In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.
Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” — the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results.
Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism” — the intuition that there’s an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what’s been called “the death by experiment” of local realism.
But what if both of these intuitions can be saved, at the expense of a third? A growing group of experts think that we should abandon instead the assumption that present actions can’t affect past events. Called “retrocausality”, this option claims to rescue both locality and realism.
What is causation anyway? Let’s start with the line everyone knows: correlation is not causation. Some correlations are causation, but not all. What’s the difference?
Consider two examples. (1) There’s a correlation between a barometer needle and the weather – that’s why we learn about the weather by looking at the barometer. But no one thinks that the barometer needle is causing the weather. (2) Drinking strong coffee is correlated with a raised heart rate. Here it seems right to say that the first is causing the second.
The difference is that if we “wiggle” the barometer needle, we won’t change the weather. The weather and the barometer needle are both controlled by a third thing, the atmospheric pressure – that’s why they are correlated. When we control the needle ourselves, we break the link to the air pressure, and the correlation goes away.
But if we intervene to change someone’s coffee consumption, we’ll usually change their heart rate, too. Causal correlations are those that still hold when we wiggle one of the variables.
These days, the science of looking for these robust correlations is called “causal discovery”. It’s a big name for a simple idea: finding out what else changes when we wiggle things around us.
In ordinary life, we usually take for granted that the effects of a wiggle are going to show up later than the wiggle itself. This is such a natural assumption that we don’t notice that we’re making it.
But nothing in the scientific method requires this to happen, and it is easily abandoned in fantasy fiction. Similarly in some religions, we pray that our loved ones are among the survivors of yesterday’s shipwreck, say. We’re imagining that something we do now can affect something in the past. That’s retrocausality.
The quantum threat to locality (that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact) stems from an argument by the Northern Ireland physicist John Bell in the 1960s. Bell considered experiments in which two hypothetical physicists, Alice and Bob, each receive particles from a common source. Each chooses one of several measurement settings, and then records a measurement outcome. Repeated many times, the experiment generates a list of results.
Bell realised that quantum mechanics predicts that there will be strange correlations (now confirmed) in this data. They seemed to imply that Alice’s choice of setting has a subtle “nonlocal” influence on Bob’s outcome, and vice versa – even though Alice and Bob might be light years apart. Bell’s argument is said to pose a threat to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is an essential part of modern physics.
But that’s because Bell assumed that quantum particles don’t know what measurements they are going to encounter in the future. Retrocausal models propose that Alice’s and Bob’s measurement choices affect the particles back at the source. This can explain the strange correlations, without breaking special relativity.
In recent work, we’ve proposed a simple mechanism for the strange correlation – it involves a familiar statistical phenomenon called Berkson’s bias (see our popular summary here).
There’s now a thriving group of scholars who work on quantum retrocausality. But it’s still invisible to some experts in the wider field. It gets confused for a different view called “superdeterminism”.
Superdeterminism agrees with retrocausality that measurement choices and the underlying properties of the particles are somehow correlated.
But superdeterminism treats it like the correlation between the weather and the barometer needle. It assumes there’s some mysterious third thing – a “superdeterminer” – that controls and correlates both our choices and the particles, the way atmospheric pressure controls both the weather and the barometer.
So superdeterminism denies that measurement choices are things we are free to wiggle at will, they are predetermined. Free wiggles would break the correlation, just as in the barometer case. Critics object that superdeterminism thus undercuts core assumptions necessary to undertake scientific experiments. They also say that it means denying free will, because something is controlling both the measurement choices and particles.
These objections don’t apply to retrocausality. Retrocausalists do scientific causal discovery in the usual free, wiggly way. We say it is folk who dismiss retrocausality who are forgetting the scientific method, if they refuse to follow the evidence where it leads.
What is the evidence for retrocausality? Critics ask for experimental evidence, but that’s the easy bit: the relevant experiments just won a Nobel Prize. The tricky part is showing that retrocausality gives the best explanation of these results.
We’ve mentioned the potential to remove the threat to Einstein’s special relativity. That’s a pretty big hint, in our view, and it’s surprising it has taken so long to explore it. The confusion with superdeterminism seems mainly to blame.
In addition, we and others have argued that retrocausality makes better sense of the fact that the microworld of particles doesn’t care about the difference between past and future.
We don’t mean that it is all plain sailing. The biggest worry about retrocausation is the possibility of sending signals to the past, opening the door to the paradoxes of time travel. But to make a paradox, the effect in the past has to be measured. If our young grandmother can’t read our advice to avoid marrying grandpa, meaning we wouldn’t come to exist, there’s no paradox. And in the quantum case, it’s well known that we can never measure everything at once.
Still, there’s work to do in devising concrete retrocausal models that enforce this restriction that you can’t measure everything at once. So we’ll close with a cautious conclusion. At this stage, it’s retrocausality that has the wind in its sails, so hull down towards the biggest prize of all: saving locality and realism from “death by experiment”.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its use spreads beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
Nadella on Tuesday said that the long-term success of the fast-developing technology would depend on it being used by a broad range of industries as well as on uptake outside of the developed world.
