Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models.
The case, Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, was one of the earliest copyright lawsuits filed against a tech company over its AI training practices. Its outcome, along with those of dozens of similar cases working their way through courts in the United States, will determine whether technology companies can legally use creative works to train AI moving forward and could either entrench AI’s most powerful players or derail them.
Vince Chhabria, a judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ordered both Meta and the plaintiffs on Wednesday to file full versions of a batch of documents after calling Meta’s approach to redacting them “preposterous,” adding that, for the most part, "there is not a single thing in those briefs that should be sealed.” Chhabria ruled that Meta was not pushing to redact the materials in order to protect its business interests but instead to “avoid negative publicity.” The documents were originally filed late last year remained publicly unavailable in unredacted form until now.
In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” Meta declined to comment.
Novelists Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, along with comedian Sarah Silverman, first filed the class-action lawsuit against Meta in July 2023, alleging the tech giant trained its language models using their copyrighted work without permission. Meta has argued that using publicly available materials to train AI tools is shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which holds that using copyrighted works without permission is legal in certain cases, one of which, the company argues, is “using text to statistically model language and generate original expression,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a motion to dismiss the authors’ lawsuit in November 2023. In this particular lawsuit, Meta has also argued that the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit.
Before these documents were made public, Meta previously disclosed in a research paper that it had trained its Llama large language model on portions of Books3, a dataset of around 196,000 books scraped from the internet. It had not previously publicly indicated, however, that it had torrented data directly from LibGen.
These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material.
“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the motion is a request to file a third amended complaint.)
In addition to the plaintiffs’ briefs, another filing was unredacted in response to Chhabria’s order—Meta’s opposition to the motion to file an amended complaint. It argues that the authors’ attempts to add additional claims to the case are an “eleventh-hour gambit based on a false and inflammatory premise” and denies that Meta waited to reveal crucial information in discovery. Instead, Meta argues it first revealed to the plaintiffs that it used a LibGen dataset in July 2024. (Because much of the discovery materials remain confidential, it is difficult for WIRED to confirm that claim.)
Meta’s argument hinges on its claim that the plaintiffs already knew about the LibGen use and shouldn’t be granted additional time to file a third amended claim when they had ample time to do so before discovery ended in December 2024. “Plaintiffs knew of Meta’s downloading and use of LibGen and other alleged ‘shadow libraries’ since at least mid-July 2024,” the tech giant’s lawyers argue.
In November 2023, Chhabria granted Meta’s motion to dismiss some of the lawsuit’s claims, including its claim Meta’s alleged use of the authors’ work to train AI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law introduced in 1998 to stop people from selling or duplicating copyrighted works on the internet. At the time, the judge agreed with Meta’s stance that the plaintiffs had not provided sufficient evidence to prove that the company had removed what’s known as “copyright management information,” like the author’s name and title of the work.
The unredacted documents argue that the plaintiffs should be allowed to amend their complaint, alleging that the information Meta revealed is evidence that the DMCA claim was warranted. They also say the discovery process has unearthed reasons to add new allegations. “Meta, through a corporate representative who testified on November 20, 2024, has now admitted under oath to uploading (aka ‘seeding’) pirated files containing Plaintiffs’ works on ‘torrent’ sites,” the motion alleges. (Seeding is when torrented files are then shared with other peers after they have finished downloading.)
“This torrenting activity turned Meta itself into a distributor of the very same pirated copyrighted material that it was also downloading for use in its commercially available AI models,” one of the newly unredacted documents claims, alleging that Meta, in other words, had not just used copyrighted material without permission but also disseminated it.
LibGen, an archive of books uploaded to the internet that originated in Russia around 2008, is one of the largest and most controversial “shadow libraries” in the world. In 2015, a New York judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the site, a measure designed in theory to temporarily shut the archive down, but its anonymous administrators simply switched its domain. In September 2024, a different New York judge ordered LibGen to pay $30 million to the rights holders for infringing on their copyrights, despite not knowing who actually operates the piracy hub.
Meta’s discovery woes for this case aren’t over, either. In the same order, Chhabria warned the tech giant against any overly sweeping redaction requests in the future: “If Meta again submits an unreasonably broad sealing request, all materials will simply be unsealed,” he wrote.
WASHINGTON – Maybe Alex Ovechkin’s wait for his 900th goal took a little longer than expected.
That only enhanced the magnitude of what Ovechkin accomplished, though, when he finally became the first player in NHL history to reach the milestone during the Washington Capitals’ 6-1 win against the St. Louis Blues at Capital One Arena on Wednesday.
Ovechkin still wasn’t sure how to put that number in perspective postgame.
“Not really,” he said. “I’m still playing, but when I’m going to be done playing, of course, I’m going to think about it. And lots of guys on the bench said, ‘900. That’s pretty special.’
“But I’m still playing, still have lots of games left.”
Ovechkin scored his 900th goal 2:39 into the second period to increase Washington’s lead to 2-0, sparking a four-goal outburst in the period that broke the game open. It also turned out to be the 40-year-old left wing’s 138th game-winning goal of his career, adding to his NHL-record total and helping the Capitals (7-5-1) snap a four-game losing streak (0-3-1).
Ovechkin, who is in his 21st NHL season, became the eighth player in League history to play 1,500 games with one franchise against the Ottawa Senators on Oct. 25. That milestone had great meaning for Ovechkin as well, but he never tires of celebrating goals, no matter how many he scores.
“Every milestone, it’s a special moment,” he said. “But tonight, obviously, it’s a special one to be the first player ever to do it.”
It was somewhat surprising Ovechkin needed until his 13th game this season to get to 900. He scored his 895th to surpass Wayne Gretzky (894) for most in NHL history on April 6 against the New York Islanders and finished last season with 897.
But after tying for third in the NHL with 44 goals in 65 games last season, Ovechkin scored only twice in his first 12 games this season and entered Wednesday on his second four-game goal drought of the season. He never went more than three games without a goal last season.
“If he doesn’t score for one game, he’s like, mad,” Capitals defenseman John Carlson said. “No one deals with that. None of us can relate to a quote ‘slump’ for him.”
Ovechkin insisted he wasn’t feeling an extra pressure to reach 900, though. He knew he’d get it eventually.
“Of course, you’re going to score one goal,” he said. “Maybe an empty-netter or whatever.”
Still, Ovechkin couldn’t block it out of his mind completely.
