If you thought AI-integrated smart glasses were bad, wait until you get a load of Sabi, a Palo Alto-based startup working on a beanie it says will probe your actual brain signals.
That’s not hyperbole. The company’s eponymous Sabi Cap, per New Atlas, comes lined with 100,000 electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, which will translate electrical signals from your brain into usable data for Sabi’s “Brain Foundation” AI model — all meant to transcribe your thoughts into digital text at what the company says will be a rate of 30 words per minute.
The AI model powering it is said to be trained on 100,000 hours of data from some 100 volunteers, Wired previously reported. But given that thought and speech patterns vary wildly between person to person, the challenge of building a universally workable EEG-to-speech device is enormous, and the company has yet to share any evidence that its product performs as advertised.
“These devices are going to have to be ready to go out of the box,” third-party neurotech consultant JoJo Platt told Wired. “They’re going to have to conform to me rather than me conforming to it.”
The commercial appeal is clear. It’s hard to imagine a surgically implanted brain chip like Neuralink ever gaining genuine mass traction, making a lightweight alternative compelling. And certain evidence does suggest that you could get usable data from outside the skull; as one non-peer-reviewed paper found a few years ago, AI models fine-tuned with EEG data represent a “significant advancement towards portable, low-cost ‘thoughts-to-text’ technology with potential applications in both neuroscience and natural language processing.”
Yet as apeer-reviewed paper published in Scientific Reports last year found, the efficacy of EEG-to-text models remains “unclear due to limitations in evaluation methodologies.” The early promise of EEG, the later study argues, is likely the result of flashy pattern memorization rather than a novel tech that can decode human brain waves.
In other words, it’s possible Sabi’s founders have massively underestimated how advanced their brain foundation model really is. Until we get a glimpse at the product, set to release later in 2026, it’s anyone’s guess whether this is a true mind-reading device, or just a very expensive hat.
The Vela Supercluster spans 300 million light years, located on average 870 million light years away from us.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared cameras imaged the Milky Way’s center to create this portrait of our galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech))
An enormous supercluster made up from over 20 individual galaxy clusters hiding behind our dusty Milky Way is even larger than astronomers had thought, affecting the motion through space of all the galaxies and galaxy clusters in our corner of the cosmos.
The Vela Supercluster was discovered in 2016 thanks to a team led by Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Some 870 million light-years away, it lurks close to the plane of the Milky Way. Extragalactic astronomers refer to a region behind our Milky Way as the ‘Zone of Avoidance’ because dust between our galaxy’s stars blots out, or deeply reddens, light from more distant galaxies behind it.
Given that this Zone of Avoidance takes up about 20% of the entire sky from our vantage point on Earth, that’s a lot of celestial real estate inaccessible to us.You may like
Fortunately, astronomers have their ways and means of bypassing the Zone of Avoidance, and now, Kraan-Korteweg and her team have done just that to discover the true scale of the vast Vela Supercluster.
Gravity from huge superclusters tugs on the motions of galaxies across the universe, drawing them closer. We see these subtle galaxy motions as ‘cosmic flows’, like tides and eddies that carry galaxies this way and that.
However, while we knew the Vela Supercluster was exceptionally massive when it was discovered, it didn’t seem massive enough to account for all the cosmic flows seen by astronomers.
The CosmicFlows catalogue, organized by astronomers in France and Hawaii, is a record of measurements of the ‘peculiar’ motions of galaxies, or rather, their motions that deviate from that expected by the continuous expansion of space. Once gravitational interactions with nearby galaxies have been accounted for, any excess peculiar motion is therefore the result of ‘cosmic flows’ — the gravitational attraction across hundreds of millions or even billions of light-years towards large centers of mass.
There are many cosmic flows across the universe as streams of galaxies head in one direction or another. The ‘Great Attractor,”–– the romantic name given to one large supercluster also hidden by the Zone of Avoidance and connected to the Laniakea supercluster of which the Milky Way is a tiny part — is just one source of cosmic flow. The Shapley Supercluster, located 650 million light-years away, is another.
