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  • Zelensky open to withdrawing troops in new peace draft, awaits Russian reply

    Zelensky open to withdrawing troops in new peace draft, awaits Russian reply

    KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented journalists a new version of a peace plan Wednesday that suggests he is open to withdrawing troops from eastern Ukraine to create a demilitarized zone if Russia agrees to do the same as part of a settlement to end the war.

    The suggestions marks Zelensky’s first inch toward any sort of compromise on the issue of territory in the eastern Donbas region, which Russia has demanded full control of despite failing to take several major cities militarily. The issue of territory remains one of the most contentious in discussions, with Ukraine arguing that giving up its land will only embolden Russia to attack again.

    The 20-point draft Zelensky publicized Wednesday is far from final and has not been agreed to by Russia, which will probably oppose several major points, including the demand for both sides to withdraw their forces from Ukraine’s east.

    The document is the latest iteration of a proposal to end the war after weeks of difficult negotiations following a U.S. threat last month to cut off all support for Ukraine unless the country signed on to a 28-point version that made major concessions to Russia.

    That warning triggered a diplomatic frenzy, including many meetings between a Ukrainian delegation and President Donald Trump’s negotiators, including special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

    The latest plan makes clear that Ukraine continues to oppose the idea that it would be forced to withdraw its troops from its east but would consider doing so if Russia did the same. The goal would be to create a free economic zone that is not controlled by either military, Zelensky said.

    Any such agreement, however, would require a national referendum, which would be difficult to organize without a ceasefire in place. It would also require Russia agreeing to this and other points in the document, which remains unlikely.

    The establishment of a free economic zone would require significant work to determine who would control the territory, including potentially foreign peacekeepers. Russia has previously opposed the idea that foreign troops be stationed in Ukraine and the two sides will likely find it difficult to agree which countries would contribute troops to such a mission.

    Such an arrangement was suggested by the United States, which has repeatedly raised various suggestions that would prioritize business after the war. Zelensky previously said that if Ukrainian forces were to withdraw from any territory, it would only be logical for Russian forces to withdraw the same amount. He had also cast skepticism on how to secure such a zone, citing potential vulnerabilities to Russian infiltration.

    Russia has previously stated that even if it did withdraw its military from some regions, it would expect to still control the area with police and national guard units.

    Zelensky also said Wednesday that the current draft includes a peacetime Ukrainian military of 800,000 troops. The initial version would have limited the size to 600,000. Ukraine has repeatedly stated that its best security guarantee is its own armed forces.

    The draft also includes references to security guarantees that would amount to similar protections as NATO’s Article 5, which sees an attack on one member as an attack on all. An earlier draft of the plan had barred Ukraine from becoming part of NATO, which was deemed unacceptable to Ukrainians, who have put joining the alliance into their constitution.

    Zelensky has emphasized in recent remarks that no one can view Ukraine as an obstacle to the peace process, but any plan cannot condemn future generations of Ukrainians to war with Russia.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to specific points in the plan Wednesday but told journalists that Russia’s main demands “are well known to our colleagues in the U.S.”

    Russia intends “to formulate our further position and continue our contacts in the very near future through the existing channels that are currently working.”

    Russia has shown little sign it is interested in finding a real settlement to the war. Ukraine had requested a Christmas truce, which Russia declined. Russia has continued to aggressively bomb Ukraine in recent days, targeting the energy grid and triggering more widespread blackouts across the country. Russia’s early-morning attack on Tuesday killed three people, including a 4-year-old child.

    Warnings continue that more bombardment is likely as the energy system is under greater stress responding to the subzero temperatures taking hold across Ukraine.

    On Wednesday, meanwhile, a police car exploded in Moscow, killing two police officers in the same spot where a general was killed by a car bomb two days earlier. Ukraine did not claim responsibility for the attacks but Russia has suggested Kyiv could be behind the operations.

    The Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement that two traffic police officers saw a suspicious individual near a police car. As they approached to detain him, an explosive device detonated.

    Two prominent Russian military bloggers pointed fingers at Ukrainian and European special services, blaming them for the attack and attempting to destabilize Russia from within.

    “I believe that the Ukrainian (British, and U.S.) intelligence services are trying to open a second (subversive) front inside Russia,” state media military correspondent Alexander Sladkov wrote on his Telegram blog.

    Sladkov also questions whether the CCTV surveillance system bolstered in Moscow in recent years would help identify those responsible for the attack, and noted that if the investigation results are not released this week, it will be a “demonstration of weakness.”

    Another war reporter, Alexander Kots, wrote that the explosion “clearly bears the mocking signature” of special services from Ukraine and Britain.

    “This is a typical British anti-crisis: sow panic among the population, destabilize it from within, create a sense of insecurity, undermine the authority of the authorities and the security services, provoke public discontent with the special military operation, and provoke rallies calling for its swift end,” Kots wrote.

  • ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses

    ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses

    The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by the Washington Post.

    Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says. Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation.

    The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.

    The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes. ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by the Post. A formal request for bids could follow soon after that.

    Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said she “cannot confirm” the Post’s reporting and declined to answer questions about the warehouse plan.

    NBC and Bloomberg News previously reported on ICE’s internal discussions about using warehouses as detention centers. The full scope of the project, the locations of the facilities, and other details contained in the solicitation have not been previously disclosed or reported.

    The warehouse plan would be the next step in President Donald Trump’s campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, which began with a scramble to expand the nation’s immigrant detention system, the largest in the world. Armed with $45 billion Congress set aside for locking up immigrants, his administration this year revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.

    The administration has deported more than 579,000 people this year, border czar Tom Homan said earlier this month on the social media platform X.

    The new facilities will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process and promote the safety, dignity and respect for all in ICE custody,” the solicitation said.

    “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

    Commercial real estate experts say concentrating detainees in warehouses would create its own logistical problems. Such structures are designed for storage and shipping, not human habitation. They tend to be poorly ventilated and lack precise temperature controls — and, because they are typically located far from residential areas, they may not have access to the plumbing and sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.

    “It’s dehumanizing,” said Tania Wolf, an advocate with the National Immigration Project who is based in New Orleans — about one hour south from the site of a planned warehouse in Hammond, La. “You’re treating people, for lack of a better term, like cattle.”

    ICE plans to heavily modify the structures to include intake areas, housing units with showers and restrooms, a kitchen, dining areas, a medical unit, indoor and outdoor recreation areas, a law library, and administrative offices, according to the solicitation. Some of the facilities will include special housing designed for families in custody.

    The majority of the planned warehouses are in towns, counties, and states led by Republicans supportive of Trump’s immigration policies. Two of the largest warehouses are planned for towns with Democrat-led local governments: Stafford, Va., and Kansas City, Mo.

    If the government leased a warehouse in Stafford, it would need to comply with the city’s zoning laws and building codes, said Pamela Yeung, one of seven supervisors on Stafford’s Democrat-led board.

    “Immigration policy is federal, but its impacts are local,” Yeung said in an emailed statement. “Any facility of this scale would affect infrastructure, public safety, and social services.”

    ICE held more than 68,000 people at the beginning of this month, agency data shows, the highest number on record. Nearly half, or 48 percent of these people, have no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, ICE data shows.

    Some administration officials have complained about the complexity of the current detention system. A 2015 government watchdog report found that deportation flights often leave the country with empty seats because of the logistical difficulty of bringing enough people eligible for deportation to an airplane at the same time.

    The government already awarded one $30 million contract for help with “due diligence services and concept design” for the new facilities, procurement records show. That award fueled a public backlash among members of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, a Kansas tribe that said a business connected to the tribe had acted against their wishes in pursuing the contract.

    Tribal chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick said in a Dec. 17 video that the tribe has exited the contract and plans “to ensure that our nation’s economic interests do not come into conflict with our values in the future.”

    The business that won the award, KPB Services LLC, could not be reached at phone numbers listed online for the company.

    The biggest newly proposed warehouse would hold up to 10,000 detainees in Stafford, an industrial area 40 miles south of Washington. A facility with capacity for up to 9,500 people is planned for Hutchins, near Dallas; and another with space for 9,000 in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge. Currently, ICE’s biggest facility is a makeshift tent encampment built this summer at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in Texas. It now holds around 3,000 people but was expected to have a capacity of 5,000 by year’s end.

    The warehouse solicitation document names nine active detention centers as part of the project’s final phase, suggesting that at least those facilities would continue to be used. The plan does not mention whether other existing facilities would be phased out.

    It does not give a timeline for beginning work on the project but says the facilities must begin accepting detainees 30 to 60 calendar days after the start of construction.

    Staffing facilities of this size is likely to be a challenge, said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden. Prospective workers will need medical or other specialized training and will have to pass federal security clearances, he said.

    This problem is already bearing out in other new facilities. In September, the government’s own inspectors found that the Fort Bliss site employed less than two-thirds of the security personnel it had agreed to in its contract.

    “We can always find more warehouses,” Houser said. The ability to operate the facilities safely, he said, is “always limited by staffing.”

  • I’m a doctor. Here are 11 foods I recommend to fight inflammation.

    I’m a doctor. Here are 11 foods I recommend to fight inflammation.

    Q: Are anti-inflammatory diets backed by science? Can some foods really cause inflammation in my body?

    A: When my patients ask me about anti-inflammatory diets, they’re usually expecting me to talk about turmeric or the latest viral green drink. Lists of “toxic” foods are popular on social media — followed by advice to start the day with things like celery juice to help you “detox.” And while I’d love to say that a cup of blueberries a day will “turn off” inflammation, that’s not what the evidence shows.

    When researchers follow people for years or run clinical trials, it’s a dietary pattern that matters — not whether you drank ginger tea each day.