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” said Nadella. He noted that a “tell-tale sign of if it’s a bubble” would be if only tech groups were benefiting from the rise of AI, rather than companies in other sectors.
However, Nadella said he was confident that AI would prove to be transformative across industries, such as helping to develop new drugs.
“I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world,” he said.
Nadella’s comments came as part of a talk with BlackRock chief Larry Fink on the first day of the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, kicking off the first of several speeches by tech executives, including Google DeepMind chief Sir Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
A growing body of data from tech companies, including Microsoft, has shown a global divide in AI adoption rates, pointing to productivity benefits and work applications being concentrated in richer developed countries.
Nadella also reiterated his view that the future of AI adoption would not rely on one dominant model provider, which has driven the tech giant’s decision to work with several AI groups, such as Anthropic and xAI, as well as OpenAI.
Microsoft gained an early advantage in AI through its $14bn bet on OpenAI, which gave the software group unique access to the ChatGPT maker’s technology and first claim on its data centre contracts.
But after restructuring its partnership with Sam Altman’s start-up in October, Microsoft has dropped exclusivity over its data centre needs and will lose exclusive access to its research and models in the early 2030s.
Nadella said companies would be able to take advantage of multiple models, including open-source ones or even building their own models using a technique called “distillation” to produce smaller, cheaper versions of powerful models.
“So the [intellectual property] of any application or any firm is, how do you use all these models with context engineering or your data?” Nadella said. “As long as firms can answer that question, they’re gonna be getting ahead.”
OXFORD, Miss. -- They came in droves, speeding into the parking lot of the tiny University-Oxford one-terminal airport, to say a final goodbye to Lane Kiffin.
They offered hundreds of one-finger salutes, almost in unison, and shouted expletives at Kiffin, who announced Sunday he was officially leaving Ole Miss for LSU.
From offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr. to Lane's ex-wife Layla, anyone who dared step foot on the two private planes sent from Baton Rouge received nothing but vitriol from spurned Ole Miss fans who so desperately wanted to believe Kiffin when he said he had changed and found happiness in their small Mississippi college town. It was mostly college-aged young men decked out in New Balances, but there were also multiple children, including one infant wrapped in a blanket and sucking on a pacifier. It's never too early, after all, to teach your children it just means more.
Never has there been anything like it, fans letting loose all their anger and disappointment at a man who had won 11 of his 12 regular-season games this year and had the Rebels all but guaranteed to make the College Football Playoff. Of course, never had a coach left a team with a real chance to win a national championship, still, either.
How could Kiffin leave now? How could he destroy so much hard-earned goodwill, from the rock bottom of being fired at the tarmac in 2013 to a man the Ole Miss fanbase and Oxford community loved and embraced as their hero?
To understand how we got to Sunday's wild scene in Oxford, CBS Sports spoke with numerous sources with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes decision-making process that ultimately led to Kiffin becoming the next LSU football coach.
The drama, coincidentally enough, cranked up into overdrive on a previous Oxford airport experience.
That was when a private plane carrying multiple members of the Kiffin family, including Layla Kiffin, was spotted arriving in Baton Rouge on Nov. 17th. It became a major national storyline, left Ole Miss administrators deeply uncomfortable about their head coach's future intentions, and exposed what had been in the works for weeks.
Kiffin and his representation had privately been engaging with three potential suitors for weeks at this point. By the weekend of Ole Miss-Florida (Nov. 15), Kiffin knew he could stay at Ole Miss or leave for either Florida or LSU. Both the rival SEC suitors had made clear by that point that Kiffin was their No. 1 target and they were willing to make him one of the highest-paid coaches in college football.
It was then that Lane told his family members, including his son Knox, that it was time to take trips to Gainesville and Baton Rouge. In the lead-up to those visits, various factions and voices pulled Lane in different directions. There were some in his ear, including CAA super agent Jimmy Sexton, telling him that LSU offered the best professional opportunities. Others believed Florida gave him the best mix of professional and personal happiness.
There was, frankly, a lot to like about Florida for Kiffin. He was a huge Steve Spurrier fan and wore a visor in honor of the Head Ball Coach. His ex-wife Layla's father, John Reaves, was a legendary former Florida quarterback. If the Kiffins all moved to Gainesville, Knox, a rising star quarterback at Oxford High School, could even play high school football at the same high school, Buchholz, his mother attended.
Kiffin had long been interested in the Florida job, even trying and failing to get in the mix back in 2021 when Florida instead hired Louisiana coach Billy Napier. After Florida fired Napier on Oct. 19 after a 22-23 record, it finally set up a potential marriage between Kiffin and the Gators.