A map of the galaxy superclusters in our neck of the cosmic woods. The two main dense cores of the Vela Supercluster can be seen. (Image credit: Dr Jérôme Léca, RSA Cosmos, St Etienne, France.)
Now, Kraan-Korteweg and her astronomers, in a study led by Amber Hollinger of the Lyon 1 Claude Bernard University in France, have discovered the origin of the excess cosmic flow: the Vela Supercluster is larger than was thought.
By using 65,518 galaxy distance measurements from the latest CosmicFlows catalogue, coupled with 8,283 new galaxy redshifts close to the plane of our galaxy, Kraan-Korteweg’s team were able to identify other galaxies and galaxy clusters that apparently are part of the Vela Supercluster. The extra data came from observations with SALT, the Southern African Large Optical Telescope, and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa. In particular, MeerKAT was able to detect galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance because radio waves from their hydrogen gas can pass through our Milky Way’s dust lanes relatively unhindered.What to read next
They found that the Vela Supercluster is comparable in mass to the Shapley Supercluster, and contains 33,800 trillion solar masses worth of material spread across a volume approximately 300 million light-years wide. It is so huge and massive that its gravitational influence over galaxies in the universe exceeds even that of the Great Attractor. It is made from two walls of galaxy clusters, each with a dense, massive core, moving towards one another under gravity.
“This discovery helps complete our map of the nearby Universe,” said the research team in a statement. “For the first time we can clearly see one of the major gravitational players hidden behind our own galaxy.”
Kraan-Korteweg’s team have nicknamed the Vela Supercluster “Vela-Banzi,” which means ‘revealing widely’ in the isiXhosa language of South Africa.
The findings are described in a paper on the arXiv pre-print paper repository.
On May 6th, 2026, Pluto goes stationary retrograde at 5° Aquarius.
While the exact station happens on May 6th, this influence has alreadybeen building in the past week, culminating with the Scorpio Full Moon on May 1st.
Things have just been more ‘Plutonic’ lately – and this intensity will continue in the coming week.
What does ‘Plutonic’ actually mean?
Lots of us associate Pluto with power plays, heavy stuff, crisis and transformation – and other themes that are really more Scorpio than Pluto.
Pluto transits CAN feel like we’re some kind of puppets on strings – but that may not have anything to do with power plays, and the crisis we’re experiencing might not actually be Pluto’s doing.
So why is Pluto so misunderstood – and how does it really operate?
Pluto is the last planet in the solar system. From its position at the edge, Pluto can see all the other planets circling around the Sun, making aspects, and playing out their cycles.
Its distance gives Pluto the widest perspective of all. He’s the manager in chief of the solar system. The scorekeeper.
There is a natural law to how everything unfolds and interconnects – and Pluto, from that vantage point, understands this in a way no other planet does.
It doesn’t just register the individual parts, but the whole ecosystem – how different elements feed into each other and regulate the overall balance.
Let’s take the ecosystem we call planet Earth. Plants, animals, humans, resources – all co-exist in a system that regulates itself.
Animals eat plants, other animals eat those animals, we humans eat pretty much everything – and eventually, we feed back into the system, nourishing the soil and continuing the cycle.
There is a natural law where nothing is too much or too little – and even when things temporarily fall out of balance, the system works to restore itself.
Pluto problems arise when we start wrestling with what is – rather than trusting the natural law that’s already taking care of it.
For example:
We hope for a certain outcome, we put in effort, money, or time – but then we don’t quite get what we expected, or on the timeline we expected.
We find ourselves in a situation with a partner – we feel we’ve done a lot, and they owe us. Resentment creeps in. We’ve been keeping score, and we’re convinced it’s unfair.
But who’s keeping the real score?
Pluto is keeping the real score. And that’s a good thing, because it means we don’t have to. It means that whatever we’re dealing with is part of a larger process that is already being accounted for.
In Pluto’s books, nothing gets missed. Every action is recorded. Every investment – of time, energy, intention – is feeding something.