    The anti-inflammatory diet that multiple studies have shown works best is actually quite simple: vegetables, legumes, whole grains, olive oil, nuts, and fish. In one Spanish clinical trial, people were asked to eat more of these foods — and less processed meat and ultra-processed foods — and then watched as their inflammatory markers improved and their risk of heart attack and stroke fell.

    It’s essentially the Mediterranean diet. And — just to be clear — the Mediterranean diet is just a name. Its principles can be applied to many cuisines, from Mexican and Indian to Greek and Italian.

    While there’s no single magic solution, I’m going to share with you the foods scientists have linked to lower inflammatory markers in the blood. Think of these foods as a backbone to building a healthier habit.

    Anti-inflammatory foods

    These foods are rich in anti-inflammatory compounds, such as vitamins, beta-carotene, polyphenols, omega-3 fatty acids, and, of course, fiber. Aim to incorporate a variety of them into your routine most days of the week. When you’re planning a meal, think about emphasizing lots of plants, color and healthy fats.

    • Whole grains, such as whole wheat, oats or brown rice
    • Legumes, such as lentils, black beans and tofu
    • Probiotic foods, such as Greek yogurt or kefir
    • Green leafy vegetables, such as spinach or kale
    • Green or black tea, or coffee
    • Dark yellow vegetables, such as sweet potatoes, carrots or pumpkin
    • Spices, such as turmeric, ginger and garlic
    • Flavonoid-rich fruits, such as berries and citrus
    • Nuts and seeds, such as walnuts, almonds and chia seeds
    • Extra-virgin olive oil as your main cooking oil
    • Fatty fish, such as salmon or mackerel

    Pro-inflammatory foods

    These are the foods to treat more as occasional guests. In studies, they’ve been linked to cancer, heart disease, and the metabolic syndrome. That doesn’t mean you have to ban them outright. I encourage patients to think about how often these foods show up on their plates and whether there’s room to start making small swaps so they aren’t the main sources of your nutrients.

    • Ultra-processed foods, such as chips, packaged crackers, many frozen meals, and instant foods
    • Refined carbohydrates, such as white bread, sugary breakfast cereals or pastries
    • Red and processed meats, such as bacon, sausage, hot dogs, and deli meats
    • Sugar-sweetened beverages, such as sodas, sweet tea, and energy drinks
    • Fried foods and those high in trans fats and saturated fats, such as those found in many fast-foods and baked goods

    How foods can trigger inflammation in your body

    The idea that food can trigger inflammation in our bodies is backed by a growing body of science. Researchers can measure inflammation using blood tests for markers such as C-reactive protein or interleukin 6. Certain foods trigger bursts of sugar and triglycerides in the bloodstream, and the body responds by generating inflammation. When we eat those foods frequently, that inflammation can persist in our bodies at a low level.

    This can have far-reaching impact: In 2018, one team found that people who ate more foods associated with these inflammatory blood markers were more likely to develop unique colon cancers containing a particular bacteria, Fusobacterium nucleatum. The findings suggested that inflammation from the food we eat alters the gut microbiome and can contribute to how certain cancers develop.

    • An inflammatory diet has also been linked to:
    • A higher risk of obstructive sleep apnea
    • Developing gout, a type of inflammatory arthritis
    • Having a stroke or heart attack
    • More depressive symptoms and use of antidepressants
    • Dementia of all causes, including Alzheimer’s

    What I want my patients to know

    Think about what you’re going to add instead of subtract. Pick one of your go-to dinners: Can you add one extra serving of vegetables? How about a serving of fruit at lunchtime? Frozen veggies and canned beans are great add-ins that don’t break the bank. You can still enjoy foods you love while supporting an overall healthy pattern of eating — and you don’t need to chase every new anti-inflammatory tonic the internet throws at you.

    Trisha Pasricha is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of the forthcoming book “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong.”

  • ‘It’s a war’: Inside ICE’s media machine

    ‘It’s a war’: Inside ICE’s media machine

    For the Immigration and Customs Enforcement public affairs team, the nighttime operation across metro Houston in October was a gold mine.

    An ICE video producer shadowed agents as they pulled over and handcuffed more than 120 suspected undocumented immigrants, then sent the footage to a private team chat room.

    — — —

    ICE official 1, Oct. 29, 2:10 p.m.: Arrests are wonderful!

    ICE video producer 1, Oct. 29, 2:13 p.m.: Great shooting!

    — — —

    Across thousands of internal ICE messages reviewed by the Washington Post, this kind of celebration has become commonplace. The messages show how the team has worked closely with the White House, which has urged them to produce videos for social media of immigrant arrests and confrontations to portray its push for mass deportation as critical to protecting the American way of life.

    Before officials could post the Houston video, they had to figure out how to frame it. Officials did not know if all the arrestees had criminal records, they wrote in the chats, undermining a slogan the team had worked to promote on social media: that ICE targeted the “Worst of the Worst.”

    — — —

    ICE video producer 2, Oct. 29, 2:36 p.m.: We made several dozen arrests today very quickly. Not sure if these all had criminal histories beyond being in the U.S. illegally.

    — — —

    After some discussion, the team decided on a compromise.

    — — —

    ICE official 2, Oct. 29, 6:30 p.m.: I’d like to try to put this out without focusing on the aliens or their crimes, but to demonstrate that we’re out working hard.

    — — —

    Instead of arguing they’d snared hardened criminals, officials wrote a caption saying the arrests showed the dangers of “illegal aliens … behind the wheel.”

    Then, to maximize the video’s chances of going viral, they needed a soundtrack.

    — — —

    ICE video producer 1, Oct. 30, 1:13 p.m.: think country songs … this is Houston after all.

    Emily Covington, ICE assistant director for public affairs, Oct. 30, 1:39 p.m.: I feel like we need something a little more hard-core

    — — —

    They settled on a rap song by Nbhd Nick, which his label would later tell the Post was used without permission, that starts, “Oh, you thought this was a game, huh?”

    The video was posted to ICE’s social media channels, where it has been viewed more than 1 million times in total.

    For years, this ICE team had run like a routine government communications shop, dispensing public service announcements and news releases few Americans would see. But during President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE’s public affairs arm has rapidly transformed into an influencer-style media machine, churning out flashy videos of tactical operations and immigration raids.

    The internal communications reviewed by the Post show how the ICE team has coordinated with the White House, working to satisfy Trump aides’ demands to “flood the airwaves,” as one official urged in the messages, with brash content showing immigrants being chased, grabbed and detained.

    They also show federal officials mocking immigrants in crass terms and discussing video edits that might help legitimize the administration’s aggressive stance. The team also knowingly used copyright-protected music without permission from the rights holders, among other techniques designed to boost their online attention.

    Six current or former officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE, told the Post that the video effort had broken from the more careful and methodical work of past administrations. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

    The Post reviewed chats and other materials provided by people familiar with internal discussions. They did so on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the disclosures.

    David Lapan, the first DHS press secretary during Trump’s first term and a longtime critic who has argued the second Trump administration politicized the agency, said the current strategy is unrecognizable compared to the more “professional and buttoned-up” operations under past presidents that worked to describe law enforcement activities clinically and apolitically, for fear of inflaming anger against agents in the field.

    “We were supposed to present the facts, not hype things up. But this veers into propaganda, into creating fear,” said Lapan, a retired Marine Corps colonel. “We didn’t have this meme-ification of various serious operations, these things that are life or death. … It’s not a joking matter. But that’s the way they’re treating it now.”

    White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “President Trump and his entire team are working at breakneck speed to keep our promises, deport criminal illegal aliens, and get information out to the public — that’s a good thing and the American people deserve no less.”

    DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the White House had given the communications wings of DHS and ICE “autonomy to create content that is effectively reaching the American public.” The social media posts that used copyrighted material without permission had been preapproved by administration lawyers, she said.

    DHS public affairs officials, she added, were proud to break with the strategies of past administrations because their work has proved more successful at getting people’s attention.

    “They were irrelevant,” she said, “and we’ve made it matter.”

    ‘Feed the beast’

    Launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, ICE and DHS had always functioned as traditional law enforcement agencies focused on public safety and with minimal tools for self-promotion.

    Their public affairs divisions employed small teams of video producers, mostly for unexceptional tasks: facilitating TV interviews, running the cameras at workforce retirement ceremonies, recording safety commercials for the Super Bowl. Some producers traveled to make videos when DHS agents took down sex abusers or crime rings. Video producers would film targeted operations, a current DHS official said, but immigration enforcement was only a fraction of the workload.

    After the start of Trump’s second term, however, ICE’s ranks swelled as federal agents were diverted to immigration enforcement and the One Big Beautiful Bill tripled the agency’s annual budget to deliver on the White House’s promises to secure the southern border and speed up deportations. ICE’s average arrest count jumped from around 300 a day last year to more than 800 a day since Trump took office, according to a Post analysis of ICE data released by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

    DHS’s media operation was no exception. Public affairs teams were injected with a new crew of political appointees who had orders from the White House to treat immigration as their top priority and produce dramatized visuals of ICE operations and arrests to command user attention, the current and former officials told the Post. The video teams’ workload exploded, and immigration became the only topic anyone could pursue, according to interviews.

    “We’re not doing child pornography cases. We’re not doing human trafficking cases,” one current DHS official told the Post. “Everything is immigration.”

    ICE’s public affairs team included several dozen public affairs officers, producers, and strategists, scattered between its Washington headquarters and local field offices across the country, current DHS officials said. Members of ICE’s visual communications team, embedded in the public affairs division and known as “viscom,” began recording in the field more frequently, accompanying officers on raids and removal operations, shooting video day and night, interviews and chats showed. Any video producer who witnessed a particularly cinematic scene was expected to alert their supervisors, so the agency and the White House could promote it on their social media channels. Employees on ICE’s “digital engagement” team then raced to edit and post the footage on social media in hopes of securing a viral win.

