The inflammation chatter is everywhere, and it’s coming for your legumes.  I first heard it from a friend recovering from surgery, who blamed her unusual post-op incision site irritation on foods TikTok had (incorrectly) informed her were inflammatory, like lentils. Antibiotics ultimately fixed her pain — turns out the incision was infected. Who knows what happened to the nutrition hearsay that lodged in her mind? Plenty of good science shows that lentils, beans, and other legumes actually have anti-inflammatory effects, but fad diets like Whole 30 demonized them years ago. Those rumors are back, along with many others, as influencers exhort people to avoid all kinds of foods with the ultimate goal of banishing inflammation from the body. That’s not something anyone would want if they understood inflammation’s complexities, says Shilpa Ravella, a Hawaii-based gastroenterologist whose book A Silent Fire explores the subject in detail. But it’s typical of the binary approach popular on social media, “where it’s either all good or all bad.”  In reality, inflammation is a double-edged sword: It’s an ancient weapon that has enabled human bodies to fight off pathogens, poisons, and traumas for millennia, but it’s also a biological process that can damage and debilitate. It’s the subject not only of thousands of TikToks, but reams of scientific research.  Here’s how inflammation can help us and hurt us, and what you need to know about reducing the risk it might pose to you. Inflammation involves the immune system, but not all immune system activity is inflammation, says David Hafler, a neurologist and immunobiologist at Yale who specializes in the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis.  In inflammatory states, the immune system has been switched into attack mode, which on a microscopic level means a variety of specialized cells are fighting what they perceive as invaders. They often do this either by attacking their adversaries directly or by releasing toxic chemicals that create intolerable conditions for them. Many experts split inflammation into two varieties, acute and chronic. Acute inflammation is the kind that happens in the hours and days after an injury or infection. It’s rarely quiet, says Ravella: “Blood flow is increasing, fluid and protein are leaking out of the vessels,” and as a result, people experience symptoms like swelling, redness, fever, and pain either all over or at the site of a specific injury or infection. “You can feel this,” she says, “and you know that kind of inflammation is helping to heal the wound.” When it’s short-lived — typically on the order of days to weeks — this type of inflammation is beneficial to us. Without it, we wouldn’t heal wounds or fight off infections. When acute inflammation is suppressed by an immunocompromising condition or medication, people are at higher risk of getting seriously ill due to small injuries or ordinary cough-and-cold viral infections.   In other words, there is such a thing as too little inflammatory activity, says Ravella: “We don’t want to go down to zero.” Unlike fast-moving acute inflammation, chronic inflammation — which typically lasts from months to years — is associated with collateral damage that limits both the quality and length of life. Some of the most prominent examples of chronic inflammation are autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system turns against the body — conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis), and lupus. These diseases are initially easy to confuse with acute, infection-related inflammation because they include so many of the same symptoms. While these symptoms don’t cause harm to our bodies when they’re directed at an invader, they can hurt us when they’re directed at our own tissues.  However, chronic inflammation can also be physically silent, causing few observable symptoms for years until it culminates in disease states. A lot of cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases, and cancers overlap with this kind of systemic chronic inflammation. Because chronic inflammation is harder to detect on routine lab tests than acute inflammation is, it’s harder to diagnose and intervene.  While experts for years thought chronic inflammation was merely a consequence of these illnesses, there’s now mounting evidence that in some cases, inflammation itself can actually lead to disease.  The paradigm shift in the science started around 2017, says Ravella, with a clinical trial showing that in heart attack patients who had abnormally high blood levels of an inflammation-associated protein, taking an anti-inflammatory drug lowered the risk of a second heart attack by 15 percent.   “The data for causation is stronger for some conditions — like heart disease and cancer — than for others,” says Ravella. For conditions like obesity, neurodegenerative disease (like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases), and some psychiatric diseases (like depression), disentangling cause from effect is more challenging.  