–> Maybe the time you invested in a relationship or a project didn’t pay off the way you hoped – but it helped someone else who needed it more than you did at that moment.
–> And the reverse is also true. Sometimes good things come your way that you didn’t directly work for in that moment – something works out, an opportunity opens up – and you might mistake it for skill or talent, when it might well be a dividend coming back around.
What goes around always comes around – just not always on our personal timing. On Pluto’s timing.
Pluto Goes Retrograde – Is Not All About Us
Most of our struggles in life come when we make life about us. This creates a kind of tunnel vision, and we miss the bigger picture.
But life is waaay more complex and interconnected than we give it credit for – and most of the time, what frustrates us, what feels unfair, what keeps us up at night – has very little to do with us personally.
There’s a much larger story going on that we simply don’t have the bandwidth to see, because, unlike Pluto, we’re not at the edge of the solar system.
Pluto in Aquarius, more than in any other sign, points to a higher order, a larger puzzle, and the understanding that everything is connected and accounted for.
When we shift our perspective from ourselves to the bigger picture, we stop wasting time and energy on resentment and score-keeping around things we have zero control over.
The same hour of unpaid overtime can create stress and grief (why am I not getting paid?) – OR it can energize us, when we see the impact we made and how that extra hour actually helped someone. Same situation – completely different experience.
When we make public speaking about us – what people will think, how they’ll judge us – we dread it. But when we focus on the message that needs to be delivered, on the people we’re there to help, the same experience becomes exhilarating. Again – same circumstance, completely different experience.
All this might sound simple – and it is.
But once the concept really lands, we can’t believe how much time, energy, and frustration we’ve been spending on things we have zero control over, instead of doing something more meaningful. We almost don’t know whether to laugh or cry – probably both.
Pluto stationary in Aquarius is that twice-a-year reminder that this is not all about us. And that by shifting our perspective from ourselves to the world, to people, to the bigger picture, we can move from frustration and resistance to flow, connection, and meaning.
In this Plutonic reflective window, ask yourself:
Where in your life are you keeping score – and what would change if you trusted Pluto to do it for you?
And where in your life could you make it less about you – and more about the world around you?
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.
The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.
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At first, Mr. Trump moved to oust China from its strongholds in the Western Hemisphere. Almost as soon as he returned to office, the United States pressured CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate with connections to China, to sell two ports in the Panama Canal Zone. Venezuela, dependent on China as a market for 80 percent of its oil exports, saw American troops abduct its leader Nicolás Maduro last winter. And Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba, a destination for Chinese investment, “is next.” It will also be better, the thinking goes, if the United States has a more secure foothold near the North Pole (a foothold such as Greenland) when the time comes to divvy up the energy and mineral resources that global warming unlocks there. Whether or not this hemispheric policy is defensible, there is a coherence to it.
The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.
That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.
The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.
It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump because he, too, recognized the musical-chairs logic of the moment. Once the music stops, the United States may lack the firepower to protect Israel from its neighbors in the traditional manner and will probably lack the inclination. Ironically, the war’s catastrophic outcome shows Mr. Netanyahu’s basic understanding to have been sound: Israel’s prospects for enlisting the United States in such anachronistic adventures were dwindling. Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.
It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.
