It can feel burning, shooting, or electric, traveling through the buttock and down the leg, sometimes into the foot. It can also make finding a comfortable position difficult. “It bothers people at night, and it bothers people in the day,” Chen says. “It can be very, very disruptive.”

One common cause is a herniated disc. The discs that cushion the bones in your spine have a tough outer layer and a softer center—think of “a jelly donut,” Chen says. If some of that inner material pushes through the outer layer, it can press on a nerve and trigger inflammation. Sometimes people can pinpoint when things went wrong: “I was moving my kid into college,” or “I was moving a couch,” Chen says. Other times, there’s no memorable moment to blame.

Another common cause, particularly among older adults, is spinal stenosis, or a narrowing of the space where spinal nerves travel. Arthritis and other changes over time can put pressure on those nerves, Chen says. People with this problem may be able to sit comfortably, then notice “pain or sometimes heaviness” in their legs when they walk.

## **What are the best exercises for sciatica?**

The best exercise for your sciatica depends on what’s causing it. “There really isn’t one exercise program that’s best for everyone,” says Dr. Keven Burns, an orthopedic spine surgeon at the Spine Institute of Arizona in Scottsdale.

Even mild exercise can feel unbearable when you’re in pain. For some people, sciatica is “absolutely debilitating,” Burns says. They “can’t stand, can’t move.”

If you have a herniated disc, exercises that gently bend the back backward may help—but only if moving in that direction eases your symptoms. One example is a prone press-up. “You lie on your stomach and gently push your upper body upward while keeping your hips on the floor,” Burns says. Some people find it easier to start by simply resting on their elbows. A physical therapist can help determine whether these movements are right for you and how to progress.

People with spinal stenosis may respond to the opposite approach: bending forward. Bringing the knees toward the chest while lying on the back, or leaning forward while seated, can provide relief for some people, Burns says.

As the pain eases, you can start working on getting stronger, too. “Your core is your internal back brace,” Burns says. That includes your back muscles and the muscles along the sides of your trunk, as well as your abs. He often recommends bridges, bird dogs, and modified planks, adjusted to what you can tolerate. “I generally prefer these stabilization exercises over traditional sit-ups or crunches, especially early in recovery,” he says.

Whatever you try, don’t just assume that the routine that helped your friend will work for you. “What helps one person may actually make someone else’s symptoms worse,” Burns says.

## **Is walking good for sciatica?**

Often, yes—and you don’t need to turn it into a fitness project. “Everyone wants to think about, ‘OK, I gotta do some exercises or stretching,’” Burns says. “Well, just don’t stop moving. Get up and walk. Take short walks.”

Several short walks throughout the day can be more manageable than one long outing. The goal is to stay active without repeatedly setting off the pain. Dr. Wellington Hsu, a spine surgeon at Northwestern Medicine, also suggests considering low-impact aerobic activity, such as using an elliptical, if it feels comfortable. Running and jumping can be harder to tolerate during a flare.

How far you walk, however, should depend on how you feel, Burns says. People with spinal stenosis may find that walking triggers leg pain or heaviness, so work with your clinician or physical therapist to find an amount and type of activity you can tolerate. You don’t need to finish your usual loop if your leg keeps hurting more with every step.

## **Can stretching make sciatica worse?**

Yes. If the back of your thigh feels tight, you might assume your hamstrings need a good stretch. But sometimes, Burns says, what feels like a tight muscle is actually tension along an irritated nerve. Patients “stretch harder, hoping to loosen things up, and end up making their leg pain worse,” he says. “More stretching doesn’t necessarily mean more improvement.”

An exercise can also change how far down your leg the pain travels. “If pain that was previously traveling into the calf or foot begins moving back toward the buttock or lower back, that’s generally a favorable sign,” Burns says. Physical therapists call this centralization. If an exercise instead sends pain farther down your leg, it may be aggravating the nerve.

It might be normal to feel sore after exercising, but some symptoms are a sign to stop. “A little muscle soreness during exercise is acceptable,” Burns says. “However, increasing radiating leg pain, worsening numbness, or new weakness aren’t things I want patients trying to push through.”

Everyday tasks can aggravate the pain, too. Chen cautions against lifting and twisting at the same time, especially with a herniated disc. Think of turning to grab your suitcase and hoisting it into an airplane’s overhead bin. Use your legs to help lift, he advises, and avoid twisting your back as you raise the bag.

## **Does physical therapy help sciatica?**

A physical therapist can help you figure out which exercises ease your pain—and which make it worse—and then build a routine that helps you get stronger without repeatedly irritating the nerve. 

One technique they might teach you is nerve gliding, which is also called nerve flossing. 

“Nerves need to move as we bend, straighten, and change positions,” Burns says. “When a nerve becomes irritated or inflamed, that movement can become uncomfortable.” A physical therapist can teach you exercises to help the nerve move more comfortably—and show you how to avoid pulling too hard.

The goal of PT is to make moving more comfortable while your body recovers, Burns says. “They give you tools to cope and compensate,” he says. “But also they allow your body to get back to normal movement while your body’s healing itself.”

Hsu often recommends physical therapy before other treatments, like medication or injections, because it has fewer risks. But finding a program a patient is comfortable with matters most. “If their body doesn’t feel good afterwards, they’re not going to do it,” he says.

## **What else helps relieve sciatica pain?**

Sitting in the same position for hours can be uncomfortable when you have sciatica, Hsu says. Try breaking up that time by standing between tasks or taking a short walk during a break. A physical therapist can also help you find ways to sit more comfortably.

Heat or cold may provide relief, too, although people differ in which they prefer. Massage can help soothe muscle tightness or spasms around the lower back and buttocks, Burns adds.

Foam rolling might ease surrounding muscle tightness, but there isn’t strong evidence that it directly treats sciatica, Burns says. Keep the pressure gentle, he advises, and back off if it triggers nerve pain.

Burns also sometimes recommends anti-inflammatory medication, such as ibuprofen or naproxen. These drugs aren’t right for everyone: Evidence of benefit for sciatica is limited, and they can cause side effects, including stomach bleeding and kidney problems.

If you’re still in a lot of pain, your doctor might suggest an epidural steroid injection, Chen says. It puts medication near the irritated nerves to help reduce inflammation. Some people get relief for weeks or months; others don’t notice much difference. The injection doesn’t remove whatever is pressing on the nerve, though. “They don’t make the disc go away. They don’t open up the space. They don’t take pressure off of the nerve,” he says.

If you’ve tried other treatments and pain is still making everyday life difficult, surgery may offer relief, Burns says. Depending on what’s pressing on the nerve, a surgeon can remove the piece of herniated disc causing the problem or create more room for the nerves.

For someone struggling to get out of bed or get through the day, that relief can make a big difference. “What surgery does offer is the ability to get better quicker,” Hsu says. Many people with a herniated disc improve without an operation, but surgery can shorten that painful wait for some patients. Results aren’t guaranteed, though—and though not everyone improves, most do, he says. A spine surgeon can help you weigh whether the likely benefits outweigh the risks.

## **When should you see a doctor for sciatica?**

If your pain is getting worse or keeping you from your usual activities, see your doctor, Burns says. They can check your strength, sensation, and reflexes to help figure out the best treatment path.

If symptoms aren’t improving after about six weeks of treatment, Burns often considers an MRI to help figure out what’s pressing on a nerve and what to try next. But certain symptoms mean you shouldn’t wait that long to be evaluated.

“If someone suddenly has difficulty lifting their foot, begins tripping because of weakness, or notices their leg becoming progressively weaker, they need an urgent medical evaluation,” Burns says. Trouble lifting the front of your foot is called foot drop, which can make your toes drag as you walk. It can signal nerve compression severe enough to cause lasting weakness, he says.

New bladder or bowel problems—like trouble starting to pee, being unable to pee, or losing control of your bladder or bowels—are also reasons to go to the ER immediately. So is new numbness around your genitals, groin, or anus. These can signal cauda equina syndrome, a rare condition in which compressed spinal nerves affect bladder and bowel function.

For many people, getting better takes weeks to months, and the first few weeks can be especially hard. If treatment isn’t helping, let your doctor know so you can discuss what to try next. Burns doesn’t want patients to assume they simply have to live with the pain. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and there are treatment options.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltd53420ff3622f122 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 15:48:33 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Angela Haupt\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How to Try Somatic Shaking for Stress Relief\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/somatic-shaking-stress-relief/<!\[CDATA\[Health\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Channel your inner wet dog.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Volodymyr Melnyk via Canva)\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt57f9bb49418aee3d/6af239177ce30ba33d1eb447/OSC_Shake.png?branch=production)

 —Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Volodymyr Melnyk via Canva)

Imagine you’ve just washed your hands, and there’s no towel. Give them a gentle shake, and then let your arms join in.

That’s the start of a [stress-management exercise](https://time.com/4063368/stress-relief-meditation/) that may help loosen your tense muscles and give you a break from [anxious thoughts](https://time.com/6286178/intrusive-thoughts-meaning-treatment/), says Kim Penberthy, a clinical psychologist and professor of research in psychiatric medicine at the UVA School of Medicine. It’s a small movement experiment—sometimes called somatic shaking—that takes a minute or less, doesn’t require any equipment, and gives you something to try when telling yourself to [calm down](https://time.com/7353430/nervous-system-reset-mindfulness/) isn’t getting you anywhere.

Here’s why shaking things out might help, plus how to give it a try.

## **How does shaking your body help with stress?**

Think about what happens when you’re replaying an argument or worrying about tomorrow’s big work presentation. Your mind is busy, sure. But your jaw might be clenched, your shoulders raised, and your neck stiff enough to make turning your head unpleasant. Shaking your body gives you a chance to notice—and loosen—some of that tension. “If you try to tense your shoulder and shake your arm, it’s sort of hard,” Penberthy says. Letting your arm hang loosely and gently moving it encourages you to relax those muscles.

The movement also gives your mind something else to focus on. Instead of mentally rewriting the email you just sent, you’re noticing how your hands feel or concentrating on moving one leg at a time. That shift may briefly interrupt rumination—and remind you that you have a way to respond when you’re feeling stuck. Part of the relief, Penberthy says, is realizing: “I’ve got some ability to do something. I don’t have to just sit here and suffer.”

Penberthy sometimes shakes things out herself. “I often do it after a very stressful day,” she says, especially when she notices her neck aching. The image that comes to her mind is athletes shaking out their limbs before heading onto the field: a mental and physical move. 

## **How to try somatic shaking**

Start small, advises Lisa George, a psychiatric and family nurse practitioner and founder of Talk Tribeca Psychiatry in New York. Stand comfortably with your feet planted on the floor, or sit down in a chair. Let your hands hang loosely and give them the same gentle shake you’d use to flick off water. Try that for 10 or 15 seconds, then let your arms join in, keeping your shoulders relaxed.

If it feels comfortable, loosen one leg and then the other, holding a chair or wall for support if you’re standing. If you’re sitting down, you can try small foot taps instead. Keep your eyes open, leave your head and neck steady, and breathe normally. A little movement is plenty.

“This isn’t something where you have to be aggressive,” George says. “You’re not throwing your arms.” She “shakes things out” in her own office, including around other people, and likens it to “an active form of stretching.” You’re moving enough to see whether it feels good, rather than trying to work up a sweat.

George’s own anxiety tends to show up in her body: Her heart races, her muscles tense, and she feels overwhelmed. When that happens, being told to meditate or work on her thoughts doesn’t necessarily help. Movement gives her another place to start. It’s also something you can fit into a stressful workday: a realistic alternative to telling a client, “‘Oh, you’re feeling stressed at work, you should go for a 20-minute run,’” she says.

After a brief shake, stop and notice how you feel. Are your shoulders a little lower? Do your hands feel less clenched? Has the conversation in your head quieted down? You might feel calmer, unchanged, or more energized. Use that information to decide whether this is something you’d like to try again. “If it feels good, great,” George says. “And if it doesn’t feel good, then stop.”

Don’t worry if the difference is small. Penberthy sometimes suggests rating your tension before and afterward, but she doesn’t want people thinking, “Oh no, I’ve only moved from 7 to 6\. I’ve failed.” Any stress reduction is valuable, she says.

## **How to make “shaking it out” a stress-relief habit**

You don’t have to save shaking for the end of a terrible day. Try it between tasks, after a tense phone call, or once you’re somewhere comfortable following an appointment you’ve been dreading.

Morgan Starr-Riestis, a therapist in Honolulu, recently did a quick shake beside her car after a trip to the dentist. Dental appointments are stressful for her, and she had already used breathing and other calming techniques beforehand. Afterward, she spent about 10 seconds bouncing around before getting into the car. “You just kind of allow that pent-up energy to feel like it has a place to go,” she says, “so you’re not carrying it around.”

It’s something she encourages her clients to try, too. “If you could think your way out of your problems,” she often tells them, “you would have done it by now.”

If you’re having trouble picturing the movement, Starr-Riestis suggests imagining water droplets on your skin and gently shaking them off, like a dog after a bath. Focus on where you notice tension, and move in whatever way feels comfortable. 

Starr-Riestis wishes the movement felt less socially awkward. “If somebody saw you doing squats publicly, they wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, that’s weird.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, they’re doing squats,’” she says. If you'd rather experiment without an audience, she adds, head to a private spot, even if it’s the restroom at work.

There’s no need to turn shaking into another time-consuming thing on your to-do list. Starr-Riestis likes that it’s free, takes very little time, and gives people something they can try anytime they have a spare second. “I think so much of our healing culture has become these long drawn-out routines,” she says. “You go to yoga for an hour, you have to do this and you have to do that.”

Just leave yourself a moment afterward to be still. Take a breath, notice how you feel, and give yourself a chance to settle before checking your phone or opening the next email. “The stillness after that is really, I think, the more important part,” Starr-Riestis says.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt1a312dc301b6dd3a Tue, 10 Nov 2026 15:06:29 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Angela Haupt\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The 10 Best Gifts for Outdoorsy Types\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/best-gifts-for-outdoorsy-types/<!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9d5f3d32ff90bea1/6af22f7d46dffeee17d9e8f0/outdoor-gifts-holidays-best-inventions.jpg?branch=production)

Every year, TIME's editors and correspondents work together to compile a collection of the most interesting and groundbreaking new products and innovations for the [Best Inventions](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/) list. As holiday season approaches, the TIME team has pulled out a selection of the 10 best outdoors items from the list that would make a perfect gift for the explorers and adventurers in your life. 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltca91698ba25ac579/6acf84e3c37bcf52cbc91c25/01_TIME_SHOOT_The-North-Face-Universal-Wawona-3-Tent.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [The North Face Universal Wawona 3 Tent](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/the-north-face-universal-wawona-3-tent/)

_Gear for a more broadly imagined adventurer_

Inclusivity is rarely the focus of outdoor equipment innovation. With the help of professional adaptive athlete Vasu Sojitra, The North Face set out to change this with the Universal Collection. The frame of the Universal Wawona 3 tent comes together with three poles of the same size, eliminating the need for designers to use color coding that would be useless to the visually impaired to signal which pole goes where. The tent’s doorway also features a low threshold that makes it easier to roll in a wheelchair, which should have no problem being stored in the tent’s cavernous front vestibule alongside any other camping gear. _—Rae Witte_

**Buy now:** Universal Wawona 3 Tent on [The North Face](https://www.thenorthface.com/en-us/p/shop-all-829783/universal-wawona-3-NF0A8GJM?color=PFQ&size=OS&utm%5Fsource=The+Arena+Group&utm%5Fmedium=affiliate&utm%5Fcampaign=affiliate&utm%5Fcontent=ecomm&irclickid=3850c7c2Na42111f1b5b88df2558b5514&irgwc=1&afsrc=1)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d467f709bc078f5/6af230295fb4461536cfce84/01_TIME_SHOOT_Coleman-Snap-N-Go.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [Coleman Snap ’N Go](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/coleman-snap-n-go/)

_A collapsible hard-sided cooler_

Hard coolers take up too much storage space; soft coolers don’t offer enough insulation. Coleman merged the best of both with its first collapsible hard-sided cooler. The Snap ‘N Go has a leakproof design, retains cold for up to 64 hours, and quickly folds to a third of its size. “You just pick the cooler up and it self-assembles—and with one tug, it collapses back down,” says VP of R&D for Outdoor and Recreation Scott Barbieri. It’s already outselling the company’s predictions: “I think it shows the desire for people to be outside and have easily transportable gear,” Barbieri says. _—Derek Rose_

**Buy Now:** Coleman Snap ’N Go on [Amazon](https://amzn.to/4rX3oNz)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0438fa4b8f2eef11/6acf84e4caff70535d18c32e/Royal-Robbins-Salathe-Sun-Hoody-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Royal Robbins

## [Royal Robbins Salathé Sun Hoodie](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/royal-robbins-salath-sun-hoodie/)

_Chemical-free mosquito protection_ 

Mosquito-borne diseases cause over [700,000 deaths per year](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12868167/), making the mosquito [the world’s deadliest animal](https://www.cdc.gov/global-health/impact/fighting-the-worlds-deadliest-animal.html). Protective measures typically involve synthetic chemicals like permethrin and Deet or natural repellents with varying degrees of effectiveness, but outdoor apparel brand Royal Robbins sees another way: fabric construction. Its Salathé Sun Hoodie is made with a proprietary tight-weave ripstop fabric that the company says is [roughly 92% effective against mosquito bites](https://outdoorindustry.org/press-release/royal-robbins-introduces-new-styles-featuring-award-winning-chemical-free-mosquito-protection-technology-for-spring-2027/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) in lab and field testing and doesn’t wear away with time, all while remaining lightweight and breathable. As an added bonus, the fabric also offers UPF40+ sun protection. _—Derek Rose_

**Buy Now:** Royal Robbins Salathé Sun Hoodie on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0hOFQH82)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta2e9e5d597f6401b/6aceeb4e5c679e3f166fd41e/LifeStraw-Escape-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

## [LifeStraw Escape](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/lifestraw-escape/)

_A faster water filter_

Designed for the outdoors, Escape is a high-flow pressurized water purifier that holds 5.25 gallons and filters 1 liter per minute, removing viruses, bacteria, parasites, and microplastics. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Escape on [LifeStraw](https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-escape)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt169dfc0d7130fc2c/6acf84e3c336f27aeba27cc4/Armedangels-Windbreaker-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —ARMEDANGELS

## [Armedangels Windbreaker](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/armedangels-windbreaker/)

_Petroleum-free and functional_

Windbreakers are usually made from petroleum-based synthetics like polyester or nylon, and treated with forever chemicals—that’s what makes them windproof, water resistant, and durable. But it’s also what makes them an environmental nightmare. “We believe as a company that nature holds the solution to the problems we face as an industry,” says Armedangels Impact and Innovation Director Julia Kirschner. The team instead designed a windbreaker with Tencel Lyocell, a wood-pulp fiber, as the main fabric, tightly woven and treated with a PFAS-free water-repellent finish. The result is a breathable, water-repellent windbreaker that doesn’t rely on the [oil industry](https://time.com/6175206/black-gold-fossil-fuel-industry/) or shed microplastics. —_Matthew Huff_

**Buy Now**: Armedangels Windbreaker on [Armedangels](https://www.armedangels.com/en-us/products/windbreaker-jacket-tinted-navy?option%5Fvalues=10965245165893%2C10965244707141)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltae9257db9891e12b/6acf84e4caff702c5618c334/Therm-a-Rest-NeoLoft-Sleeping-Pad-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Mirae Campbell