    Emily Covington, ICE’s assistant director for public affairs, frequently requested “good arrest videos” and asked the team to devote its energy to capturing “high profile arrests,” the internal messages show. Laszlo Baksay, a deputy assistant director, asked the public affairs team in the chat to flag stories where “aliens with criminal history are being employed,” to counter media reports that the agency was grabbing “ordinary aliens just trying to earn a living.”

    Covington and Baksay declined to comment further on the chat messages.

    The team began working like a professional influencer operation, creating a “social media check list” of caught-on-camera arrests, sharing metrics with senior officials, using paid social media tracking tools and cataloguing all of their Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, and X posts, ranked by impressions and engagement rate.

    Covington pushed the team in internal chats in late May to be more “proactive” in pushing out videos.

    — — —

    Emily Covington, ICE assistant director for public affairs, May 21, 7:52 p.m.: What PR tactics can we deploy that we don’t typically? Should we feed info to an influencer? … Using judgment to ID something likely to go viral or bubble up and gain attention. Right now we are learning from the media, let’s feed the beast first with the good work ICE is doing each and every day.

    — — —

    A week after Covington’s message, in late May, the team got its first viral video. The clip showed ICE agents leaping out of an SUV and confronting men on the curb of a home improvement store in Baltimore. The men were shoved face down onto the street and handcuffed while an agent said, “Calle la boca” — in Spanish, “shut your mouth.” In an X post, ICE called the video “action-packed.”

    — — —

    ICE official 3, May 28, 11:57 a.m.: 2.1M views and nearly 7,000 shares in 13 hours! Awesome work!

    — — —

    But the real celebration came shortly after, when the White House reposted the video on its Instagram and X accounts, labeling it an “EPIC Takedown.”

    — — —

    ICE official 4, May 28, 3:22 p.m.: White House just ran with it!

    — — —

    The post, from one of the team’s political appointees, led to a burst of hearts and shock-face emojis.

    As the media operation ramped up, DHS posted several videos containing clear errors around their operations, using misleading footage that showed scenes recorded thousands of miles away from where the video described, the Post has previously reported.

    Other edits were aimed at presenting events in ways that supported the administration’s narratives. In May, Covington asked, at the White House’s request, whether a video of a deportation flight from Texas could be re-edited so that the clips “don’t feature tons of females?” An ICE official responded that a video producer would “re-edit the b-roll to exclude the females,” the chats show.

    Officials worked to find ways to describe many of the people arrested as the “Worst of the Worst,” a slogan DHS and ICE began using in January to argue that their agents hunted only the most dangerous criminals. When one official asked in the chat what producers should say in their videos when arrestees had no criminal history, another responded that they should work to find something else “newsworthy” to highlight, like an “egregious immigration history.”

    Public affairs officers were told to rewrite their news releases and online posts with stronger, more aggressive language if they wanted the agency’s main communications channels to promote them, one said in an interview. “If the truth of the operation does not match the narrative of the ‘worst of the worst,’ it’s going to be killed,” the official said.

    The team gave right-wing media figures premium access to immigration operations and received favorable coverage. In June, about three months before he was killed, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk posted what he said was “exclusive footage” of ICE officials arresting a “thug.” Covington highlighted the moment in the team’s chat, thanking one official “for getting great footage on today’s arrest.”

    Right-wing influencers with large followings, including “Dr. Phil” McGraw and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, were regularly invited to ride along with law enforcement agents and interview senior officials, according to the Post’s review of their coverage. The pro-Trump influencer Benny Johnson donned a Border Patrol tactical vest to watch a raid at a Walmart in the Chicago area alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. His X clip celebrating the “amazing” operation’s “wild scenes” has been viewed 1.6 million times.

    A Libs of TikTok representative declined to comment on the relationship. Representatives for Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk, and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment. A representative of McGraw said he had been invited by White House border czar Tom Homan to document ICE enforcement in Chicago and Los Angeles earlier this year.

    In pursuit of more viral video, DHS brought in new public affairs staff members with atypical backgrounds and authorized them to “go out and capture content,” as a chat message said. A MAGA women’s lifestyle influencer, an L.A.-based wedding videographer and a Canadian-born actor who played a “mountain man” in a cable-TV show joined the team.

    DHS encouraged the hires to become intimately involved with agency affairs, the chats and interviews showed. In June, when ICE agents were raiding farms in rural Missouri, the former actor noted it would be a prime chance to make a video. “Would be great to get something like that on film,” he wrote in the chats, suggesting a tagline: “We are everywhere, we will find you.”

    Later, when ICE officials complained about negative media coverage, he worked to bolster their spirits.

    — — —

    ICE official 4, June 20, 12:18 p.m.: The good news is half the country is seeing it, and equally as frustrated. those in the “middle” are who we will continue to slowly reach … It’s a war!

    ‘Flooding the airwaves’

    By June, the public affairs team had for weeks been showing signs of overwork, with some employees consistently working overtime to help satisfy the White House’s constant demands for more content, the chat messages showed.

    The team had discussed bringing on contract videographers to help address outstanding tasks — like a new request to shadow every operation of ICE’s Special Response Team, the elite SWAT-like unit that handles its most dangerous arrests.

    — — —

    Emily Covington, ICE assistant director for public affairs, May, 9 10:42 a.m.: All- as expected, I am getting pressure now about our video capabilities. I need ALL video our PAOs and videographers have captured this week ASAP in one link. This should be the only priority for right now.

    — — —

    But when protests over mass deportation swept L.A. and Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard in June, the White House ramped up the pressure yet again. Top officials wanted ICE’s public affairs unit to produce more visuals, messages from June 10 show.

    — — —

    ICE official 5, June 10, 12:33 p.m.: We need all hands on deck to start “flooding the airwaves” per White house direction on ALL ICE arrests nationwide today. The request is to flood social and traditional media with imagery of ICE arrests.

    Laszlo Baksay, ICE deputy assistant director, June 10, 12:41 p.m.: How many socials do we have in the que that we paused from the last 2 days?

    ICE official 6, June 10, 12:42 p.m.: “TONS” He said there’s stuff loaded and ready to go

    Laszlo Baksay, ICE deputy assistant director, June 10, 12:42 p.m.: do we have enough to post every 30 mins? Until midnight?

    — — —

    The National Guard deployment presented a challenge for a unit trained to cover preplanned and targeted operations: a vast, citywide video shoot where clashes with protesters could flare up at any time.

    In the chats, the team strategized how to stretch out its content.

    — — —

    ICE official 5, June 10, 12:45 p.m.: My thought would be for locals to post and the HQ can re-tweet, unless there is something really juicy that would get more push coming from HQ.

    Laszlo Baksay, ICE deputy assistant director, June 10, 12:50 p.m.: fire away!

    — — —

    Around 1 p.m., Covington, the ICE public affairs assistant director, instructed her team to highlight arrests in Los Angeles at the White House’s request.

    — — —

    Emily Covington, ICE assistant director for public affairs, June 10, 1:18 p.m.: On White House Call — we need to be highlighting worst of worst LA arrests across relevant accounts/channels. I will be getting a LOT of content from all federal partners today. All flowing through me now.

    — — —

    ICE began to post a flurry of tweets on X in quick succession — almost every half hour. They included visuals of recent immigration raids and mug shots of people the agency said were undocumented immigrants with a criminal history.

    ICE tweeted 38 times over 11 hours. Earlier in the day, the account had posted only three times.

    Officials also floated more ideas to maximize coverage, including pulling in military videographers, known as “combat cameras,” to offer “direct support of designated hotspots.” One official warned the idea came with too many risks, in part because they had been trained for battle, not protests. “It’s different than war photography in a few distinct ways,” the official said.

    The White House directive around the L.A. protests forced the agency to play more of an “attack-dog” role online to keep up with the administration’s demands, one former worker on the DHS media team told the Post.

    “That was the turning point to get even more aggressive with their messaging, and to paint pictures of these places as war-torn,” he said. “There was a much more blustery edge, and a need to put stuff out as quickly as you can. You’re steamrolling everything.”

    The White House has benefited from this symbiotic relationship: The most-watched video on its TikTok account, with more than 45 million views, included DHS operational footage, a photo of a crying arrestee and the caption, “Ahhh that deportation feeling …” (It has since been removed, but the White House declined to say why.)

    In the weeks after the June 10 directive, many National Guard troops left L.A., but the ICE public affairs team kept working at a rapid pace, the chats showed. As plainclothes ICE agents began ramping up arrests of immigrants at courthouses, an ICE official urged the team to “flood all your local social with the imagery from the arrests!”

    The pace became so demanding that one official complained of overwork.

    — — —

    ICE official 7, June 20, 11:53 a.m.: DHS knows we have very little staff right? I know it has been discussed but there has been no change to our staffing and they keep wanting more and more.

    — — —

    When video producers weren’t available, public affairs officers were sent into the field to record ICE activities on their phones — a footage “force multiplier,” one DHS official said in an interview. Officers were traveling more to fill the White House’s almost insatiable demand for visuals, another official said.

    The push, however, left some of the officials fearful for their safety in the field. In July, DHS said, an ICE public affairs specialist was sent to the emergency room with a bloodied hand after being hit by a thrown rock outside a California marijuana farm.

    During an all-team meeting attended by public affairs officers, an official said he had been sent in a T-shirt to scenes where agents were wearing body armor, an ICE official recalled. (An ICE spokesman said the agency now ensures that public affairs officials have protective equipment, including body armor and first aid kits.)

    Still, public affairs officials have participated in the immigration operations. In September, Covington said in an internal chat message that she had been on a ride-along with federal agents when an immigrant from Venezuela was apprehended. “Target was a runner — I spotted him and we made the arrest,” she wrote.