The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The Times and a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2026, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Has Overextended the Empire Dangerously . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
~ Viktor Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Wikipedia
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 3, 2026 James Tunney, LLM, is an Irish Barrister who has lectured on legal matters throughout the world. He is a poet, a visual artist, and author of The Mystery of the Trapped Light: Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism plus The Mystical Accord: Sutras to Suit Our Times, Lines for Spiritual Evolution. His website is http://www.jamestunney.com. James explores the life and spiritual transformation of Edith Stein, the phenomenological philosopher who became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. He discusses her journey from Judaism through atheism to Catholic mysticism, and her deep engagement with suffering, empathy, and the nature of the soul.Tunney also examines her philosophical legacy, her martyrdom at Auschwitz, and her enduring relevance in a modern world shaped by scientism and technological abstraction. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:08:45 Early life and Jewish roots 00:17:30 Philosophical awakening and Husserl 00:26:15 Conversion and Teresa of Avila 00:35:00 Carmelite vocation and inner life 00:43:45 Empathy, suffering and the cross 00:52:30 Phenomenology and spiritual insight 01:01:15 Nazism, martyrdom and destiny 01:10:00 Legacy, sainthood and Europe 01:15:00 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Saturday, April 18, 2026)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 4, 2026 Doug Marman, an Eckankar practitioner, is author of The Whole Truth: The Spiritual Legacy of Paul Twitchell; It Is What It Is: The Personal Discourses of Rumi; The Hidden Teachings of Rumi; The Silent Questions: A Spiritual Odyssey; The Spiritual Flow of Life and the Science of Catalysts; Sukhmani: The Secret of Inner Peace; and Lenses of Perception: A Surprising New Look at the Origin of Life, the Laws of Nature, and of Our Universe. His website is http://spiritualdialogues.com/ In this video from 2020, he provides insights about parapsychology based on his experience with “soul travel”. He describes the dynamics, based on his experience, of the astral plane, the causal plane, and the mental plane. He discusses a unique state of consciousness that he characterizes as half in and half out of the body. He suggests that this unusual state could be the source of many ostensible UFO abduction reports. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on September 25, 2020.)
After covering a viral TikTok of a woman explaining the “stark differences” she noticed after moving from a Republican-leaning to a Democratic-leaning state, BuzzFeed Community members who did the same (or vice versa) also came out to share their own stories — and they didn’t hold back. Here are some of the biggest, wildest differences people who’ve lived in both blue-leaning and red-leaning states have noticed:
1. “We moved from Wisconsin to California and actually wondered why it took us so long to get out of racist Wisconsin. The kids went to college here and were definitely not coming back to Wisconsin. We retired and went back to work once we got to California, and it was the best decision ever. Nobody here asks, ‘What does your husband do that you can afford a house like that?’ You also just can’t beat the weather, which is perfect every day. The mountains and the beautiful Pacific Ocean are shared by all, not just those who purchased a home nearby. You have to have a good job to be able to live and make it in California, but so far, we are living the good life and are here to stay. Blue all the way!”
2. “I live in Ohio and grew up in Indiana, but I’m from Michigan and do research in Chicago for work. Red states are inhabited by people who are constantly in a state of fear. They point out what’s wrong with everything different than them, but in reality, they’re miserable people. Chicago is a vibrant, happy city, and Detroit is fun and has good-working folk. Are red states cheaper? Sure, but you have no choices there. There’s much more diversity of economy in blue ones.”
3. “My wife and our two school-aged boys lived outside of Charlotte, North Carolina about 15 years ago. At the time, there was no Trump or MAGA, so things weren’t nearly as polarized as they are today. BUT, there are two aspects that basically made my wife and me decide to move back to Maryland: extremely poor public schools (even though we lived in an affluent area), and everyone is a Bible thumper. Rural NC is very backward.”
4. “I moved from a blue state to a red state to be near family. The people are friendly but not well-educated. They always talk about freedom, yet vote for idiots who pass laws that infringe on their personal rights and economic well-being. I don’t get it.”
5. “I’ve lived in New York, Ohio, and Kentucky. Ohio was the worst. I met the most prejudiced people of every color there. It was surprising and shocking. Growing up in New York, we never knew which neighbor was going to stop in for coffee and a chat. The doors were kept unlocked and open during the day, and neighbors helped each other. But Kentucky is my home now. Even though it’s a red state, most people are kind and respectful. It’s safer here, and I love it. I have great neighbors who are like family, and it’s a beautiful state, too!”
6. “I was born in NYC. At 10, my parents moved my sister and me to Jacksonville, Florida. At 27, I moved back to NYC and am now living on Long Island. Jacksonville has gotten worse over the years, and I’ve never liked the politics, with the fake Christians and racism. The irony is that Long Island is more red than Jacksonville.”