“I think a couple of days ago somebody asked me about, ‘Do you think about it?’” Ovechkin said. “Of course. It’s a huge number. No one ever did it in NHL history and to be the first player ever to do it, it’s a special moment. So, yeah, it’s nice it’s over, and it’s nice to get it at home, so the fans and family can be here.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
How Ovechkin scored his 900th also was a bit unexpected. It didn’t come on one of his trademark one-timers from the left circle or his lethal wrist shot. It was a spin-around backhand from the bottom of the right circle.
“But I’ll take it, and it is what it is,” Ovechkin said. “Sometimes you have a great opportunity to score, and the goalie make a save or you miss the puck or you miss the net and whatever.”
Ovechkin started the play that led to his 900th after Blues goalie Jordan Binnington tried to pass the puck from behind his net into the right corner. Ovechkin batted the puck down out of mid-air, curled out of the corner and slid a backhand pass to defenseman Jakob Chychrun in the high slot.
Chychrun unleashed a wrist shot that went wide right of the net, but the puck caromed off the glass directly to Ovechkin at the bottom of the right circle. Ovechkin quickly spun and backhanded the puck toward the net. It sailed past Blues forward Nathan Walker and inside the right post before Binnington could slide over to stop it.
“It finds a way in, in true 'O' fashion,” Capitals coach Spencer Carberry said. “I think that's among many qualities that he's demonstrated over his career as a goal scorer, the different ways that he's scored. That's just another example of finding ways to score goals. Pucks hit things and get thrown to the net.
“Next thing you know, it's in the back of the net and he's got 900 goals in the NHL, which you just can't wrap your head around that.”
Ovechkin banged the glass behind him with his left glove and stick before turning back toward his Capitals teammates, who piled off the bench to celebrate with him.
“I know it seems like, after the rodeo we’ve been on the last year or two, you get numb to it, but then it’s just — I don’t know,” said Carlson, who has been teammates with Ovechkin for 17 seasons. “You think about it, it’s just incredible what he’s done. Being alongside him for so long, you’ve seen just so many milestones, it’s insane the history that maybe will never be touched again.”
Ovechkin will try to start toward his next 100 goals when the Capitals visit Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins at PPG Paints Arena on Thursday (7:30 p.m. ET; HULU, ESPN+, SN). It will be the 99th time, including the Stanley Cup Playoffs, that Ovechkin, the No. 1 pick in the 2004 NHL Draft, and Crosby, the No. 1 pick in the 2005 NHL Draft, will play against each other.
When asked about Ovechkin closing in on 900 goals earlier Wednesday in Pittsburgh, Crosby marveled at his longtime rival’s consistency and how he’s done it for more than two decades.
“I said it when he got the record that I think a lot of people, myself, probably him included, thought it would be pretty difficult to get that many goals, but he’s continued to find ways year after year,” Crosby said. “To be that consistent and that productive is pretty hard to even fathom.”
How much higher Ovechkin can set the goal record is difficult to predict. He’s in the final season of his contract and hasn’t decided yet if he’ll continue to play in the NHL next season.
Ovechkin has at least the remainder of this season to add to his total, though, and with 900 behind him, perhaps, he’s about to go on one of his hot streaks.
“Well,” he said, “we’ll see tomorrow.”
Joselyn Chimbo knows how to read because her grandmother came to the United States, a move that allowed Joselyn access to education, books, and the freedom to learn. Joselyn's grandmother didn't have that freedom, she says, boxed out of literacy because her family couldn't afford to pay for her to access it.
“Literacy was withheld from Indigenous communities like my grandmother’s as a tool of oppression,” Joselyn writes. "Those left illiterate were exploited and experienced a lack of economic and social mobility due to the massive cost of an education.
Because of that history, 17-year-old Joselyn, from New York, is advocating for the right to read so young people like her will continue to have the freedom to read a wide and unlimited array of books, offering them access to information and perspective on the world. Joselyn is the grand prize winner of the New York Public Library's National Teen Art Contest, part of their annual Freedom to Read campaign necessitated by the “alarming rise in book bans and challenges around the country.”
According to PEN America, there were more than 10,000 bans on more than 4,000 books in the 2023-2024 school year. Of these banned or challenged books, most feature LGBTQ characters or characters of color. Since 2021, PEN America has documented more than 16,000 book bans in public schools, which it calls a level of “censorship” not seen since the 1950s, during the McCarthy-era Red Scare.
As a reminder of the importance of the freedom to read, Joselyn's award-winning painting depicts matriarchs and their children — a testament to the women in her family who made sacrifices so she and future generations would have access to education. She also painted a young girl reading “a book that opens to a shadow of orange and red dust representing knowledge,” Joselyn wrote in her artist statement. Together, these women represent “a generational connection and how we should foster and grant the ability to learn and read to all ages.”
“I was interested in creating an art piece specifically on the topic of the freedom to read because it can connect back to the art I usually enjoy making,” Joselyn tells Teen Vogue. “The art I am used to creating is centered around my culture, as well as my identity.”
Joselyn's work will be featured in an upcoming edition of NYPL’s Teen Voices magazine and will be exhibited this summer in the flagship New York Public Library location. Joselyn won the grand prize, and the Library named 17 additional winners, young artists from across the country who submitted work representing what the power of reading means to them. And she'll use the award toward continuing her own education.
“Winning NYPL’s National Teen Art Contest means a lot to me because I’m able to share my work with others, as well as use the award grant to fund my supplies for my freshman year of college,” Joselyn says.
Here, see Joselyn's painting, grand prize winner of the National Teen Art Contest, exclusively premiered in Teen Vogue.
The genetic testing company 23andMe — which allows users to spit in a tube and send away the sample for a detailed DNA analysis — is filing for bankruptcy.
The California biotech firm announced in a statement this week that it had entered the federal bankruptcy process with the goal of finding a buyer to address its ongoing money troubles. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki also has stepped down as CEO, and said in a post on X she hopes to purchase the company herself. The board rejected an offer she made earlier this month, according to a press release.
23andMe has faced financial hardship for years, struggling to overcome the fact that many people who went to the website for a one-time DNA test didn't become repeat customers. In November, the company laid off more than 200 employees, or roughly 40% of its staff.
The bankruptcy announcement also comes less than two years after 23andMe suffered a massive data breach affecting 6.9 million customer accounts.
The possibility that the company, once valued at $6 billion after it went public in 2021, could be sold has raised concerns about what would happen to the sensitive information of its more than 15 million users.
In its bankruptcy announcement, 23andMe said the data privacy of its customers would be an "important consideration" in any sale. But federal law does little to secure genetic information given over to a private company, two legal experts on data privacy said.