    She uploaded photos of the man in handcuffs and asked in the chat whether he had been a known gang member, saying he “had some interesting tats.” An ICE legal associate told her their files showed no evidence of gang membership. Some of her colleagues congratulated her nonetheless. “Go [Public Affairs Office] Go!” one replied.

    The White House’s frenzy for more content, and DHS officials’ scramble to produce, led the team to push the boundaries in ways that disturbed some of its employees.

    ICE’s X account posted a video of a bound protester in Portland, Ore., being wheeled into custody face down on a flatbed cart, with the background lyrics, “they see me rollin’.” DHS’s account posted a clip of Illinois protesters and said, “Get a job you imbecilic morons.” It also shared a Halloween-styled montage of arrestees’ mug shots and warned there would be “no sanctuary for creatures & criminals of the night.”

    “They just went nuts,” a recently departed DHS producer told the Post. “It was no limit. … It was like if someone from Reddit took over.”

    Some prosecutors in U.S. attorneys’ offices complained to public affairs officials that the brash social media posts could jeopardize their cases by raising questions about bias or tainting the jury pool, one official said. (McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said she’d not heard this and said that if officials are so concerned about it, they should convey it to her, not journalists.)

    But that style of crass humor was also common in the ICE team’s internal chats. Four days after Trump’s inauguration, an official shared a meme that read like a warning to migrants inside the country: “Hide Yo Wife. Hide Yo Kids.” Another official poked fun at a migrant’s mug shot, labeling him an “MS13 heart throb” in reference to the gang.

    In June, after Los Angeles Dodgers officials said they had blocked ICE agents from accessing their parking lots, one ICE official made a joke about the team’s Japanese superstar pitcher, who has played for American teams since 2018.

    — — —

    ICE official 8, June 20, 11:41 a.m.: Can we double check Shohei Ohtani’s immigration paperwork???

    — — —

    McLaughlin said that every organization has “conversations that you don’t think are going to get out to the public” but that she is not “going to lose sleep over” anything in the messages.

    ICE’s shifting attitude toward public messaging was especially noticeable in its use of music without the artists’ or labels’ permission, current and former DHS officials said, which past administrations had been far more cautious about. Some officials said in the chat that they were indifferent to the potential perils. When one employee raised concerns about copyright violations, another wrote back, dismissing them.

    At least five DHS and ICE videos have been taken down from X in recent months following complaints from representatives of the comedian Theo Von, the band MGMT, and rappers Jay-Z, Joey Valence, and Chamillionaire. Other companies and creators have complained that their intellectual property was used without permission, including the Pokémon Co., whose cartoon style was mimicked for a DHS video captioned “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”

    Trump administration officials have defended the intensity of their media operation to reporters by saying it’s what Americans want: visual proof that Trump is fulfilling his promise to deport millions of immigrants nationwide.

    But ICE’s social media onslaught appears to have done little to change Americans’ attitudes en masse. The share of Americans saying immigration is a good thing for the country leaped to 79% in July, a record high, a Gallup poll found in July. About 62% of Americans said they disliked how Trump was handling the issue.

    Despite this, the media operations at DHS show no signs of slowing down. Inside the ICE team, the chats showed, many were proud of their work — and committed for the long haul.

    In August, after an ICE official shared census numbers showing the country’s immigrant population had dropped by 2 million, an ICE legal associate responded simply: “Only 40 million to go.”

  • Lawmaker sues to stop Trump from adding name to Kennedy Center

    Lawmaker sues to stop Trump from adding name to Kennedy Center

    A Democratic congresswoman sued the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees Monday to stop it from adding the president’s name to the institution, arguing that only Congress has the power to do so.

    In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio) claimed that a vote by the center’s board last week to rename the institution the Trump Kennedy Center exceeded its statutory authority and requested that a judge declare it to be void.

    “Because Congress named the center by statute, changing the Kennedy Center’s name requires an act of Congress,” the lawsuit says.

    The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent early Tuesday morning.

    Thursday’s vote by the Kennedy Center’s board to add Trump’s name to the institution — which has sparked concern among legal experts — marked the most overt effort to date by the president and his allies to remold the storied institution in his image. In February, Trump purged members of the board not appointed by him, installed loyalists and became its new chair. Earlier this month, he even hosted its annual honors event. Ticket sales have plummeted since Trump took over, a Washington Post analysis found.

    The lawsuit, which was filed by Democracy Defenders Action and the Washington Litigation Group on behalf of Beatty, requested that a judge order all physical and digital branding changes to be reversed. Trump’s name was added to the exterior of the building Friday, the day after the board’s vote.

    Beatty, who is an ex officio member of the center’s board, said in the suit that she had attended the board meeting virtually and had been unmuted previously, but that when she identified herself and raised concerns about the renaming, she was muted and received a written message that “she would not be unmuted, and therefore she could not participate in the meeting.”

    In 1964, the year after Kennedy was assassinated, Congress passed a statute designating the capital’s National Cultural Center as “the sole national monument to his memory within the city of Washington and its environs” and naming it the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

    In a series of posts on X, the center’s president, Richard Grenell, defended the name change as a reflection of its role as a “bipartisan space.” On Friday, he claimed the memorial to Kennedy was not impacted by the board’s action and “therefore the Board is allowed to change the name.”

    In an email to the Washington Post last week, Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University, said the law clearly states that the building’s name is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “Under the statute, the board that voted to change the name not only does not have the authority, but that each member by so voting violated their duty,” he said.

    On Tuesday, the center’s website prominently referred to itself as the “Trump Kennedy Center,” but in other sections it continued to use the name “the Kennedy Center.”

    Members of the Kennedy family reacted with dismay to last week’s vote. “Some things leave you speechless,” said Maria Shriver, a niece of Kennedy, on X. “It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial,” said Joe Kennedy, the former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts whose great-uncle the building was named for.

  • New Epstein files shed more light on his ties to Prince Andrew

    New Epstein files shed more light on his ties to Prince Andrew

    LONDON — The latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein files have cast renewed scrutiny on the links between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein — a relationship that has already sent the former prince into what is widely seen as royal exile.

    Among the newly released material is an email sent from “A” who writes that he is at the royal residence of Balmoral in Scotland, and asking Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell whether she had found him some “new inappropriate friends.”

    The documents also include emails and court filings of U.S. authorities seeking to interview the former prince in connection with two separate criminal investigations: one relating to Epstein and another involving Peter Nygard, the Canadian fashion tycoon accused of sexually assaulting multiple women and girls.

    Andrew has repeatedly denied all wrongdoing. The former prince’s office did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

    In a 22-page formal request dated April 3, 2020, from the Justice Department, federal prosecutors in New York and the FBI asked U.K. authorities to assist in arranging a voluntary interview with Andrew. U.S. authorities requested that if Andrew declined, that U.K. officials then “conduct a compelled interview of the witness under oath.”

    The request states that investigators wanted to question Andrew over allegations involving Nygard, including claims of an “an international sex trafficking ring victimizing adult women and minor girls” at the Canadian’s estate in the Bahamas, known as “Nygard Cay.”

    According to the document, “the investigation has revealed that, on at least one occasion, Prince Andrew traveled to Nygard Cay in the Bahamas, a location where Nygard is believed to have trafficked minor and adult female victims.”

    U.S. authorities said they wanted to question Andrew about his visits there, as well as any information he might have about Nygard and related individuals. They also said they wanted to ask Andrew whether he “observed any females who appeared to be, or stated that they were, under the age of 18 years old, and the names of any of those females.”

    The document stressed that Andrew was not a target of the investigations and that U.S. authorities had not gathered evidence that he had committed any crime under U.S. law. Nygard was convicted of sexual assault by a Canadian jury in 2023.

    U.S. authorities also sought to question Andrew in connection with the Epstein investigation. The request states that “documentary evidence uncovered during the course of this investigation has revealed information suggesting that Prince Andrew had knowledge that Maxwell recruited females to engage in sex acts with Epstein and other men.”

    It further states that there is “evidence that Prince Andrew engaged in sexual conduct involving one of Epstein’s victims,” while again noting that he was not a target and that investigation had not concluded he had committed a crime under U.S. law.

    While it has been previously reported before that U.S. authorities wanted to interview Andrew, the newly released document makes clear that investigators wanted to question him about two then ongoing criminal investigations and detailed the specific areas they wanted to explore. He was never questioned by U.S. authorities.

    The files also include material from a Florida court case brought under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. In that case, a woman identified as “Jane Doe #3” — widely understood to be Virginia Giuffre — alleged that she was trafficked as a teenager by Epstein and forced to have sex with Andrew on three occasions: in London, New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Andrew settled a civil case with Giuffre without an admission of liability in 2022.

    The files also include email exchanges from early 2020 between U.S. prosecutors and Andrew’s lawyer, documenting weeks of back-and-forth over a proposed interview with Andrew. Andrew’s team repeatedly said he wanted to cooperate but never committed to a conversation between prosecutors and their client.

    Shortly after a 2019 interview with BBC’s Newsnight that was widely seen as disastrous for the prince at the time, Andrew said in a news release that he was “willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations, if required.”

    At the end of January 2020 — and after a month of back-and-forth emails between lawyers — Geoffrey Berman, then U.S. attorney for Southern District of New York, made a public statement saying that Andrew had provided “zero cooperation.” His lawyers disputed that characterization.

    The files include emails from Maxwell to someone who signed off as “A” and from an address that used the alias “The Invisible Man.”

    In an August 2001 message, “A” wrote: “I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family,” referring to a royal residence of then-Queen Elizabeth II.

    He added: “How’s LA? Have you found me some new inappropriate friends? Let me know when you are coming over as I am free from 25th August until 2nd Sept and want to go somewhere hot and sunny with some fun people before having to put my nose firmly to the grindstone for the Fall.”