## [Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft Sleeping Pad](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/therm-a-rest-neoloft-sleeping-pad/)

_A cozy, knit, inflatable sleeping pad_

After decades of creating some of the lightest sleeping pads for camping, Cascade Designs’s latest release is also one of the plushest. At 30 oz., the new Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft Sleeping Pad is still quite light. But instead of crinkly, unbreathable nylon, the inflatable mattress is constructed from a stretch knit polyester usually reserved for apparel, which feels smooth against your skin and is virtually noiseless when you shift in your sleep. It also inflates to 4.6-in. thick, unprecedented for a mattress that—when rolled up—is hardly larger than a 1L Nalgene water bottle. _—Adam Schram_

**Buy now:** Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft Sleeping Pad on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0injVH1b)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdb9b695938e06136/6acf84e459e207809f6136b8/Opinel-Neo7-Alpine-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —STUDIO LBLB VIVIAN BRUCHEZ

## [Opinel Neo7 Alpine Folding Knife](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/opinel-n-o7-alpine/)

_A multitool purpose-built for mountaineering_

More climbers die on Mont Blanc than on any other mountain in Europe. To help the Chamonix mountain guides who work to prevent this, French knife manufacturer Opinel involved several ENSA-certified guides to develop and test a multi-tool tailored to their specific needs. Designed so it can be opened with one gloved hand, the [Neo7 Alpine](https://www.opinel-usa.com/products/neo7-alpine-folding-knife) includes a serrated stainless-steel knife (perfect for cutting breakcord) and a quarter-inch bit holder (sized for ski and snowboard adjustment and repair). “Instead of trying to do everything, it focuses on doing the most important jobs very well," said Francoise Detroyat, Opinel's Marketing Director. _—Erica Zazo_

**Buy now:** Opinel Neo7 Alpine Folding Knife on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B02KcqE7e)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt498cd92fa8f6c1d1/6aceebb57f48ae57c9b3fff9/Marmot-Wraptor-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Marmot

## [Marmot Wraptor](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/marmot-wraptor/)

_A more flexible sleeping bag_

Marmot’s Wraptor sleeping bag has dual-flap magnetic closures instead of zippers for flexibility and a foot vent to help campers regulate body temperature. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Wraptor on [Marmot](https://www.marmot.com/c/marmot-equipment-sleeping-bags-wraptor)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb025d85239a12bff/6acf825f04105810558be96c/American-Trench-Ventile-Shell-Jacket-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —American Trench

## [American Trench Ventile Shell Jacket](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/american-trench-ventile-shell-jacket/)

_Naturally waterproof cotton_

Cotton is infamously bad when wet, absorbing moisture and causing hikers’ hypothermia. Ventile, developed for the British military in 1943, is a cotton weave that leverages the fabric’s desire to expand when wet; when densely woven, the damp fibers actually create a natural elemental barrier—no weatherproofing chemicals required. American Trench uses the elegantly utilitarian material in its new Ventile Shell Jacket. Here, the fabric’s waterproofing is aided by a light water-repellent finish and thorough internal seam taping, a technical manufacturing process rarely attempted by factories outside of southeast Asia. The Ventile Shell, however, is manufactured in Clifton, N.J. _—Daniel Varghese_

**Buy now:** American Trench Ventile Shell Jacket at [americantrench.com](https://americantrench.com/products/the-ventile-shell-jacket?)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltefffe1a2dc156b50/6acf84e3c37bcfdf3ac91c29/Cinch-Outdoors-Wingman-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Cinch X Wildland

## [Wild Land Wingman](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/cinch-outdoors-wingman/)

_Truck bed glamping_

Vehicle-based camping is [on the rise](https://oia.outdoorindustry.org/l/51282/2026-02-23/f4j3xz%5C), and Wild Land’s Wingman is here to meet the moment. The Wingman is a hardshell topper tent that transforms a pickup truck bed into a two-story camping system [with the press of a button](https://cinchoutdoors.com/pages/wingman); founder and CEO of Wild Land's distribution partner Cinch Outdoors Jake Jackson describes it as somewhere between a traditional tent and an RV. The second-story sleeping area—for example—is decked out with a transparent PVC skylight, built-in Bluetooth speakers, lighting, and a high-density foam mattress. Purists might say it’s not camping, but for Jackson, “It's as close as you can get to the wildest parts of nature with a hotel-like experience.” _—Derek Rose_

**Buy Now:** Reserve Wild Land Wingman on [Cinch Outdoors](https://cinchoutdoors.com/pages/wingman)

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt489ee2139abf7ea1 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 14:23:02 +0000<!\[CDATA\[TIME Staff\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The 10 Best Gifts for the Home\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/best-gifts-for-the-home/<!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt701a474e21f468a8/6af22c1b7ce30b12691eb425/home-gifts-holidays-best-inventions.jpg?branch=production)

Every year, TIME's editors and correspondents work together to compile a collection of the most interesting and groundbreaking new products and innovations for the [Best Inventions](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/) list. As holiday season approaches, the TIME team has pulled out a selection of the 10 best household items from the list that would make a perfect gift for those looking to add more practical pizzazz to their space. 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltca5ff53a4c38cee0/6acf851890def4a9111c1041/Dreame-MF10-Bladeless-Fan-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Courtesy of Dreame

## [Dreame MF10 Bladeless Fan](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/dreame-mf10-bladeless-fan/)

_A futuristic smart fan_

Earlier this year, Yu Hao, the founder and CEO of leading [robot-vacuum-maker](https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/dreame-ranked-no-1-global-130500173.html) Dreame, made headlines and [stirred controversy](https://www.briefs.co/news/robot-vacuum-makers-100-trillion-dream-china-crackdown/) with his goal of building it into the world’s first [$100 trillion company](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/a-chinese-start-ups-dilemma-exposes-cracks-in-beijings-tech-funding.html). The first step is rapidly expanding into various sectors, including phones, wearables, and air care. Dreame’s newest smart fan, the futuristic [MF10](https://homeair.dreametech.com/products/mf10-bladeless-fan), provides wide-ranging airflow via two bladeless, independently oscillating wings. (Each wing rotates up to 180 degrees horizontally and 90 degrees vertically for 270-degree circulation.) The MF10’s TempSync system senses air temperature and automatically adjusts fan speed to optimize comfort and energy use. _—Derek Rose_

**Buy Now:** Dreame MF10 Bladeless Fan on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0g2RKae9)

## 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3a267da36e97d0e7/6af22dba28c86606c08f60c0/01_TIME_SHOOT_Vestaboard-Note.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [Vestaboard Note](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/vestaboard-note/)

_Retro message board_

Vestaboard’s split-flap messaging displays evoke the sight and sound of a mid-century train station, but founder and CEO Dorrian Porter says it’s more than a nod to the past—it’s a respite from glowing screens. “The whole internet collapsed into our phones,” Porter says. “There’s an opportunity to put that information into our lives in simpler, more peaceful ways.” The Note—a compact version of the company’s [much larger flagship product](https://www.vestaboard.com/flagship)—launched in February, and can display personal messages, weather, stock prices, Spotify songs, and [hundreds](https://www.vestaboard.com/help/vestaboard-plus) of other options via [2,880](https://www.vestaboard.com/note) mesmerizing flaps controlled via an app. _—Derek Rose_

**Buy Now:** Vestaboard Note on [Vestaboard](https://shop.vestaboard.com/products/note)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt20432f3a21c7ec26/6acf83b090def472841c1028/Aura-Ink-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Aura

## [Aura Ink ](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/aura-ink/)

_A cordless, wall-mounted digital frame_

[Digital photo frames](https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025/7318374/aura-aspen/) have been around for decades, but you couldn’t easily wall-mount them without cord clutter until Aura Ink, a wireless, 13.3-in. display that can hold a charge for up to three months. Unlike traditional LCD frames that can make your living room feel like Times Square, Aura Ink uses a color e-paper technology that gives photos a vintage-print quality. Designing it meant “reinventing the whole product," Aura co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen says. For instance, because e-paper reflects ambient light (unlike a back-lit LCD), the Ink has a built-in front light that automatically adjusts to the room’s brightness. _—Jessica Sager_

**Buy Now**: Aura Ink on [Aura Frames](https://auraframes.com/ink)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt612afc50c50eb608/6acf83b092bb50b2bb0f0d5a/01_TIME_SHOOT_Syncere-Lume.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [Syncere Lume](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/syncere-lume/)

_A lamp that does chores_

Like Lumiere the candlestick before it, the Lume both sheds light and completes tasks for its owner with nary a complaint. To create an AI-powered butler, AI startup Syncere reimagined the bedside lamp as a robotic arm that, when prompted via an app, makes the bed or sorts through a heap of clean laundry and folds it into neat piles. The current iteration can be wheeled around the house, and works best when purchased in a pair to fold clothes, make the bed, or pick up clutter. The company says it will learn more tasks with time. _—Emma Barker Bonomo_

**Buy Now:** Lume on [Syncere](https://syncere.com/product)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdfcaef01f022db91/6acf83b192bb5080ad0f0d5e/Philips-Skylight-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Signify

## [Signify Philips Skylight](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/signify-philips-skylight/)

_Engineering natural light_

The lighting pros at Philips have tackled the final frontier: replicating natural sunlight. The Philips Skylight provides a ceiling-mounted frame, which comes in two sizes, filled with a light panel that mimics the soft, fluctuating daylight of a skylight for those who rent or live on lower floors. The biggest challenges, its designers say, were mimicking the fade from crisp morning rays to bright noon light to a soft evening glow, and creating a sense of depth to conjure the distant sky. The VitaUp version even uses safe UV-B lights to stimulate vitamin D production. _—Emma Barker Bonomo_

**Buy Now**: Signify Philips Skylight on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0gGgzQBz)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf4042ee04fd9214c/6acf85256a8fc54b783489a8/Flipper-Devices-Busy-Bar-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Flipper Devices

## [Flipper Devices Busy Bar](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/flipper-devices-busy-bar/)

_A timer that limits distractions_ 

Busy Bar started with a [cardboard box with an LED strip](https://habrastorage.org/getpro/habr/post%5Fimages/18f/d70/7d1/18fd707d1c52dc990859e183e3d353df.gif) as a stoplight to let [coworkers](https://time.com/tag/coworkers/) know you’re occupied. Now the glowing gadget, which resembles a retro alarm clock, can share a personalized message, set a Pomodoro timer, lock down distracting apps, silence notifications, _and_ connect to smart home systems to dim lights and change the music—all at the touch of a physical button. And that’s just the beginning. The product is open source, which gives you plenty of opportunity for customization. Place the bar on your desk, attach it to your monitor, or hang it on the wall and find your focus. _—Nina Elder_

**Buy Now:** Flipper Devices Busy Bar on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0b9St5W4)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb67f657b6a14ce3a/6acf823c6a8fc52be234897b/01_TIME_SHOOT_Marshall-Stockwell-III.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [Marshall Stockwell III](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/marshall-stockwell-iii/)

_Classic portable speaker, better battery life_ 

Many portable Bluetooth speakers still prioritize function over form. Marshall’s revamped Stockwell III marries the two ideas, fitting a ton of features into a sleek package that looks like a mini version of the brand’s iconic amps. The battery lasts for an industry-best 40 hours and is replaceable (essentially unheard of in consumer electronics). Audio is better than ever too: Marshall’s signature True Stereophonic 360° audio ensures [music](https://time.com/tag/music/) sounds amazing from all angles, while the Dynamic Loudness feature automatically adjusts balance across volumes. _—Eliza Thompson_

**Buy Now:** Marshall Stockwell III on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B05cRvNh6)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta107bf0b14586a1c/6acf83b1f0a6ca33dee89962/Ecovacs-Winbot-W3-Pro-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —ECOVACS

## [Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/ecovacs-winbot-w3-pro/)

_Cordless robot window washer_

Cleaning floor-to-ceiling windows can feel like an Olympic sport. Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni lets you sit this one out. Simply press the small [robot](https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025/7318493/figure-03/) against a pane of glass and watch its TruEdge scrubber get within 1.1 mm of edges and corners. Unlike its predecessor, the W3 Omni is paired with a portable station whose built-in battery powers 130 minutes of continuous cleaning—no nearby outlet or extension cord necessary. That same dock features Vortex Wash, which automatically cleans the robot’s dirty wiping pads in about a minute. Your ladder and microfiber cloth could never. _—Matthew Huff_

**Buy Now**: Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0hOpyjVU)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8982a2de30f703cd/6ad0cad44d8d16f491315a7a/Nuwave_Smart_Mug-time-best-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Courtesy of Nuwave LLC

## [Nuwave Smart Mug](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/nuwave-smart-mug/)

_A cup that does the brewing_

Plenty of mugs claim to keep beverages hot, and a few will even reheat a drink if it gets cold, but the 14-oz. Nuwave Smart Mug goes a step further by brewing tea and [coffee](https://time.com/4849985/coffee-caffeine-live-longer/) on the spot. Add coffee grounds or loose tea leaves to its stainless-steel brewing filter, then tap a preset button for coffee, green tea, or black tea, or choose a temperature of your liking anywhere from 70°F to 205°F. Then discard the grounds or leaves and enjoy at your leisure: the dishwasher-safe cup maintains the just-so temp for more than five hours, and automatically shuts off once you’ve taken your last sip. _—Matthew Huff_

**Buy Now**: Nuwave Smart Mug on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B070zl8sG)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2a5bc2ccc28d575/6acf8286f0a6ca038ee8995c/Ninja-Slushi-Twist-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —SharkNinja

## [Ninja Slushi Twist](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/ninja-slushi-twist/)

_Life of the party_

The original Ninja Slushi [sold out 15 times](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289595/sharkninja/) after it debuted in July 2024\. Now SharkNinja has doubled down on that success, literally, with the Slushi Twist. The double-barreled frozen-drink maker can churn out two icy drinks at once, even when their ingredients—and therefore their freezing points—are markedly different. The machine’s Dual SlushAssist technology uses sensors to analyze each mixture and determine how cold it needs to get, and its refrigeration system controls the chambers independently, so a margarita and a milkshake can reach peak consistency at the same time. Two spouts let you pour each flavor separately or in a swirl. _—Matthew Huff_

**Buy Now:** Ninja Slushi Twist on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B02vkcrfJ)

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt125d3c881b74ee57 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 14:21:10 +0000<!\[CDATA\[TIME Staff\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How TIME and Statista Determined the World's Best Companies in Sustainable Growth 2027\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027-methodology/<!\[CDATA\[Business\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Photo-illustration by TIME; FanPro—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt61cb00f6b67de8c4/6aea08c668c81454fb6265d1/World_s-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027.jpg?branch=production)

 —Photo-illustration by TIME; FanPro—Getty Images

The "[World’s Best Companies - Sustainable Growth 2027](https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027/)" ranking is a comprehensive analysis aimed at identifying companies that demonstrate outstanding performance in sustainable development while maintaining strong financial health. The ranking focuses on three key dimensions - Revenue Growth, Financial Stability, and Environmental Impact. Only companies that transparently disclose their environmental data are considered for inclusion in the ranking.

## Methodology

The first dimension, Revenue Growth, was evaluated based on a company's revenue between 2023 and 2025\. To ensure a fair comparison, revenue growth was analyzed both in terms of relative growth and compared to the industry average. Companies were required to demonstrate consistent revenue growth during the evaluation period to be considered.

The second dimension, Financial Stability, was assessed using well-established financial metrics, including the Piotroski F-Score and Altman Z-Score. The F-Score measures a company’s financial health by examining profitability, leverage, and liquidity, while the Z-Score assesses the likelihood of bankruptcy. Companies that showed resilience and stability, especially in times of economic uncertainty, scored highly in this category. Additionally, profitability over the last five years (2021- 2025) was an important factor, ensuring that companies not only grew but maintained solid financial foundations. Industry specific KPIs were utilized to portray financial stability of companies within the banking, insurance and REIT sectors.

The third dimension, Environmental Impact, was a core focus of this analysis. Using data from 2024, the evaluation covered both direct and indirect carbon emissions, categorized as Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. Companies were evaluated based on their total emissions and emissions intensity, measured both relative to revenue and industry peers. Green energy use, water consumption, and waste management were additional key performance indicators. Companies that effectively reduced their environmental impact while maintaining operational efficiency scored highly in this dimension. Data sources included publicly available sustainability reports, environmental disclosures, and third-party environmental databases.

Once all data was collected, it was consolidated and weighed within a scoring model. The scores of all three dimensions were weighed equally to determine the final ranking score, with a maximum of 100 points. The 500 companies with the highest scores were featured on the “[World’s Best Companies - Sustainable Growth 2027](https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027/)” ranking by TIME and Statista.

[See the full list. ](https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027/)

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt960d0324e900f78b Tue, 10 Nov 2026 14:01:05 +0000<!\[CDATA\[TIME Staff\]\]><!\[CDATA\[World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth 2027\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

As the world is reshaped by the AI industry while trying to stave off the worst effects of climate change, corporations have to strike a balance between growth and environmental and social stewardship. TIME and Statista have published the third annual ranking of World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth, identifying 500 companies that demonstrate outstanding performance in sustainable development while maintaining strong financial health. The ranking accounts for revenue growth, financial stability, and environmental impact. Only companies transparently disclosing their environmental data are considered for inclusion in the ranking.

[**Methodology: How TIME and Statista chose the World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth**](https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2027-methodology/)

Compared to [last year’s list](https://time.com/7332989/worlds-best-companies-sustainable-growth-2026/), in the top ten, several companies improved their rankings, and there were some new names appearing on the list as well. Nvidia, a company at the epicenter of AI’s buildup, climbed from no.6 last year to lead this year’s list. Its [revenues across](https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc%5Ffinancials/2027/Q227/Q227-Revenue-by-Market-Platform-Slides.pdf) its various business platforms like data centers, hyperscale, AI cloud, and edge computing have continued to grow from 2025, with a 106% year over year growth, as reported in its [2027 Q2 earnings](https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc%5Ffinancials/2027/Q227/Q2FY27-CFO-Commentary.pdf), driven by the Blackwell Ultra infrastructure [introduced over the last few years](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-blackwell-ultra-ai-factory-platform-paves-way-for-age-of-ai-reasoning). “We're the only company in the world that creates and builds, offers an entire AI factory platform, a full-stack system. And customers can still mix and match,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on [an earnings call in August](https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/content%5Ffiles/TRANSCRIPT%5F-NVIDIA-Corp-NVDA-US-Q2-2027-Earnings-Call-26-August-2026-5%5F00-PM-ET.pdf). “Most companies just don't have the skills to do that or desire to do that. And so, there's an entire part of the market that we experience growth. There's sovereign AI, there are regional AIs, there are neoclouds, there are AI start-ups, there are enterprises – which represents about half of our business, and that's growing 100% a year.” (The data for this year's list does not account for Nvidia's recent stock dip following the announcement of an [investigation into CEO Jensen Huang's](https://apnews.com/article/nvidia-jensen-huang-spy-china-63531dec0fe5c145afaac94dde31d478) relationship with a suspected Chinese spy.)