There was only one problem: the first conversation between Kiffin and Florida AD Scott Stricklin did not go well, according to multiple sources with knowledge of how Kiffin perceived the call. At the time, Florida was the biggest job available and had the leverage to dictate some of its terms. That included wanting a general manager with an NFL background who wouldn't report directly to Kiffin. This was a non-starter for Kiffin, who strongly believes in the abilities of Ole Miss general manager Billy Glasscock, and had concerns about that setup. It got the weeks-long pursuit off to an awkward start from Kiffin's perspective, though Florida continued to aggressively pursue the Ole Miss coach.
(Florida announced Sunday it had hired former Jacksonville Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell in conjunction with its hiring of Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall.)
There was something just beneath the surface, too. Multiple sources had long cast doubt on Stricklin's desire to ever hire Kiffin, a brilliant offensive mind with a penchant for stirring up drama. There was a reason, after all, that his mother used to call him "Helicopter" growing up.
"He thrives on fucking with people," one long-time friend said. "You cannot begin to understand how much he enjoys that part of it."
Stricklin, a more buttoned-up personality, had preferred Napier's no-nonsense approach over Kiffin's antics the last time around.
With the Florida booster base rallying around pursuing Kiffin, Stricklin did his due diligence and started vetting the Ole Miss coach before firing Napier. The biggest question he posed to those who knew Kiffin well was whether Lane had really changed and grown up. The answers Stricklin got made him comfortable enough to heavily pursue him as the next Florida head coach.
Still, Kiffin was well aware that he wasn't Stricklin's cup of tea, and the feeling was mutual. It was the kind of thing that could have possibly been overcome if there were no other options, but Ole Miss all but allowed him to do whatever he wanted in Oxford and kept giving him more and more resources to push the program forward. "He was never told no," one source said. Kiffin was concerned about Stricklin meddling and how they would mesh, later telling confidants he had a "weird vibe" about the situation.
And then came LSU.
Kiffin delighted in beating Brian Kelly and LSU earlier this season, but even he may not have known what it would lead to.
When LSU fired Kelly on Oct. 26th and later AD Scott Woodward, it became the story of college football. With Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry's involvement in both Kelly's and Woodward's dismissals, it signaled to some that LSU lacked much-needed alignment and could be subject to the governor's future whims, potentially hurting its ability to attract a top candidate.
Kiffin wasn't one of those people, however. In fact, he knew that if Woodward had remained the athletic director, he was very unlikely to get the LSU job, according to multiple sources. Woodward had told different people he wasn't the biggest Kiffin fan.
New athletic director Verge Ausberry, long a Woodward deputy, didn't share those feelings. The initial conversation with LSU, especially in contrast to the one he had with Stricklin and Florida, couldn't have gone better for Kiffin.
As one source familiar with the conversation described, LSU's pitch was: "Coach, we love you, we love what you've done. Whatever it is you do, however it is you do it, we just want you to pick that up, bring it here, we'll fund it and let's go."
"Music to his ears," is how Kiffin received the pitch.
Some in Kiffin's camp believe that had Florida made that same pitch right out of the gate, he could have ended up in Gainesville instead. And had Stricklin moved on from Napier a year earlier, as he considered before bringing him back for the 2025 season, multiple people believe Lane would have jumped at it following a 10-3 season that just missed the playoff cut.
Adding to LSU's momentum came a pitch directly from Louisiana Governor Landry, according to multiple sources. It was a productive early November call for both sides. It made Landry an enthusiastic supporter of LSU's all-in pursuit of Kiffin, which included a seven-year deal with an average salary of more than $13 million and an escalator, should Kiffin win a national title, that would make him the highest-paid coach in the country. Landry had previously complained about Kelly's $54 million buyout and initially vowed that LSU wouldn't issue a contract like that again.
After the Kiffin family visit to Baton Rouge went well, there was considerable optimism on LSU's side that they would swipe Lane out of Oxford. One plugged-in source even told CBS Sports that week, while nothing was officially done, that the most significant questions were about public relations and an exit strategy out of Ole Miss, not whether he'd be LSU's next coach. It was "very delicate with the Ole Miss side," the source said, and Kiffin was "trying to thread the needle" to be able to take the LSU job and still coach Ole Miss in the playoff.
Kiffin never explicitly told Ole Miss he was leaving, though. In fact, multiple conversations between Ole Miss's football coach and athletic director Keith Carter led the athletics director to believe he'd stay.
It was what made trying to predict what Kiffin would do so difficult for even those who knew him best. He could tell one person one thing and another the complete opposite. In recent weeks, there were days his staff was all but sure he would leave for LSU and then the next day Lane would talk about how good they had it in Oxford. Even those confident Kiffin would leave Ole Miss would frequently offer the caveat of him all but accepting the Auburn job in 2022, only to back out at the last minute.
The Ole Miss administration, including chancellor Glenn Boyce, did everything in its power to keep Lane in Oxford. They were willing to match salary offers that he got elsewhere. They were committed to maintaining a competitive salary pool to attract and retain the best assistants. They believed a national championship was possible at Ole Miss and just wanted Lane to believe it, too.