7. “I hate admitting this, but Idaho had the best Medicaid. My children are disabled, so we’ve dealt with Medicaid in Louisiana, Idaho, Washington, and now Illinois. Idaho hadn’t privatized its Medicaid, whereas these other states force you to pick a management plan from a crappy insurance company, and then you’re limited to what these insurance companies will pay for, or who takes it. You need prior approval for anything out of the ordinary. In Idaho (from 2013 to 2016), if you are on Medicaid, you’re on Medicaid. Everybody seemed to take it, and you never had to worry if this person took Aetna or if that person only took Blue Cross. It was so much easier. I really wish other states did this, and I have to wonder how much these states are paying to get these management companies to do Medicaid, and if it’s really worth it.”
—Anonymous
8. “I grew up in Louisiana and ended up in Maryland for grad school. It’s a bit more expensive, but other than the DC burbs, it’s pretty affordable for the Mid-Atlantic. I’m so never moving back to Louisiana, especially with the likes of Landry in charge down there.”
9. “I moved from Houston to rural South Carolina for a job. The culture shock was what got me. Yes, my property taxes on an acre of land are $700 per year (I’m retired now), but the celebrating-everything-regarding-the-Civil-War stuff was disgusting: Confederate Ball, Confederate Memorial Day, having the first shot, being the first to secede, etc. There being Confederate flags displayed in yards is too much. I just want to scream, ‘You lost, get over it!’ It’s not bad on the coast, but it’s pathetic in rural upstate.”
10. “I moved from New York state to Florida. It’s awful. It’s very red here, and the politics are all about racism and being anti-gay. They’re banning books and now sociology in college. God forbid anyone is actually educated and informed. People in my area can be friendly, but it’s surface. It’s all about money and outdoing everyone. The cost of living isn’t really any cheaper. The big difference is there’s no state income tax. I’m counting the days ’til I can move back home.”
—Anonymous
11. “I moved from Northern California to George five years ago, and people from the South already seem to have negative feelings about California. For the most part, people are friendly, but they let you know they don’t want you to try to change things here. I can’t understand how fellow Christians think being a Democrat is somehow wrong. One of the most important rules is to love the Lord above all else, and secondly, brotherly love. Wouldn’t social programs fill that bill?”
12. “I live in a very red part of an overall blue state in the Northeast. The thing I’ve noticed is how insulated the MAGA folks keep themselves. They live in a bubble where they somehow ignore the drugs and the unhoused around, so they can say they live in a more ‘high-end’ area. They claim those types of problems are all in bigger cities. They somehow don’t see the unhoused sleeping downtown at night, or the kids in school without lunches and in dirty clothes, or the guy tweaking and arguing with himself next to the farmers market every weekend. They see what they want to see and will call you a liar for pointing out the truth. The brainwashing is complete, and they will believe their GOP- and FOX news-fed lies over what they are seeing in front of them.”
13. “I moved from the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to Virginia. Southern hospitality is a myth. People here are still fighting the Civil War. I moved after four years to the east coast of Florida, and the mix of people and beliefs was much better.”
—Anonymous
14. “I was raised in super rural Missouri, went to college in a liberal pocket of Nebraska, went to grad school in Indiana, chose Louisville, Kentucky as a home for 15 years, and have now been in a blue pocket of Kansas for nearly three years now. I won’t leave the Midwest (or South, if that’s how you want to categorize Louisville) because I want the US to stay purple. Admittedly, I stay near blue pockets, but every state I have lived in is similar. If you don’t bring up politics or religion, then everything is copacetic. As you create true friendships, you’ll find out that a close friend is actually of a very different school of thought than you, but that’s where we as a society learn to stretch. I love not being in an echo chamber. We have great conversations about the ‘why’ behind our deeply held beliefs, and we respect each other enough to grow.”