David Furman, a Stanford immunologist who uses genomics data to study links between aging, the immune system, and cardiovascular health, says chronic inflammation is more common in people with chronic pain, older people, and those with obesity. One effect of having the immune system always set to simmer is a “boy who cried wolf” situation: It’s so used to being saturated with inflammatory proteins that “when the real threat comes in, cells don’t respond,” he says. One effect of having the immune system always set to simmer is a “boy who cried wolf” situation That might explain why people in these groups were at such a vastly increased risk of death due to Covid-19 infection early in the pandemic, and why they are at higher risk for other diseases. Scientists are exploring other triggers in the world around us that could cause chronic inflammation, including poisons in our air; disruptions to our circadian rhythm and other stressors; problems with our food and water; and changes to the microbes that colonize our guts. Researchers call this range of inputs the “exposome.” It’s something we don’t have much control over — “You’re fighting a ghost,” says Furman — and yet a deep bench of research links many of these exposures to inflammatory pathways. In general, it’s hard to link any single exposure to a common outcome in humans because scientists cannot ethically control a person’s environment like they can with a lab rat. That makes it hard to do the kind of randomized, controlled human trials that many health experts favor. Researchers still have a lot of open questions about when inflammation is a cause, an effect, or something incidental to a disease or set of symptoms. And where there are gaps in science, people can make money and gain attention by exploiting the public’s understanding. TikTok is a showcase for many inflammation myths and scaremongering, much of it peddled by influencers who earn a living from your engagement or in some cases, are actively trying to sell you something. “Listing of a bunch of random symptoms to try to sell you a program or a product is unprofessional and predatory, if it’s even coming from a professional,” says dietitian Abbey Sharp in a TikTok debunking the “hidden signs your body is inflamed” genre.  Echoing expert advice about avoiding health misinformation, Sharp suggests consumers should be suspicious of vague, oversimplified, context-free statements about the causes and fixes of inflammation, especially ones from people who make money off your attention. Additionally, be aware that foods are not necessarily inflammatory just because they make you gassy (hello again, legumes!), cause some people allergic reactions (think: soy), or aren’t tolerated by people with certain conditions. Gluten, for example, causes inflammation for people with celiac disease but is fine for most others.   There are ways to reduce your risk for the kind of chronic inflammation that may cause health problems. One of the main recommendations Hafler makes to his multiple sclerosis patients is to avoid processed foods; that nutritional habit, and many others linked to lower markers of inflammation, can also benefit people with risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but also those without specific health conditions.  The inflammation-fighting diets actual experts recommend all have something in common: “We have an anti-inflammatory nutrient, perhaps our most anti-inflammatory nutrient,” says Ravella, “and that nutrient is fiber.” She recommends going well beyond the Food and Drug Administration’s recommended daily allowances of fiber — especially soluble fiber, which nourishes microbes in the gut whose work may help lower inflammation elsewhere in the body. Be aware that foods are not necessarily inflammatory just because they make you gassy (hello again, legumes!) Beans — yes, beans! — and grains are excellent sources of soluble fiber. Leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables also contain compounds that protect against inflammation, as do nuts, seeds, fatty fish like salmon and mackerel, and a whole variety of berries. Fermentation is also a powerful way to boost foods’ anti-inflammatory properties. That’s in part because the process yields good bacteria and fungi that, when eaten raw, fortify the gut microbiome. Even in fermented foods that are cooked — like sourdough bread — the microscopic architecture changes in ways that may have anti-inflammatory effects.  Hafler recommends minimizing fat and salt in your diet, and all the experts I spoke to recommended avoiding processed foods, especially those that contain compounds and ingredients uncommon in home kitchens. The methods used in home kitchens are a lot less likely to cause inflammation than the ones used in industrial food production, which makes cooking from scratch really important, says Furman.  That even goes for treats like ice cream, he says: The surfactants and emulsifiers that produce the smooth texture in many mass-produced ice creams temporarily alter the gut’s microbiome and reduce the intestine’s protective layer, which can contribute to inflammation in ways the raw ingredients of a homemade version wouldn’t.  Spending time in nature and with other humans and animals may also reduce inflammation, in part by diversifying the microbiome, but potentially through other mechanisms. Exercise, including strength training, is also key — “Muscle is a secretory organ with anti-inflammatory properties,” says Furman — and weight control can lower risk by reducing fat cells’ secretion of pro-inflammatory substances. Ultimately, most evidence-based recommendations for an anti-inflammatory lifestyle overlap significantly with what experts have long suggested is a healthy lifestyle. We can always do more — eat ever more pesticide-free food, breathe ever-cleaner air. But “we can’t go back to being cavemen,” Furman says. It’s really up to us how far we go.   

The former President's plan to bring water to the California desert is, like a lot of his promises, a goofy pipe-dream.

After suing both Apple and Google over app store payment policies, Fortnite developer Epic Games now has its sights on Samsung.