On the sustainable development side, Nvidia has partnered with industries like healthcare, education, weather monitoring and more to improve and expand services and accelerate innovation. Related discussion around grid demands of AI, Nvidia stated in its [2026 sustainability report](https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/documents/NVIDIA-Sustainability-Report-Fiscal-Year-2026.pdf) that it is working on, for example, power-flexible AI factories that can increase capacity while reducing stress on the grid, especially during peak times. It is also working on designing increasingly energy efficient products including chips. In addition to using creative ways to capture and reuse water on its various campuses, Nvidia stated that it’s deploying closed-loop liquid cooling across its AI factories and leased data centers where applicable. The design of their cooling system “can significantly reduce or eliminate water use for cooling compared to traditional evaporative systems.” Additionally, Nvidia supports industry-wide efforts to validate the source of minerals used in its products with the goal to use “only conflict-free gold, tantalum, tungsten, and tin (3TG).” The company reported that it has removed noncompliant 3TG smelters and refiners from its supply chain to help meet this goal.

E.L.F. Beauty, no. 2 this year, up from no. 13, had a strong-performance year across its portfolio, including with the brand Rhode, which it [acquired last year](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289584/elf-beauty/), and Naturium. In a second quarter [earnings report in November,](https://investor.elfbeauty.com/stock-and-financial/press-releases/landing-news/2026/11-04-2026-210608777) its net sales this past March to end of September are up 51% compared to the same period last year. “This marks our 31st consecutive quarter of net sales growth. That is almost eight continuous years of growth. We are one of only six public consumer companies out of 516 that has grown for 31 straight quarters and averaged at least 20% net sales growth per quarter,” CEO Tarang Amin said in the [earnings call](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ELF/earnings/ELF-Q2-2027-earnings%5Fcall-725309.html). “Rhode continues to break records with every launch, including most recently in Sephora Europe, marking the biggest launch in Sephora's history.”

E.L.F has also leveled up from a [C to a B in its CDP climate score](https://www.elfbeauty.com/impact/environment-sustainability#acting-on-climate-and-emissions) during the second year of reporting due to getting more suppliers to use renewable energy, using lower carbon logistics such as hydrogen trucks for shorter delivery on the West Coast of the U.S., and designing packaging with recycling in mind as well as sourcing “smarter materials like FSC-certified paper and wood, and post-consumer recycled and bio-based resins.” 

Four international companies in the list’s top ten are new: France-based management consulting firm Wavestone (no. 5), Sweden-based helmet maker Mips (no. 6), Taiwan-based integrated circuit designer Aspeed Technology (no. 7) which provides remote server management chip products, and the U.K.-based real estate company LondonMetric Property (no. 9).

See the full list of the World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth below:

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltbdceb3a4527e2003 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 14:00:46 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Charlotte Hu\]\]><!\[CDATA\[TIME's Kid of the Year Is Helping First Responders Comfort Children in Crisis\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/kid-of-the-year-2026/<!\[CDATA\[U.S.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Inspired by his own experiences with autism, 9-year-old Ledger Mann created emergency comfort kits for children in crisis. His idea has now spread to six states.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Matt Eich for TIME\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Ledger Mann, 9, at home with some of his LGM bags on Oct. 25.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf9106055053a5e89/6af1f78263734cb7b5c91d8b/koty-2026-ledger-mann-2.jpg?branch=production)

Ledger Mann, 9, at home with some of his LGM bags on Oct. 25\. —Matt Eich for TIME

The little lost boy in Prince George County could not know about the effort the grownups were making to find him. He hadn’t been gone very long, but the county in Virginia is wooded, with streams and thickets and tangles. Any child could become hopelessly lost there. 

For this boy, who has autism and experiences sensory-processing challenges, the unfamiliar environment could be especially overwhelming. So the grownups mustered the police and rallied the fire department, deployed a drone, and released the dogs, all of them scouring the dense local woods.

To the profound relief of the community—to say nothing of his desperate family—the boy was soon found. He hadn’t gone far—no farther than the back deck of his home, where he had climbed into the storage cabinet below a gas grill and shut the little door behind him. That was where the first responders found him—sitting calmly and cross-legged, insulated from the intrusive buzz and searing light of the world around him.

Sergeant JT Mann of the Prince George County police department was one of the searchers who found the boy. When he came home that evening, he told his wife and two sons what had happened. They would understand better than most, he knew, because the younger of his two children—Ledger, 9—also has autism. Ledger heard the story and sympathized with what the lost boy must have experienced.

“I felt a little sad for him,” he says. “I felt a little bad for him.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt72063d0c52f47701/6af20583b713ad122b67113b/1000038588_(1%29.jpg?branch=production)

Ledger stands with the flight crew of HCA Virginia’s Air Care Eagle emergency medical helicopter in Hopewell, VA, holding a bag he presented to the crew for the helicopter on Nov. 4, 2025\. —Courtesy of the Mann family

Ledger—whose work has earned him recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2026 and as a TIME for Kids Service Star, our sister publication’s program highlighting young people making a positive impact—approved of the way his father had coaxed the boy out of the cabinet, playing a video on a smartphone to catch his eye and ease his fear. But he also believed that wasn’t enough. 

There are so many things a child on the spectrum might appreciate in a crisis, Ledger thought—a blanket, a plush toy, a book, a fidget spinner to busy their hands, wireless headphones to listen to music or stories, sunglasses to dim the outside glare. If the child is nonverbal, a dry-erase board and a marker would provide a way to write down thoughts or respond to questions. 

“Dad,” he said straightforwardly, “you don’t have those things.”

It was at that moment last year that Ledger resolved to set things to rights. First responders should always have these types of items on hand, he said, so that all children—especially those with autism—can find comfort in traumatic situations, including car accidents and fires, when things move fast and the world seems to be coming unmoored. And, Ledger believed, all of those objects should be carried in a clear backpack so children could see and point to what they need. 

“He came up with that whole concept in a span of 10 minutes,” says Ledger’s mother Amanda, the elected commonwealth’s attorney for Dinwiddie County, Virginia. 

Since then, Ledger, his parents, and his big brother Peyton, 16—along with no shortage of friends, neighbors, first-responder groups and other volunteers—have worked to make his vision a reality. The family has a Facebook page called LGM Bags—for Ledger Greyson Mann—and is looking to register as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Ledger’s bags are distributed in six states, and the family doesn’t plan to stop there. 

Money to support Ledger’s idea started almost immediately, with a round of funding from a very fitting source: Ledger’s piggy bank. As it happened, there was ample cash on hand.

“Ledger saves his money religiously,” says Amanda. “He doesn’t like to spend, so he had about $100.” That was enough to pay for the first four bags and all of the plushies and other goodies needed to fill them. The family delivered them to local police stations and firehouses, and the reaction of the first responders was so enthusiastic and so rewarding for Ledger that he pressed to make and distribute more. But since Ledger’s piggy bank could stretch only so far, JT decided to engage the community.

“We reached out to civic centers—the Moose Lodge, the Fraternal Order of the Police, churches—who donated money toward purchasing the bag and the stuff that goes in it,” says JT. “Nothing in the bag is expensive. Everything is from the Dollar Tree or Dollar General. They’re not $100 headsets. They’re $5 headsets.”

Before long, the Manns’ garage was piled high with the makings for dozens of emergency go bags. Before the work began, much of Ledger’s free time was spent doing homework, practicing jujitsu, and playing organized football—and it still is. But he now spends his remaining time in the garage, packing up the bags in a careful, just-so way. Each item is accounted for so every bag is complete, all carefully arranged so that nothing is hidden from view.

“He’s very particular about how the bag has to be made,” says JT. “He has an assembly line and everything has to be done perfectly.”

The more bags the family assembled, the more widely the Manns distributed them, and they took care to position them strategically. Dinwiddie County covers 286 sq. mi., so the Manns initially distributed bags in central locations before expanding outward to ensure no area was overlooked. The various hospitals, EMS teams, police departments, and fire departments that had bags on hand showed a ready willingness to share the wealth with other responders who didn’t.

“If the fire department’s on one side of the county, our police officer \[in the vicinity\] wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the police station,” says JT. “The bags are located so that the police officer could pick one up at that fire station.”

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbfbc9618530e913a/6af1f7e509298fbcf721303e/koty-2026-ledger-mann-1.jpg?branch=production)

Ledger and his father JT, a sergeant with the Prince George County police department. —Matt Eich for TIME

Word of good deeds has a way of getting around—and so it was with the Manns’ efforts. Early this year, a local television reporter approached the family to produce a story that aired well beyond the Dinwiddie County limits. Corporations, private citizens, and first-responder groups from Florida, New York, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, and elsewhere in Virginia reached out to offer support or request bags for their communities.

“We had one individual fly out from Texas,” says JT. “She flew all the way \[to Virginia to deliver\] bags from her company. She visited our police department over one weekend to meet Ledger because he was such an inspiration to her.”

So far, the Manns have assembled and distributed more than 475 bags—an impressive number that is continuing to grow. 

Ledger the public servant is, of course, still Ledger the kid, with schoolwork and hobbies very much a part of his life. Until this year, he attended a Dinwiddie public school, but, according to his mom, the kind of specialized attention he needs as he’s grown older requires a smaller environment. Now he is one of 10 children attending a private school known as the Learning to Lead Academy. His favorite subject is math; his favorite hobby is Lego; his favorite position in football is on the offensive line. But the day before speaking to TIME, he played defense—and even recorded a quarter-back sack.

Ledger has a long way to go before having to think about what he wants to be when he grows up, but he has some ideas—a couple of them inspired by his father and his brother Peyton, who is eyeing colleges and wants to study architecture. “I want to be a lot of things,” Ledger says. “A police officer, a builder, work with robotics.”

With each bag the family distrib-utes, they discover something new about what kids in distress need for comfort. Children get to keep any item they select from a bag, while the bag and its remaining contents go back to the first responders, who replace the missing items. Far and away the comfort items in greatest demand are the plush animals. Ledger himself has a mountain of them.

“We have a playroom full and a bedroom full of plushies,” says Amanda. “Whether it’s a boy or a girl, a stuffed animal is always a good comfort for any child. They can be in their own little world, where they’re safe and comfortable.”

During weekends or when Ledger is on school vacation, the family visits the towns and counties that have requested the bags, deliver-ing completed ones and helping to assemble others on-site.

“It’s healing to him and beneficial to him to go out to meet all these people,” Amanda says. “And when we go, they welcome him with open arms. They let him meet therapy animals, including horses.”

The only participating locale the family hasn’t visited in person is Ulster County, New York, which committed itself to assembling 100 bags. Instead, the county and the family -arranged a Zoom conversation so that Ledger could explain how the bags should be assembled. As he had been with the other jurisdictions the family worked with, Ledger was all business, keeping a close eye on how the bags were packed. “One place was doing it out of order,” JT says. “He was not a fan of that.” 

During the family’s travels to various states, the first responders give Ledger challenge coins and patches, which he collects. At his suggestion—and following his design—LGM Bags now has its own patch and coin.

Ledger’s passion and attention to detail continue to fuel the project—one that the family hopes to take nationwide. 

“I want to have this go everywhere,” says Ledger. “To all of America!”

_Correction: Nov. 11, 2026\._ _The original version of this story misstated the county in which a child was lost. It was Prince George County, not Dinwiddie County._

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt62f096416343403f Tue, 10 Nov 2026 13:00:04 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Jeffrey Kluger\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Inside the Troubling Rise of TeleICUs\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/inside-the-trouble-rise-of-teleicus/<!\[CDATA\[Health\]\]><!\[CDATA\[More hospitals are using remote critical-care doctors as they struggle with costs. Yet patient care can suffer, experts say.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Pexels, Arafat Uddin via Canva)\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt39f9d83e3edadcb1/6ae10d76187d3119388ffb05/teleICU.png?branch=production)

 —Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Pexels, Arafat Uddin via Canva)

It was the middle of the night in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Island Hospital in Anacortes, Wash., and a patient was hallucinating and in withdrawal from alcohol. The Ativan he’d been given wasn’t enough to lower his heart rate, and Joyce Selph, a longtime nurse, was called over to assist. 

The protocol, she knew, was to call the attending physician and figure out next steps, but there was a problem. The hospital used a teleICU model, in which doctors staffed the ICU during the day, but only remote doctors were available overnight, via computer screen. Selph and the other nurses had tried to reach the teleICU doctor, but no one answered the calls.

There was no one else to ask, and the patient was rapidly deteriorating. So Selph, who had been a nurse for more than 30 years, did what she assumed a doctor would do; she started the patient on Precedex, a medication that can help sedate a patient. 

Giving medication without a doctor’s orders risked her license, Selph knew, but not doing anything risked the patient’s life. The patient survived. Selph was so disturbed by the incident that she complained to her nursing supervisors and to the hospital’s administration that having a doctor on screen rather than in person was bad policy, but they decided to keep it for financial reasons, she says.

Soon after, Selph quit her job at Island Hospital, she says, because she felt that the teleICU was endangering patients’ safety and making her practice outside of her scope. 

“They did it as a cost-saving measure because they were having trouble getting hospitalists to want to be there,” Selph says. “But I felt very strongly that it was unsafe.” (Island Health said, in a statement to TIME, that it launched a teleICU program in 2021 to strengthen the level of critical care available in its rural community. It has used a vendor to run the program, the spokeswoman said, and “any technical challenges that have arisen have been addressed directly with \[the vendor\] to ensure continued safe, effective patient care.”)

More hospitals are implementing teleICUs, especially overnight, as they struggle to recruit enough providers while keeping costs low. Having a remote physician who can staff multiple hospital ICUs at once can keep ICUs open and revenue coming in, even in the midst of an [ongoing shortage of doctors](https://time.com/article/2026/10/04/us-health-care-workforce-in-crisis/). Though the model was initially pitched as a way to help rural systems deploy experts at all hours, it is frequently used in more urban and suburban areas as well. One [2025 paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39499590/) surveyed 574 adult ICUs across the country and found that about one third implemented some form of telemedicine. 

The teleICU model has been gaining attention recently after Conor Hylton, a 26-year-old dental student, died in 2024 after being transferred to an teleICU at the Milford Campus of Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut, part of Yale New Haven Health. In March 2026, his family filed a lawsuit over his treatment. The complaint included an inspection report from the Centers from Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that found, among other failures, that no physician had overseen Hylton’s care after he was transferred to the ICU, and that the ER physician who had been called up to intubate him did not know the way to the ICU and got lost, delaying Hylton’s treatment by crucial minutes.

William Hylton, Conor’s father, told TIME about the experience of watching his son die as a doctor on a big screen tried to give nurses instructions to adjust his ventilator. He’d brought his son to the emergency room with stomach pain the night before and was told he’d be hydrated inpatient and released shortly after. Conor was transferred to the ICU after William had left for the evening, because his pancreas was inflamed and his heart was racing. The hospital violated its own policy by not informing Conor’s parents that he had been transferred, the CMS report found. His parents got a call at 4:30 a.m. alerting them that their son was near death and in the eICU; they raced to the hospital where they watched their son die, 11 hours after he had arrived at the hospital. “I started thinking about the guy in the screen, and thinking, ‘What the hell was that?’” Hylton says. “Why wasn’t there someone at his bedside?”

The hospital in Connecticut isn’t the only teleICU where patient care appears to have suffered because of the remote setup. TIME reviewed hospital inspection reports from the last six years by the [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services](https://qcor.cms.gov/main.jsp) and found three other instances in which patients died or received substandard care after interacting with a teleICU doctor. In one 2024 instance in Los Banos, Calif., a teleICU physician ordered a medication for a patient whose heart rate was rapidly dropping, “but the record did not indicate it was administered,” the inspection says, and the patient died. In 2021 at a medical center in Reading, Penn., a teleICU physician ordered that a patient with COVID be intubated, but no in-person doctor capable of inserting a chest tube was available for two hours; the patient coded while the chest tube was finally being inserted. And at a hospital in Louisiana, a critically ill patient could not be transferred to another facility for care because hospital staff “failed to follow the appropriate process for after-hours when there was no in-house physician on call.” They did not know they were supposed to call the teleICU doctor, and the patient died while waiting to be transferred. 

Experts say that while teleICUs can be useful in providing care, many hospitals don’t use them effectively and instead use them primarily to cut costs. “It can definitely be misused if the goal is to make the spreadsheet look good and staff as many beds as possible with one doctor,” says Dr. Eric Scholten, who works as an teleICU doctor in a system in the American West where he says the system functions well. (His hospital did not give him permission to speak on its behalf.)

Selph says that nurses are often the ones who have to take on the duties of examining a patient and assessing them in person because a teleICU doctor can’t. That seems wrong to her. “These patients are being charged for care, thinking they are getting a physician monitoring their case,” she says. “But in reality they weren’t even assessing the patients themselves; it was the nurse assessing and giving information.”

It’s an open secret among many doctors and nurses that some hospitals with teleICUs provide poor quality care. One doctor whose practice contracts with a teleICU in North Carolina and provides services there—who wished to remain anonymous—told TIME that none of the doctors in his practice send their families to the hospital where the teleICU is used because they all think it’s sub-standard care. “The running joke is, ‘Don’t send me to that hospital if I’m sick,’” he says. 

## The rise of the teleICU

TeleICUs first became popular in the mid-2000s after research suggested that patients in ICUs would benefit from having what’s called an “intensivist,” an expert in treating ICU patients, available 24-7, says Deena Costa, a professor at the Yale School of Nursing who has studied teleICUs. At the time, many hospitals didn’t have intensivists available overnight.

A company called Visicu, [founded in 1998 by two intensivists at Johns Hopkins Hospital](https://www.forbes.com/2006/03/30/ipo-outlook-visicu-sr%5Fcx%5F0331visicu.html), became the leading company to provide this teleICU technology, advertising that it could cut costs by 25% while making an intensivist available around the clock and reducing the number of ICU deaths: a win-win-win.

Costa, who was an ICU nurse before going into academia, says she remembers the buzz around the Visicu system at the time, but that nurses she interviewed had mixed feelings about its effectiveness. Some told her they felt micromanaged and surveilled. Since then, [some studies](https://blog.hospitalmedicine.org/could-intensivists-be-harmful-to-icu-patients-health/) have suggested that the round-the-clock presence of an intensivist isn’t as essential as researchers once thought because it [doesn’t have an impact](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26308426/) on mortality, she says.

But many hospitals had already embraced the teleICU system, and for some, there was no going back. By 2016, Philips, [which had acquired Visicu](https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/home/news/13015050/philips-acquiring-visicu) in 2008, was touting the financial benefits of teleICUs, [citing a study](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-demonstrates-improved-patient-flow-and-financial-benefits-of-philips-eicu-program-for-managing-critical-care-populations-300377182.html) that found that they increased case volume by 44% and helped save hospitals tens of millions of dollars by reducing the need for doctors on the premises. 

ICUs on their own don’t generally bring in a lot of revenue for hospitals, says Dr. Nandita Nadig, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and a critical care doctor. But some hospitals that have other specialties that may bring in revenue, like a stroke center or a surgeon who performs bypass surgery, are required to have ICUs if they want to have those specialties, she says. 

By 2018, about 18% of total ICU beds in the U.S. used telemedicine critical care, up from less than 5% in 2010, [one study found](https://journals.lww.com/ccejournal/fulltext/10.1097/cce.0000000000000468~characteristics-of-us-acute-care-hospitals-that-have). 

Then came the pandemic. As ICUs became filled with critically ill people and hospitals faced a shortage of critical care doctors, more facilities adopted the technology. 