"Often, if there's so much personal data that a group has, it's maybe in a hospital setting or a research setting and can be governed by more meaningful safeguards," said Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"The scale of how much highly sensitive data 23andMe has is unique," she said.
Is your DNA data protected by law? It depends
For many 23andMe customers, the company holds two sensitive pieces of information: the user-provided saliva sample, and the detailed genetic profile created from it.
In an FAQ about the bankruptcy posted on its website, 23andMe said a new owner would have to abide by "applicable law" governing the use of user data, but data privacy experts say there isn't much on the books.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, applies to health care providers and insurers but not direct-to-consumers companies like 23andMe, according to Anya Prince, a University of Iowa law professor who studies health and genetic privacy. Another law called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bars employers and health insurance companies from discriminating against people due to genetic information.
"That's pretty much it on the federal level," Prince said.
Some states have adopted their own laws covering genetic privacy. At least 11 U.S. states have enacted laws giving consumers a say in how their genetic data is used, according to an article published by Prince in 2023. Those laws typically let users request that the companies delete their data and require law enforcement agencies to get a warrant or subpoena to access genetic information, Prince said. 23andMe already adheres to both of those policies, she added.
23andMe also says any genetic data it shares with researchers is stripped of identifying information, such as names and birth dates. In its bankruptcy FAQ, the company said it hopes to "secure a partner who shares in its commitment to customer data privacy."
How to protect your data, according to experts
23andMe will remain in operation through the bankruptcy proceedings, and the company says customers can still delete their data and shutter their accounts.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a consumer alert last week that residents should "consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material" the company has.
Bernstein of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said any concerned 23andMe customers should delete their data, request that their saliva sample be destroyed and revoke any permissions they may have given to use their genetic information for research.
"We would recommend taking those actions and advocating to your state and federal representatives to pass strong consumer privacy laws," she added, "as this is just the first example of a company like this with tremendous amounts of sensitive data being bought or sold."
Even before a possible sale goes through, Prince, the law professor, said she wonders how many people know what data 23andMe already shares and with whom. For example, the company has given over anonymized data to the pharmaceutical giant GSK for years to help it develop new drugs.
"Everybody's worried about what a new company can do with the data — and that is a concern — but frankly some of the things that people are worried about, 23andMe already can do or already does," Prince said.
Vermonters have learned the hard way not to get their hopes up about spring. The season here is long and cruel. Any stretch of warm, sunny weather will not be followed by more of the same, as it might be in other parts of the country, places where spring means green grass, flowers and confidently putting away one’s winter clothes.
In Vermont, warm days in early spring are just a tease of what is still months away. Between winter and actual spring, some Vermonters have lightheartedly identified five mini-seasons — “fool’s spring,” so named because it is soon followed by “second winter,” then “spring of deception,” “third winter” and finally “mud season.”
Thus it has apparently always been. A letter printed in the Vermont Gazette in February 1791 — a month before the state joined the Union — complained about the coming months during which Vermonters could do little. “(W)e cannot perform journeys by reason of the depth of the mud, our fields are not arable, sled(d)ing is at an end, and our grain is threshed: in a word there seems to be an interregnum of all business,” lamented the writer, who signed the letter with the pen name “Clergyman.” (Pseudonyms were frequently used in newspapers of the period for a variety of reasons, including trying to keep the focus on a writer’s ideas rather than their identity.)
During this pause, no work could be done, “save that of making sugar.” The writer was referring to maple sugar, the granular sweetener produced by cooking down maple syrup. At the time, maple sugar was more popular than syrup because it was easier to store and had a longer shelf life.
Clergyman’s letter was an impassioned plea — supported by economic and ethical arguments — for Vermonters to take up sugar making on an industry scale. The letter was timely, arriving as it did at the start of a national movement to promote domestic sugar production in the United States, which helped produce a maple sugar bubble.
European settlers in the Northeast had learned how to sugar from the indigenous population, who for untold ages had been tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap to distill its sugary goodness. But when Clergyman wrote his letter, most Vermonters who made maple sugar only produced enough to meet their own families’ needs. It was a wasted opportunity, he argued. “It is evident, at this time especially, that peculiar exertions ought to be made for the furtherance of the sugar manufactory,” he wrote.
Most people bought their sugar from the Caribbean. But a variety of factors — hurricanes, earthquakes and uprisings by the enslaved people who made the sugar — had recently restricted the supply and caused the price to double.
Clergyman considered sugar making an act of patriotism, since it produced goods in America and kept money in the nation’s economy rather than sending it to one of the European countries operating sugar plantations in the Caribbean. “(T)he old proverb forever holds true that a penny saved is as good as a penny earnt,” he added.
Clergyman hated that friends would sometimes apologize for serving homemade maple sugar: “It gives me pain, it destroys all the pleasure of the visit, when I set down at the teatable of a friend to hear the too common complaint, Oh we are poor folks, we have nothing to give you but homemade sugar.” As if maple sugar were inferior to imported cane sugar.
Worse still was when a friend would serve him imported sugar with pride. “(I)t gives me still greater pain when I sit down to a friend’s table, furnished with loaf-sugar [as Caribbean sugar was called], which I have no reason to doubt was the purchase of a drained purse, perhaps of the last shilling.”
Clergymen proposed a radical shift in how Vermont farms operated each spring: “Now suppose every husbandman in this state, at this leisurely time, should exert himself with all his labourers equally the same as he does in haying and harvesting, what would be the event?”
Answering his own question, Clergyman wrote: “Why this state, at a moderate calculation, would be four thousand pounds richer this present season!” It would be “commendable” for farmers to “take time by the foretop” — i.e. hurry — and buy more equipment to make more sugar.
It would be better for farmers to work within the local economy rather than engage in more distant trade. “Would it not be more commendable than to send their grain after rum, sugar and foreign molasses, with many other frivolous articles, which are purchased only because they are foreign. It is a lamentable consideration, that so many of our good citizens have such an itching desire, such an insatiable thirst after foreign and imported goods.”
New York State had recently appointed a committee to “enquire into the manufactory from the juice of the maple tree,” he wrote. If New York could see the value of locally made sugar, Clergyman asked, “Shall we then who are citizens of Vermont, who live in the very bowels of that kind of sweetness, be inactive? Shall we resemble the fool who has a price put into his hands but no heart to improve it; let us rather… now, in the dead of winter, exert ourselves in preparing our sap and store troughs. In this manufactory we neither rob nor injure any man, we only take what bountiful nature liberally bestows.”