Four years after Epic sued Google for running an illegal app store monopoly — a case it won this past December — Epic is suing again. The Fortnite game developer has filed a second antitrust lawsuit against Google, and now additionally Samsung, accusing them of illegally conspiring to undermine third-party app stores. The lawsuit revolves around Samsung’s “Auto Blocker” feature, which now comes turned-on-by-default on new Samsung phones. While it’s turned on, it automatically keeps users from installing apps unless they come from “authorized sources” — namely, Google and Samsung’s app stores. Epic claims there’s no process for any rival store to become “authorized.” When Epic filed its original lawsuits against Google and Apple in...

The signature policy proposal of Donald Trump’s third campaign for the presidency is a tariff: a tax of 60 percent imposed on all imports from China and 10 percent on imports from any other country. Not only does he want this tax hike, which would raise about $291 billion or 1 percent of GDP when fully implemented, but he says he’ll do it unilaterally. “I don’t need Congress, but they’ll approve it,” Trump declared at a September 23 rally. “I’ll have the right to impose them myself if they don’t.” This is a rather enormous policy change for a president to undertake unilaterally, and one of dubious legality. For comparison, the hike Trump is considering is over twice as large as the tax increases used to fund Obamacare. (And make no mistake — tariffs are tax increases.) Experts like former World Trade Organization (WTO) deputy director-general Alan Wm. Wolff have argued that no law passed by Congress gives the president the power to levy across-the-board tariffs along the lines Trump proposes. Even so, Congress has given the executive branch a remarkable amount of flexibility to set tariffs. This is a mistake. Members of Congress, whether or not they support Trump’s tariff plans, should be able to agree on this much: As the Constitution lays out in the taxing clause, it’s Congress’s job to set taxing and spending policy for the United States. It’s been that way for the US’s whole history, it’s the traditional role of legislatures in all democratic countries, and putting this power instead in the president’s hands cuts the people’s representatives out of the process of determining how they are taxed — a concept that goes back to before the American Revolution. While Congress has in the past given up its power to tax in the case of trade to the president and the cabinet, it should reverse that trend. One way to do so is to pass a bill like Sen. Rand Paul’s No Taxation Without Representation Act to ensure that any changes in tariffs are subject to a congressional vote before taking effect. The presidential power to impose tariffs does not originate from a simple bill or program; rather, it slowly accreted over time, with a particular expansion over the past decade as the Trump administration rediscovered authorities in old laws that enabled it to wage a trade war with China and protect the steel industry. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, for instance, gives the president the right to levy tariffs upon the secretary of commerce’s recommendation without asking Congress. This was the authority Trump used to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum back in 2018, tariffs which Biden recently expanded slightly. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives a similar power to impose tariffs based on unfair trade practices by foreign nations on the advice of the Office of the US Trade Representative. Trump used this power to impose sweeping tariffs against China. Biden has made liberal use of this power, too, expanding tariffs on steel, batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles from China. Finally, there’s Section 201 of that same 1974 law, which allows tariffs against imports that “seriously injured or threatened … serious injury” to domestic companies. Trump and Biden have used this to justify tariffs on washing machines and solar cells from most countries. Even if Trump couldn’t implement a full 10 percent tariff on all imports with his executive powers — because the previous authorities apply only to specific industries or specific countries — he could make a lot of progress toward that goal. His 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, for instance, may very well be possible because it’s narrowly targeted at one nation. He and Biden have proven that the president can, without Congress, raise taxes on imports very significantly. I happen to think most of both Trump and Biden’s tariffs were wrongheaded and that Trump’s plan for more sweeping tariffs amounts to a significant tax increase on the poor and middle class that would hurt US exports, invite retaliation from other countries, harm America’s international reputation, and fail to create any jobs for people who need them. (Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked the Trump tariff plan as a “sales tax” but hasn’t disavowed Biden’s tariff policies.) That said, you don’t have to agree with me on the merits of the tariffs to agree with a narrower point about the process: This shouldn’t be the president’s decision. Congress is the branch of government invested with the power to tax and spend, and these trade laws have narrowed its power to the benefit of the executive in a way