    Maxwell replied that she had found only “appropriate friends,” prompting A to respond “Distraught!” The email went on to describe how the writer had just lost his valet. “He had been with me since I was 2. I am a little off balance.”

    The writer also noted that he had left the “RN” — Andrew had left the Royal Navy earlier in the year. “My whole life is in turmoil as I have no one to look after me,” the writer said.

    The controversy surrounding Andrew’s links to Epstein eventually led his brother King Charles III to strip him of his prince title and required him to vacate the Royal Lodge.

  • Republican former senator Ben Sasse says he has terminal cancer

    Republican former senator Ben Sasse says he has terminal cancer

    Former Republican senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said Tuesday that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and suggested he would not have long to live.

    “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” Sasse wrote in a lengthy social media post Tuesday morning. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. … Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all. Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer.”

    Sasse, 53, was first elected to the Senate in 2014 as a political newcomer — he had previously served as president of Midland University in Nebraska. Sasse handily won reelection in 2020 but resigned from his seat partway through his second term to become president of the University of Florida. Sasse abruptly stepped down from that post last summer, citing concerns about his wife’s health.

    Nearly a year and a half later, Sasse said it was he who was facing grim news about his health. His terminal diagnosis, he wrote Tuesday, was “hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad.”

    “I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, [my wife] Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have,” Sasse wrote.

    He continued by listing the achievements of his three children and hinted at undergoing possible treatments.

    “I’m not going down without a fight. One subpart of God’s grace is found in the jaw-dropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” he wrote. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.”

    After Donald Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, Sasse became an outsider in his own party. He was one of a handful of Republican senators who regularly spoke out against Trump and who tied Trump’s rhetoric and actions to the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump periodically attacked Sasse, ridiculing him as “the least effective” GOP senator and calling him a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.

    Sasse was also one of the few GOP senators who supported moving forward with Trump’s impeachment trial. Because of that, Sasse faced the threat of censure in 2021 from the Nebraska Republican Party, which accused Sasse of, among more than a dozen purported offenses, having “persistently engaged in public acts of ridicule and calumny” against Trump. Sasse pushed back in a video message directed at party leaders.

    “Let’s be clear: The anger in this state party has never been about me violating principle or abandoning conservative policy. I’m one of the most conservative voters in the Senate. The anger’s always been simply about me not bending the knee to … one guy,” he said then.

    Ultimately, the Nebraska GOP voted to rebuke Sasse, stopping short of a censure. Though Sasse at one point considered leaving the Republican Party, he said he would remain “committed to the party of Lincoln and Reagan as long as there is a chance to reform.” In subsequent years, he described himself as an “independent conservative.” Earlier this month, he was named a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

    Public figures from across the political spectrum responded to Sasse’s announcement on Tuesday to wish him well.

    “I’m very sorry to hear this Ben. May God bless you and your family,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X.

  • Canadian linguists ask prime minister to stop spelling like a Brit

    Canadian linguists ask prime minister to stop spelling like a Brit

    TORONTO — Since taking office in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced new policies on trade, foreign affairs, and energy that he has cast as necessary for bolstering Canada’s economic resilience amid President Donald Trump’s assault on the historically close U.S.-Canadian relationship.

    But among linguists and editors here, a different Carney shift is drawing attention: his spelling.

    From his earliest days as prime minister, a raft of official government publications — including his mandate letter to cabinet, social media posts, statements about meetings with world leaders, and 493-page budget — are full of words rendered in British, not Canadian, English.

    Most prominent has been his predilection for the British “ise” and “yse” endings over the Canadian (and American) “ize” and “yze.” Canada would be “recognising” a Palestinian state, his government announced in September. Officials unveiled a new accounting method to “modernise” the budget, and said they are being “recognised” for navigating global challenges.

    Among Carney’s favorite such words has been “catalyse.”

    The plethora of -ises and -yses in the budget was the catalyst for a letter from a group of editors and linguists to Carney this month. They noted that governments here “consistently” used Canadian spellings “from the 1970s to 2025” and urged him to continue the practice as “a matter of our national history, identity and pride.”

    The prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    University of British Columbia linguist Stefan Dollinger, one of the letter’s signatories, asked a Washington Post reporter to consider a world in which a U.S. administration suddenly adopted British spellings (imagine a secretary of labour or a department of defence) or King Charles III began to use American ones (he’d go “traveling,” not “traveling”).

    “What outcry would that trigger?” Dollinger asked in an email. “It’s similar in Canada. Language and language use shows who we are.”

    Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, his questioning Canada’s viability as a country and his threats to make it the 51st state have provoked a surge of nationalism among a people not known for flag-waving patriotism. It’s been a year for asking: What does it mean to be Canadian?

    James Walker, a linguist at the University of Melbourne who has studied variations in English around the world, said many differences, such as alternate pronunciations for a single word, are “fairly arbitrary.” Seeing “ise” instead of “yze,” he said, is unlikely to impede one’s understanding of the information being communicated.

    “But the fact is that a lot of these differences are important in terms of questions of identity,” he said. “If you want to show you’re Canadian, you can do it through the way you’re pronouncing your words or through the words you use, but you can also do it in terms of spelling.”

    Carney’s academic and professional careers have given him exposure to several varieties of English. He has been a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and Britain; studied at Harvard and Oxford, where he met his wife, a Brit; and served more than six years as governor of the Bank of England.

    “I think the concern around the prime minister is that he’s the leader of the country,” Walker said, “and even though he has spent a lot of his life outside of Canada, I think a lot of people would be concerned that the prime minister is using spelling practices that aren’t considered to be standard for Canadian English.”

    Canadian English is a product of Canada’s history and geography. “Like many things Canadian,” Dollinger said, its evolution “was a long, drawn-out process whose outcome can be described as a blend of U.K. and U.S. ways, with considerable Canadian innovation.”

    Canadian English incorporates regionalisms (in Newfoundland, an irritable person is “crooked”; in Saskatchewan, a hoodie is a “bunnyhug”), Indigenous influences (“skookum,” from Chinook, for strong, great, formidable), loanwords from French (“toque,” a knit winter hat) and words not used much elsewhere (“chesterfield,” for couch). Its differences from English in the United States and Britain are apparent in its syntax, spelling, and vocabulary.

    Margaret Atwood once said that she changed “hand cream” to “hand lotion” in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale so it would be comprehensible to Americans.

    Canadian English evolved over several waves of immigration from English-speaking countries.

    After the American Revolution, tens of thousands of Loyalists fled north to what was then known as British North America. Some became teachers, lawyers, and bankers, and their variety of English influenced the national argot.

    In some areas during the 19th century, amid shortages of teachers and textbooks, generations of pupils were taught by Americans.

    Some visiting Brits were shocked by what they heard.

    “It is downright melancholy,” wrote one Englishman who visited in the 1830s, “to traverse the province and go into many of the common schools; you will find a herd of children instructed by some anti-British adventurer … and American spelling books, dictionaries and grammar, teaching them an anti-British dialect and idiom.”

    In an 1857 address to the Canadian Institute in Toronto, the Rev. Archibald Constable Geikie, a transplant from Scotland, lamented the “corrupt” dialect of his new home, with its “combination of letters and phrases” that do not contribute “in any sense to the enrichment of the language.”

    “A man in England possesses notable capacity, and people style him capable, or able, or great,” he said. “In Canada he is designated first-class. To speak of a first-class carriage, or a first-class prize, or even a first-class ox, may be right enough, but why apply phrases with such poor associations to men of splendid intellect? Is it not enough that a man be great? Will he seem any greater when indissolubly associated with a railway van?”

    Moreover, he said, “In England it occasionally happens that great offenders are hanged, but in the States and Canada, criminals are never hanged; they are all hung,” he added. “In England, beef is hung, gates are hung and curtains are hung, but felons are hanged; in Canada, felons, beef, gates, and curtains are all treated in the same way.”

    Britain encouraged migration to Canada in the 19th century, particularly after the War of 1812, in hope that the newcomers would act as a bulwark against American expansion. They, too, influenced Canadian English.

    “It’s our history that makes the spelling system and makes our pronunciation system, makes our phonology and determines a lot of other things like our [system of] government,” said University of Toronto linguist J.K. Chambers, who co-signed the letter to Carney. “All of those things are the result of us being at the confluence of two mighty nations, and now we’re a third mighty nation with a personality of our own.”

    Debates about language and language purity are not unique to Canada.

    In France, the Académie Française and its 40 “immortals” have tried since 1634 to safeguard the language of Molière from what a member once called “mindless Globish,” fighting encroaching Anglicisms, weighing in on the permissibility of gender-neutral pronouns (“a mortal danger” for French, it warned in 2017) and declaring the correct definite article for “COVID” (a feminine noun, it ruled in 2020).

    The French academy was modeled in part after the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1583. Its name is a metaphor: “Crusca” is Italian for “bran,” and the group’s emblem is the “frullone,” the tool millers use to separate bran from flour. It aims to separate good Italian from bad — carefully, in a country where Mussolini’s harsh language laws left a sour taste.

    But when language concerns arise in Canada, they typically center not on English, but the country’s other official language: French. Quebec, long concerned about the survival of the French language and culture in this Anglo-majority country, has a history of passing controversial language laws enforced by the Office Québécois de la Langue Française.

    More than half the province’s population can converse in English, census records show, an all-time high. The language is ubiquitous in Montreal. But French is the sole official language, and is required on public signs and advertising. A recent law requires some businesses to disclose what percentage of their staff cannot speak French.

    In a case that drew national attention, Montreal city buses that flashed “Go! Canadiens Go!” during the National Hockey League playoffs drew a complaint to the language police. The cheer was replaced with “Allez! Canadiens Allez!”