Only at the very end of his letter, once he had made his long and strenuous economic argument for maple sugaring, did Clergyman mention the ethical reason for doing so.
“Another consideration may be mentioned, viz. that by stopping the importation of sugar from the West (I)ndies, we shall diminish the plea of necessity for enslaving the natives of Africa; by which we shall gratify the feelings of benevolence, and render essential service to the cause of freedom,” he wrote.
This anti-slavery argument was the main motivation behind the national movement. Given his chosen pen name, this might also have been the principal reason for Clergyman to write his letter. He might have wanted to leave the ethical argument until after he had, hopefully, won readers over with his assertion that maple would benefit them and their state financially.
Sugar had recently become a political tool. Antislavery activists in England organized a boycott of Caribbean sugar in 1788 to drive down the cost of sugar, thereby making the slave trade less profitable.
Prominent Americans took up the cause, some noting that, unlike the British, their countrymen had a ready substitute for boycotted sugar. William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, New York, and father of novelist James Fennimore Cooper, started a maple sugar business in 1789 and became a leading proponent of creating large-scale maple operations. That same year, Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the Society for Promoting the Manufacturer of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. Rush extolled the virtues of maple sugar in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. secretary of state, arguing that it would free the country from the need to import slave-produced sugar. Indeed, Rush wrote, the country might even create a maple sugar surplus to export. The anti-slavery argument resonated with Jefferson, although Jefferson’s deeds often fell short of his ideals: he himself continued to enslave hundreds on his Virginia properties.
Americans could soon even read about the moral virtue of maple trees and the sugar they yielded in a poem by diplomat David Humphreys, which included the lines: “Bleed on, blest tree! and as thy sweet blood runs,/ Bestow fond hope on Afric’s sable Sons.”
Four months after Clergyman’s letter appeared, two future presidents, Jefferson and then-Congressman James Madison, were visiting Vermont as part of a tour of New England and New York. At a dinner in Bennington, Jefferson spoke of the benefit that the new state’s abundant maple trees could bring to the young nation, freeing it from dependence on foreign sugar, then one of America’s largest imports.
News broke during Jefferson’s tour that a Dutch company had bought up land in Vermont to establish a major maple sugar operation. The scheme ultimately failed, however, apparently because Vermonters wanted to work for themselves, not a foreign company.
When he returned to Monticello, Jefferson had a grove of maple trees planted, not realizing that the Virginia climate was ill-suited for making maple sugar. He encouraged Americans to have their own maple groves to provide a ready supply of sugar.
That’s a sentiment that Clergyman would have shared. “For my single self,” he wrote in his letter to the Gazette, “I feel prouder to tell my friends, around my board, this is sugar of my own making, and with more pleasure I present them with the bowl thus filled, than with the most refined loaf-sugar.”
As a young professor of chemistry at Harvard in the 2000s, David Liu was trying to accelerate evolution.
This quest took place on the cellular level. Inside every cell in the body, molecules known as proteins act like tiny machines, carrying out biological functions—their efficiency honed by eons of natural selection. And scientists had discovered ways to engineer proteins that were even more efficient, or were built to fix specific problems.
But the work of changing the makeup of a protein was slow: a graduate student would chivvy evolution along by hand, painstakingly altering the experimental conditions once a week or so, and it would be a year before they’d know whether the whole thing had failed or succeeded.
Now, Liu turned a thought over in his mind: could a clever researcher press fast-forward on the process so dozens of new forms rose and fell in the space of a day?
Liu and his graduate student Kevin Esvelt envisioned a way to do this by using a phage—a type of virus that infects bacteria, whose life cycle, crucially, can be as short as 10 minutes. By giving a phage instructions to create a specific protein, then rewarding subsequent generations that successfully produced that protein, they were able to replicate the natural selection process with surprising speed.
In 2011, when the team announced their results in Nature, they could run 200 generations in about eight days. In less than one week, they evolved three new enzymes, their purposes custom-designed by Liu and his colleagues. This process, called phage-assisted continuous evolution, or PACE, has since become a powerful tool for scientists working to advance research and cure diseases. “[It] really reminds me of some of the real classics in the field,” says Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. ’89, S.D. 2023, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Since then, Liu—now Cabot professor of the natural sciences—has become a leading pioneer of inventive processes that operate on the molecular level in living organisms. He has also become renowned, in his lab and beyond, as a scientist who seems to be in perpetual motion: existing on little sleep, spinning off on side pursuits, and developing companies to springboard his laboratory insights into real-world use.
During the past 18 months alone, two treatments based on his research—one for a genetic lung disease, the other for a lethal metabolic disorder—have made headlines, as did advanced mouse studies focused on curing progeria, a disease that makes children age prematurely. And there’s more to come.
Today, Liu’s office at Harvard is decorated with things that move and toys and oddities that spin in the air. (Liu is also the Merkin professor at the Broad Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.) Their persistent energy matches that of the man himself—the same energy that was evident from his youth. Liu grew up in Riverside, California, where orange groves and desert stand side by side. He remembers his father, an aerospace engineer, leaving at 4 a.m. for a two-hour commute to El Segundo, the aerospace hub where his company was located. Liu’s mother, a physics professor, held down the fort at home with Liu and his sister and became one of the first female tenured faculty members in her department at the University of California, Riverside.
Liu’s parents didn’t exert pressure on their son to be a scientist. It was his childhood spent outdoors, watching the natural world, that set him on that path. All day at school he looked forward to going out into his backyard, a wilderness of weeds and insects. He was particularly fascinated by ants and their ability to somehow leave trails, invisible to humans, for each other to follow. Was it possible, he wondered, to remove whatever chemical it was they sensed and lay a new path to somewhere else? “I wanted to ask and answer my own questions,” he says. “I was curious about how things worked.”
At 18, Liu participated in the Junior Sciences and Humanities Symposium and won a trip to the 1990 Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm. There, he watched Harvard chemist E.J. Corey give his Nobel lecture. Corey is a mastermind of organic synthesis—the branch of chemistry that uses complex cascades of reactions to build molecules. Afterwards, Liu, then a freshman at Harvard, approached the Nobelist.
“I asked him a question about insect juvenile hormone,” Liu recalls. How could one part of this molecule change, while other parts, apparently identical, stayed untouched? Corey explained that he knew how the molecule would fold up, protecting some areas, exposing others to change.
“It was pretty awesome, which just made him seem even more like some kind of chemistry god to me,” Liu recalls. He exhales, a little self-consciously, and continues, “Then I asked him, while we were at this Nobel Prize lecture, if I could work in his lab.” Corey gently suggested that Liu take some organic chemistry classes first, then check in with him later.