By October 2020, [Philips said it was seeing](https://www.results.philips.com/app/uploads/2026/04/philips-third-quarter-results-2020-transcript.pdf) “increased interest in telehealth solutions like Tele-ICU.” 

## The benefits of teleICUs

For hospitals, the big benefit of a teleICU is that it can provide the perspective of a critical care doctor without having to pay for one to be at your facility at all hours. This is especially beneficial for rural hospitals that can’t afford to staff a critical care specialist around the clock, or for a larger health system where one virtual specialist can check in on patients at multiple hospitals. 

“The reality is that not every place is desirable to raise a family or build a life, so you do need some of this backstop—I do believe there’s a place for it,” says Dr. Allison Harriott, a critical care and emergency medicine physician who [has researched teleICUs](https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/tele-icu/2014-12). “But can it fully supplant what I do at the bedside? I don’t think so.” 

Having a remote intensivist available to lend expertise can be useful for patients in rural areas, says Nadig. Intensivists may see a red flag that a patient should be put on a heart-lung machine, for instance, or that they need a lung transplant. They can also help patients who are in small, local hospitals stay in their communities, she says, rather than be transferred hundreds of miles to a facility with an intensivist. 

The U.S. has a shortage of intensivists, Nadig says, and as patients get older and their care becomes more complex, teleICU doctors can be better than not having any intensivist available. 

One [2025 study](https://journals.lww.com/ccmjournal/fulltext/10.1097/ccm.0000000000006827~prolonged-tele-critical-care-utilization-is-associated-with) funded by Philips found that from 2012 to 2020, hospitals with telecritical care capabilities had lower patient death rates in the ICU and shorter ICU stays. Philips customers use the technology “to extend access to intensivist expertise, support bedside clinicians, monitor patient populations and help identify patients who may need earlier intervention,” says Martijn Hartjes, an executive at Philips who leads hospital patient monitoring. 

But both Hartjes and Nadig agree: a teleICU doctor should not replace bedside physicians. “The value of a teleICU is really how well it’s applied,” says Nadig. Hartjes echoed this sentiment. “The Philips eICU program,” he says, “is intended to supplement, not replace, bedside care.” 

## Problems with implementation 

The original purpose of teleICUs seems to have been lost in recent years, Nadig says. A [2021 study](https://journals.lww.com/ccejournal/fulltext/10.1097/cce.0000000000000468~characteristics-of-us-acute-care-hospitals-that-have) found that teleICUs were actually less predominant in rural hospitals than in urban and suburban hospitals.

Recent estimates suggest that about [one fifth](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34235456/) of hospitals in the country use teleICUs. Now, as [more hospitals struggle financially](https://time.com/article/2026/09/08/losing-health-insurance-affects-everyone/) in response to funding cuts in legislation like H.R. 1—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—and impending cuts to Medicaid, some are considering switching to teleICUs. In 2025, the _Milwaukee Journal Sentinel_ [reported](https://www.wpr.org/news/ascension-wisconsin-hospitals-outsourcing-private-equity-nursing) that Ascension, a nonprofit chain of Wisconsin hospitals, was replacing some of its critical care doctors with physicians from a national staffing agency, including telehealth doctors. (Ascension said in a statement that it had incorporated telehealth capabilities “as a supplement to our providers and care teams, a model used broadly around the world.”) A Montana-based medical center [told NBC](https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/community-medical-center-shifts-pediatric-icu-to-telehealth-model-amid-staff-pushback) in June 2026 that it planned to transition its pediatric intensive care services to a 24/7 telehealth-supported model, despite pushback from physicians and nurses. 

TeleICUs operate very differently in the U.S. than they do in other countries, says Dr. Claudia Spies, medical director of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin, a teaching hospital that has a teleICU. Spies, who has researched teleICUs, says that in Germany and other high-income countries, the teleICU exists to give patients access to more specialists who can weigh in on their case. But this complements in-person care; hospitals with teleICUs do not typically cut staff, she says. Instead, there is still a doctor physically present in the teleICU, who consults with the other doctors over the screen to decide how best to treat the patient. 

“Here, it was never really used to save money on staff,” Spies says. “In my opinion, that’s not the way an ICU should be established.” Public health insurance in Germany won’t reimburse treatment in the ICU if there is not a doctor physically present, she says. 

In Brazil, teleICUs [expanded](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39382244/) during the COVID pandemic, but were primarily used to train physicians and nurses in responding to critically ill patients, rather than replacing in-person health care. The program stayed in place after the pandemic in many hospitals that did not have [intensivists](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12913-025-12894-4?utm%5F) on site.

Scholten, the doctor who works at an teleICU in the U.S., says that the system can work well—even without a doctor physically present in the ICU—if the virtual doctor is familiar with the hospital system and the doctors who work there. The doctor needs to intimately understand the processes of how the hospital works, like who to contact to get a patient intubated or discharged. His hospitals have flow sheets that tell nurses what to do if someone is deteriorating rapidly and there’s no cardiac surgeon nearby, for instance. Outsourcing the teleICU to third-party contractors is generally not a good model, he says. “It takes a lot of resources to make it work well,” he says, “as a service to keep people in their local community.” 

In his experience, teleICUs have been helpful at getting patients off of ventilators earlier than they would have been able to if they’d had to wait for a doctor to round, he says, which cuts down on infection risk. For routine pneumonia or routine heart failure, teleICUs can help local doctors more effectively manage patients, he says. 

But teleICUs shouldn’t be thought of as a way to save money, he says—because oftentimes, they don’t. “I would argue that it’s cost-neutral,” he says. “It provides high-quality care to rural sites and allows you to efficiently care for patients.” 

“It can go awry when they just say, ‘We’re getting rid of bedside coverage, and you just call this person who’s a long way away and doesn’t know the culture,” Scholten says.

## Unfamiliar territory

The problem of a teleICU doctor being unfamiliar with the inner workings of a hospital came up repeatedly in the public records searched by TIME. Many times, hospitals with problematic teleICUs did not have a clear process for communication between virtual doctors and inpatient doctors. In other instances, patients and their families were not told why the patient was being seen by a teleICU doctor rather than a bedside doctor. 

After Conor Hylton died, CMS investigated Bridgeport Hospital’s Milford Campus and found that “the hospital failed to ensure quality medical care was provided to a patient who presented to the Emergency Department and was transferred to the intensive care unit.” Among other things, the investigation found that the hospital did not integrate the teleICU well into the rest of the system: there was no process for the in-person emergency room doctor to sign out to the teleICU doctor, for instance. And when Hylton went into cardiac arrest at 4:33 a.m., the only doctor who could intubate him—the emergency room doctor—did not arrive until 4:45 a.m. because the doctor did not know how to get to the ICU: proof, his family’s lawyer argues, of a system that did not plan adequately for emergencies. The nurses, teleICU doctor, and hospitalist were all unsure who was supposed to lead the code in the ICU when Hylton went into distress, according to the report. Yale New Haven Health said in a statement to TIME that “our priority has always been, and remains, providing safe, high-quality care to our patients. We remain committed to continuous review and improvement of patient safety practices. Because this is active litigation, we cannot comment on specific allegations and will address the claims in the appropriate legal forum.”

Similarly, in 2024, CMS investigated Memorial Hospital Los Banos in California after the teleICU doctor ordered a critical medication for a patient that may not have been administered, and the patient died. The [report](https://qcor.cms.gov/HospitalCombinedReportObjectPDF?cmsNumber=050528&facilityName=Memorial+Hospital+Los+Banos&address=520+West+I+St&city=Los+Banos&state=CA&surveyDate=2024-03-13&tag=A0000%2C+A0043%2C+A0049%2C+A0084%2C+A0115%2C+A0118%2C+A0132%2C+A0144%2C+A0338%2C+A0340%2C+A0385%2C+A0398%2C+A0405%2C+A0431%2C+A0432%2C+A0438%2C+A0440%2C+A0441%2C+A0465%2C+A0468%2C+A0750%2C+A1151%2C+A1152%2C+A1153%2C+A1160%2C+A1162&formattedSurveyDate=03%2F13%2F2024) found no record of the in-house physician being notified of the patient’s condition, and no record of any doctor—virtual or not—proclaiming the patient dead. CMS determined that the hospital and the outside teleICU company it contracted with did not appropriately coordinate care. Medical directors of the teleICU and the hospital were supposed to be meeting quarterly to improve care in the teleICU, but they did not, according to the report. Sutter Health said, in a statement, that “we [consistently take opportunities to reexamine and reevaluate policies and clinical workflows within all our care settings so as to enhance our abilities to care for our patients,”](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sutter-health/) but that legal requirements prevented the hospital from providing additional information. 

The lack of a clear chain of command between doctors in the hospital and the one in the teleICU came up frequently in CMS investigations into incidents involving this type of care. In Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, an ICU patient was awaiting transfer to another hospital, but one doctor did not answer their phone, and staff failed to notify any other medical provider—including those in the teleICU, who were on call from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. The teleICU was called later that night when the patient was in severe distress, according to the [CMS report,](https://qcor.cms.gov/HospitalCombinedReportObjectPDF?cmsNumber=190160&facilityName=Glenwood+Regional+Medical+Center&address=503+Mcmillan+Road&city=West+Monroe&state=LA&surveyDate=2024-04-02&tag=A0000%2C+A0115%2C+A0144&formattedSurveyDate=04%2F02%2F2024) and soon after, the patient died. The hospital’s chief medical officer later said in interviews with CMS that staff should have called the teleICU for the transfer, but the inspection report found that staff weren’t trained on who to contact. (Healthcare Systems of America, which owns Glenwood Regional Medical Center, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The absence of in-person staff to treat patients who need immediate care also came up repeatedly in CMS investigations involving teleICUs. At Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center, a patient’s lung collapsed and a virtual ICU physician ordered intubation and placement of a chest tube, but “the cardiothoracic physician failed to arrive in a timely manner,” and the patient coded when the chest tube was being inserted, according to the [CMS investigation](https://qcor.cms.gov/HospitalCombinedReportObjectPDF?cmsNumber=390096&facilityName=Penn+State+Health+St.+Joseph&address=2500+Bernville+Road&city=Reading&state=PA&surveyDate=2021-03-04&tag=A0000%2C+A0338&formattedSurveyDate=03%2F04%2F2021). The report found that there was no chain of command for staff to escalate the process when an in-person physician does not show up on time, the report found. Penn State Health did not respond to a request for comment. 

William Hylton says that patients, like his son, have the right to know whether the hospital they’re going to has an teleICU, and whether there are nearby hospitals that may have more in-person resources available to help patients in distress.

“There was no doctor in person providing critical care,” he says. “You can’t insert a breathing tube through a television.”

He hopes that Connecticut and other states will pass laws that require hospitals to divulge whether they have teleICU and offer to transfer patients to other hospitals if they can’t handle the level of care that the patient needs. 

It’s not just Connecticut where family members are seeking more transparency about teleICUs. In its investigation into the incident at Memorial Hospital Los Banos, CMS interviewers found that the family members of another patient who was in the same ICU had concerns about the teleICU. That patient’s son and daughter-in-law said that they did not like that the hospital did not have doctors present in the ICU and that patients were telemonitored. They had asked for their father to be transferred to a larger hospital with more resources, according to the inspection report, but he was not transferred. He also died in the hospital.

Joyce Selph, the nurse who was uncomfortable with how telehealth was administered at her hospital in Washington, now works at a hospital with in-person staff in the ICU, but she still thinks about the suffering that her patients had to go through because of the teleICU.

“We all know as nurses that stuff happens after hours,” she says. “But if there’s a time delay in getting care, for an ICU setting, that’s deadly.” 

It bothers her that she told Island Hospital repeatedly about the problems in the teleICU and that nothing changed. She was the first to leave based on the changing model of care, she says, but since then, “there has been an exodus.” (A spokesperson for Island Health said its retention is in line with the national average and that its teleICU helps give care teams support so that patients aren’t automatically transferred to Seattle when Island Health can safely care for them near their homes.)

Selph says she remembers waiting as long as 30 or 45 minutes to hear back from a teleICU doctor at her old job when she needed to know how to handle a patient. In an ICU, time matters, she says, and a wait like that can change a patient’s trajectory. Even when the doctors did answer her calls, there was not a good system to communicate what was going on to the doctors on the screen, she says. “There’s a doctor who has never seen the patient before, has never assessed them—it’s like putting a blindfold on and trying to do medicine.” 

She also believes that patients should know more about what kind of care they’ll be getting in an ICU before they check into a hospital. “The community has a right to know, if you’re going to come in and half of your care is going to be covered by a doctor who pops up on screen,” she says. “I wouldn’t take anybody I cared about to a hospital that used an eICU at night.” 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt8cae0aeeae33f40c Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:00:04 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Alana Semuels\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How Democrats Can Win Florida in 2028\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/how-democrats-can-win-florida-in-2028/<!\[CDATA\[Ideas\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Showing up for Floridians outside of election season will build trust, writes Isvett Verde.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Eva Marie Uzcategui—Bloomberg via Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt96d47798f416020d/6af227bbf7d590616666ff4b/florida-elections.jpg?branch=production)

 —Eva Marie Uzcategui—Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Tuesday, [Democrats](https://time.com/article/2026/11/05/senator-elizabeth-warren-why-democrats-won-the-midterms/) flipped [traditionally Republican states](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/texas-midterms-showed-that-latino-voters-are-still-looking-for-a-political-home/) in places many considered out of reach. As I watched the returns come in from my apartment in Brooklyn, I wondered whether Florida, my home state, would also turn blue. 

In the end, Republicans won most of Florida’s major statewide races––one of the few losses Democrats suffered. On the surface, the sea change that swept through the country appeared to have missed Florida. But Democratic candidates here didn’t lose by much, and that distinction paints a more complicated picture of Florida’s electorate.

The results challenge the assumptions about the political limits of progressives in the state. With 2028 approaching, Democrats need to start building a new movement in Florida now.

## The results were very close

On election night, Alfred Soto, an associate teaching professor of communications at Florida International University, was momentarily buoyed as he watched the vote count with friends in Miami. For years, Soto mobilized voters as part of the Cuban American Democrats, before the organization disbanded earlier this year. “As I saw those early returns, I thought, can we do this? Is this possible?” 

Early returns showed Democrat David Jolly, the candidate for governor, leading Republican [Byron Donalds](https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/byron-donalds-congressman-trump-republican-governor-florida/), and [Angie Nixon](https://time.com/article/2026/10/25/what-does-trump-s-declining-latino-support-mean-for-florida-/), the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, appeared to be locked in a tight race. In Miami-Dade County, where I grew up, it looked as though the Republican Rep. [María Elvira Salazar](https://time.com/article/2026/09/17/trump-immigration-florida-republican-maria-elvira-salazar-midterms/) could lose her House seat. And Republican Rep. [Mario Díaz-Balart’](https://time.com/3825781/mario-diaz-balart-obamas-cuba-policy/)s race initially looked reassuring, but later reporting revealed a much more competitive contest. 

Jolly came within [roughly 1 point](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/03/us/elections/results-florida.html) of winning the governor’s race, while Nixon came [within roughly 3 points](https://floridaelectionwatch.gov/FederalOffices) of flipping a U.S. Senate seat. Every county in Florida, except one, [moved blue](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/03/us/elections/results-senate.html?uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Finteractive%2F433d3393-6c89-577b-8500-37b8e18c6678&office=senate&mapType=shiftMap#https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/03/us/elections/results-senate.html)—in some cases, by double digits. 

Miami-Dade County had the [highest voter turnout](https://www.miamitimesonline.com/news/florida/florida-election-results-miami-dade-voters-favor-democrats-as-republicans-win-statewide-races/article%5F31520902-7ce3-44d2-8bfc-c8c5dfd21015.html) in a midterm election in more than two decades, and the country flipped blue after voting Republican in 2022.

As I write this, Salazar’s race has entered a recount and though Díaz-Balart has claimed victory, that race remains [too close to call](https://apnews.com/projects/elections-2026/us-house-results/). It is a stunning turn of events when you consider that they are two longtime Republican incumbents running in heavily Hispanic districts. 

Nixon’s performance was particularly notable given the circumstances of her campaign. She was [outspent](https://19thnews.org/2026/10/angie-nixon-florida-senate-moment/) by Republican-aligned outside groups, running in a state Trump carried comfortably in 2024\. 

Many Cubans, who make up the [largest share](https://www.miamidade.gov/elections/library/reports/voter-registration-statistics-districts.pdf) of voters in the city, cringe at the mere mention of socialism. And yet, Nixon made huge headway [campaigning on an agenda](https://angienixon.com/meet-angie/) that included Medicare for All, universal childcare, and other [democratic socialist priorities](https://time.com/article/2026/08/20/inside-dsa-reshape-democratic-party/). 

“It left me more energized than ever,” Soto said. “I thought, okay, maybe Florida now is where Texas was in 2018, 2020.” 

## Latinos in Florida are feeling the impacts of Trump’s policies

Many Florida families have been battered by the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Haitians in South Florida who lost [Temporary Protected Status](https://time.com/7365395/america-owes-haiti-tps/) have lost their jobs and are afraid to step outside. In Doral, where there is a strong Venezuelan community, some businesses have shuttered, and local officials are facing pressure over the [city’s cooperation agreement with ICE](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/doral/article317326861.html). 

It’s true that Cubans and other Latinos in Miami supported Trump’s deportation policies and have stood by the Republican Party. But some have come to [regret](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article317814345.html) that support, and in part this election’s results bear that out.

And it’s not just immigration. South Florida is now considered one of the [most expensive](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/realestate/think-nyc-is-expensive-you-havent-looked-at-south-florida.html) places in the country. 

Groceries are where Elisa Douglass, a jewelry-maker in Miami, feels it most. Her family used to spend about $150 a week on groceries. Now she shops at two or three different stores depending on what is on sale, and the bill is closer to $380\. 

“The difference is crazy,” she said. Even a small pack of Bustelo coffee (a staple in many Latino households) costs $8\. Her elderly parents, who live off $32,000 a year, lost their [Medicaid](https://time.com/7342386/trump-government-cuts-foreign-aid-health-climate-workers/) as a result of recent federal policy changes and administrative cutbacks. 

To win Floridians in 2028, Democrats need to acknowledge, and promise to address, bread-and-butter economic challenges like these head-on. They need to [make the case ](https://securingamericaspromise.substack.com/p/the-immigration-policy-that-could)that protecting immigrant families and creating legal pathways for people who want to contribute to this country are in America's best interests.

## How Florida is changing

To be sure, Florida has shifted in recent years. Senator Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis have shaped who moved to the state and changed how voter rolls were maintained. On paper, the state became much safer for Republicans. 

“It’s still a very Republican electorate at the end of the day,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Labs said. Still, he cautioned, “you can’t start with the default assumption that Florida’s off the table.” 

Díaz-Balart nearly lost in a race that few people were focusing on or talking about. In Orlando, Democratic Rep. Darren Soto appeared to be holding on in a district redrawn after the [Supreme Court’s _Callais_ decision](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/fairness-justice/what-louisiana-v-callais-means-voting-rights-act), which split the area’s Puerto Rican community [across several districts](https://puertoricoreport.com/florida-redistricting-and-puerto-rican-voters/) and dropped his seat’s Hispanic share to about [36%](https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2026/04/30/florida-redistricting-map-republican-desantis-democrat-race/).