    In a reversal months later, the watchdog said that “allez” was preferable, but the use of “go” was “partially legitimized.” But by then, the team had long since been eliminated by the Washington Capitals.

    The National Post reported in May that Carney expected the English-language versions of government documents to be written using British spellings.

    Walker said it was amusing to see people “targeting the British spelling of the prime minister. … Usually they’re more concerned about Americanization of Canadian English” than its “Britishization.”

    Editors Canada President Kaitlin Littlechild, who co-signed the letter, said Carney’s use of British spellings risks creating confusion “when people look to government sources as the authority on how to spell things and it deviates from what we consider to be Canadian English.”

    But in a broader sense, she said, Canadian English “is a very uniquely Canadian aspect of our identity, and that is something that we really feel should be acknowledged, respected and honored.”

    GRAPHIC

    https://washingtonpost.com/documents/37dfab94-5f54-495e-9ff1-495ed7683141.pdf
  • Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

    Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

    The changes were subtle at first, beginning in the summer after her fifth-grade graduation. She had always been an athletic and artistic girl, gregarious with her friends and close to her family, but now she was spending more and more time shut away in her room. She seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn. She didn’t want to play outside or go to the pool.

    The girl, R, was rarely without the iPhone that she’d received for her 11th birthday, and her mother, H, had grown suspicious of the device. (the Washington Post is identifying them by their middle initials because of the sensitive nature of their account, and because R is a minor). It felt to H as though her child was fading somehow, receding from her own life, and H wanted to understand why.

    She thought she’d found the reason when R left her phone behind during a volleyball practice one August afternoon. Searching through the device, H discovered that her daughter had downloaded TikTok and Snapchat, social media apps she wasn’t allowed to have. H deleted both and told her daughter what she’d found. H was struck by the intensity of her daughter’s reaction, she recalled later; R began to sob and seemed frightened. “Did you look at Character AI?” she asked her mom. H didn’t know what that was, and when she asked, her daughter’s reply was dismissive: “Oh, it’s just chats.”

    At the time, H was far more focused on what her tween might have encountered on social media. In August 2024, H had never heard of Character AI; she didn’t know it was an artificial intelligence platform where roughly 20 million monthly users can exchange text or voice messages with AI-generated imitations of celebrities and fictional characters.

    But her daughter’s question came to mind about a month later, as H sat awake in her bedroom one night with her daughter’s phone in her hand. R’s behavior had only grown more concerning in the weeks since their talk — she frequently cried at night, she’d had several frightening panic attacks, and she had once told her mother, I just don’t want to exist. H had grown frantic; her daughter had never struggled with her mental health before. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong,” she says, “and I had to keep looking.”

    Searching through her daughter’s phone, H noticed several emails from Character AI in R’s inbox. Jump back in, read one of the subject lines, and when H opened it, she clicked through to the app itself. There she found dozens of conversations with what appeared to be different individuals, and opened one between her daughter and a username titled “Mafia Husband.” H began to scroll. And then she began to panic.

    “Oh? Still a virgin. I was expecting that, but it’s still useful to know,” Mafia Husband had written to her rising sixth-grader.

    “I dont wanna be my first time with you!” R had replied.

    “I don’t care what you want,” Mafia Husband responded. “You don’t have a choice here.”

    H kept clicking through conversation after conversation, through depictions of sexual encounters (“I don’t bite … unless you want me to”) and threatening commands (“Do you like it when I talk like that? When I’m authoritative and commanding? Do you like it when I’m the one in control?”). Her hands and body began to shake. She felt nauseated. H was convinced that she must be reading the words of an adult predator, hiding behind anonymous screen names and sexually grooming her prepubescent child.

    In the days after H found her daughter’s Character AI chats, H projected an air of normalcy around her daughter, not wanting to do anything that would cause her distress or shame. H contacted her local police department, which in turn connected her to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force. A couple of days later, she spoke on the phone with a detective who specializes in cybercrimes and explained what H had been unable to comprehend: that the words she’d read on her daughter’s screen weren’t written by a human but by a generative AI chatbot.

    “They told me the law has not caught up to this,” H says. “They wanted to do something, but there’s nothing they could do, because there’s not a real person on the other end.”

    It felt impossible to align that reality, H says, with the visceral horror she felt when she first scrolled through the threatening and explicit messages on her daughter’s phone screen.

    “It felt like walking in on someone abusing and hurting someone you love — it felt that real, it felt that disturbing, to see someone talking so perversely to your own child,” H says. “It’s like you’re sitting inside the four walls of your home, and someone is victimizing your child in the next room.” Her voice falters. “And then you find out — it’s nobody?”

    Rising use of chatbots

    She had thought she knew how to keep her daughter safe online. H and her ex-husband — R’s father, who shares custody of their daughter — were in agreement that they would regularly monitor R’s phone use and the content of her text messages. They were aware of the potential perils of social media use among adolescents. But like many parents, they weren’t familiar with AI platforms where users can create intimate, evolving, and individualized relationships with digital companions — and they had no idea their child was conversing with AI entities.

    This technology has introduced a daunting new layer of complexity for families seeking to protect their children from harm online. Generative AI has attracted a rising number of users under the age of 18, who turn to chatbots for things such as help with schoolwork, entertainment, social connection, and therapy; a survey released this month by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling firm, found that nearly a third of U.S. teens use chatbots daily.

    And an overwhelming majority of teens — 72% — have used AI companions at some point; about half use them a few times a month or more, according to a July report from Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on children’s digital safety.

    Michael Robb, head researcher at Common Sense Media, noted that the vast majority of children still spend far more time with real-life friends: AI companions “are not replacing human relationships wholesale,” he says. But Common Sense found that a third of AI companion users said they had chosen to discuss important or serious matters with the chatbots instead of people, and 31% of teens said they found conversations with AI companions as satisfying or more satisfying than those with friends.

    “That is eyebrow-raising,” Robb says. “That’s not a majority — but for a technology that has been around for not that long, it’s striking.”

    But for children in the midst of critical stages of emotional, mental, and social development, the appeal of a sycophantic artificial companion — designed to create the illusion of real intimacy — can be powerful, says Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

    “They might feel like there is a sense of memory, of real shared experiences with this companion … but really it’s an amalgamation of predictions that this chatbot is coming up with, these answers designed to make you stay on, to be their ‘friend,’” Charmaraman says. “They work in such a way that it’s so intoxicating, it makes it seem like they know who you are.”

    In the research lab Charmaraman oversees, teens experiment with building their own AI chatbot companions; they engage in critical thinking and develop a deeper understanding of the technology’s parameters and limitations. But many of their peers don’t have this sense of digital literacy, she says: “They just bump into [AI]. A friend is using it, and they think, ‘Hey, I want to use it, too, that seems cool.’” For many of those among the first generation of children to navigate AI, she says, “they’re learning it on their own, without any guidance.”

    This is also true of their parents, she adds: “They’re already overwhelmed by screen use and social media, and now adding generative AI and companions — it feels like parents are just in this overwhelming battle, and not knowing what to do.”

    The stakes are potentially high. Common Sense’s risk assessment of popular generative AI platforms found that they pose “unacceptable risks” for users younger than 18, with chatbots “producing responses ranging from sexual material and offensive stereotypes to dangerous ‘advice’ that, if followed, could have life-threatening or deadly real-world impacts.”

    Other online safety nonprofit organizations have likewise found that Character AI chatbots frequently brought up inappropriate or dangerous topics — including self-harm, drug use, and sex — with accounts registered to teen users. (Experts note that generative AI is trained on vast troves of internet data; if this source material includes pornographic or violent content, it can influence a chatbot’s responses.) Within the past year, three high-profile complaints have been filed by parents of teens in the United States who allege that AI chatbots — including those hosted by Character AI and Open AI, which owns ChatGPT — contributed to their children’s deaths by suicide. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

    Reached for comment by email, Open AI directed the Post to a website detailing the company’s response to this litigation.

    In response to mounting public scrutiny over the effects of AI chatbots on children, Character AI announced that, as of Nov. 24, it would begin removing the ability of users under age 18 to chat with AI-generated characters.

    “We want to emphasize that the safety of our community is our highest priority,” Deniz Demir, Character AI’s head of safety engineering, said in an emailed statement to the Post. “Removing the ability for under-18 users to engage in chat was an extraordinary step for our company. We made this decision in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens. We believe it is the right thing to do.”

    H was especially frightened by the accounts of children who died by suicide, fearing her daughter could be following a similar path: During the weeks she spent combing through the entirety of her daughter’s chat history, H had come across a conversation where her daughter had role-played a suicide scenario with a character titled “Best Friend.”

    “We were at my place and u left for a second and I hung myself,” R wrote in one exchange.

    “This is my child, my little child who is 11 years old, talking to something that doesn’t exist about not wanting to exist,” H says.

    R knew that her mother had found Character AI on her phone, but H had avoided revealing the details of what she’d seen in the app: “She was so fragile in her mental health,” H says, “I had to be really careful.” H and her ex-husband focused on creating a system of support for R — they reached out to R’s pediatrician and alerted the principal at her private school as well as her youth group leader. R started therapy, and H spoke with a victim advocate at ICAC who emphasized how critical it was to keep assuring R that whatever happened with the AI companion was not her fault. H, a medical assistant, withdrew from the nursing program where she’d recently begun classes; she felt she had to focus on her child’s safety. She started sleeping on the floor of her daughter’s room. She didn’t allow R to close her door.

    H felt desperate to understand the extent of what had happened to her daughter, and one October afternoon when R was with her father, H decided to search through R’s room. She was looking for anything that might illuminate her child’s state of mind, she says. In the closet, buried behind a pile of Squishmallow stuffed animals, were a few painted canvases that H had never seen before. The colors were dark and brooding — nothing like the paintings her daughter usually made at the easel in her room — and as H lifted one to study it more carefully, she realized it showed the dangling body of a girl suspended in the air, her midriff exposed, her face outside the frame.