With the help of his organic chemistry professor, Joseph Grabowski, Liu made Corey’s acquaintance again at Harvard, eventually joining his research group. With the elder scientist’s blessing, he decided that the place for him was where chemistry met biology. As a graduate student, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley with chemistry professor Peter Schultz, who had been tinkering with the genetic code to build proteins in a test tube that did not occur in nature.
Liu started working on getting such a system up and running in living cells, developing a process—which penalized cells with enzymes that functioned normally and rewarded cells with those that acted unusually—that would reshape protein evolution in the laboratory. Other scientists noticed: after earning his Ph.D. in 1999, he was hired at Harvard as an assistant professor.
“It was an interesting time. I had no idea what I was doing, which may have been the biggest source of awkwardness,” Liu recalls. “But also now, only five years after leaving Harvard as an undergrad, I was suddenly a colleague of all of these professors.”
He didn’t want to presume, so he defaulted to extreme deference. “I would say, ‘Oh, thank you, Professor Schreiber, for that comment. Thank you, Professor Corey.’ And I remember, after one of the faculty meetings in my first fall, one of the professors pulled me aside and said, ‘David, we think you should just call us by our first names.’”
As he got his research group off the ground, Liu wanted to continue evolving proteins. He was particularly inspired by a paper from Martin Wright and Gerald Joyce at the Scripps Institute, which focused on the molecules of RNA. Lab evolution of both custom proteins and custom RNAs had always taken a long time. But Wright and Joyce, remarkably, set up a system where all day and night, the RNA continuously evolved, spinning through about 300 generations in 52 hours. “I just thought the idea was so amazing,” Liu says, “and it remains one of the most beautiful papers I’ve ever read.”
He showed it to Esvelt as they brainstormed a way to evolve proteins with similar speed. Esvelt had the idea to start with a virus called the filamentous bacteriophage, which infects the bacterium E.coli. First, he put a gene for a protein he wanted to evolve into the virus. Then he took some of the machinery the virus needed to live and put it in E.coli. Finally, he engineered the E.coli so that it would only hand over what the virus needed if that targeted protein was produced at high levels.
The virus faced enormous pressure to make this protein. At the same time, each generation provided a new chance for interesting new mutations in the gene to creep in. By speeding up or slowing down the flow of fresh host cells into a vessel called the lagoon, Esvelt controlled the pace of the evolution.
It was an intense period in Esvelt’s life—Liu, he says, seems to need only about four hours of sleep a night, and they were often trading emails and ideas at unusual times, racing to generate new data in order to apply for funding for the next phase of the PACE project.
“We never lost hope at the same time,” Esvelt says. “I persisted in the times when he had lost it, and he kept me going through the more frequent times when I was frustrated.”
With PACE, Liu had a way to evolve enzymes with custom purposes. Having done this, Liu set his sights on another ambitious target: editing the code of life itself. It was around this time that CRISPR-Cas9, a system for cutting the genome, was first being described—Doudna, one of its developers, recalls talking with Liu about it early on. CRISPR tools allow scientists to bind and snip DNA and introduce other genetic material.
CRISPR on its own is not a medicine, however. “I quickly realized that most of the genetic diseases that one might want to treat with genome editing could not be treated [only] by cutting DNA, because cutting DNA disrupts the gene,” says Liu. “Instead, they needed to be treated by correcting a mutation back to a healthy sequence.” What if, he wondered, we could make enzymes that would actually reverse a mutation chemically?
DNA can be pictured as two long ribbons of letters, running parallel to each other. Each letter stands for a particular type of nucleic acid base, and each base has its own partner on the matching ribbon: adenine (A) binds to thymine (T), and cytosine (C) binds to guanine (G). Many dangerous mutations are the result of a simple alteration of one pair of bases. Sickle cell anemia, for instance, is the result of an A turned to a T.
With postdoctoral fellow Alexis Komor, Liu discussed ways to alter a mutated base pair back to the healthy version. Komor brought three elements together: an enzyme that could alter a single C, a targeting system from CRISPR-Cas9 to aim it at the right part of the genome, and another protein that solidified the change. In 2016, she and Liu described using this setup to cleanly convert a C:G pair to an A:T pair in living cells, without the organism missing a beat; the double helix was never sliced.
A flurry of innovation filled the next few years. In 2017, Liu and graduate student Nicole Gaudelli described a technique for going the other way: making an A:T pair into a C:G pair, an effort Liu attributes to “heroic” work by Gaudelli. And in 2019, Andrew Anzalone and Liu published another method for tackling yet more mutations. Anzalone, also a graduate student, completed his complex project in a year and eight days.
The response from scientists exploring gene editing to correct diseases was immediate. “It’s a great tool for the field to be able to make targeted changes in one step,” Doudna reflected. There have been at least 23 clinical trials using the techniques, focusing on illnesses ranging from lung cancer to metabolic diseases.
Targeted editing could help with more than just genetic diseases. Because Liu’s techniques provide very precise, clean ways to alter DNA, they can improve existing treatments where DNA is edited, such as CAR-T-cell immunotherapy for cancer. In this treatment, a patient’s own immune cells are removed from the body and given genes that allow them to make antibodies against their specific type of cancer cells. When the immune cells are reintroduced into the patient’s body, they hunt down the cancer, often curing the disease altogether.
In 2021, Alyssa Tapley, a 12-year-old in England, was diagnosed with leukemia. Chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant failed. In 2022, she had a few weeks left to live when her hospital arranged for her to join a trial using Liu’s techniques. Her immune cells were altered so they could target the cancer cells, and Tapley lived. She is still alive and cancer-free. In April 2025, when Liu was awarded the Breakthrough Prize, a major international science award, Tapley attended the ceremony.
Liu brings the same kind of intensity he displays in his research to other aspects of life. His office is lined with geological specimens, labeled with information about where they were collected, which he gives away to his students as, one by one, they graduate. “When I first joined,” Esvelt recalls, “he had taken up painting and become quite good at that. Then he took up woodworking and installed a giant lathe system in his basement and made some really amazing wooden bowls out of various pieces of wood that he found while hiking or walking along the beach.”
Next came an exploration of photography and optics. “You can sort of sense,” Esvelt says, “he wants to be able to do everything.” (“Ask him about his skills in poker,” Doudna suggests.)
That ceaseless energy shapes the environment of his lab, where he long ago stopped hiring people for specific achievements but instead focused on bringing in researchers he thought would work well with others. Although the goal was never publishing for publishing’s sake, on average, he estimates, the lab publishes a paper nearly every 17 days and has maintained this pace for about five years.