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stumped for Nixon’s campaign. “We need to be pulling up for these candidates in the south,” she said in [a video](https://x.com/MsWinterrrr/status/2118055016246497385?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2118055016246497385%7Ctwgr%5E53a7ddcb5fc649148da88715096e72032699d023%7Ctwcon%5Es1%5Fc10&ref%5Furl=https%3A%2F%2Fwhereisthebuzz.com%2Faoc-urges-democrats-to-back-black-candidates-in-the-south-we-need-to-be-pulling-up%2F) posted on Instagram. 

But to fund a serious program in Florida, national Democratic groups would need to focus on year-round organizing, instead of concentrating most of their efforts around election time. This matters especially because Florida has over 5.6 million registered Republicans, more than 4.1 million Democrats, and over 3.3 million with no party affiliation. Reaching and persuading even some of those unaffiliated voters could make a real difference in statewide elections.

## ‘Walking away has its own costs’

Chuck Rocha, the political strategist [behind many Democratic wins](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/05/opinion/hispanic-voters-midterms-democrats.html) this election, said his group spent “more than $2.6 million on Spanish-language ads, media and mail over three to four months,” and that Latino voters overperformed. “When you invest,” he said, “you can see the outcomes.”

Rocha argued that winning statewide would take longer-term investment, because many young Latinos are just becoming eligible to vote, and many are frustrated with both parties. That means reaching them on streaming services and YouTube, not network TV, to “remind people why their life sucks, and who’s to blame, and what you’re going to do to fix it.” 

But ads are only one piece. Democrats also need groups working in communities on issues like immigration and food insecurity, he said, outside election season. Showing up for Floridians outside of election season will build trust.

“The mantra was always: Florida’s too big, too complicated, too expensive,” Odio said. “But walking away has its own costs.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt6627b8a1fd8e70cd Tue, 10 Nov 2026 11:00:10 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Isvett Verde\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The Democratic Wins No Election Forecaster Expected\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/midterm-election-results-biggest-democrat-surprise-wins-forecaster-ratings-republican/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[A TIME analysis of election forecasters found more than a dozen races that none anticipated would go blue—but did in the end.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images, William Hale Irwin—AP, Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt929298cf184b3781/6af2f78862c306a7454baf66/2026-democrats.png?branch=production)

 —Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images, William Hale Irwin—AP, Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images

A pediatrician, a former professor, and a minister with a shoestring campaign are among the Democrats [headed to Congress](https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/democrats-2026-midterm-elections-deep-red-states/) after defeating Republican candidates few expected to lose.

A TIME analysis of 10 pre-election forecasts found more than a dozen House races that Democrats won that every forecaster rated either as tilting, leaning, likely, or even safe Republican or [as a toss-up](https://time.com/article/2026/11/03/us-election-midterms-forecasters-analysis-senate-race-ratings/). 

Some Democratic candidates had experience as mayors or state lawmakers, but many are political newcomers. Several won despite significantly smaller campaign spending.

Many of the races mark the first time a Democrat has been elected in years. In South Carolina, [Annie Andrews](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/south-carolina-senate-results-darline-graham-democrat-annie-andrews-republican/) will become the state’s first Democratic senator in more than two decades.

**Read More:** [_These 2026 Election-Winners Made History in Their States_](https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/midterms-elections-race-gender-religion-history-state-firsts/)

Several more potential upsets remain in races that have yet to be called by the Associated Press as of early Tuesday, one week after Election Day. In [Mississippi](https://time.com/article/2026/11/05/mississippi-senate-race-2026-midterm-elections-colom-hyde-smith/), which all 10 forecasters rated Republican, Democratic District Attorney Scott Colom leads Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. If he wins, he would be the state’s first Democratic Senate winner since 1982 and its first Black senator since the Reconstruction era.

Colom [posted](https://x.com/scott%5Fcolom/status/2119867476741693475) on social media Monday that the “prognosticators” that had written off his and other races in traditionally deep-red parts of the country as solid Republican “made it much more difficult to fundraise and are part of the reason the South has been neglected for so long.” He added: “They’re only a reflection of the past and mysteriously avoid any accountability when they’re wrong.”

The election forecasters TIME examined—Cook Political Report, Decision Desk HQ, FiftyPlusOne, Fox News Power Rankings, Inside Elections, Race to the WH, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Silver Bulletin’s FLIPR Deluxe model, Split Ticket, and _The Economist_—[largely saw](https://time.com/article/2026/10/27/republicans-say-the-polls-are-wrong-could-that-be-true-/) the [blue wave](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/democrats-win-control-of-senate-in-blue-wave-election/) coming. But none foresaw just how big it would be.

Here are the races they got wrong in the [2026 midterm elections](https://time.com/article/2026/11/03/midterm-elections-2026-key-races-live-results-polls-latest-news-updates/).

## Indiana’s 5th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2058996a1ab9467/6af2ebeb46dffe1911d9eb1a/J.D._Ford_IN-05.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect J.D. Ford (D, Ind.) arrives for the first day of new member orientation at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, 2026\. —Allison Robbert—AP

J.D. Ford, a Democratic state senator in Indiana, will become Indiana’s first openly gay member of Congress. He defeated Republican three-term Rep. Victoria Spartz in a district that President Donald Trump carried by 17 points in the 2024 presidential election. Not a single forecaster rated the race even as a toss-up.

Ford is the first Democrat elected to the district since Jim Jontz in 1990, although its boundaries have changed substantially since then. Ford [raised nearly $800,000 less](https://ballotpedia.org/Indiana%27s%5F5th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection%2C%5F2026) than his opponent, according to campaign disclosures through Oct. 14, although outside spending favored Ford. Around [$4.2 million was spent](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/in-05) to support him or attack Spartz, as compared to $1.3 million to support Spartz or attack Ford, according to Federal Election Commission filings through Nov. 6.

## Missouri’s 2nd district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5084a6f65b1c85de/6af2ec445a73330d2d33a061/Fred_Wellman_MO-02.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Fred Wellman (D, Mo.) speaks to the media in Washington on Nov. 8, 2026\. —Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images

Fred Wellman has become the first Democrat elected in Missouri’s 2nd congressional district since Joan Kelly Horn in 1990\. The podcaster and Army veteran defeated seven-term incumbent Ann Wagner, a Republican, by more than 16,000 votes. Wellman was a first-time candidate.

[Inside Elections rated](https://insideelections.com/ratings/house/) the race Solid Republican, while six other forecasters rated it tilt, lean, or likely Republican. Wellman’s campaign [spent $1.9 million](https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri's%5F2nd%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026) through Oct. 14, while Wagner’s spent $5.7 million—almost three times as much. General election outside spending also favored Wagner, with [$980,000 spent](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/mo-02) to support her or attack Wellman, while $387,000 was spent to support Wellman or attack Wagner.

## North Carolina’s 6th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb176788c63e426dd/6af2ecb7b713ad847667141b/Cyril_Jefferson_NC-06.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Cyril Jefferson (D, N.C.) walks through the Capitol basement during new member orientation on Nov. 9, 2026\. —Allison Robbert—AP

Cyril Jefferson, the youngest elected mayor of High Point and the city’s second Black mayor, beat incumbent Addison McDowell. McDowell had won in 2024 without a Democratic nominee on the ballot after redistricting prompted Democrat Kathy Manning to retire.

Jefferson’s campaign [spent around $224,000](https://ballotpedia.org/North%5FCarolina%27s%5F6th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026) through mid-October, compared to McDowell’s campaign spending of $1.3 million—more than five times as much. Outside spending in support of Jefferson [totalled just $211](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nc-06).

Jefferson told [Axios](https://www.axios.com/2026/11/06/house-democrats-nc-tennessee-new-members-wave) that national groups repeatedly dismissed the district as “nowhere on our radar.” Of the 10 forecasters TIME analyzed, seven rated the race as safe or solid Republican, while the other three rated it as likely Republican—the strongest rating short of safe or solid. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) didn’t even name the race as one of its “[Districts in Play](https://dccc.org/2026-districts-in-play/).”

## North Carolina’s 9th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt828a4fb14f1267c2/6af2ed125a7333ef1c33a06b/Richard_Ojeda_NC-09.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Richard Ojeda (D, N.C.) speaks to the media in Washington on Nov. 8, 2026\. —Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images

Richard Ojeda II beat incumbent Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is responsible for electing House Republicans. Ojeda is a former West Virginia state senator and an Army veteran who served for 24 years, including 15 at Fort Bragg. He previously unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Congress in West Virginia and mounted a short-lived 2020 presidential campaign.

Ojeda’s campaign [reported spending $2.9 million](https://ballotpedia.org/North%5FCarolina's%5F9th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026), compared with Hudson’s $3.9 million, although outside groups [spent more than $390,000](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nc-09) supporting Ojeda or opposing Hudson, compared with just $6,000 spent for Hudson.

Hudson is serving his seventh term in Congress since 2013\. [Fox News rated](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-power-rankings-kansas-moves-toss-up-nebraska-moves-lean-r) the race as Solid Republican, while the other nine forecasters all rated it as likely Republican.

## North Carolina’s 13th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3fabe6fc74428d1a/6af2ed647ce30bf9f01eb68f/Paul_Barringer_NC-13.jpg?branch=production)

Rep-elect Paul Barringer, then the Democratic nominee for North Carolina’s 13th congressional district, smiles during an interview in Garner, N.C., on Oct. 8, 2026\. —Matt Ramey—AP Photo

Paul Barringer, a lawyer, healthcare consultant, and tree farmer, defeated Republican first-term incumbent Brad Knott. Barringer has not previously held elected office. A former Republican, he switched parties before running, and his campaign emphasized cooperation across party lines.

Barringer’s campaign [spent around $800,000](https://ballotpedia.org/North%5FCarolina's%5F13th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026)—about a quarter less than Knott’s $1.1 million. FEC data compiled as of Nov. 6 [showed no reported outside spending](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nc-13) for or against either candidate.

The district last elected a Democrat in 2022, when Wiley Nickel won. Republican legislators subsequently redrew the district boundaries to remove Democratic voters around Raleigh and include Republican rural areas. Nickel declined to seek re-election in 2024\. All 10 forecasters TIME analyzed rated the 2026 race as likely Republican.

**Read More:** [_Republicans Went All In on Redistricting Ahead of the Midterms. Why Did It Fail?_](https://time.com/article/2026/11/08/republican-redistricting-2026-midterm-elections/)

## North Carolina’s 14th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4dca9800a0e8d6c4/6af2ee2a28c8666c0d8f6301/LaKesha_Womack_NC-14.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect LaKesha Womack (D, N.C.) speaks to reporters in Washington on Nov. 8, 2026\. —Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

LaKesha Womack, a political newcomer, beat Republican first-term incumbent Tim Moore. Womack had among the smallest campaign spending at [$55,600](https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/H6NC14069/), compared to Moore’s [$1.9 million](https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/H4NC14015/). She also received almost no outside financial support, with reported general election spending in support of her [totalling just $122](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nc-14). By comparison, outside groups spent $183,000 for Moore. Meanwhile, Republicans spent more than $1 million on media advertising in the race, according to AdImpact data cited by the _Times_, while Democrats spent nothing.

Moore was North Carolina’s longest-serving state House speaker before entering Congress. He helped shape the 2023 Republican redistricting plan, and not even the DCCC considered the 2026 race as “in play.” Five election forecasters rated the 2026 race as safe or solid Republican while the other five rated it as likely Republican.

Womack, a minister and business consultant, spoke during her campaign about becoming unhoused after a medical emergency left her in intensive care. Her platform prioritized health care and housing affordability.

## New Jersey’s 2nd district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf667241d7f0bbefb/6af2ee875a7333361c33a073/Zack_Molluck_NJ-02.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Zack Mullock (D, N.J.) speaks to the media in Washington on Nov. 8, 2026\. —Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images

Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock defeated four-term Rep. Jeff Van Drew in a district where Trump won by 13 points in the 2024 presidential election. Van Drew originally won the seat as a Democrat in 2018, but switched parties in 2019 during Trump’s first impeachment.

Mullock told the [_New York Times_](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/us/politics/congress-democratic-long-shots.html) that he never expected to win but nevertheless ran out of a desire to challenge the Trump Administration. [Split Ticket rated](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/split-ticket-2026-midterms-model) the race as Safe Republican, while all nine other forecasters rated it lean or likely Republican.

Mullock’s campaign [spent $856,000](https://ballotpedia.org/New%5FJersey%27s%5F2nd%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection%2C%5F2026) through Oct. 14, while Van Drew’s campaign spent $2.3 million. Mullock’s campaign never received financial support from the DCCC, the _Times_ reported, even though the race was on its “Districts in Play” fundraising targets list. Mullock nevertheless benefitted from heavy independent spending against Van Drew. Outside groups [spent $1.9 million](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nj-02) for Mullock or against Van Drew, compared to $601,000 for Van Drew.

## Nevada’s 2nd district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt279895f4bc74bea8/6af2eedf3c8cbec790efc48f/Teresa_Benitez-Thompson_NV-02.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Teresa Benitez-Thompson, then a Democratic candidate in Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, poses during a campaign event in Incline Village, Nev., on June 11, 2026\. —William Hale Irwin—AP

Teresa Benitez-Thompson became the first Democrat ever elected to Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, winning a race that not a single forecaster TIME analyzed had rated as even a toss-up, though Republican retiring Rep. Mark Amodei, who had won the district by 19 points in 2024, had said the seat was “[at risk](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/17/nevada-gop-congress-01125370)” due to the Trump-endorsed GOP nominee seeking to replace him. 

Benitez-Thompson, a former Nevada Assembly majority leader and social worker, defeated Republican David Flippo, a small business owner whom Amodei refused to endorse over controversies related to Flippo’s military record as well as personal and campaign finances.

Benitez-Thompson’s campaign [spent around $873,000](https://ballotpedia.org/Nevada's%5F2nd%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026), compared with Flippo’s $2.8 million. The race [attracted $6.5 million of general election outside spending](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/nv-02)—the most that district has ever seen, according to the [_Nevada Independent_](https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/oh-shit-we-won-inside-the-perfect-storm-that-flipped-nevadas-only-gop-house-seat)—$2.5 million of which supported Benitez-Thompson or attacked Flippo.

## Ohio’s 10th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5c36905cf82bdbc5/6af2ef5b09298f04b721337f/Kristina_Knickerbocker_OH-10.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Kristina Knickerbocker, then the Democratic candidate for Ohio’s 10th congressional district, conducts a roundtable on childcare costs in Dayton, Ohio, on Oct. 21, 2026\. —Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Kristina Knickerbocker narrowly defeated 12-term incumbent Mike Turner, flipping the district blue. Only [FiftyPlusOne had rated](https://fiftyplusone.news/forecast/house) the race as a toss-up, while nine other forecasters rated it as lean or likely Republican.

Turner [spent about $538,000 more](https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio's%5F10th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026) on his campaign than Knickerbocker, an Air Force veteran and nurse practitioner who has not previously held elected office. But independent spending favored the Democrat, with outside groups [spending around $7.7 million](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/oh-10), including $4.6 million from House Majority PAC, on helping Knickerbocker defeat Turner. Outside groups spent $4.5 million for Turner or against Knickerbocker.

The last Democrat elected to the district was Dennis Kucinich in 2010, before the district was redrawn from the Cleveland area to the Dayton area.

## Ohio’s 15th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0175087a39c4789d/6af2efa728c8666d718f6308/Don_Leonard_OH-15.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Don Leonard, then the Democratic candidate for Ohio’s 15th congressional district, talks with voters in Circleville, Ohio, on Oct. 23, 2026\. —Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Don Leonard beat three-term incumbent Mike Carey in a race that, like Ohio’s 10th district, only FiftyPlusOne had rated as a toss-up, while the other forecasters rated it as lean or likely Republican. The district last elected a Democrat in 2008, when Mary Jo Kilroy won under different boundaries.

Leonard, a former college professor at Ohio State, was a first-time candidate who defeated the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, Adam Miller, in the primary. Leonard’s campaign [spent around $1.2 million](https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio's%5F15th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026) through Oct. 14, compared with Carey’s $4 million. House Majority PAC [spent another $2.5 million](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/oh-15) against Carey, contributing to a total of $6.5 million of outside spending on Leonard’s side. Outside groups spent $5.1 million on Carey’s side.

## South Carolina’s 1st district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5bf7d72c89c8f148/6af2f019cdd4081e824d4663/Nancy_Lacore_SC-01.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Nancy Lacore, then the Democratic candidate for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district, speaks to campaign staff and volunteers during a canvassing kickoff at her camapign headquarters in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., on Sept. 26, 2026\. —Bill Clark—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Nancy Lacore, a retired Navy vice admiral who was dismissed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in 2025 and has not previously held elected office, defeated Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt in the open race to represent South Carolina’s 1st district.

Democrat Joe Cunningham previously flipped the seat in 2018, then lost to Republican Nancy Mace in 2020\. Mace did not pursue reelection this year to pursue an unsuccessful run for governor.

Lacore’s campaign [spent around $4.7 million](https://ballotpedia.org/South%5FCarolina%27s%5F1st%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection%2C%5F2026) against Honeycutt’s $984,000, although Honeycutt benefitted from [$7.5 million in outside spending](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/sc-01), compared to $3.7 million for Lacore.

Cook Political Report and Race to the WH rated the race as a toss-up, while eight other forecasters rated it as tilt, lean, or likely Republican.

## Texas’s 9th district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5b392d87677b19c1/6af2f02828c866ef958f630e/Leticia_Gutierrez_TX-09.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Leticia Gutierrez (D, Texas) speaks at an Election Night rally in Baytown, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2026\. —Jason Fochtman—Houston Chronicle/Getty Images

Leticia Gutierrez, a former Houston government aide and environmental advocate, beat Republican small business owner and veteran Alex Mealer in a district that the GOP [redrew](https://time.com/7331821/partisan-redistricting-fight/) last year. The redrawn boundaries transformed a Democratic-held district into an area that Trump had carried in 2024 by nearly 20 points. Still, Gutierrez won by 15.1 points despite her campaign [spending considerably less](https://ballotpedia.org/Texas'%5F9th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection,%5F2026)—$104,000 in total—than Mealer’s $2.6 million. She was supported by an additional $268,000 in outside spending, compared with $3.1 million on Mealer’s side.

Gutierrez, a first-time candidate, told the [AP](https://apnews.com/article/house-midterm-elections-democrats-republicans-0bc9600f5ee30a5740c4a597cd44c6e6) that Democrats and donors considered her district a lost cause. Not a single forecaster that TIME analyzed rated the race even as a toss-up.

Gutierrez’s surprise victory retains the Democratic hold on the district. Democrat Al Green had represented the district since 2005 and won unopposed in 2024, but the redistricting moved him into a different congressional contest, in which he lost the Democratic primary.

Gutierrez’s win comes amid a broader [blue wave in Texas](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/what-just-happened-in-texas-changes-everything/) and marks one of the largest Democratic shifts across the country, shifting the district around 35 percentage points toward Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential election.