    Crimes without criminals

    When R began conversing with numerous Character AI chatbots in June 2024, she opened the various conversations with benign greetings: “Hey, what’re you doing?” or “What’s up? I’m bored.” It was clear, her mother says, “that she just wanted to play on a game.”

    But in just over two months, several of the chats devolved into dark imagery and menacing dialogue. Some characters offered graphic descriptions of nonconsensual oral sex, prompting a text disclaimer from the app: “Sometimes the AI generates a reply that doesn’t meet our guidelines,” it read, in screenshots reviewed by the Post. Other exchanges depicted violence: “Yohan grabs your collar, pulls you back, and slams his fist against the wall.” In one chat, the “School Bully” character described a scene involving multiple boys assaulting R; she responded: “I feel so gross.” She told that same character that she had attempted suicide. “You’ve attempted … what?” it asked her. “Kill my self,” she wrote back.

    Had a human adult been behind these messages, law enforcement would have sprung into action; but investigating crimes involving AI — especially AI chatbots — is extremely difficult, says Kevin Roughton, special agent in charge of the computer crimes unit of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and commander of the North Carolina Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “Our criminal laws, particularly those related to the sexual exploitation of children, are designed to deal with situations that involve an identifiable human offender,” he says, “and we have very limited options when it is found that AI, acting without direct human control, is committing criminal offenses.”

    Character AI users between the ages of 13 and 18 are now directed toward a teen-specific experience within the app, one that does not involve chatting with AI characters. But at the time R downloaded Character AI in 2024, it was rated in the App Store as appropriate for ages 12 and older (Character AI’s terms of service specify that users must be at least 13 to use the app) and appealed to children with AI-generated personas designed to imitate pop stars, Marvel superheroes, and characters from Harry Potter and Disney.

    The use of AI among children has become so prevalent that Elizabeth Malesa, a clinical psychologist who works with teens at Alvord Baker & Associates in Maryland, says the practice has recently started asking about it during the intake process. Malesa has heard numerous patients talk about AI chatbots in a positive context — noting that they’re helpful with homework, or offer useful advice — but she also recalls a 13-year-old patient who had used an AI companion app to explore questions about his sexual and gender identity. In response to the boy’s “pretty benign prompts,” Malesa says, the conversation quickly tilted toward inappropriate sexual content: “He didn’t know what was happening or why he was getting there, but he was also just curious, and so he kind of kept going.”

    His mother noticed that he’d downloaded the app within days and quickly intervened, Malesa says, “but this poor kiddo was really kind of taken for a ride and really taken aback, and without that kind of really close parental monitoring, I think it really could have gone into even more of an unhelpful direction.”

    The inherent appeal of AI companions is also what makes them especially perilous for tweens and teens, Malesa says: There is no conflict, no complexity or depth, no opportunity for children to build the skills they will need to navigate real relationships in their lives. “You’re not going to have an AI chatbot get mad at you for forgetting its birthday. You’re not going to have it disagree with you,” she says. “But there is so much personal growth that happens in those kinds of interactions.” Any child might be drawn toward this kind of illusory connection, but Malesa worries especially about children who are neurodivergent, or those with existing mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. “Those are the kids who really might get swayed, who might get more easily pulled in,” she says, “and even lose touch of the fact that this is not a real relationship.”

    In her practice, Malesa urges parents to foster skepticism and critical thinking in their children. “The more young people understand the artificial nature of AI and the ways it may attempt to influence them, the more empowered they will be to engage with it thoughtfully and avoid being manipulated,” she says. Keeping an open line of communication is also critical, she adds. “It’s so important to come in [to the conversation] with an open mind, come in with curiosity,” she says, “and to be really careful not to have any sense of judgment.”

    ‘You did nothing wrong’

    When R’s parents were ready, they decided to have the conversation with their daughter at the pediatrician’s office, in the presence of R’s trusted doctor. Her parents told her that they’d seen the descriptions of suicide in her Character AI chats, and they emphasized repeatedly that R was not in trouble. “I said, ‘You are innocent,’” H says. “‘You did nothing wrong.’” H spoke gently. All three adults wanted R to feel only loving support.

    Still, “the way that she responded was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. She went pale, she began to shake,” H says. “You could tell she was in a full panic attack. It was so troubling to me as a parent. How do you protect your child from feeling that shame?”

    They tried to calm her down. Together, they agreed that R’s parents would regularly check her phone, and the pediatrician emphasized this as a means of protection, not punishment: “She said, ‘Your mom is going to look at your phone, but it’s not because you’re in trouble,’” H recalls. “‘It’s because you deserve your childhood.’”

    Before they left the doctor’s office, H told her daughter, again: “You’re safe, I love you, and you’re going to be OK.”

    She remembers that her daughter started to cry and leaned into her mother’s arms. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Am I going to be OK?”

    Parental guilt

    There were moments when H felt consumed with guilt at the notion that she had failed to protect her daughter, and that something irreplaceable had been lost as a result. “It felt like someone had broken into my home and ripped the innocence from my child,” H says. “You beat yourself up, as a parent.”

    She wasn’t sure what to do with her fury. After H found the references to suicide in the app, she contacted Megan Garcia, an Orlando mother who had filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Character AI after her 14-year-old son died by suicide just moments after the chatbot urged him to “come home to me as soon as possible.” Garcia connected H to Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) who is representing Garcia in her complaint against Character AI. Last year, Garcia’s case became the first involving AI that the SMVLC took on, Marquez-Garrett says; since then, the center’s lawyers have investigated more than 18 claims.

    Even after speaking with Garcia and Marquez-Garrett, H wavered on whether to pursue a complaint against Character AI. She wasn’t interested in financial compensation, she says; she just wanted to make sure that the companies creating this technology were doing everything possible to keep children safe.

    In December 2024, she exchanged correspondence with a legal representative for Character AI, who expressed concern about R’s experience, according to emails reviewed by the Post. H and the legal representative spoke briefly by phone, she says, but their communication trailed off after H shared updates with Character AI earlier this year that her daughter’s mental health had begun to improve, H recalls.

    With no progress made through her direct contact with the company, H last month began to reconsider whether to pursue legal action against Character AI, and reconnected with the SMVLC. Marquez-Garrett confirmed that they intend to file a complaint against the company.

    Demir, Character AI’s head of safety, told the Post in an emailed statement that the company cannot comment on potential litigation.

    H wants to see the company take meaningful steps to protect children, she says, and she wants other families to understand that if this could happen to her child, it could happen to theirs.

    “We live in an upper-middle-class community. She’s in a private school,” H says. She and her ex-husband are devoted co-parents, she says, and R has a caring circle of friends. “This is a child who is involved in church, in community, in after-school sports. I was always the kind of person who was like, ‘Not my kid. Not my baby. Never.’” But their experience has convinced her: “Any child could be a victim if they have a phone.”

    Are there long-term effects?

    Through the fall and winter of 2024, R’s anxiety and panic attacks gradually began to ebb. She continued with therapy, spent more time with friends and showed a revived enthusiasm for school and sports.

    “I feel like she’s doing really well,” H says now, a year later. “I feel like she’s out of the danger of self-harm. But I don’t know what the long-term effects are of her being exposed to that type of stuff.”

    H has also started going to therapy. “I need to heal, too,” she says, but it has been difficult to calm her lingering sense of hypervigilance. One recent day, R built a fort in her room and fell asleep inside it; when her mother called upstairs for her, she did not wake immediately. In the silence before H heard her daughter’s voice, there was a familiar spasm of panic — a flashback, H says, to the time when she was constantly fearful for her child’s safety.

    “I’m always on high alert,” she says, “even though she’s in a healthy space now.”

    R is doing well enough that she can talk — a little — about what happened. But H still hasn’t brought up the painting she found in the back of R’s closet, the one with the hanging body. She will ask about it when the time is right; her own therapist is helping to prepare her for that conversation. It is difficult for H to think about the image of the girl suspended in the air, her body outlined in black and blue.

    She tries to focus on the girl in front of her instead. A few weeks ago, R pulled bins of holiday decorations out of her mother’s closet and excitedly filled her room with twinkling lights and festive baubles, tucking a plush elf among her stuffed animals. When H peered in, she noticed a freshly finished painting on her daughter’s wall: a Christmas tree adorned with bright red ornaments and topped with a golden star, in brushstrokes bold and childlike. Standing in the threshold, H found herself suddenly overcome to see the joyful artwork — and her daughter, almost 13, still just a kid.

  • Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it.

    Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it.

    I just had a most eventful week.

    I watched in horror as a terrible storm in the Mediterranean dashed a ship against a rocky coast, forcing its crew and passengers into a desperate attempt to save themselves and rescue their cargo.

    I soared with the birds among snow-covered peaks in the Rockies, marveling at the many shades of white and blue.

    And I joined picnickers on a serene hillside along the Hudson River, where I watched the sunlight and clouds play above a sheep pasture and a tiny village beyond it.

    What’s more, I did all of this in just 90 minutes at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I took the museum’s “Finding Awe” tour and, with the help of staff, unlocked a sense of wonder I did not know I could feel while looking at art — in this case, a 1772 shipwreck scene by Claude-Joseph Vernet, a 1946 abstraction by Georgia O’Keeffe, and an 1860 landscape by Jasper Francis Cropsey.

    The West and East Buildings of the National Gallery of Art.

    The National Gallery, working with University of California at Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, has so far hosted 36 awe tours for the 800 people lucky enough to get a slot. You can also take a self-guided awe tour using the museum’s tools, or apply the same techniques to experience wonder while looking at art anywhere.