“What made it so fruitful is that he just really allowed me and others to be who we are,” says Gaudelli. “There was a sense of freedom.” She felt that there was a current of quiet confidence running through the lab; if you could imagine something, you could build it.
“He has this internal locomotive,” Anzalone adds, “that really pushes him to get the most.” He laughs, remembering the time when he and Liu were preparing to submit their gene editing paper. Liu would wake up at 4 a.m. and edit Anzalone’s draft. During the day, Anzalone would perform more experiments, chasing down final details. At night, Anzalone would add to the draft, working until about 2 a.m. Two hours later, Liu would be up to work on it again.
In March, news broke that one of Liu’s editing techniques had helped do something remarkable: researchers had used it to cure a baby boy’s lethal metabolic disorder. It was an astounding achievement that demonstrated the potential that stems from basic science.
At the same time, the Trump administration was beginning its campaign against science funding. Billions of research dollars have since been frozen or canceled nationwide; a federal judge recently ordered the administration to reinstate more than $2 billion in funding to Harvard, though the White House said it plans to appeal the ruling. Now, Liu is very worried about how to protect the next generation of scientists from the storm. Students and postdoctoral researchers need time and freedom to think, he says, to live without fear that their institutional support will just evaporate.
Even before federal funding for research was suddenly stripped from labs across the country, the frailty of the support system for young scientists concerned him. In 2020, after fruitlessly exploring other avenues for securing better pay for his lab members, Liu quietly decided to start dividing his salary among them every year.
Liu has co-founded many companies, three of which are publicly traded. Anzalone, after finishing his doctorate, went on to help lead Prime Medicine, a new start-up co-founded by Liu to commercialize the gene editing technique they’d developed together. Along with CRISPR pioneers Doudna and Feng Zhang, Liu also helped found Editas Medicine, which explores ways to use this technology to treat serious diseases. Gaudelli joined Beam Therapeutics, where she spent the past few years advancing a gene editor that may be used to treat sickle cell anemia. (She has since moved on to become an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures.)
“Accumulating wealth is not anywhere in the top 100 things I want to do,” Liu says. “My students and the work that we do, and the patients who reach out, and the families like Alyssa [Tapley]’s—these are all so much more meaningful than how many digits are in a bank account.”
And while Prime, Beam, and Editas are vehicles that aim to produce treatments and medicines that change lives, he notes, they draw their strength from the academic science that was their inspiration. Their vigor is linked to the freedom scientists have to imagine things that have yet to exist.
“Science matters,” Liu says. “Universities matter.” Enormous dividends are paid over decades by the funding of young scientists just getting underway, just beginning to imagine what comes next, Liu says, “who will go on to make their own discoveries, or to teach, or to work in industry to help develop the next great drug.”
Gaudelli thinks back to the way the Liu lab seemed to encourage transformative thinking, such as the idea that a letter of genetic code could be changed almost as easily as a light switch can be flipped. “I was allowed to imagine something that seemed impossible,” she says. “And then, one day, it was not.”
MARION — Former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody probably committed a felony crime when he told a witness to delete text messages they exchanged before, during and after he led raids on a newspaper office and the publisher’s home, a district judge ruled Wednesday.
But Cody won’t be tried for the raids, which Marion County Record editor-publisher Eric Meyer says is the real crime.
A two-hour preliminary hearing revealed new details about the texts that Cody exchanged with Kari Newell, whose drunk driving record and request for a liquor license at her restaurant ignited an international drama two years ago. Newell took the stand and testified that Cody told her during a phone call to delete text messages between the two of them so that people wouldn’t get the wrong idea about whether they were romantically involved.
“Chief Cody had stated that he felt it would be in my best interest to delete those,” Newell said.
About six weeks after the raids, Newell texted Cody to say she was concerned about having deleted their earlier messages, she said. Cody replied that she was being paranoid.
Their exchange coincided with widespread scrutiny of the police raids in August 2023 of the newspaper office in flagrant disregard for the First Amendment and legal protections for journalists. Kansas Reflector first reported on the chilling raids.
Cody, working in coordination with the sheriff’s office, county attorney and Kansas Bureau of Investigation, had investigated whether Meyer and reporter Phyllis Zorn committed identity theft and other crimes by looking up Newell’s driving record in a public online database. A magistrate judge, ignoring the absence of evidence and state law, authorized the police raids of the newspaper office, Meyer’s home, and the home of city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother died in distress a day later.
Police exceeded the scope of the search warrants by seizing reporters’ personal cellphones, work computers, and other equipment. Video showed Cody reviewing a reporter’s file on allegations that had been made against him.
At the KBI’s request, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation conducted a yearlong inquiry into whether Cody or anyone else had committed a crime. Special prosecutors Marc Bennett, of Sedgwick County, and Barry Wilkerson, of Riley County, cleared all law enforcement of any wrongdoing in carrying out the raids, which spawned five ongoing federal lawsuits.
However, CBI special agent John Zamora learned from talking to Newell that she had deleted text messages at his request, spanning a period of one week before to one week after the raids.
The prosecutors presented an exhibit at Wednesday’s preliminary hearing that totaled 31 pages of text messages, including one where Cody said he was working with a publisher to write a book about the experience.
Zamora testified that he interviewed Newell in person in December 2023.
“Just tell me what’s happening,” he recalled telling her. “What’s going on here?”
Newell told him she agreed to delete texts, at Cody’s request, because she was worried that her now ex-husband would accuse her of having an affair with Cody, Zamora said.
Wilkerson asked Zamora, who has 30 years of law enforcement experience, if he had ever directed a witness to delete messages or documents.
“No,” Zamora said.
After talking to Newell, Zamora said, he obtained the deleted text messages from Jennifer Hill, the attorney who is defending the city and county from federal lawsuits over the raid. Cody, who had given her his cellphone, had not deleted the text messages himself.
Cody’s attorney, Sal Intagliata, of Wichita, cross-examined Zamora about his investigation. According to Intagliata, the special agent told Hill that he was just trying to “check all the boxes.” Zamora said he didn’t remember making the comment.
When Newell took the stand, she said she has had no communication with Cody since leaving town amid the controversy two years ago.
Zorn and Meyer sat front and center in the courtroom, with Zorn tightlipped and taking notes and Meyer in an incredulous slouch, newspaper tucked in his pants pocket.
Cody, who now lives in Hawaii, appeared by Zoom. He sat expressionless with his chin on his hand for most of the hearing.