He ultimately could never get there, unable to resist the siren call of a "blue blood." Kiffin didn't believe he'd get a premier job again, according to those who know him well, not after he crashed and burned at USC. He had tried and failed over the years to get numerous big jobs that opened up, including Florida, Miami, Texas A&M and Alabama, but could never get traction. He seemingly had too much baggage for elite jobs, which preferred safer hires over the unpredictable Lane.
When he suddenly had two of the best jobs in the country, Florida and LSU, fighting over him, he couldn't resist. It seemed to color the way he viewed his current job, too, even though he publicly said he loved Ole Miss. He'd privately complain about the fanbase and whether the program's recent success was sustainable, especially compared to more historically successful programs like Florida and LSU. He locked in on what he thought were disappointing home crowds, telling some around him that didn't happen in Baton Rouge and Gainesville.
He convinced himself that Ole Miss offered no more security than any other SEC job, including the two pursuing him, which had just fired their coaches after less than four seasons. He brought up the corollary to Kentucky coach Mark Stoops, who was beloved there for exceeding expectations at a typically extremely challenging job. Stoops had done so well at Kentucky that he even came close to getting the Texas A&M job in 2023 -- the same one Lane tried and failed to get in the mix for -- but trustees reportedly killed the deal.
Two years after almost getting the A&M job, Kentucky fired Stoops on Monday after a couple of disappointing seasons.
Kiffin believed the same could happen to him at Ole Miss if he went 7-5 or 6-6 in consecutive seasons. If he stayed and passed up the LSU job now, he said he'd risk becoming Mark Stoops and missing his chance at a big job.
Ole Miss did its best to dissuade Kiffin from this notion. For one, as they told him, he had never won fewer than eight games in a season when you excluded the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season. He averaged 10 wins a season, Ole Miss administrators explained to Kiffin, so why would he ever be worried about losing his job? The fanbase loved him, and he was the face of pins, t-shirts, and plenty of other memorabilia. Even his dog, Juice Kiffin, had become an unofficial mascot of the football program. He had more job security than any coach in the country, they reasoned with him.
But it never clicked for Kiffin the way Ole Miss hoped. All the talk about having a statue at Ole Miss one day never moved him. He was getting restless, even telling one confidant before the season he felt he was "ready for change." One Ole Miss booster, who liked Kiffin and got to know him well during his time in Oxford, said of Lane: "He needs something to chase. Once you have conquered all and there is nothing left to chase, it's time to go."
That time had come for Kiffin. He was ready to move on to greener pastures in Louisiana. He desperately wanted to win a national championship like his mentors Nick Saban and Pete Carroll, and believed LSU offered him a better chance to do so than Ole Miss. He had been enamored with LSU for years, believing it was an incredible job with a fertile recruiting base and a state that only had to support one Power Four team, unlike Mississippi or Florida.
There was only one issue: Kiffin still wanted to coach Ole Miss in the playoff.
Weeks before Kiffin officially left for LSU, sources told CBS Sports that if Ole Miss was convinced that its coach was leaving, the school wouldn't let him in the playoff. It wasn't a card it wanted to play, but with the early signing period starting Dec. 3 and the transfer portal window opening Jan. 2, the school could not afford to start a coaching search in January if Kiffin was leaving.
It created an increasingly tenuous situation between a man who wanted to have his cake and eat it, too, and a school that had no interest in letting him do so. For weeks, it bubbled beneath the surface with both parties hoping it wouldn't come to a head. If he had left a year earlier it wouldn't have been an issue, but wildly overachieving with Division-II quarterback transfer Trinidad Chambliss and a team picked to finish 7th in the SEC made an exit that much harder.
"His own success has made his own position so untenable," one source said leading into the Egg Bowl.
It finally happened on Saturday, during a meeting between Kiffin, Carter and Boyce at the chancellor's house. It was then that Ole Miss finally, definitively knew Kiffin was leaving, after weeks of wishy-washy statements and noncommittal answers about committing to the school long-term. With Kiffin's mind made up, Ole Miss was ready to move on.
The Ole Miss coach wasn't going to leave for Baton Rouge without a fight, though. In a conversation described as tense, Kiffin didn't want to back down from his desire to coach the team through the postseason. When Ole Miss showed no interest in allowing him to do so, Kiffin, according to sources, threatened to take the offensive staff with him immediately if Carter and Boyce didn't relent. They held firm; Kiffin would not be coaching the team in the playoff.
As word of Kiffin's tactics spread, multiple Ole Miss football players confronted him in his office Sunday about it. Kiffin refused to directly answer whether he had told his on-field offensive staffers that if they didn't get on the plane with him to Baton Rouge the next day, they wouldn't have a spot on his LSU staff.
"I'm not making them go," Kiffin told the players. "They can do whatever they want."
Even after the Saturday night meeting that made clear Kiffin was leaving for LSU and wouldn't be coaching the team moving forward, he was still pushing hard on Sunday to Carter and others to allow him to do so. He believed down to the very end he would eventually win out and get what he wanted. It wasn't until Ole Miss informed Kiffin that it was moving forward with defensive coordinator Pete Golding as its coach that he finally relented and accepted his fate.