“I would say Indiana is the least expensive state to live in, but I really appreciate that every single Kansas person I’ve met is entirely respectful of alternate opinions. Kansas is perfectly purple. The communities come together for emergencies and truly care about everyone. There are so many pride flags and ‘Don’t tread on me’ bumper stickers. It runs the gamut. In the end, the overwhelming sense is ‘I won’t regulate you if you don’t regulate me.’ Sad that legislators used the ‘gut and stuff’ tactic to strip our communities of trans protections this year, though. My 8-year-old boy with long hair is now scared to turn 9 because he might get fined for coming into the bathroom with me next month….But hey, that was the work of a few. I haven’t met a single Kansan who agrees with that bill.”
—Meg, Kansas
15. “I’ve lived in Arizona and Indiana. Indiana is a ruby red state, but only because the ‘QpubliKKKlan’ cult has gerrymandered the hell out of this state. It’s really mostly 50/50, but the Democrats have been separated into separate districts. My representative only represents parts of multiple counties. I’ve worked with die-hard Republicans, and we got along fine and had some interesting debates, but only as long as their cult leader was in power in the White House. But as soon as that piece of shit lost in 2020, they decided they hated all Democrats. When I lived in Arizona, I didn’t notice that division, but of course, that was decades before Diaper Don the Con started dividing us all.”
16. “I bought a house last year in a deeply red Southern state (I hate it here, but I grew up here, and I committed to relocation before the 2024 election since I believed there was no way Trump would win). Anyway, I was in disbelief when I got my property tax bill and saw how low it was. First, I was relieved, but then I got a little angry. The roads are shit, the schools aren’t great, and public services are shit. These rednecks refuse to invest in anything that would improve the quality of life here.”
17. “I’ve lived in both blue and red states, and each has people who are equally ignorant and judgmental of the others’ ways of life. But I also think they have an equal quotient of assholes. Red state assholes will loudly announce who they hate with their voices and faces showing, while blue state assholes will say ‘Hola’ to the local Latine community, go to pro-women charity dinners, write checks at benefits for Black children, and then silently promote or hire their kids or rich friends for the best positions of power to fill. They’ll put Kamala signs in their yard but vote for Trump for the third time. Reds glorify their ignorance while Blues weaponize their money and status over people they say they’ll support but don’t.”
18. Lastly: “I went from Upstate New York to Pittsburgh. It was uncomfortable to live in a swing state because, even though Pittsburgh itself was pretty liberal, the entire state’s laws could affect me as a woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Pennsylvania was uptight and loose in all the wrong ways.”
—Anonymous
If you moved from a Republican-leaning state to a Democratic-leaning one or vice versa, what was your experience? Share with us in the comments, or you can anonymously submit your story using the form below.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Wikipedia
When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s shores in Humboldt’s lifetime, the cats and rats that descended from their ships began decimating the native population of black robins — sparrow-sized birds with yellow-soled feet that had evolved without mammalian predators, mate for life in monogamous pairs, and raise only two chicks per year in cuplike nests close to the ground.
Bird by bird, claw by claw, there were only seven survivors within a century.
Black robin among other native birds (John Gerrard Keulemans, 1907)
Desperate to encourage the survivors to breed, conservationists moved them to Mangere Island, where twenty thousand trees were planted just to provide a hospitable habitat for the robins. But they would not pair — mysterious are the ways of even a bird’s heart, for it is all a single mystery.
Two of the seven died.
Among the five survivors there was a sole female capable of laying fertile eggs — a robin so aged that she came to be known as Old Blue. At eight, she had outlived the average black robin twofold. With the survival of the species resting on Old Blue’s near flightless wings, scientists thought that if her offspring were raised by surrogate parents, she would be able to lay more eggs.
Warblers were the first designated foster parents, but they failed to feed the chicks enough.
Tomtits were tried next, but they were too successful as foster parents — the black robin chicks grew up perceiving themselves as tomtits and wanted to mate only with other tomtits.
Finally, the chicks were returned to Old Blue, in whose care they thrived as black robins.
A single mother brought a whole species back from the brink of extinction.
Old Blue lived to be fourteen and raised eleven chicks. All the black robins in the world today, numbering around 250, are fractal emissaries of her genes — a winged reminder that immensities of harm can be undone by a single act of tenacious tenderness.
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