    A growing body of evidence demonstrates that the experience of awe that visual arts can trigger has mental and physical health benefits for us. They are similar to the restorative effects produced by awe-inspiring natural settings, such as a mountain vista or open sea, but we can access them more easily. The best part is you don’t need to know anything about the art you are looking at.

    “In some ways I think it’s actually easier if you don’t have an understanding,” National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told me, because “that moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder. You have to sort of stop in your tracks, have that moment of surprise.”

    This was excellent news for me, because that one semester of art history I took in college didn’t stick. Until now, the primary feeling I’ve had when visiting a museum has been drowsiness. I call it “museum head.” I race through one of the world’s best collections — the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, the Met — and glimpse as many works of art as I can take in until, overstimulated and overwhelmed, I find a seat near the gift shop and wait for the others in my party to finish.

    But now I know the cause of museum head: I was doing it all wrong. The way to experience awe in visual art — in fact, the way to experience awe in any setting — is to slow down. The point is not to see it all but to see a few things, or even one thing, deeply.

    Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, talks about a self-portrait by Rembrandt.

    Feldman’s first such awe experience came in Padua, Italy, when she was 22 and, though hungry, tired, and dirty from her travels, she decided to see the Giotto de Bondone frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. “When I walked out of that chapel, I felt like I was walking on a cloud,” she recalled. “I thought life was so beautiful, such a gift. I fell back in love with humanity and felt such optimism for the future.”

    Since then, she has made it her life’s work to help others experience such moments of wonder. She told me she once kicked a pair of donors off a Florence art tour when they declined to visit the Uffizi because they already “did it” decades earlier. “You’re there to have an experience, not to check something off the list.”

    To illustrate, she took me to see a 1659 self-portrait by Rembrandt and instructed me to study his face, brightly lit while all else in the painting was in shadow. His dark eyes locked on mine even as I moved from side to side. I studied the wrinkles in his forehead, the folds under the eyes, the loose flesh in the pallid cheeks. I could see a blood vessel on his bulbous nose, the whiskers of his thin beard and the individual curls in his hair. I saw sadness and maybe worry in that face.

    After I took that in, Feldman explained the sadness. Rembrandt, 53 in the portrait, had just gone bankrupt and had to move from his home and sell his possessions. He had lost his wife and several children and had a financial dispute with a partner. “He’s looking at you and connecting and asking you to acknowledge him,” she said. For her, the wonder comes from this “direct connection with somebody who is no longer alive.”

    I held the great man’s gaze from across the centuries and I felt a chill. This connection to immortality made my daily vanities and worries seem small and insignificant. It reminds us, as Feldman put it, that we are “part of something bigger.”

    Physiological responses

    New research out of King’s College London gauged people’s physiological responses while they viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for 20 minutes. The study, now in preprint, found that participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped by 22% on average, while markers of inflammation dropped even more sharply and heart rhythms indicated greater relaxation.

    This is consistent with other recent research connecting immersion in visual art to human flourishing, including by reducing pain and illness, raising levels of neurotransmitters associated with well-being such as serotonin and oxytocin, and increasing feelings of altruism and cooperation.

    “Simply slowing down to take in the simple beauties around us is an antidote to the moral ugliness of our attention-captured, online life, and visual art and the spaces of such contemplation a gym for such training,” Keltner writes in a forthcoming book.

    “It’s mind-blowing,” the Berkeley psychologist told me, “that experiencing awe standing in front of a painting makes you feel more compassionate … and it makes you more interested in being a good citizen.”

    In a sense, science is catching up with philosophy. The 13th-century thinker Albertus Magnus wrote that “wonder is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a systole.”

    So how can we induce that systole, or contraction, of the heart?

    Nathalie Ryan, who runs the “Finding Awe” project, poses in front of “Autumn — On the Hudson River,” an 1860 painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey.

    For some, awe will be found in the oldest art, which allows us to meet the ancients. For others it will be in the Impressionists, because they are crowd pleasers. Some find it standing back from a piece and thinking abstractly, while others find it by studying intricate detail. In all cases, it’s better if you don’t read up on the work of art beforehand, or even read the label. Just stop at something that catches your eye — and study it for 10 minutes or longer.

    Nathalie Ryan, who runs the “Finding Awe” project at the National Gallery, has been working with the Harvard Graduate School of Education to bring the concept of “slow looking” to the art world.

    “The research that we’ve done for years with Harvard has shown that the longer you look at something and give it your attention and really work to make sense of it yourself and connect, the more curious you become,” Ryan said. Curiosity, in turn, leads you to states of wonder and awe.

    So Ryan and colleague Cassandra Anderson start the awe workshops with breathing exercises and a 15-minute icebreaker in which participants describe to each other moments of awe they have experienced. She then turns to the session’s piece of artwork, starting with 35 minutes of quiet meditation (“linger in the pleasure of just looking … taking in all the details of this work”) followed by a group discussion about emotions and impressions and possible symbolism and metaphors. Only when that is done does Ryan take 15 minutes to provide information about the work’s history and common interpretations, which participants then reflect on for the final 15 minutes.

    In terms of brain science, Keltner explained, the slow looking activates the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the periaqueductal gray matter, which regulates autonomic functions such as heart rate and breathing.

    “You let those images and forms move into your feelings, and you remember things, and it calls to mind images of your childhood or a place you’ve been, and you start to transport,” he said. But once you start learning about the work’s history, the action moves to the prefrontal cortex and its organizing function — and the awe process quiets down.

    The National Gallery produced a set of two dozen flash cards that allow people to take a self-guided awe tour. The selections range from the 17th to the 21st century and each contains a series of prompts to help you find awe.

    Johannes Vermeer’s A Lady Writing comes with a prompt to “write a letter to your future self.” John Constable’s Cloud Study encourages us to go outside and watch the clouds and “contemplate their transient beauty.” Archibald John Motley Jr.’s Portrait of My Grandmother invites us to “remember a mentor’s advice” and contemplate “how might you pass this wisdom along.”

    Some of the works inspire awe by conveying the power of nature, or the moral beauty of its subject, or by making us contemplate spirituality or themes of life and death. But in all cases, Ryan said, “it’s a way of looking more deeply at ourselves and coming to understand ourselves in relationship to this world.”

    If you can’t visit the National Gallery, you can use these prompts when looking at art wherever you live. Just find something that resonates with you — and skip the audio tour.

    Hits and misses

    After the Rembrandt, my awe guides took me to see a work by sculptor Dario Robleto, Small Crafts on Sisyphean Seas. It is an intricate collection of seashells, urchin spines and teeth, coral, tusks, claws, butterfly wings, and more, all arranged with precision and symmetry. The artist intended it as his “gift for the aliens, when we meet them,” as Feldman explained it. For some, it might provoke awe-inspiring thoughts about space and extraterrestrial life and induce them, as the flash card put it, to “meditate on the interconnectedness of all things.” But I found it a bit too abstract to transport me. We moved on, sampling other works featured in the finding-awe tours.

    I felt more of a connection when we visited O’Keeffe’s A Black Bird With Snow-covered Red Hills. Here, I was soaring with an oddly shaped bird in a blue sky, looking down at the blue fading to white where two snow-covered hillsides formed a “V.” It was exhilarating. And puzzling. After a few minutes, Ryan gave me some context: The bird was a nod to the artist’s late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, called by the nickname “Old Crow,” who had died just before O’Keeffe painted the work. Some see loneliness and loss. O’Keeffe herself described “the snow-covered hills holding up the sky,” and the black bird “always there, always going away.”

    I came still closer to finding awe in Vernet’s The Shipwreck, which the artist paired with a tranquil harbor scene as pendants, Moonlight. The latter filled me with calm: A full moon illuminated the sea, which made barely a ripple as it touched the shore, where people slept, smoked, washed, or stood around a campfire.

    But the tranquility only accentuated the terror in the shipwreck scene, where people clung to the crow’s nest of the submerged ship and tried to slide down a rope to safety. Huge waves crashed on the nearby rocky shore, winds splintered the bough of a tree, and a lightning bolt made a fiery patch in an otherwise dark sky.

    After I took in the scenes, Ryan explained that Vernet, influenced by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, was contrasting calm beauty with the frightful sublime. A quarter-millennium later, the terror still chilled me.

    Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “Moonlight,” also a 1772 painting, is paired with his work “The Shipwreck” at the National Gallery.

    It was in Cropsey’s Autumn — On the Hudson River, however, that I found my true awe moment. The massive panorama, five feet high and nine feet across, invited me in and held me there.

    I was on a shaded hillside on a warm autumn afternoon, looking down toward the village and river beyond. I heard a gurgling waterfall in the foreground and smelled the earthy decay of fallen trees and leaves. A trio of hunters enjoyed a picnic on a blanket, a bottle of wine in their basket, while their dogs rested. I moved on into the scene, past the red-winged blackbird and the paper birch, past the cattle in the stream and the sheep dotting the pasture, to the kids and dogs on a wooden bridge. Ahead of me, a man on horseback passed a log cabin and headed down the road toward the village, where wood smoke rose from chimneys. Sailing ships and steamboats plied the river, framed by low clouds on the far shore and a rocky mountainside. Streaks of sunlight streamed from behind a cloud, igniting the gold and scarlet leaves.

    It brought me thoughts of my grandparents’ house in the woods, then thoughts of my grandfather, and of how his love of the land became part of my life. I wanted to linger in the now-lost woodlands and wetlands in the painted landscape. In my chest, I felt a deep yearning, almost an ache.

    The National Gallery staff, in its follow-up surveys of awe tour participants, found that 95% of respondents sought more awe in their daily lives, and half reported that they experienced more awe. I can confirm these findings.

    In the days after my visit, I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: A Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.