He did not attend a team meeting, at the school's request, instead packing up his office as Carter introduced Golding as the program's next head coach. There were cheers and excitement for Golding, a well-regarded defensive mind and the best recruiter on Kiffin's staff.
As Golding feverishly worked to hold on to as many Ole Miss staffers as possible, Kiffin made his way to the airport. He was still upset he wouldn't coach the team, even calling out Carter in a prepared statement. While he claimed the team asked Carter to allow him to keep coaching -- and he did have supporters on the team in that regard -- Ole Miss sources strongly pushed back on the notion it was a widespread feeling. Multiple players had become frustrated with Kiffin's indecision overshadowing the team's accomplishments, according to sources, and were ready to move on. Some even told the Ole Miss administration they cared more about whether their position coaches were staying than Kiffin at that point.
Kiffin took many of those coaches with him on the plane including his brother Chris, Weis Jr., co-offensive coordinator Joe Cox and receivers coach George McDonald. Days ahead of the early signing period, Kiffin took general manager Billy Glasscock and senior director of player personnel Mike Williams to LSU, too. Kiffin on Monday sent out one of his famously cryptic tweets that included an easter egg: The flag of Trinidad, which of course could be interpreted to mean something regarding Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss, who has filed a waiver for eligibility in 2026.
Quarterback portal dominoes aside, Kiffin alone was a massive coup for LSU, which beat out two rivals for him. The Tigers' brass believed they had a coach worthy of following in the footsteps of Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron in bringing more national championships to Baton Rouge. With multiple police motorcycles guiding him through the city, Kiffin arrived in Baton Rouge like a conquering hero to a throng of celebrating fans.
But after weeks of drama enveloped the Ole Miss program over Kiffin's antics, overshadowing the best season in program history, even one LSU source expressed a tinge of concern. Kiffin had already infamously been the first coach fired in between a semifinal and national championship as Nick Saban did back in 2017, and now he became the first head coach to be pushed out before coaching his team in the playoff.
"I don't know that his drama is going to go well here at LSU," the source said. "They want it now, but I don't think they'll like the drama."
More than 300 miles away in Oxford, a wild scene showcased what happens when the drama that felt so fun for so long finally turned ugly. A man once held up as a demigod was now a fanbase's biggest villain.
Kathryn Nicolai has gotten really, really good at putting people to sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep has always been something of a superpower for her, so it’s only natural that she built a business around helping other people do it too.
“I always say, I sleep like it’s my job,” she says, laughing.
Nicolai describes herself as an architect of coziness. Her office, with its enormous lounge chair and dangling mobiles and strings of fairy lights, is practically a temple to the feeling.
“If I can make any part of my life feel softer or cuter, I’m going to do it,” she says.
Once a yoga teacher, Nicolai is now the founder of the Nothing Much Happens empire, a podcast, book, and general storytelling machine that helps put millions of Americans to sleep as quickly as possible.
But how did a business based on telling bedtime stories to adults take off?
Nicolai, who will launch an app and release a second book next year, never imagined she’d be a professional writer. It wasn’t until her early 30s, when a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that she began to think seriously about it.
“Right before she died, she said, ‘You’ve got to make your dreams come true. I won’t be able to do mine,” Nicolai recalls. “And I said, ‘I know.’ And she went, ‘Don’t blow me off. I am telling you something very important right now.’”
Nicolai didn’t even know what her dreams were. “I was just getting to the next day,” she says. “I think that if Renee hadn’t interrupted me, I would have kept doing that for a long time.”
When she actually sat down to think about it, she realized something. What she really wanted, she thought, was to tell bedtime stories to adults.
Empire of rest
Like many kids, Nicolai grew up on stories. Her dad got her into audiobooks as a child, and she played a record that told the story of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase over and over for an entire summer.
As she got older, she turned to meditation and yoga, eventually becoming a full-time yoga teacher. She created and ran her own studio, met her wife and got married, and settled down with their dogs in Michigan.
When she had that pivotal conversation with her friend Renee, she was already spending a considerable amount of time using her voice and presence to help calm people down. But she’d long harbored a secret dream of becoming a writer. Maybe, she wondered, there was a way to combine both passions.
“Your life doesn’t have to make sense to anybody else. If you have a passion, it doesn’t matter if it works. It matters that you pursue it,” she says.
At first, she wanted to tell a story in book form, but the barrier to entering the publishing industry felt high. A podcast seemed more accessible. Anyone with a microphone could have one. Why not her?
At the time, she knew of just one other sleep podcast, which recapped TV episodes. “I really thought, this is quite niche,” she says.
It took her two years to actually sit down to record the first story — a rambling tale about all the smells and sensations you encounter as you make your way home from work in the rain, one that would help take her listeners from the day’s onslaught of information to a quieter place.
She knew it would put people to sleep, because she’d been falling asleep to some version of it herself for years. She released the first episode in April 2018.
At first, the reception started out, well, sleepily. She was checking the download metrics every day: 24, 48, 100. A month in, the numbers ticked modestly upward, to ~1.5k.