District Judge Ryan Rosauer rejected Intagliata’s argument that it was “a legal impossibility” to blame Cody for deleting texts that he ultimately turned over himself. The judge found probable cause that Cody had committed the low-level felony crime of interfering with the judicial process by inducing a witness to withhold information in a criminal investigation.
Cody entered a not guilty plea, and Rosauer scheduled a trial for February.
If convicted, because he has no criminal history, Cody’s sentence would be presumptive probation.
In an interview after the hearing, Meyer said he was worried about the “big picture.”
“None of this has anything to do with the crime,” Meyer said, referring to the raids on his newsroom and home.
“This is not even about the case,” Meyer said. “This is about what he did after the case.”
He also said he was concerned that Cody was being made a scapegoat for the raids, despite the widespread involvement of other people and law enforcement agencies.
“We still want some statement, an official judgment of the court, that this was wrong, so that no one can use this excuse anymore that, ‘Oh, we aren’t sure that it’s illegal to raid newsrooms, and because we’re not completely sure, we can still do it,’ which seems like a stupid excuse to me,” Meyer said.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.
The ruling is a harsh verdict on the rise of giant technology companies that have used their roots in the internet to influence the way we shop, consume information and search online — and indicates a potential limit of Big Tech’s power. It is likely to influence other government antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The last significant antitrust ruling against a tech company targeted Microsoft more than two decades ago.
“This is the most important antitrust case of the century, and it’s the first of a big slate of cases to come down against Big Tech,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school who studies antitrust. “It’s a huge turning point.”
The decision is a major blow to Google, which was built on its search engine and has become so closely associated with online search that its name has become a verb. The ruling could have major ramifications for Google’s success, especially as the company spends heavily to compete in the race over artificial intelligence. Google faces another federal antitrust case over ad technology that is scheduled to go to trial next month.
Monday’s ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.
What the Judge Said in His Ruling
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
Judge Mehta’s ruling capped a yearslong case — U.S. et al. v. Google — that resulted in a 10-week trial last year. The Justice Department and states sued in 2020 over Google’s dominance in online search, which generates billions in profits annually. The Justice Department said Google’s search engine conducted nearly 90 percent of web searches, a number the company disputed.
The company spends billions of dollars annually to be the automatic search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google paid Apple about $18 billion for being the default in 2021, The New York Times has reported.
“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” Jonathan Kanter, the top Justice Department antitrust official, said in a statement. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company would appeal the ruling.
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
During the trial, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, testified that he was concerned that his competitor’s dominance had created a “Google web” and that its relationship with Apple was “oligopolistic.” If Google continued undeterred, it was likely to become dominant in the race to develop artificial intelligence, he said.
Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, countered in his testimony that Google created a better service for consumers.
Users choose to search on Google because they find it useful, and the company has continued to invest to make it better, the company’s lawyers said.
“Google is winning because it’s better,” John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead courtroom lawyer, said during closing arguments, which were held months later in May.
The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with its search engine. Instead, Google collected more data about consumers that it used to make its search engine better and more dominant.
Judge Mehta sided with the government, saying Google had a monopoly over general online search services. The company’s agreements to be the automatic search engine on devices and web browsers hurt competition, making it harder for rivals to challenge Google’s dominance.
For more than a decade, those agreements “have given Google access to scale that its rivals cannot match,” Judge Mehta wrote.
The government also accused Google of protecting a monopoly over the ads that run inside search results. Government lawyers said Google had raised the price of ads beyond the rates that should exist in a free market, which they argued was a sign of the company’s power. Search ads provide billions of dollars in annual revenue for Google.
Judge Mehta ruled that Google’s monopoly allowed it to inflate the prices for some search ads. That, in turn, gave the company more money to pay for its search engine to get prime placement, he said.
“Unconstrained price increases have fueled Google’s dramatic revenue growth and allowed it to maintain high and remarkably stable operating profits,” he said in the ruling.
Judge Mehta ruled in Google’s favor on some lesser claims. Google offers advertisers many tools, including one that they use to manage advertising on different search engines. State attorneys general argued during the trial that Google had illegally excluded Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, from aspects of those tools. But Judge Mehta ruled against their claim.
Legal scholars expect this decision to influence government antitrust lawsuits against the other tech giants. All of those investigations, conducted by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, began during the Trump administration and have ramped up under President Biden.
The Justice Department has sued Apple, arguing that the company made it difficult for consumers to ditch the iPhone, and brought the other case against Google. The F.T.C. has separately sued Meta, claiming the company stamped out nascent competitors, and Amazon, accusing it of squeezing sellers on its online marketplace.
With those cases, the government is testing hundred-year-old laws originally used to rein in utility and other monopolistic companies like Standard Oil.
A victory for the government provides credibility for its broader attempt to use antitrust laws to take aim at corporate America, said William Kovacic, a former chairman of the F.T.C.
“It creates momentum that supports their other cases,” he said in an interview in June.
Google has also faced antitrust scrutiny in Europe, where officials charged the company last year with undermining rivals in online advertising.
The last major U.S. court ruling on a tech antitrust case — in the Justice Department’s 1990s lawsuit against Microsoft — cast its own shadow over the Google arguments. Judge Mehta repeatedly pressed lawyers to explain how the specifics of the case against Google could fit into the legal precedents.
The Microsoft antitrust case alleged that the tech giant combined practices like bullying industry partners and leveraging the popularity of its digital platform, from which users typically didn’t switch, to stifle competition.
A District Court judge initially ruled against Microsoft on most counts of possible antitrust violations and ordered a breakup of the company, but an appeals court reversed some of those decisions. President George W. Bush’s administration settled with the company in 2001.
The Ancient Greek philosophy has acquired a new generation of acolytes. USC Dornsife philosophy professor Ralph Wedgwood explains its appeal.
In 2012, Penguin Random House sold 12,000 copies of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, reflections influenced by the Ancient Greek philosophy Stoicism. In 2019, the book sold 100,000 copies.
YouTube channels devoted to “Modern Stoicism” have millions of subscribers, and Silicon Valley tech millionaires expound its wisdom. What prompted a 2,300-year-old philosophy to stage a comeback in such spectacular fashion?
It may be that Stoicism’s ancient framework for managing emotions feels particularly relevant for navigating modernity’s crises. Our phones buzz ceaselessly with alarm about rising authoritarianism, the threat of nuclear war, or AI’s impending takeover, yet responding constructively to all of these disasters feels impossible.