that is difficult to justify. The Social Security Administration is not allowed to set Social Security taxes, nor is the Department of Health and Human Services allowed to set Medicare taxes, but the Department of Commerce and the Office of the US Trade Representative are explicitly authorized to recommend tariffs that take effect upon the president’s approval. Why is trade the exception? One possible rationale might be that tariffs are a tool of foreign policy, which is traditionally an area where the executive has more autonomy. But even in that context, the tariff powers are extraordinary. Congressional authority is necessary to approve treaties and declare war; the War Powers Resolution means that armed conflict short of declared war needs congressional approval, too, as does funding conflict. Allowing a tariff increase without any congressional vote at all is a much greater deferral of authority. There are more specific, partisan reasons why Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about the presidential tariff power. For the past half-century, the GOP has been mostly a free-market, anti-tax party, which should naturally lead to skepticism of taxes and especially of unilateral presidential powers to levy taxes. As outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it recently, “I’m not a fan of tariffs. They raise the prices for American consumers. I’m more of a free-trade kind of Republican that remembers how many jobs are created by the exports that we engage in.” The large number of Republicans still holding to that worldview should support curbing the presidential power to levy tariffs. Democrats, even those sympathetic to tariffs and skeptical of free trade, should be wary of consigning a whole area of policymaking to Trump’s whims should he win the election. He demonstrated in his first term that he was very willing to use the tariff powers, more willing than any recent president, and his second term should, if anything, see him use them more promiscuously.  Presidential authority on tariffs also opens the door to corruption. Importers are allowed to petition the Commerce Department for specific waivers from tariffs, an allowance corporations unsurprisingly use to extract special favors. Apple, for instance, got exemptions from anti-China tariffs for iPhones and Apple Watches.  Given what we know about Donald Trump and his clientelist, favor-trading mode of politics, is that really a kind of power he should have? Is it a power Democrats will trust him to use in a non-corrupt manner? Or should Congress have the ability to curtail tariffs and limit opportunities for abuse? Some presidential powers, like the power to pardon political allies or immunity from prosecution, stem from the Constitution or the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it. But the tariff powers stem from statutes passed by Congress, and they can be rescinded by further acts of Congress. There were some proposals during the Trump years to require congressional approval for section 232 tariffs, most notably the Trade Authority Act introduced to the Senate by Mark Warner (D-VA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). That bill has been kept alive in the most recent Congress by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Don Beyer (D-VA). But Gallagher has since resigned from Congress, and Toomey retired in 2022.  More to the point, section 232 is only one of the sources of authority the president can use for tariffs. Sections 201 and 301 of the 1974 Trade Act would remain and could be used to raise taxes unilaterally. The Supreme Court could, in theory, strike down tariffs that overstep congressionally delegated authority, but historically, the courts have deferred to the executive on trade. The only bill I know of that would tackle the full suite of laws authorizing presidential tariffs is the No Taxation Without Representation Act from Rand Paul. As Paul put it in a statement upon introducing the bill: “Unchecked executive actions enacting tariffs tax our citizens, threaten our economy, raise prices for everyday goods, and erode the system of checks and balances that our founders so carefully crafted.” I find myself agreeing with Paul on very few issues, but he’s dead right on this one: Taxation is a congressional authority, and that should apply to tariffs as much as anything else. “To me it’s sensible policy,” Wolff, the former WTO executive and veteran US trade negotiator, told me. He might add carve-outs to give the executive flexibility in emergency cases (like when another nation levies a tariff against us first, or as part of a sanctions regime against a state like Russia or Iran), but broadly, the principle that Congress should authorize tax increases makes sense. We’re essentially out of time for Congress to act before its preelection October recess, and action may be harder in November and December when we know who the next president will be, and their copartisans may be less willing to support actions to constrain their powers. But the battle will only get harder once a new president takes office and starts proposing tariffs.  The time to act is this year, before that happens and while Congress has an opportunity to reassert its taxing power. The alternative could mean hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tax increases issued unilaterally by the president, with Congress unable to stop it.