Back then, she was still running her yoga studio, teaching five or six times a week, writing stories, and recording the podcast. By the time she’d been putting out episodes for a year, she’d reached 10m downloads, earning money from ads and premium content subscriptions.
“And then I got a literary agent, and then I sold my book in about 35 countries,” she says. “And I was like, okay, apparently this is going to be a thing.”
Americans clearly needed help getting a good night’s rest. And Nicolai wasn’t the only person thinking about how to help people sleep better.
In 2014, the CDC declared insufficient sleep a public health problem. For the one-third of Americans who aren’t getting the recommended seven or more hours a night, that means higher rates of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and obesity, and other conditions.
By 2017, McKinsey & Company released a report suggesting private equity firms look into investing in sleep optimization. There’s a business case to be made for the industry: Studies have estimated the US loses ~$400B a year in productivity due to sleep deprivation.
Over the last 10 years, the sleep industry has exploded. Mattress companies are multiplying, as are wearable tech options like Oura rings that monitor your activity so you can achieve optimal results even when sleeping.
In 2015, Americans spent an estimated $41B on sleep aids. By 2024, that number sat at $67B. Consumers can now buy a whole host of CBD-infused gummies and oils. A few companies even make CBD-infused bedsheets and pillowcases.
Sleep tourism is also now a thing: Hotels are offering pillow menus and retreat weekends. Luxury resorts are offering trip itineraries focused on getting a better night’s rest. Last year, trend forecast agency WGSN labeled “therapeutic laziness,” AKA bed rotting, as one of the year’s top trends.
The bedtime story market is also getting more crowded. When Nicolai started out, there was just one other sleep podcast. Now, there are hundreds, and apps like Calm are getting in on the boom, offering their own stories narrated by celebrities like Harry Styles and Matthew McConaughey.
Nicolai has come a long way from her first episode. Her stories, which are set in a village called Nothing Much, are effective because:
They’re heavy on nostalgia and familiarity.
The overarching activity is soothing and/or enjoyable.
They’re steeped in sensory detail.
As the title suggests, nothing much happens.
She still writes every story herself, all 495 of them now. But it wasn’t until four years into the project that she sold her beloved yoga studio, going all-in on the village of Nothing Much.
“This whole enterprise I was building was about rest. I could not burn my candle at both ends and then try to pretend to know how to help people rest,” she says.
She picked a lane, switched to a weekly episode release cadence, and watched her numbers soar. “Now, 200k [people] might listen to me on a day,” she says. She’s at 200m downloads overall. She employs two of her friends, one of whom does “community care,” AKA customer service, for the villagers (listeners) who span the globe.
Her stories focus on feelings: a morning with the windows open and fresh fall air blowing through, an evening when two friends meet for the first time, a walk through the backcountry after the rain. She’s introduced listeners to librarians, bakers, innkeepers, and a whole host of animals that call Nothing Much their home.
“So many people tell me they wish they could live in the village of Nothing Much,” she says.
In January, Nicolai is launching an app that will help them do that — at least for an hour or two every day.
The great thing about being famous for your voice is that although she has some high-profile fans — literary giant Meg Wolitzer, for one — Nicolai enjoys moving mostly anonymously through a life she calls ridiculously charmed.
She still lives in Michigan and spends her days dreaming up how to expand the village. She has kids' books in mind, and wants to write a book starring two beloved villagers, Marmalade (a cat) and Crumb (a dog). She’d also love to create feel-good sleep content for TV.
“People like me sometimes get called Pollyanna-ish, or told we’re walking around with rose-colored glasses,” she says.
But, she points out, our brains are primed through negativity bias to focus on scary or upsetting things.
“So when you deliberately go out of your way to look for good things, that’s not rose-colored glasses. That’s taking off the gray ones. You’re actually more of a realist than you were before.”
Sounds like a dream to me.
I like to tell people that the night before I stopped sleeping, I slept. Not only that: I slept well. Years ago, a boyfriend of mine, even-keeled during the day but restless at night, told me how hard it was to toss and turn while I instantly sank into the crude, Neanderthal slumber of the dead. When I found a magazine job that allowed me to keep night-owl hours, my rhythms had the precision of an atomic clock. I fell asleep at 1 a.m. I woke up at 9 a.m. One to nine, one to nine, one to nine, night after night, day after day. As most researchers can tell you, this click track is essential to health outcomes: One needs consistent bedtimes and wake-up times. And I had them, naturally; when I lost my alarm clock, I didn’t bother getting another until I had an early-morning flight to catch.
Then, one night maybe two months before I turned 29, that vaguening sense that normal sleepers have when they’re lying in bed—their thoughts pixelating into surreal images, their mind listing toward unconsciousness—completely deserted me. How bizarre, I thought. I fell asleep at 5 a.m.
This started to happen pretty frequently. I had no clue why. The circumstances of my life, both personally and professionally, were no different from the week, month, or two months before—and my life was good. Yet I’d somehow transformed into an appliance without an off switch.
