Mogadishu, Somalia – Ending the United States' "forever wars" was a major slogan of Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign, during which he and many of his supporters spoke out against American resources and lives being put to waste in conflicts across the globe. But on February 1, a mere 10 days after being inaugurated for a second time, President Trump announced that the US had carried out air strikes targeting senior leadership of ISIL (ISIS) in Somalia. "These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States," his post on X read. This marked Trump's first military action overseas, but it wouldn't be his last. In the time since, the US has provided weapons and support to Israel in its wars in Gaza and across the Middle East; it has launched strikes on Yemen; and even attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.

Last fall, Politico reporter Alex Thompson wrote a short news story about President Biden's then-science adviser, Eric Lander, and how he was driving everyone in the White House crazy. Then, after writing that article, Thompson got an anonymous tip about Lander's mistreatment of his staff, which included lawyer Rachel Wallace. Wallace alleged that Lander bullied her and retaliated against her for raising ethical red flags about his behavior. One of those red flags was about Eric Lander's closeness with another Eric, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Lander's desire for Schmidt's foundation, Schmidt Futures, to help fund the White House science office. After Thompson wrote about the bullying allegations, Lander resigned from the administration under pressure.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. On Aug. 30, my heart broke a tiny bit. That day, the Guardian published a remarkable interview with Frank Oz, Jim Henson's longtime collaborator and the puppeteer behind Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and other classic Muppets. Oz hasn't been involved with the Muppets since 2007, three years after Disney purchased the franchise. He tells the Guardian: "I'd love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn't want me, and Sesame Street hasn't asked me for 10 years. They don't want me because I won't follow orders and I won't do the kind of Muppets they believe in. He added of the post-Disney Muppet movies and TV shows: "The soul's not there.

Some of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley want to scan your eyeball. You almost certainly shouldn't let them. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffmann, and major venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz are all backing a recently revealed plan by a company called Worldcoin, which mashes up three big ideas: It's a cryptocurrency company, and it's a Universal Basic Income project, and also it's a biometric-scanning company. If, first, the world will share its irises. According to a recent report by Bloomberg, Worldcoin's goal is to use cryptocurrency as way to spread money more equitably around the world in a setup similar to a universal basic income.

Humans have been trying and often failing to land robots on Mars since 1962. Four different space agencies from around the world have attempted this improbable feat 18 times. It's happened successfully only eight times--remarkably, all by NASA. On Thursday, the American space agency will try for number nine, as the Perseverance rover attempts to gently settle onto the Red Planet. Launched July 30, Perseverance carries an impressive array of instruments and technologies, including 23 cameras, three spectrometers, a radar mapper, and a weather station.

As technology and automation rapidly remake a very different future of work, some economists predict that women will benefit the most from the coming disruptions. Although women have no doubt been hardest hit by the COVID-19 economy, in the coming years, women-dominated caring jobs--like nursing, teaching, and providing child and elder care--that aren't easily replaced by machines will be among the fastest-growing occupations and thus more likely to be "future-proof." It's not that many women's jobs won't be automated away. Just as men-dominated mechanical and machine operating jobs are predicted to disappear, so too are women-dominated administrative and clerical jobs. But most of these future-of-work predictions assume women will continue to dominate the care economy. And all because men aren't expected to care.

While I was making dinner, I yelled at Alexa. But the recipe was a little complicated, and I kept having to repeat myself to get the damn Amazon Echo to turn off the timer. And when I used my computer communication voice to ask it to play NPR One so I could catch up on the news--it had been a whole eight or nine minutes since I had checked in with the world--it tried three times to instead play "The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix From NPR Music." I feel a little bad about it, remembering Rachel Withers' (very persuasive!) 2018 piece for Future Tense about why she won't date men who are rude to Alexa: It matters how you interact with your virtual assistant, not because it has feelings or will one day murder you in your sleep for disrespecting it, but because of how it reflects on you. Alexa is not human, but we engage with her like one.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked an unprecedented economic crisis, during which more than 30 million Americans have relied on state and federal unemployment benefits as a lifeline. While states have delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to the jobless, almost everyone would admit that the process was something like a catamaran sailing during a hurricane. Millions of claimants had to wait weeks to receive their payments, and new benefits promised by the CARES Act to gig workers, students, and others typically ineligible for aid took weeks, even months, to set up and deliver. As a new data dashboard from the Century Foundation and New America makes clear, only 60 percent of unemployment claims submitted by mid-June were paid by June 30--better than in the spring, but still far below historical averages. While some of these claims were made by workers that may be eventually declared ineligible, for many more, it's been a purgatory of pending status.

I reach out to you still contemplating the profundity of what Mark Zuckerberg told his congressional inquisitors on Wednesday: "The space of people connecting with other people is a very large space." So large, it even includes newsletters in your inbox. Three clear winners and one loser emerged from Wednesday's Big Tech hearing in Washington. The winners were Rep. Pramila Jayapal, our new "eviscerator in chief"; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai's future career as an anger-management therapist; and Tim Wu. When the going gets tough in coming weeks, I will close my eyes and picture the Google CEO soothingly saying "congressman" with infinite patience, as he did at the beginning of all his answers. The more irate the congressional questioner, the more patient, measured, and empathetic his "congressman" sounded.

Kate Compton, an expert in artificial intelligence, responds to Holli Mintzer's "Legal Salvage." I've begun collecting vintage brooches. I started after reading a theory that Queen Elizabeth was communicating secret political shade through her choice of accessories. They also reminded me of my grandmother, a woman with that refined 1950s hostess style that I learned to associate with being an adult. I can wear one to feel like the sort of formidable grand dame that I imagine myself growing into as I age.