**Read More:** [_Are Democrats’ Stunning Midterm Upsets in Deep-Red States a Blip—or Is Their Map Expanding?_](https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/democrats-2026-midterm-elections-deep-red-states/)

## Texas’s 23rd district

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt05f2a30697d3c799/6af2f0ac28c866af738f6313/Katy_Padilla_Stout_TX-23.jpg?branch=production)

Rep.-elect Katy Padilla Stout (D, Texas) gives remarks to the media outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 8, 2026\. —Aaron Schwartz—Getty Images

Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney and former teacher who has not held elected office before, defeated Republican gun rights activist Brandon Herrera for the seat previously held by Republican Tony Gonzales, who [dropped his re-election bid](https://time.com/7382815/tony-gonzales-texas-congress-reelection-drop-out-primary-affair-staffer/) and later resigned from Congress amid an [ethics investigation regarding a sexual affair](https://time.com/article/2026/05/11/congress-sexual-misconduct-epstein-metoo/) with a former staffer. 

Three election forecasters rated the race as a toss-up while seven rated it as lean or likely Republican. Padilla Stout, who is the district’s first Democratic winner since Pete Gallego in 2012, [spent roughly $973,000](https://ballotpedia.org/Texas%27%5F23rd%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5Felection%2C%5F2026) on her campaign, compared to Herrera’s $2.8 million, though she was helped by outside groups [spending around $4.8 million](https://paidforpolitics.com/races/tx-23) for her or against Herrera. Outside groups spent $3.1 million on Herrera’s side.

## South Carolina Senate

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt955b83ea851be884/6af2f0f7e47c1eea7cc30c70/Annie_Andrews_SC.jpg?branch=production)

Sen.-elect Annie Andrews (D, S.C.) arrives at the Capitol for new member orientation on Nov. 9, 2026\. —Win McNamee—Getty Images

[Annie Andrews](https://time.com/article/2026/11/02/south-carolina-senate-midterm-elections-lindsey-graham-darline-annie-andrews/) became the first woman elected to the Senate from South Carolina and the first Democrat elected to the Senate from the state since Fritz Hollings in 1998\. Andrews beat Republican incumbent [Darline Graham](https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/darline-graham-nordone-runoff-south-carolina-special-gop-senate-primary/), who had been [appointed](https://time.com/article/2026/07/13/lindsey-graham-senate-seat-vacancy-congress-gop-replacement/) after the death of her brother, longtime Republican Sen. [Lindsey Graham](https://time.com/article/2026/07/12/the-world-pays-tribute-to-sen-lindsey-graham/), in July.

Andrews, a [pediatrician](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/doctors-scientists-won-2026-midterm-elections/) who had never held elected office and ran unsuccessfully for the House in 2022, was helped by heavy campaign spending—[$22.5 million against Graham’s $1.28 million](https://ballotpedia.org/United%5FStates%5FSenate%5Felection%5Fin%5FSouth%5FCarolina%2C%5F2026). Nevertheless, her victory was surprising. Of [the eight 2026 U.S. Senate races that at least one forecaster had rated a toss-up](https://time.com/article/2026/11/03/us-election-midterms-forecasters-analysis-senate-race-ratings/), it was the only one where not a single forecaster had rated the race as tilting, leaning, or likely Democrat. (Democrats won all of those races, except for Alaska, which remains uncalled.) Seven rated the South Carolina race as tilt, lean, or likely Republican, while three rated it a toss-up.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt4869622da64723cf Tue, 10 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Miranda Jeyaretnam\]\]><!\[CDATA\[What Making a Film About Iran Taught Me About Power\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/film-iran-civil-society-death-penalty-power/<!\[CDATA\[Ideas\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Iran is a country oppressed by its laws. It is also a country full of people who have become extraordinarily adept at navigating them.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Morteza Nikoubazl-Nur Photo-Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Young Iranian women walk together along a sidewalk in downtown Tehran, Iran, on April 23, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb3dff951fbaccf66/6af1fba0d52f493454038d42/GettyImages-2272159716_(1%29.jpg?branch=production)

Young Iranian women walk together along a sidewalk in downtown Tehran, Iran, on April 23, 2026\. —Morteza Nikoubazl-Nur Photo-Getty Images

More than a decade ago, in Tehran, Tahereh Noori, a ​35-year-old housewife, and her two teenage daughters[ killed](https://tabnak.ir/fa/news/368218/%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C-%DA%A9%D9%88%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B7%D8%A6%D9%87-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%DA%AF%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%82%D8%AA%D9%84-%D9%BE%D8%AF%D8%B1) her husband. They buried his body beneath the living room floor, under the coffee table. Tahereh had endured years of abuse, and all her attempts to obtain a divorce through Iran’s family courts had failed. The violence had become part of her children’s lives as well as her own. She felt there was no other way out. 

When I first heard her[ story](https://www.mehrnews.com/news/2141291/%D9%85%D8%AD%D8%A7%DA%A9%D9%85%D9%87-%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B7%D8%A6%D9%87-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%DA%AF%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%82%D8%AA%D9%84-%D9%BE%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D8%B8%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%85%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%82%D8%B6-%D9%85%D8%AA%D9%87%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86), I could not stop thinking about the distance between asking for a divorce and burying a husband beneath the floor. What had happened in those years? How had killing him come to seem like her only escape? 

By the time my co-director, Farzad Jafari, and I began making _An Eye for an Eye_, a film about Taherah, she had spent 14 years in prison under the threat of execution. Under Iran’s system of qisas, her husband’s family could seek her execution or forgive her in exchange for diya, or blood money. Her temporary release on bail gave her a chance to participate in negotiations over her fate. Her children, now adults, were trying to raise the money that might save their mother’s life.

I had expected to make a film primarily about Tahereh and the tragic drama of her life: the violence she had endured, the legal system that had trapped her, and the possibility that she might be executed. Instead, making the[ film](https://www.iranintl.com/202610228010) transformed my understanding of the strength of Iranian civil society.

### Iranian lessons

During our research, we met activists who had devoted their time and attention to helping people facing the death penalty. This was how I got to know Farkhondeh Jabarzadegan, an anti-execution[ activist](https://tabnak.ir/fa/news/1193423/%D9%86%D8%A7%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA%D9%87%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B2%D9%86%DB%8C-%DA%A9%D9%87-200-%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D9%86%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF), and the women who volunteered alongside her. They were lawyers, social workers, activists, and ordinary citizens who had learned to navigate a legal system that families often struggled to contend with on their own. They did not work through a single organization or follow a formal plan. Much of their work was unpaid. Sometimes they simply knew whom to call. 

At first, I thought of this as a practical response to a broken system. But the longer I watched, the clearer it became that I was seeing something more consequential. These women had built a kind of informal infrastructure of care. They knew which doors might open. They knew how to approach a grieving family. They knew when to argue and when to listen. They understood that telling grieving relatives they were wrong to stay angry would do little to persuade them to forgive a person who had killed someone they loved. 

These women activists spent hours sitting with Tahereh’s husband’s relatives, asking them to reconsider. They would listen to anger without dismissing it. When the conversation turned to money, they tried to bring the amount of blood money demanded within reach of Tahereh’s family. Watching them, I became aware of how much skill it took to sustain what might look from the outside like an ordinary conversation. They were negotiating the terms of forgiveness with a family whose decision was bound up with grief, anger, faith, and money, and could determine whether Tahereh lived or died. And they were doing it without the power to compel anyone. 

They also had to listen to Tahereh herself. After 14 years in prison, she was understandably angry and felt she had been punished enough. Her children were desperate to prevent her execution, whatever it took. Tahereh did not always agree with the people trying to help her. She often resisted their advice or became frustrated with the process. They were not helping an idealized or even always grateful victim. The volunteers kept working with her, responding to a complicated person in an impossible situation.

### Navigating Tehran 

In making this film, I expected to encounter the many restrictions that Iranian society and its religious legal system imposed on women. I expected to see how the law oppressed and failed them. What surprised me was how much influence women had learned to exercise within those constraints. That influence was rarely dramatic. Often it took the form of quiet persistence, whether that meant making another phone call, finding another intermediary, or sitting down with someone who had already said no. 

Their work made me think differently about what civil society means in a country where formal institutions may not provide people with the protections they need. We often think of civil society in terms of organizations, institutions, and public movements. But it can also take less visible forms. It can grow out of knowledge passed from one person to another, relationships built over years, and a willingness to intervene in the life of someone who is neither a friend nor a relative. The women I met had developed precisely this kind of network.

Their work also challenged an assumption I had held about what it means to live under a restrictive system. It is easy, particularly from outside Iran, to imagine people living under such systems primarily as powerless. But power does not disappear simply because the state is powerful. Power moves into other places. People living under authoritarian governments can still exercise power and influence through relationships, knowledge, social networks, and persuasion. 

The women helping Tahereh could not rewrite the law. They could not compel her husband’s family to forgive her. They could not undo the violence that had already taken place. But they could open up possibilities within a system that seemed to leave very few. And that changed the way I thought about Iran. Through Tahereh’s story, I learned that Iran is not simply a society oppressed by its laws. Iran is also a society full of people who had become extraordinarily adept at navigating the country’s legal and political system. 

The ingenuity these Iranian activists had developed was itself, in part, a consequence of the failures of the institutions around them. I wish they did not have to spend their time persuading families to spare families facing executions. Their efforts cannot substitute for laws that protect women from violence or for a justice system that treats them fairly. But their work reveals something that is easy to miss when all we see of Iran is its government: the persistence of a socially and culturally engaged population that has not surrendered its capacity to act. 

Tahereh’s story began with a failure of institutions. A woman tried to leave an abusive marriage and could not. The violence escalated. Eventually, she and her daughters killed the abuser they believed they could not escape. But the story did not end there. Around Tahereh were people who refused to accept that her fate was predetermined. They could not erase the killing. They could not make the system fair. They could not guarantee forgiveness. They could intervene and they did.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltef4c7bf8616fbf0b Tue, 10 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Tanaz Eshaghian\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Congress’s Permitting Bill Is a ‘Massive Giveaway’ to the AI Data Center Industry, Critics Warn\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/permitting-bill-data-centers/<!\[CDATA\[Business\]\]><!\[CDATA\[A bipartisan bill has come under fire from environmentalists who argue that it will facilitate gas-powered data center construction.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Stephanie Keith—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Protestors rally against the CoreWeave AI data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey in October. As data center anger has swelled, Congress just passed a bill that could ease their construction.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltac212794d01b2b98/6af22b0563734cc840c91e1d/GettyImages-2300814821.jpg?branch=production)

Protestors rally against the CoreWeave AI data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey in October. As data center anger has swelled, Congress just passed a bill that could ease their construction. —Stephanie Keith—Getty Images

On Monday, the Senate voted to advance a bipartisan bill aimed at easing the construction of new energy infrastructure. The bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), has a [broad base of support](https://www.energy.senate.gov/press/dem/what-theyre-saying-heinrichs-bipartisan-permitting-reform-deal-will-deliver-cheaper-energy-more-jobs-responsible-growth/), including from labor leaders who contend it will produce thousands of jobs and clean energy proponents who believe it could unlock wind and solar. Its sponsors are hoping to pass the bill before the current Congress ends in January. 

But the bill has also received vehement blowback from a growing coalition of anti-data center critics, who argue that it would accelerate the buildout of an industry that Americans resoundingly voted against in the midterm elections. BAAJA does address affordability concerns by forcing data centers to pay the full cost of the upgrades they trigger, and contains transmission reforms designed to modernize the grid. But it also strips back environmental protections and could lead to more data centers powered by gas and built on public lands.

Hundreds of local and national organizations have signed letters urging Congress not to pass the bill as written, including the [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/11/sierra-club-baaja-remains-fundamentally-flawed-despite-manager-s-amendment) and the [Natural Resources Defense Council](https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/nrdc-senate-permitting-bill-still-needs-improvements). Conversely, many industry trade [groups](https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/are-data-centers-ready-to-pay-double-to-unclog-the-grid/) have been [supportive](https://www.itic.org/news-events/news-releases/iti-permitting-reform-is-essential-to-maintain-america-s-technology-leadership) of the bill, despite the fact that it would likely make building more expensive. On Sunday, Donald Trump urged the Senate to pass the bill on Truth Social, [writing](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117583560661477967) that “China will take any Data Center that we don’t want.” 

The bill represents the first major test for Democrats post-election, as they contend with how to deliver on affordability and many other issues in their sprawling coalition at the same time. 

“Everything about BAAJA goes against the spirit of voters this midterms, in which we saw voters turn out for candidates who directly oppose data centers,” says Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaigns manager at the environmental nonprofit Oil Change International. “This bill is a massive giveaway to the data center industry—and creates a backdoor for fossil fuels to enter the grid through data centers.” 

**Read More:** [_How AI Backlash Shaped the 2026 Midterms_](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/midterm-elections-results-ai-industry-data-centers/)

## Gas and Fossil Fuels

America’s data center boom has also been a gas boom. In the scramble to bring AI data centers online as fast as possible, many developers have built their own gas power plants instead of waiting to connect to the grid. Global Energy Monitor data [reported](https://www.wired.com/story/us-data-centers-drive-gas-power-expansion/) by _Wired_ show that U.S. gas projects powering data centers increased from roughly 4 gigawatts in early 2024 to 189 gigawatts in development by mid-2026\. In some cases, these gas plants have worsened local pollution and exacerbated health issues like asthma, scientific researchers contend. 

**Read More**: [_Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk’s xAI_ ](https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/)

BAAJA incentivizes a wide range of energy sources to come online faster, including solar and wind. Many experts are hopeful that the bill will accelerate the buildout of transmission lines that are essential for bringing clean energy online. 

But environmentalists worry that the first and foremost beneficiary of the bill won’t be clean energy sources but rather gas-powered data centers, because there is already a massive pipeline of proposed projects waiting for various approvals. Rosenbluth points to several gas-powered data centers that are currently plodding through the permitting process, including the Ports-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio and the STAK Energy Campus in Alaska. If BAAJA were to pass, she says, key environmental permits they are trying to obtain could be fast-tracked, potentially allowing them to come online much more quickly. 

Holly Bender, chief program officer of the Sierra Club, says that "based on their need for speed to power, the data center industry is driving a historic and alarming investment in gas and fossil fuels. There’s a lot in this bill that will make it easier and faster to build gas pipelines, while making it harder for communities to have a say.”

## Public and Tribal lands 

Another major concern from critics is that the bill will lead to many more data centers getting built on federally-owned land. The Trump administration has embraced this idea, and signed an executive order in July 2025 directing the Interior and Energy departments to make federal sites available for data centers and to streamline their environmental reviews. “We’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we’ve got to build AI data centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum [said in 2025.](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/may/5/burgum-build-baby-build-data-centers-win-ai-race-versus-china/)

There are at least 17 active applications connected to data center campuses on public land, covering thousands of acres in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and other states, [one recent study](https://westernpriorities.org/2026/10/new-map-tracks-data-center-applications-moving-through-blms-pipeline/) found. BAAJA’s permitting provisions could make those projects easier to advance and harder to stop, including limiting judges’ ability to halt construction due to environmental review. 

Additionally, some Tribal organizations and leaders have spoken out forcefully against the bill, with a coalition of Tribal leaders [writing](https://www.106strong.com/nov-7-press-release) on Saturday that the bill would “gut the ability of Tribal Nations and the American public to identify and protect historic and cultural places threatened by federally connected projects—including data centers.” 

## Potential benefits 

However, the bill’s advocates argue that it addresses several of the public’s most pressing data center concerns. The first is around affordability: The bill contains ratepayer protections which would require developers to pay for the added cost of transmission. One study estimates that data centers would pay approximately [$55 billion](https://gridstrategiesllc.com/grid-funding-from-data-centers-in-baaja/) in transmission charges over ten years—about $35 billion more than under current policy. The bill establishes protections to prevent households and businesses from being left with the bill for failed projects. 

“The day of data center freeloading ends when this bill passes,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors, [said](https://x.com/AidanRMackenzie/status/2119840161362247719) last week. He added on Monday that passing the bill would set the stage for Democrats to work on substantial clean energy policies next year when they control both chambers. 

A [study](https://rhg.com/research/baaja-us-energy-system-impacts/) from the Rhodium Group projected that the bill as introduced will reduce household electricity bills, both by expanding access to lower-cost electricity and by preventing data-center costs from being shifted to other customers. But Meg Slattery, a staff scientist at Earthjustice, contends that the ravenous demand from the data center industry could simply soak up the power that comes online. 

“It's quite possible that if there are more gas pipelines being built, for example, that is going to increase data center demand,” she says. “We are supportive of transmission reform because we want to build a clean energy grid that benefits everybody. But these other provisions, we think, are going to fast-track the worst version of this story.” 

Following Monday’s cloture vote, the Senate must vote to take up the legislation. If it does, the bill will face the amendment process, and any Senate-passed version would then have to pass the House in identical form before going to Trump. 

The bill’s advocates argue that its passage would serve as a rare bipartisan win and a victory for affordability. But critics, especially those on the left, are calling for Democrats to wait until the next Congress. “You just heard Americans demand much more of a say in a way that AI is shaping their lives,” says Michele Jawando, the CEO of Omidyar Network. “Whenever you try to ram something through in a lame duck Congress before you have a hundred new House members, that’s never a good look for either the industry or other actors.” 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt8332983593535403 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 04:00:08 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Andrew R. Chow\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Fossil Fuel Emissions Are Expected to Decrease in 2026\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/fossil-fuel-emissions-decrease-2026/<!\[CDATA\[Climate\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The drop is largely due to the Iran war and clean energy expansion.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[CN-STR—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Workers install solar panels on the roof of a greenhouse growing mushrooms in Yuexi County, Anqing, in China's eastern Anhui Province on Oct. 29, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltafef3b885164e373/6af23b2bcaf94b00737416c7/carbon-budget.jpg?branch=production)

Workers install solar panels on the roof of a greenhouse growing mushrooms in Yuexi County, Anqing, in China's eastern Anhui Province on Oct. 29, 2026\. —CN-STR—Getty Images

Global [fossil fuel](https://time.com/article/2026/04/24/why-countries-are-attending-fossil-fuel-transition-summit/)emissions are likely to decrease by 0.4% in 2026, according to new research by the [Global Carbon Project](https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-895), an annual report that tracks trends in global carbon emissions. 

The drop was spurred on by the energy shock triggered by the [Iran war](https://time.com/7382998/iran-war-global-energy-transition/) and the [expansion of wind and solar power](https://time.com/collection/time100-climate/2026/tim-latimer/) adoption globally. 

While it’s a promising sign, the researchers say that the findings don’t spell out a permanent decline in fossil fuel use, but rather a temporary shift. 

“We see a decrease in emissions, but it's probably driven by a short term shock rather than a systemic peak,” says Mike O’Sullivan, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and one of the report’s researchers. 

Two of the world’s three biggest emitters are expected to see a drop in emissions. China’s emissions are expected to drop by 0.9% in 2026, following two years of remaining flat or falling. The country is a world leader in clean energy adoption, but is also responsible for 32% of global [fossil fuel emissions](https://time.com/7333440/2025-carbon-emission-record-high/). The U.S. is also expected to see a 1.3% decrease in emissions, mainly attributed to a decrease in coal emissions following a spike in 2025 due to high natural gas prices and a spell of cold weather. This trend, however, could shift. Since taking office, President Trump has invested hundreds of millions towards reviving the country’s coal industry, and repealed emissions standards for coal and gas power plants.

India, on the other hand, will likely see emissions rise by 4.4%—a bump from the 3.5% annual growth in fossil fuel emissions it has averaged over the last decade. 