I saw an acupuncturist. I took Tylenol PM. I sampled a variety of supplements, including melatonin (not really appropriate, I’d later learn, especially in the megawatt doses Americans take—its real value is in resetting your circadian clock, not as a sedative). I ran four miles every day, did breathing exercises, listened to a meditation tape a friend gave me. Useless.
I finally caved and saw my general practitioner, who prescribed Ambien, telling me to feel no shame if I needed it every now and then. But I did feel shame, lots of shame, and I’d always been phobic about drugs, including recreational ones. And now … a sedative? (Two words for you: Judy Garland.) It was only when I started enduring semiregular involuntary all-nighters—which I knew were all-nighters, because I got out of bed and sat upright through them, trying to read or watch TV—that I capitulated. I couldn’t continue to stumble brokenly through the world after nights of virtually no sleep.
I hated Ambien. One of the dangers with this strange drug is that you may do freaky things at 4 a.m. without remembering, like making a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches and eating them. That didn’t happen to me (I don’t think?), but the drug made me squirrelly and tearful. I stopped taking it. My sleep went back to its usual syncopated disaster.
In Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq lists the thinkers and artists who have pondered the brutality of sleeplessness, and they’re distinguished company: Duras, Gide, Pavese, Sontag, Plath, Dostoyevsky, Murakami, Borges, Kafka. (Especially Kafka, whom she calls literature’s “patron saint” of insomniacs. “Dread of night,” he wrote. “Dread of not-night.”) Not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sleeplessness was triggered by a single night of warfare with a mosquito.
But there was sadly no way to interpret my sleeplessness as a nocturnal manifestation of tortured genius or artistic brilliance. It felt as though I’d been poisoned. It was that arbitrary, that abrupt. When my insomnia started, the experience wasn’t just context-free; it was content-free. People would ask what I was thinking while lying wide awake at 4 a.m., and my answer was: nothing. My mind whistled like a conch shell.
But over time I did start thinking—or worrying, I should say, and then perseverating, and then outright panicking. At first, songs would whip through my head, and I couldn’t get the orchestra to pack up and go home. Then I started to fear the evening, going to bed too early in order to give myself extra runway to zonk out. (This, I now know, is a typical amateur’s move and a horrible idea, because the bed transforms from a zone of security into a zone of torment, and anyway, that’s not how the circadian clock works.) Now I would have conscious thoughts when I couldn’t fall asleep, which can basically be summarized as insomnia math: Why am I not falling asleep Dear God let me fall asleep Oh my God I only have four hours left to fall asleep oh my God now I only have three oh my God now two oh my God now just one.
“The insomniac is not so much in dialogue with sleep,” Darrieussecq writes, “as with the apocalypse.”
I would shortly discover that this cycle was textbook insomnia perdition: a fear of sleep loss that itself causes sleep loss that in turn generates an even greater fear of sleep loss that in turn generates even more sleep loss … until the next thing you know, you’re in an insomnia galaxy spiral, with a dark behavioral and psychological (and sometimes neurobiological) life of its own.
I couldn’t recapture my nights. Something that once came so naturally now seemed as impossible as flying. How on earth could this have happened? To this day, whenever I think about it, I still can’t believe it did.
In light of my tortured history with the subject, you can perhaps see why I generally loathe stories about sleep. What they’re usually about is the dangers of sleep loss, not sleep itself, and as a now-inveterate insomniac, I’ve already got a multivolume fright compendium in my head of all the terrible things that can happen when sleep eludes you or you elude it. You will die of a heart attack or a stroke. You will become cognitively compromised and possibly dement. Your weight will climb, your mood will collapse, the ramparts of your immune system will crumble. If you rely on medication for relief, you’re doing your disorder all wrong—you’re getting the wrong kind of sleep, an unnatural sleep, and addiction surely awaits; heaven help you and that horse of Xanax you rode in on.
It should go without saying that for some of us, knowledge is not power. It’s just more kindling.
The cultural discussions around sleep would be a lot easier if the tone weren’t quite so hectoring—or so smug. A case in point: In 2019, the neuroscientist Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, gave a TED Talk that began with a cheerful disquisition about testicles. They are, apparently, “significantly smaller” in men who sleep five hours a night rather than seven or more, and that two-hour difference means lower testosterone levels too, equivalent to those of someone 10 years their senior. The consequences of short sleep for women’s reproductive systems are similarly dire.
“This,” Walker says just 54 seconds in, “is the best news that I have for you today.”
He makes good on his promise. What follows is the old medley of familiars, with added verses about inflammation, suicide, cancer. Walker’s sole recommendation at the end of his sermon is the catechism that so many insomniacs—or casual media consumers, for that matter—can recite: Sleep in a cool room, keep your bedtimes and wake-up times regular, avoid alcohol and caffeine. Also, don’t nap.
I will now say about Walker:
1. His book is in many ways quite wonderful—erudite and wide-ranging and written with a flaring energy when it isn’t excessively pleased with itself.