Enter Stoicism, which urges you to ignore the rage bait, put down the phone and think more constructively. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them,” says the Stoic Epictetus in his Handbook.
“Stoics think that each of us are finite, limited beings. There are a few things we can control and other things we can’t control, and we should keep track of those things and have different attitudes towards those domains,” says Ralph Wedgwood, director of the School of Philosophy and professor of philosophy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “That’s the goal of life, to have this accurate understanding, and to be guided by this.”
Stoicism: The phoenix philosophy
Stoicism was born from disaster and has rerisen, rather Phoenix-like, for centuries. Around 300 B.C., a shipwreck bankrupted a merchant named Zeno and landed him in Athens, Greece. There, he began studying philosophy, eventually developing and teaching his own. He held forth at the Stoa Poikile, a columned walkway from which his acolytes, Stoics, would later draw their name.
For nearly 500 years, the philosophy held great influence in both Greece and the Roman Empire. It was eclipsed over the years by other branches of philosophical thought, and then Christianity. A millennium passed, and Stoicism became mostly forgotten, the vast majority of its texts lost or destroyed, including those of Zeno. (Most of what remains is Roman like the Meditations.)
In the 15th century, the Renaissance’s renewed interest in classical antiquity sent excited scholars diving into the archives to dredge up older ideas. One of these was Stoicism. The debut of the printing press in the 1440s made broad distribution of ideas easier, and Stoicism gained a more permanent cultural foothold, although its popularity would continue to wax and wane over the years.
Although Stoicism’s ascendance seems relatively recent, it’s actually been a somewhat steadily growing, subliminal influence since the 1970s.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of talk therapy that encourages patients to rethink their emotional reactions, was directly inspired by Stoicism. Its founder, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck, told an interviewer in 2007, “I also was influenced by the Stoic philosophers who stated that it was a meaning of events rather than the events themselves that affected people.”
CBT is now one of the most popular forms of mental health treatment. Small wonder, then, that Stoicism’s popularity has grown alongside the widespread clinical use of its philosophical relative.
Stoicism as a tool for the warrior scholar
However, unlike traditional therapy, which often conjures up visions of pastel couches and comforting Kleenex, Stoicism has a reputation for tactical, mindful hardiness.
Aurelius wrote down his reflections while planning military campaigns. Navy Officer James Stockdale famously deployed its teachings to help him endure years of torture and imprisonment during the Vietnam War. Stockdale turned in particular to the lectures of Epictetus, who himself suffered as a slave in ancient Rome.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that its current revival has sprung up in large part from the “manosphere” of male podcasters, YouTubers and Substack writers, an association that has some poo-pooing its revival as just a toxic return to repression of male emotions.
Wedgwood, whose USC Dornsife courses include “The Ancient Stoics” (PHIL 416), says that’s an inaccurate understanding of the philosophy. “It’s not about tamping down feelings. For Stoics, it’s about achieving an emotional intelligence, trying to change your habits so they’re not so destructive,” he says.
Stoics criticized emotions like anger, which they regarded as misleading. They analogized the beginnings of anger to being splashed with cold water, the jolt of which makes you feel you must immediately react. “This is an illusion, that somehow revenge would fix the wrong,” says Wedgwood. “Rather than raging or fuming, you should try to have feelings that are productive. We should think of the future rather than avenging the past.”
Women will find the philosophy’s wisdom just as useful; Stoics themselves made a number of egalitarian arguments, observes Wedgwood. “The later Stoics are not social reformers, but they believed women should receive the same education as men and insisted they have the same capacities as men for courage, wisdom and self-control.”
Stoics offer “circles of concern” to guide priorities
In addition to better management of emotions, Stoics offer helpful insight into how to prioritize demands on our time and resources, says Wedgwood. Such a framework may be increasingly helpful in an era in which we’re grappling with how to best respond to the crises of the entire world.
Consider the debate over rebuilding Notre Dame: Effective altruists decried the millions spent to fund the reconstruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral, arguing that the money would have been better spent on lifesaving mosquito tents in Africa. In recent discussions around immigration, Vice President JD Vance revived St. Augustine’s notion of “Ordo Amoris” (“Order of Love”) as a guide to how we deploy our attention and resources.
Stoics have been contemplating the best way to order our priorities since Zeno himself. They proposed that humans inhabit a nested set of circles, a framework of affinity dubbed “Oikeiosis.” The innermost circle was our soul, next came one’s physical body, then various layers of family, after that one’s community, and so on, to the entirety of humankind.
Closer circles are usually given more weight, but those closer to the edge of the ring can still be valued. We may even strive to collapse some of the difference between outer circles at times by treating them as if they inhabited a more inner ring. “For the Stoics, we do not belong to just one whole, we are part of many wholes, called to serve all those many communities,” says Wedgwood.
Belgium's Olympic team forfeited from Monday's mixed competition triathlon after one of its triathletes, Claire Michel, became sick after swimming in the Seine last Wednesday — a river that's faced frequent water quality and safety concerns.
"The Belgian Hammers will not start in the Mixed Relay competition at the Paris Games," the Belgian team said in a release. "Michel, one of the athletes in the mixed relay team, unfortunately has to withdraw from the competition due to illness."
While the Olympic team did not describe Michel's illness nor blame the Seine, Belgium newspaper De Standaard reported that the triathlete was hospitalized and treated for an E. coli infection Sunday. The bacteria can cause serious intestinal and medical issues.
Meanwhile on Sunday, Olympic organizers canceled a planned practice swim for triathletes after poor water quality test results. In a release obtained by NPR, organizers said "heavy rains" on Wednesday and Thursday led to the practice-swim cancellation. Heavy rains can overwhelm the city’s antiquated sewer system, leaking untreated sewage into the Seine river — increasing rates of E. coli bacteria.
In the years leading up to the Paris Olympic games, France spent more than $1 billion to clean the Seine river, which had been illegal to swim in for more than a century. It has long been considered too contaminated for human use. On July 17, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo jumped into its murky waters and declared, "we did it!"
Olympic triathletes — including Michel — last competed in the Seine on Wednesday. As it stands, Olympians are set to swim in the Seine on Monday for the mixed competition triathlon, without the Belgian team. Daily river testing will continue ahead of the Monday triathlon and the marathon swimming races scheduled for Thursday and Friday.
"Belgian Triathlon hope that lessons will be learned for future triathlon competitions," the Belgian team release said. "We are thinking of training days that can be guaranteed, competition days and formats that are clear in advance and circumstances that do not cause uncertainty among athletes, entourage and fans."