The European Union and Japan are also expected to see slight decreases in fossil fuel emissions, while emissions for the rest of the world are alsoexpected to decrease by 0.7%—largely due to decline in oil use. 

Global emissions from land-use change, another sector tracked in the report, have decreased over the past decade, but this year they’re expected to rise to 5.1 billion metric tons. That’s due to an increase in peat fires, slow burning fires that move beneath the ground, consume wetland soil and often lack visible flames, many of which have been ignited by human activities, and El Niño, which is increasing wildfire risk in places like Southeast Asia and South America. These fires release large amounts of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. 

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 ppm in 2026—54% above pre-industrial levels. According to the report, the global carbon budget, which represents how much carbon dioxide can be emitted before warming reaches 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, is now at 150 billion metric tons—equivalent to less than four years of emissions, assuming the world continues to emit at its current rate. 

The world is expected to blow past 1.5 degrees of warming, the U.N. has recently warned, and global climate goals are falling short of what is needed. But the authors highlight some signs of promise.

Despite some places seeing total emissions increase between 2019 and 2025, all regions still saw growth slow—including in China, India, and other emerging economies. On the other hand, more than two dozen countries have managed to grow their economies without increasing emissions, and the global adoption of wind and solar energy has helped avoid billions of metric tons of emissions. 

The authors estimate that, between now and the end of 2028, 64-79% of emissions from new energy demand will be offset by new solar and wind power and electric vehicles. What’s more, if the world continues to see an acceleration of clean energy adoption, it could see emissions peak and decline in just a few years. 

It doesn’t mean the work is done. “There's plenty of good news in terms of the rapid expansion of renewables,” says O’Sullivan, “but on a global scale, it's completely inadequate.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt43f276240714dd29 Tue, 10 Nov 2026 01:00:03 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Simmone Shah\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Trump Opens the Door to an Immigration Deal. Democrats Want Proof He's Serious\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/democratic-congress-immigration-deal-Trump-DACA-mass-deportation-amnesty/<!\[CDATA\[Politics\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Following crushing midterm losses, Trump softened his tone on immigration, but promoted Stephen Miller.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Aaron Schwartz–Bloomberg via Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, left, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, arrive for a news conference with Democratic lawmakers outside the Capitol in Washington, DC, on Thursday, May 21, 2026.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6a3f1e22e175183d/6af22b7909298f0b2b2130e2/GettyImages-2276924954.jpg?branch=production)

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, left, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, arrive for a news conference with Democratic lawmakers outside the Capitol in Washington, DC, on Thursday, May 21, 2026\. —Aaron Schwartz–Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Trump signaled last week that he is open to working with Democrats on immigration, after two years of carrying out [aggressive immigration enforcement](https://time.com/article/2026/10/19/ICE-immiration-raid-Wilder-Idaho-warrant-FBI-ACLU/) across the country. 

Days after the [midterm election losses](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/democrats-power-midterms/), Trump acknowledged during an interview on _60 Minutes_ filmed on Friday that his Administration’s mass deportation policies might be “too tough.” “Let the people that are here, and in some cases, here for 10 and 15 years—work a deal for them,” Trump said. 

  
The offer by Trump follows a midterm election in which his Administration policies prompted a national backlash that strategists say played a role in delivering to Democrats one of their best election showings in decades. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin echoed Trump’s conciliatory remarks, telling reporters at a conference in Maryland that Trump has encouraged him to work with Democrats who have reached out about collaborating on immigration reform in the new Congress.

The prospects of Trump agreeing to an immigration deal drew wariness from both parties. Democrats were especially circumspect at Trump’s gentler tone days after [tapping Stephen Miller](https://time.com/article/2026/11/06/stephen-miller-tapped-as-trump-s-new-chief-of-staff-replacing-susie-wiles/), the architect of the Administration's immigration agenda, as his new White House Chief of Staff. 

“Miller…is probably extremely unlikely to advise the president to sign a bad immigration bill or a sweeping amnesty,” says Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and a resident fellow at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies.

The crop of newly elected Democrats to Congress include many who campaigned against Trump’s immigration policies, specifically raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Democratic Socialist Claire Valdez, who just won a House seat in New York which includes part of Brooklyn and Queens, [said](https://x.com/RNCResearch/status/2119824631301644749) at a press conference on Sunday that congressional Democrats “have a mandate” to abolish ICE.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Leader who is on track to be the next Speaker of the House, [said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blia5ITZ7cs) in a CBS interview on Monday that any potential deal with Trump should start with restoring protections for recipients for programs like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which covers undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, and Temporary Protective Status (TPS), which allowed immigrants who sought refuge from natural disasters or armed conflicts to stay and work in the U.S.

“We can begin by moving in the House, and ultimately in the Senate, the Dream and Promise Act in order to restore protection for DACA recipients and TPS recipients. And that should be a foundation for more broader work that can be done together,” Jeffries explained, adding that reforming ICE and ending mass deportation would also be a part of the discussion. 

It’s unclear how many Republicans would work on any immigration deal in the new Congress. The House Freedom Caucus, which represents a bloc of ultra conservative lawmakers in Congress, posted on Monday that it [rejected](https://x.com/freedomcaucus/status/2119788508478898507?s=46) any potential efforts to offer amnesty to undocumented immigrants.

Mullin stressed that the administration would not support a blanket amnesty program, but was open to movement on programs that cover hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the country such as DACA. “If we want to have an immigration reform where we can look at DACA, and figure out a way that these individuals can become, maybe, legal permanent citizens…that’ll be up to Congress to do that. I’ll be open to talk to anything,” Mullin said, according to [multiple](https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/09/politics/live-news/midterm-election-trump-congress?post-id=cmw9hn05i00003b6wp4rn2bn9) [outlets](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/11/dhs-sec-mullin-open-to-daca-deal-but-draws-hard-line-against-amnesty-01156602). 

Yet, as one source in Congress familiar with the immigration policy discussions tells TIME, if Trump is serious about working with Democrats on immigration, he could prove it by slowing down or even pausing deportations across the country. In the meantime, his comments may be seen by many as little more than an empty gesture.

“It doesn’t seem like there is anything to work with him on at the moment but that may change next year,” the source adds. 

# Trump’s history with immigration reform

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This isn’t the first time Trump expressed openness to some immigration reforms. 

During his State of the Union address in 2018, Trump proposed a [framework](https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/four-pillars-the-trump-administration-immigration-plan) to congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million people eligible for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. But the measure was viewed as a half-hearted measure by Trump, who acknowledged it lacked the votes in the Senate. The legislation ultimately [failed](https://time.com/5318500/immigration-bills-vote-congress-family-separation-policy/) to pass the House, with 112 Republican members joining all House Democrats in opposing the bill. 

The last time that a comprehensive immigration reform bill was taken seriously by both chambers of Congress was in 2013, during Obama’s second term, according to Arthur. That measure would have allowed undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. to stay in the country while waiting to apply for a green card. The bill was ultimately killed in the House by far-right Republicans [led](https://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2016/jeff-sessions-stephen-miller/) by then-Rep. Jeff Sessions and his chief of staff, who was the same Stephen Miller Trump just [promoted](https://time.com/article/2026/11/06/stephen-miller-tapped-as-trump-s-new-chief-of-staff-replacing-susie-wiles/) to the same role in his White House.

“The rule of thumb in Washington is always to take Donald Trump seriously, but never take him literally,” says Arthur.

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blte00d0e4699b8e912 Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:35:16 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Philip Wang\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Are Data Centers to Blame for Rising Electricity Prices?\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/are-data-centers-to-blame-for-rising-electricity-prices-/<!\[CDATA\[Ideas\]\]><!\[CDATA\[John Farrell argues that America's electricity monopoly model is ultimately responsible for skyrocketing energy costs.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[mammuth—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1f60fb3caa6fbf06/6af230f263734c2405c91e31/Rising-Enegy-Costs.jpg?branch=production)

 —mammuth—Getty Images

The [data center debate](https://time.com/article/2026/10/21/how-america-s-ai-trust-issues-could-impact-the-midterms/) rages [nationwide](https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/midterm-elections-results-ai-industry-data-centers/), and it often centers on one question: How much are data centers driving up electric bills? 

But most Americans would be surprised to learn that their bills will keep climbing—even if no new hyperscaler data centers ever show up. And that raises an even more revealing question: Why is the U.S. still running its economy on a 100-year-old utility model built for the early 1900s?

Using this antiquated electricity delivery system in the modern era has large and widespread consequences. Electricity rates have risen [30%](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm%5Ftable%5Fgrapher.php?t=table%5F5%5F03) in the past five years, and the typical American household pays an extra [$300](https://ilsr.org/energy/utility-bill-calculator/) annually. Utilities in at least eight states are preemptively shutting off electricity service. And some states are responding to threats of catastrophic wildfires often sparked by their own utility equipment. Meanwhile, obsolete utility approaches to meet forecast hyperscaler data center demand threaten even higher costs for ordinary ratepayers.

As a country, we should commit to adopting and linking new technologies like solar and battery storage, giving individuals and communities more control over power production and supply, and offering the cheapest and cleanest way to meet our power needs. However, the old monopoly utility system creates powerful incentives for companies to act against the public need for clean, cheap energy and to thwart existing public oversight mechanisms. Accelerating technological improvements for local power generation and resilience further widens the gap between the outdated utility model and the opportunities of a modern electricity system. 

To be fair, our archaic system made sense at the time. Since the advent of electricity generation, political leaders believed in the public benefits of this essential resource and that a delivery monopoly—a single set of wires to each home or business—was prudent. Then, one after another, states struck bargains to grant for-profit companies a monopoly over electricity delivery in exchange for state oversight. This state-by-state regulatory model quickly fell short, as utilities speculated in unregulated industries and hid the costs. The collapse of large utility holding companies in the 1920s and 1930s [contributed](https://energyhistory.yale.edu/electricity-and-the-public-good-private-public-power-debates-in-the-1920s-30s/) to the Great Depression, [demanding](https://storage.googleapis.com/jnl-bcls-j-bclr-files/journals/1/articles/2439/63e3a3da9b94c.pdf) new federal rules. In 1935, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act made several changes meant to curb utility industry excesses, including breaking up multi-utility holding companies and setting guidelines to prevent a recurrence of mergers that threatened the public interest.

This revised regulatory framework held for 50 more years, but as an economic philosophy of “[bigger is better](https://time.com/3062887/why-big-mergers-are-bad-for-consumers/)” took hold in our national politics in the 80s and 90s, the fervor of market consolidation swept up the utility industry, too. From the mid-90s to 2015, mergers shrank the number of investor-owned utilities by almost half, even as electricity use rose [20%](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/mer.pdf). The death knell of market competition came in 2005, when Congress [repealed](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2005/12/20/05-24116/repeal-of-the-public-utility-holding-company-act-of-1935-and-enactment-of-the-public-utility-holding) key provisions of its 1935 legislation and lifted a ban on utility political contributions, sharply reducing federal oversight and dramatically increasing political influence. Fewer and larger utility companies have meant more power for shareholders and poorer service for consumers.

Utilities have only reinforced that power by crushing potential competitors. They’ve used loopholes in infrastructure planning rules to build pet projects that effectively excluded new entrants. They’ve [lobbied](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/lobbying-clash-intensifies-over-utilities-right-to-build-grid) states for "right of first refusal" laws to get first dibs on owning new poles and wires. They’ve added layers of detailed and time-consuming review and high fees to the grid connection process for new solar arrays and batteries. They’ve also aggressively [lobbied](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/climate/rooftop-solar-panels-tax-credits-utility-companies-lobbying.html) to reduce the energy savings consumers earn from rooftop solar projects.

This old and expensive utility model is increasingly at odds with remarkable technological innovations underway in the production and distribution of electricity. [Research](https://www.rewiringamerica.org/research/homegrown-energy-report-policy-affordable-household-upgrades) by Rewiring America suggests that nearly all the forecast demand from data centers could be met with residential or business clean energy assets such as solar, batteries, and heat pumps, much faster and more affordably than utility-preferred investments like large power plants and transmission lines. Similarly, community solar projects can be built in mere months and share electricity among many “subscribers” (including renters and others typically left out of rooftop solar adoption). This is why experts like myself believe that local resources can directly lower energy costs for [millions](https://www.brattle.com/the-untapped-grid/) of consumers and simultaneously make grids more resilient against climate events such as wildfires or storms. 

The gigawatts of rooftop solar installed by California home and business owners, for example, saved all in-state utility customers over [$2 billion](https://mcubedecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/calssa%5Frooftop-solar-reduces-costs-for-all-ratepayers-2025.pdf) in 2024 alone. Many Californians have attached batteries to their solar systems, allowing them to dispatch power into the state’s grid in periods of sky-high wholesale prices, lowering costs for everyone. But the state’s big three investor-owned utilities have only complaints, because those consumer savings from consumer investments don’t result in big shareholder profits.

We can prevent data centers—or the next big energy demand—from spiking energy bills, but it requires acknowledging two fundamental truths. 

First, the costly failures of today’s grid lie in the overbroad monopoly powers that pit for-profit grid operators against the entrepreneurs and customers who can generate and manage clean electricity for themselves and others. Utilities can only block rooftop solar, for example, because they have a publicly granted monopoly over the poles and wires to which the arrays connect. 

Second, only breaking up for-profit utilities and removing the profit motive from electricity delivery can end the perverse incentives that drive for-profit utilities to abuse their market and political power. 

If we make local electricity distribution a public service, restructured utilities will profit only when they provide a valuable service, not just build a thing. Their proposed power solutions for AI data centers (or anything else) should have to prove as cost-effective as the energy provided by independent producers or networks of customers deploying local solar, batteries, and heat pumps. Like the federal government’s breakup of AT&T fifty years ago, separating the public function of running the network from the competitive function of supplying services (telephones and modems in the AT&T case, local solar electricity in the utility case) can unleash lower costs and innovations –– such as the original fiber optic network that birthed the modern Internet. 

The electricity monopoly model has failed, unable to reconcile central planning and private profits with electricity democracy enabled by modern technology. We can restructure our utility system to tap the best resources from fair and open markets run by accountable grid operators, if we break up the monopoly corporations that stand in the way. Putting the public back in charge would allow us to build a cleaner, more efficient, and resilient grid, better able to meet the challenges of the modern economy, and make good on the promise of this public service that Americans can depend on. 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltf6a7cfbcb9e3d5fc Mon, 09 Nov 2026 20:46:25 +0000<!\[CDATA\[John Farrell\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Weight-Loss Drugs May Help Sleep Apnea and Arthritis\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-may-help-sleep-apnea-and-arthritis/<!\[CDATA\[Health\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Eli Lilly reported results from new studies exploring the effects of its GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on sleep apnea and arthritis.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[UCG/Contributor—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf157f767ea41e7c5/6af21b5463734c46dbc91dfa/GettyImages-2275860760.jpg?branch=production)

 —UCG/Contributor—Getty Images

Researchers continue to document benefits of GLP-1 drugs beyond weight loss and diabetes. At the American Heart Association annual meeting in November and in new studies published in scientific journals, scientists at Eli Lilly reported that Foundayo (orforglipron), its GLP-1 pill [recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration](https://time.com/article/2026/04/01/fda-approves-eli-lilly-obesity-pill/) (FDA), helped reduce the number of [obstructive sleep apnea](https://time.com/7176245/sleep-apnea-treatments-cpap-machine/) episodes people had. Another drug called [retatrutide](https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/eli-lilly-triple-targeting-experimental-weight-loss-drug-promising-results/)—an experimental weight-loss injection that the company is currently testing—helped ease pain caused by osteoarthritis in the knee.

## Foundayo and sleep apnea

In sleep apnea, people stop breathing for brief periods of time, depriving the body and brain of oxygen, which can drive up blood pressure, contribute to atrial fibrillation, place [added burden on the heart](https://time.com/article/2026/04/13/heart-disease-is-preventable-sadiya-khan-essay/), and even sometimes lead to stroke. 

Weight is one of the strongest risk factors for sleep apnea. Excess weight can restrict airways around the neck, throat, and chest, so losing weight can reduce the number of sleep apnea episodes.

Though Foundayo is only approved for chronic weight management—not yet for obstructive sleep apnea—the data suggest it’s the third product from Lilly to address the condition. Its two GLP-1 medications—Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss—are already approved to treat obstructive sleep apnea in those groups. But both of those medicines require patients to inject themselves weekly; Foundayo is a pill, which could provide patients with a more convenient option if the FDA approves it for that purpose. Ken Custer, executive vice president and president of cardiometabolic health at Lilly, says that by the end of 2026, the company plans to submit a request to the FDA for Foundayo’s approval in people who are overweight or obese who also have obstructive sleep apnea.

The two studies published in[ _JAMA_](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/10.1001/jama.2026.24080?guestAccessKey=ea930da2-5b75-4316-bd3c-4825a853fb37) included more than 700 people in nine countries who were overweight or obese—with a BMI of 27 or higher—and had moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea. Some used a device for positive airway pressure therapy (PAP), and some did not. 

People in the study lost an average of 28 pounds—about 11% of their starting body weight—compared to people who took a placebo. Those on the drug also showed improvements in risk factors for heart disease, including reduced levels of the inflammatory marker CRP, and lower blood pressure.

They also had about 44% fewer overnight apnea events over a year compared to those who took a placebo. By the end of a year, about 20% of those who took Foundayo either went into remission for their condition or transitioned to a milder form of the disease. Those results put Foundayo on par with Zepbound for its effect on sleep apnea. 

The study also showed that people who did not use PAP devices had slightly greater reductions in sleep apnea events than those who did. Custer says that could indicate that PAP devices may be doing some of the work to manage the events. It’s also possible that those who didn’t use the devices were generally earlier in their disease.

## Retatrutide and osteoarthritis

In a separate study presented at the conference and[ published in the _New England Journal of Medicine_](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2610676?query=featured%5Fhome), the company reported on an injectable compound still in development, retatrutide, and its effect on arthritis pain in the knee. Retatrutide targets three hormones related to weight, while Foundayo targets one and Zepbound two. Arthritis pain and weight are related, so weight loss can be a major contributor to reducing arthritis-associated pain in joints like the knees. 

That’s what the researchers saw in two studies involving more than 1,000 people who were overweight or obese (with a BMI of at least 27) and also had osteoarthritis in the knee. People were given varying doses of retatrutide or placebo.

Those who received the injectable drug weekly lost about 25% of their body weight, and two thirds of those who got the drug reported a 50% drop in knee pain after more than a year.

While weight and arthritis pain are correlated, “the mechanism of what causes the pain is poorly understood,” says Dr. Thomas Schnitzer, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, anesthesiology, and medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and one of the co-authors of the study. Excess weight can contribute to arthritis in the joints in several ways. One is physical: extra weight places a heavier load on joints and can lead to wearing of the joints and pain. Another is more metabolic: fat cells can produce inflammatory factors that can cause pain in joints. Some data suggest that GLP-1 drugs may have anti-inflammatory effects, which could also contribute to the reduction in pain seen in the study.