Therese Mascardo was done with the daily grind of life in Los Angeles. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was seeing around 40 clients a week and spending hours in the car commuting.  “There’s a pressure that you feel as an American, and in LA, I certainly felt like I needed to work as much as possible, either to make my rent or buy Whole Foods, and so my quality of life really suffered there,” Mascardo, 42,  said.  So Mascardo made a radical change in search of an easier lifestyle. She kept seeing Portugal on lists of great places to live as a “digital nomad,” a fairly recent term for a person who can work remotely from various locations rather than a fixed location. Since 2007, the European country offered would-be nomads a visa that allowed them to live there so long as they were earning money while working for a company from a non-EU nation.  Mascardo fit the bill.  She decided to move to Lisbon in 2018. At first, Mascardo said, it was hard to stop being a “workaholic.” She continued seeing more than 35 clients a week remotely but eventually pared down to around 25 clients per week, a move she could make because Lisbon is so affordable.  She gave up the car, too. “Most of my friends live within a 15-minute walk of my house, or I can take an Uber that costs 10 euros to the other side of town, a maximum of 30 minutes by car,” she said.  And Portugal felt peaceful, too. Mascardo and other digital nomads we spoke with in Portugal cited the prevalence of gun violence in the United States as one factor for leaving.  “It’s crazy to live in a place where every day I don’t wake up and read about a mass shooting,” Mascardo said. “That whole part of my brain that was experiencing trauma in the USA isn’t dealing with that anymore.”  The pandemic turned work in America upside down: Lots of companies went fully remote, which meant knowledge workers in particular had more freedom than ever before to choose where to live without changing jobs, just as Mascardo did. Four years later, however, many companies have called workers back into the office at least some of the time, some for the whole workweek.  Which means some workers are living the digital nomad dream while others are back to long commutes and $15 desk salads. We wanted to know what these two extremes reveal about how we think about work and how we balance work and life, so a team from Vox’s Today, Explained podcast went to Portugal. We also visited an American city where the five-day, in-office workweek never went away: Miami. We’ll get to Miami tomorrow, but today, we’re exploring how Portugal turned itself into a haven for remote workers and saw mixed results. Thousands of digital nomads from all over the world have moved to Portugal, many after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though nomads by their nature are hard to track, some estimates show there are about 16,000 living in Lisbon alone, the bulk from the US.  In 2022, a few years after Mascardo arrived, Portugal began offering a new type of visa as an incentive for digital nomads. The D8 visa allows non-EU/EEA citizens with remote jobs to live and work in the country for up to one year, with a path to permanent residency.  Even before that, Portugal was an attractive place for digital nomads to hang out. After the Great Recession obliterated economic growth in the country, the government set up a generous tax structure and relatively easy visa requirements for certain kinds of foreigners (a.k.a. those with money). The idea was to attract not just people with cash to spend but entrepreneurs and knowledge workers to juice a torpid economy.  It worked, said Luís Carvalho, a professor of economics at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. Just look at his own city.  “Twenty years ago, the city was declining very fast. You saw a lot of criminality. Buildings were falling apart,”  said Carvalho. One of the oldest city centers in Europe, Porto was usually known for Port wine, not laptop warriors. When foreign workers started showing up, so did a new energy. New skills, higher incomes, entrepreneurialism. Tourism, too.  The urge to travel and visit a new country is baked into digital nomadism, so it’s not surprising that coworking and coliving spaces have popped up there. We accidentally stayed in one in Porto, where we stumbled on a place called Outsite Muoco that looked like a regular hotel. It’s actually a chain of rooms and apartments with locations all over the world catering to longer-term stays and “using the remote work revolution to define a new way of life.” The property in Porto had several coworking spaces, sleek Scandinavian design, and even a library to listen to vinyl records.  We met 25-year-old Gia Lee in the vinyl library while a British punk band played a concert in the basement. She never pictured herself jet-setting around the world while working, but Lee graduated from college right into the pandemic and the worst job market since the Great Recession. “There were no jobs at all in 2020. I was planning to go into a normal ad agency and corporate trajectory but Covid threw a wrench into the situation, and we kind of had to adapt and figure out how to do our own thing,” Lee said. That meant bouncing right into fully remote work. Lee and two friends founded a marketing agency called NinetyEight that provides brands with insights into the minds of Gen Z. It just made sense to Lee to continue keeping the company fully remote because it’s less expensive and provides more freedom to move around.  The pandemic gave lots of laptop workers like Lee tons of time to consider their living situations and jump the pond, but all this self-actualization had some negative effects for the Portuguese.  Foreign workers, often flush with cash, drove up housing costs. Carvalho and a team estimate an 8.5 percent increase in prices due to foreign workers. That’s been infuriating to a lot of Portuguese people, who are now facing some of the highest housing costs and the lowest median income in Western Europe. Tourism hasn’t helped either. There’s now a movement to get short-term rentals banned in Lisbon.  Mascardo has picked up on a change of sentiment from locals. “Prices have skyrocketed for housing because people show up with their American budgets and just throw their money around, and inflation doesn’t help,” she said.   New hopeful digital nomads are showing up in Portugal every day; more than 2,500 visas were already issued this year.   Carvalho hopes the Portuguese government can find a way to achieve balance. He says it’s important to attract entrepreneurs into the country and that a lot of new skills and technology came to Portugal precisely because of the visa and tax incentives introduced to digital nomads. But policymakers have to consider the impact on Portuguese society as a whole before native citizens of the country are priced out of their own housing market.  “I think you cannot have a decent city without economic growth and without people coming in with skills and talent. So I see policymakers very much as cooks who are trying to combine different ingredients, but the recipe is not there. So sometimes you have to create the recipe yourself.”