Schnitzer says the data should be strong enough to consider the experimental drug as a treatment for arthritis pain in the knee, and Custer says Lilly is studying the drug for chronic low back pain. Lilly is also studying Foundayo for more generalized pain that’s not related to weight. “We believe the incretins \[the group of molecules to which GLP-1s belong\] have analgesic effects mediated by something other than weight loss, given their involvement in inflammatory pathways and potentially impacts on neuronal function,” Custer says. 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt48d33c8d22cf1b56 Mon, 09 Nov 2026 19:59:32 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Alice Park\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Corporate Leaders Discuss the Economic and Technological Future of Latin America at TIME Impact Dinner\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/corporate-leaders-discuss-latin-america-economic-technological-future/<!\[CDATA\[World\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Three industry leaders in the region talked about the topic during a panel at a TIME Impact Dinner on Friday.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Industry leaders in Latin America discussed the economic and technological growth occurring across the region at TIME’s Impact Dinner: Leading LATAM's Next Chapter of Growth in Brazil on Friday. Speaking on a panel at the dinner were Paula Bellizia, the vice president of Amazon Web Services in Latin America; Henrique Dias, co-founder and CEO of NoHarm.ai, an artificial intelligence healthcare platform; and Athina Kanioura, the CEO of Latin America for PepsiCo, which sponsored the event.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

Industry leaders in Latin America discussed the economic and technological growth occurring across the region at TIME’s Impact Dinner: Leading LATAM's Next Chapter of Growth in Brazil on Friday. Speaking on a panel at the dinner were Paula Bellizia, the vice president of Amazon Web Services in Latin America; Henrique Dias, co-founder and CEO of NoHarm.ai, an artificial intelligence healthcare platform; and Athina Kanioura, the CEO of Latin America for PepsiCo, which sponsored the event.

Industry leaders in Latin America discussed the economic and technological growth occurring across the region at TIME’s Impact Dinner: Leading LATAM's Next Chapter of Growth in Brazil on Friday. 

Speaking on a panel at the dinner were Paula Bellizia, the vice president of Amazon Web Services in Latin America; Henrique Dias, co-founder and CEO of [NoHarm.ai](http://noharm.ai), an artificial intelligence healthcare platform; and Athina Kanioura, the CEO of Latin America for PepsiCo, which sponsored the event. 

Kanioura called Latin America “the place to be” for many businesses. 

“We see a lot of white space for big companies to invest, drive growth, drive differentiation, drive innovation,” Kanioura said. She said that PepsiCo has been growing at a faster pace in Latin America than in any other region in the world. 

Brazil, Dias noted, is full of skilled workers, especially in the engineering, computer science, and AI sectors. He said, however, that without outside investment, it’s difficult to make the most of that workforce and stoke economic growth.

“We have very talented people. What we don’t have here is money” said Dias, whose company operates in Brazil as a non-profit that provides free AI services to the public health sector. 

With funds, he contended, “we can build a Silicon Valley in Brazil." 

“But we don't have that kind of money that \[is\] in North America,” he added. “But we have very clever people, very clever companies.”

In addition to a talented workforce, the corporate leaders asserted that emerging technologies will be a key ingredient in Latin America’s future growth. 

“Technology is hitting us, is coming towards us in a positive way in terms of really bringing more wealth and bringing opportunity for people,” Bellizia said. 

To illustrate the vital role technology is playing in Brazil, she explained that 12 million companies in the country—which she said represents roughly half of all the businesses there—said they are using AI in their work, and that the rate of AI use is growing at a fast pace of 30% year over year. 

When asked what is required to continue Latin America’s steady pace of economic and technological growth, Bellizia said: “What this continent lacks is infrastructure. It doesn't lack talent. It doesn't lack drive. It doesn't lack resilience. But for you guys to have the technology that you need, you need data centers. For data centers to be there, you need infrastructure. You need water.” 

Dias added that there needs to be a larger investment in national technology and a movement away from “importing AI technology” from industry giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.

“We need to invest in national technology to be more independent from the rest of the world and to be independent ourselves,” he said. 

_TIME Impact Dinner: Leading LATAM's Next Chapter of Growth was presented by PepsiCo._

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt8eb67e89c2ba3efe Mon, 09 Nov 2026 19:53:00 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Connor Greene\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The 10 Best Gifts Under $100\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/best-gifts-under-100/<!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blteb97eaa792af3361/6af1167e5fb4465987cfcabf/under-100-gifts-holidays-best-inventions_(3%29.jpg?branch=production)

Every year, TIME's editors and correspondents work together to compile a collection of the most interesting and groundbreaking new products and innovations for the [Best Inventions](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/) list. As holiday season approaches, the TIME team has pulled out a selection of 10 best items from the list under $100 that would make a perfect gift. 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd5456c8dd4035538/6acfe3c466e6901cf2f452c2/MyAir.0_OriMouse.jpg?branch=production)

 —TIME

## [MyAir.0 OriMouse](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/myair-0-orimouse/)

_A responsive mouse that folds down flat_

After the pandemic forced him to work more flexibly between home, office, and the infinite spaces in between, Horace Lam began searching for a mouse that could keep up. Some were too slick—he’s dropped and broken two. Others felt too heavy. Lam, an inventor who has worked with Targus and Logitech, created the myAir.0 OriMouse, which weighs just 40 grams and charges via USB-C. Inert, the mouse sort of resembles a flattened origami frog. But magnetically snap its two legs together, and the mouse takes on a faceted shape that allows it to nestle comfortably in your palm. _—Daniel Varghese_

**Buy Now:** OriMouse collection on [MyAir.0](https://myair0.com/en-us/collections/frontpage) 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd65eed2341487929/6acef119f400d934886517b7/Bandit-Vanisher-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Bandit

## [Bandit Vanisher ](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/bandit-vanisher/)

_No more sweat marks_

Vanisher is a new sports performance fabric from Bandit that disperses and hides the appearance of sweat, while providing light compression and sun protection. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Bandit Vanisher Collection on [Bandit Running](https://banditrunning.com/collections/vanisher?srsltid=AU7gw4Xlt47ueSg28x%5FlFK-6jsSaB3bHNKc8MjTJ3sbiLoR9wz69XEla)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf710a5cefffaedd7/6acee5d7f400d96fd3651785/LeapFrog-LeapMove-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

## [LeapFrog LeapMove](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/leapfrog-leapmove/)

_Learning in motion_

LeapFrog's LeapMove console uses a built-in camera so kids can control offline motion-based educational games—involving reading, math, spelling, and problem-solving—with their bodies on your TV. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** LeapFrog LeapMove on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0dnkn6fz)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt57a97e2baf21e5f5/6acfafe690def4786a1c1327/nothing-ear-3a-best-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —TIME

## [Nothing Ear 3a](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/nothing-ear-3a/)

_Headphones that can save and share audio_

The new Nothing Ear 3a headphones offer ample aesthetic appeal in an affordable package. But they impress for their unique capability to record and share what you’re listening to. Once you’ve paired the headphones and set up an account in the Nothing app, you can squeeze both earbuds to start taking an audio snapshot, which you can then replay, transcribe, or share with friends. You can even adjust the recording window so that your snapshot includes audio played up to 30 seconds before you actually pressed the buds. Snapshots are under a minute, but the headphones can also record a phone call of up to an hour long. —_Daniel Varghese_

**Buy Now:** Nothing Ear 3a on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0aanjA1u)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ed1e5bb5ae13bdc/6acee61aae052725cc85c2b8/Maxell-Wireless-Cassette-Player-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Maxell Corporation of America

## [Maxell Wireless Cassette Player](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/maxell-wireless-cassette-player/)

_Portable tapes for the modern age_

Cassette tape legacy company Maxell has released a bluetooth-headset-compatible cassette player with a rechargeable battery that can support 11 hours of wireless playback. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Maxell Wireless Cassette Player on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0gzRVBF2)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta3b0958c34761b6d/6acee4fa4336ceb4fce2659e/Twogather-DA1-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Twogather Inc.

## [Twogather DA1 Camera](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/twogather-da1/)

_Live in the moment_

DA1 is a screen-free camera with no connectivity, app, or storage that prints black-and-white photos on BPA-free thermal paper as “receipts of your memories.” _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** DA1 Camera on [DA1](https://www.da1camera.com/products/da1-camera-full-bundle-1)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb265a8575ccd2ea9/6aceeed3862260bd31fd1fcc/Ringo-Pro-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Ringo Products LLC

## [Ringo Pro](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/ringo-pro/)

_Water bottle and phone stand_

Ringo Pro is a water bottle with a built-in MagSafe-compatible mount, allowing it to be used as a portable hands-free tripod for a smartphone. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Ringo Pro on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B08Z6dwoG)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7972a09d64179db7/6acf81f5c336f2ba1da27c8e/Brick-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Brick

## [Brick](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/brick/)

_The ultimate screen time suppressant_

At the ripe age of 23, TJ Driver decided his relationship to his phone needed to change. “It was getting in the way,” he says. He enlisted Zach Nasgowitz, a friend from his undergraduate computer science program, to create Brick, a productivity system that married the available app blocking capabilities of iOS software with a corporeal magnet that acts like a key. If you want access to a blocked app while you’re “Bricked,” you have to tap your phone to the drab, concrete colored Brick, equipped with an NFC chip—often that’s all the friction needed to get you to do something other than doomscroll. The app is now also available on Android. _—Daniel Varghese_

**Buy now:** Brick on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0dLQGoQq)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt669ea8961851d4d6/6aceed6f86226049f4fd1fc0/Lumadrop_Art_Kit.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hunt Rettig

## [Lumadrop Art Kit](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/lumadrop-art-kit/)

_Layered luminescence_

Lumadrop’s unique art kit uses layered translucent film and reflective materials to create luminous, color-shifting compositions. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Lumadrop Art Kit on [Shopify](https://lumadrop-shop.myshopify.com/products/lumadrop-art-kit?variant=45902294122695)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48e78695b01a1cdd/6acee4d9c26d3a1614ccb6a4/Rimiq-Inflatiq-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —All-Fit Automotive, Inc.

## [Rimiq Inflatiq](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/rimiq-inflatiq/)

_On-the-go air_

This portable electric tire pump with auto shut-off can inflate tires, balls, bikes, as well as charge phones with 12V of emergency pass-through power. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Rimiq Inflatiq on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0dLQGoQq)

## 

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt88a88a75b1b9161c Mon, 09 Nov 2026 18:38:53 +0000<!\[CDATA\[TIME Staff\]\]><!\[CDATA\[The 10 Best Gifts Under $50\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/best-gifts-under-50/<!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blteb02ba9f150478c0/6af1138ccdd40819ca4d3f88/under-50-gifts-holidays-best-inventions.jpg?branch=production)

Every year, TIME's editors and correspondents work together to compile a collection of the most interesting and groundbreaking new products and innovations for the [Best Inventions](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/) list. As holiday season approaches, the TIME team has pulled out a selection of 10 best items from the list under $50 that could be a crowd favorite at your next white elephant exchange. 

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte494987d29eae96b/6aceee2a13db9dbad2e74729/Woofino-Bowl-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Nate Dodge

## [Woofino Bowl](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/woofino-bowl/)

_An ultra-portable water bowl_

The Woofino Bowl is a light dog bandana that, unfolded, pops up into an on-the-go water dish. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Woofino Bowl on [Woofino](https://woofino.co/products/woofino-wearable-dog-bowl?srsltid=AU7gw4UHXtxU3g3vQ%5FAnsBG%5F3VO3d5V2aXJ9AbFsJaSwiUgvmEKDefg%5F)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt600b689414bdced7/6acee41ea107170639f78eb6/Heyhae-Sun-Cured-Gel-Nail-Polish-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —heyhae

## [Heyhae Sun-Cured Gel Nail Polish](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/heyhae-sun-cured-gel-nail-polish/)

_A little sunshine, a lasting manicure_

Heyhae’s semi-cured liquid gel nail strips harden under natural sunlight in just five to 10 minutes, eliminating the need for a traditional UV or LED nail lamp. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Heyhae Sun-Cured Gel Nail Polish on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B07TqEecU)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte08a233aa46af7a8/6aceefae2902b1c795c74eb7/Kodak-EC35-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —RETO PRODUCTION LIMITED

## [Kodak EC35](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/kodak-ec35/)

_A classic film camera_

This simple 35mm point-and-shoot film camera comes with fixed settings and an iconic ’90s look. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now**: Kodak EC35 on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0hrZ1vKH)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt206cda9682b578cb/6acee3bd8622609d21fd1f95/Mello-Clip-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Toni Power - Cofounder of Mello

## [Mello Clip](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/mello-clip/)

_A comfortable hair clip_

These claw clips are designed to be flexible but also firmly hold hair while lying flat against the head. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Mello Clip on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0j8YKQ0r)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc85f7af9f0e04097/6acef178a1071704c7f78edc/Play-Doh-Blooms-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Hasbro

## [Play-Doh Blooms](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/play-doh-blooms/)

_Build your own bouquet_

Targeted to adults, Play-Doh Blooms allows them to craft floral arrangements with a kit that includes Play-Doh, tools, molds, a vase, and finishing spray. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Play-Doh Blooms on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0j8YKQ0r)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4482726cf79319c5/6af115a15fb446a798cfcab7/01_TIME_SHOOT_Loop_Experience_2.JPG?branch=production)

 —Hugo Yu for TIME

## [Loop Experience 2](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/loop-experience-2/)

_Trendy ear protection_

Earplugs have always been an unpleasant necessity: utilitarian and often uncomfortable, but essential in many situations. Loop has changed that with their highly functional earplugs that look more like jewelry than auditory safety measures. The brand offers a range of decibel-reducing options, including the popular Experience 2, which uses an acoustic channel, membrane, and mesh to evenly reduce sound rather than just muffling it—and this year got a design makeover by collaborating with [Harry Styles’ company Pleasing](https://pleasing.com/products/pleasing-x-loop-experience-2-loud-enough?variant=47564746817766). Once you spot a pair in the wild, you’ll see them everywhere: [hot-ticket concerts](https://time.com/7310051/science-obsessed-stadium-concerts/), noisy train platforms, outdoor raves, and overloud movie theaters. _—Eliza Thompson_ 

**Buy Now:** Loop Experience 2 on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B07Lt5WjS)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc0dc83bbe5cc0b67/6acef0757f48ae35f7b4000e/RingLine-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —EJ Evans

## [RingLine](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/ringline/)

_Stronger golf ball alignment_

RingLine is a stainless steel golf ball alignment marker with heightened precision and durability. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** RingLine on [RingLine](https://ringlinegolf.com/) Golf

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7d5d1b758a3936f/6aceee8cb12e6a3ed8bb750b/FinalPress-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —FinalPress

## [FinalPress](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/finalpress/)

_Easy-to-clean French press_

FinalPress is a micro French press made of stainless steel (and zero plastic) that can brew hot, iced, or cold brew coffee anywhere, and comes with a unique bottom-lid ejection system for easy cleaning. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** FinalPress on [Amazon](https://link.amazon/B0aYWMVrY)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb5d568dfb3bc5fc/6acef141b12e6ae99dbb7519/WobbleWorks-MindFrames-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —WobbleWorks

## [WobbleWorks MindFrames](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/wobbleworks-mindframes/)

_Build-your-own costumes_

MindFrames lets kids snap colorful geometric pieces together to create wearable shapes like crowns, wings, wands, and masks, encouraging the development of spatial reasoning, problem-solving, and fine motor skills. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** MindFrames on [WobbleWorks](https://wobbleworks.net/collections/mindframes)

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e3e7ca2ada22e64/6aceef8eb12e6af284bb7511/Tiny-Vinyl-Player-time-inventions-2026.jpg?branch=production)

 —Tiny Vinyl

## [Tiny Vinyl Player](https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-special-mentions/2026/tiny-vinyl-player/)

_Cute little records_

Tiny Vinyl Player accommodates fully functional and traditionally pressed 4-inch vinyl records that are available in limited edition collections. _—TIME Staff_

**Buy Now:** Tiny Vinyl Player at [Target](https://www.target.com/p/tiny-vinyl-player-black/-/A-1010655248)

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=blt975bf3c0a5533ce5 Mon, 09 Nov 2026 18:38:11 +0000<!\[CDATA\[TIME Staff\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How To Efficiently Heat Your Home As a Renter This Winter\]\]> https://time.com/article/2026/11/09/home-winter-heating-renters/<!\[CDATA\[Climate\]\]><!\[CDATA\[How to stay warm without wasting heat or money this winter season.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[Silas Stein—Getty Images\]\]><!\[CDATA\[A thermostat can be seen on a radiator in an apartment.\]\]><!\[CDATA\[

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt09840672ec9ea9b5/6af1f23fe47c1ec20cc30952/home-heating.jpg?branch=production)

A thermostat can be seen on a radiator in an apartment. —Silas Stein—Getty Images

Winter is fast approaching, beckoning a drop in temperatures that will leave most people wanting nothing more than to curl up inside. But with energy prices on the rise, [heating your home](https://time.com/6248870/how-to-lower-energy-bill-home/) might be more expensive this [winter](https://time.com/7222241/how-are-our-winters-impacted-by-climate-change/) season—especially for renters who can’t readily make big changes to their home to better prepare for the cold. 

"It's a little challenging for renters, because they can't make a lot of adjustments to the design of their home or add insulation,” says Nicholas Rajkovich, associate professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, whose work covers [energy](https://time.com/tag/energy/) efficiency. “But there certainly are things that you can try to do inside an apartment or a house that you're renting.”

The simplest solution might not be the one you want to hear. “To save energy, turn the thermostat down,” says Ian Shapiro, professor of practice in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Syracuse University, whose work focuses on sustainability. “Setting the temperature lower will save energy.”

**Read more:** [_How To Stay Safe and Warm In Extreme Cold Weather_](https://time.com/7357129/extreme-cold-weather-how-to-stay-safe/)

If you control the heating in your home, turn the heat off entirely if you’re leaving the house. If you’re able to, avoid heating rooms that are unoccupied. 

As the temperatures begin to drop, do an audit of your windows and doors to make sure they are properly sealed. Roughly [30%](https://news.mit.edu/2020/preventing-energy-loss-through-windows-0106) of a home’s heating and cooling energy is lost through the windows. 

Before checking, Shapiro recommends running your hand under the faucet. The water’s temperature doesn’t matter, but the moisture will make you more attuned to air movement.“\[Your hand\] becomes even more sensitive to leaks,” he says. Once you’ve figured out where cold air might be coming in from, you can apply temporary caulking or removable foam insulation to deal with the draft. 

While it might be tempting to break out a space heater, experts warn against relying on them. For one, they can be a safety hazard—fuel-burning space heaters can produce carbon monoxide, and even electric heaters can cause fires if not used properly. 

More so, if your landlord pays for the heat, you might be taking on an additional expense. “In most apartments the heat is paid for by the landlord, and if you plug in an electric resistance heater, you're now taking on the cost of the heat yourself,” says Shapiro. “So I'd caution \[against them\] because typically the electricity in an apartment is \[likely\] paid for by the tenant, but the heat is paid for centrally by the landlord.” 

If you can, consider purchasing a window heat pump, which operates by moving heat rather than generating it. It’s an efficient way to supplement your central heating system and heat a single room—and can also serve as an air conditioner in the summer. 

At the end of the day, the simplest tricks can get the job done. “Reduce the temperature in the house, put on an extra sweater, and wear a blanket,” says Rajkovich. “All of those things are very inexpensive ways to save some money.”

\]\]> https://time.com/?p=bltbf31632d5241dcec Mon, 09 Nov 2026 18:29:56 +0000<!\[CDATA\[Simmone Shah\]\]>