2. Both Why We Sleep and Walker’s TED Talk focus on sleep deprivation, not insomnia, with the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that too many people choose to blow off sleep in favor of work or life’s various seductions.
If public awareness is Walker’s goal (certainly a virtuous one), he and his fellow researchers have done a very good job in recent years, with the enthusiastic assistance of my media colleagues, who clearly find stories about the hazards of sleep deprivation irresistible. (In the wine-dark sea of internet content, they’re click sirens.) Walker’s TED Talk has been viewed nearly 24 million times. “For years, we were fighting against ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ ” Aric Prather, the director of the behavioral-sleep-medicine research program at UC San Francisco, told me. “Now the messaging that sleep is a fundamental pillar of human health has really sunk in.”
Yet greater awareness of sleep deprivation’s consequences hasn’t translated into a better-rested populace. Data from the CDC show that the proportion of Americans reporting insufficient sleep held constant from 2013 through 2022, at roughly 35 percent. (From 2020 to 2022, as anxiety about the pandemic eased, the percentage actually climbed.)
So here’s the first question I have: In 2025, exactly how much of our “sleep opportunity,” as the experts call it, is under our control?
According to the most recent government data, 16.4 percent of American employees work nonstandard hours. (Their health suffers in every category—the World Health Organization now describes night-shift work as “probably carcinogenic.”) Adolescents live in a perpetual smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early for school (researchers call their plight “social jet lag”); young mothers and fathers live in a smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early (or erratically) for their kids; adults caring for aging parents lose sleep too. The chronically ill frequently can’t sleep. Same with some who suffer from mental illness, and many veterans, and many active-duty military members, and menopausal women, and perimenopausal women, and the elderly, the precariat, the poor.
“Sleep opportunity is not evenly distributed across the population,” Prather noted, and he suspects that this contributes to health disparities by class. In 2020, the National Center for Health Statistics found that the poorer Americans were, the greater their likelihood of reporting difficulty falling asleep. If you look at the CDC map of the United States’ most sleep-deprived communities, you’ll see that they loop straight through the Southeast and Appalachia. Black and Hispanic Americans also consistently report sleeping less, especially Black women.
Even for people who aren’t contending with certain immutables, the cadences of modern life have proved inimical to sleep. Widespread electrification laid waste to our circadian rhythms 100 years ago, when they lost any basic correspondence with the sun; now, compounding matters, we’re contending with the currents of a wired world. For white-collar professionals, it’s hard to imagine a job without the woodpecker incursions of email or weekend and late-night work. It’s hard to imagine news consumption, or even ordinary communication, without the overstimulating use of phones and computers. It’s hard to imagine children eschewing social media when it’s how so many of them socialize, often into the night, which means blue-light exposure, which means the suppression of melatonin. (Melatonin suppression obviously applies to adults too—it’s hardly like we’re avatars of discipline when it comes to screen time in bed.)
Most of us can certainly do more to improve or reclaim our sleep. But behavioral change is difficult, as anyone who’s vowed to lose weight can attest. And when the conversation around sleep shifts the onus to the individual—which, let’s face it, is the American way (we shift the burden of child care to the individual, we shift the burden of health care to the individual)—we sidestep the fact that the public and private sectors alike are barely doing a thing to address what is essentially a national health emergency.
Given that we’ve decided that an adequate night’s rest is a matter of individual will, I now have a second question: How are we to discuss those who are suffering not just from inadequate sleep, but from something far more severe? Are we to lecture them in the same menacing, moralizing way? If the burden of getting enough sleep is on us, should we consider chronic insomniacs—for whom sleep is a nightly gladiatorial struggle—the biggest failures in the armies of the underslept?
Those who can’t sleep suffer a great deal more than those gifted with sleep will ever know. Yet insomniacs frequently feel shame about the solutions they’ve sought for relief—namely, medication—likely because they can detect a subtle, judgmental undertone about this decision, even from their loved ones. Resorting to drugs means they are lazy, refusing to do simple things that might ease their passage into unconsciousness. It means they are neurotic, requiring pills to transport them into a natural state that every other animal on Earth finds without aid.
Might I suggest that these views are unenlightened? “In some respects, chronic insomnia is similar to where depression was in the past. We’d say, ‘Major depression’ and people would say, ‘Everybody gets down now and then,’ ” John Winkelman, a psychiatrist in the sleep-medicine division at Harvard Medical School, said at a panel I attended last summer. Darrieussecq, the author of Sleepless, puts it more bluntly: “ ‘I didn’t sleep all night,’ sleepers say to insomniacs, who feel like replying that they haven’t slept all their life.”
The fact is, at least 12 percent of the U.S. population suffers from insomnia as an obdurate condition. Among Millennials, the number pops up to 15 percent. And 30 to 35 percent of Americans suffer from some of insomnia’s various symptoms—trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, or waking too early—at least temporarily. In 2024, there were more than 2,500 sleep-disorder centers in the U.S. accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Prather told me the wait time to get into his sleep clinic at UCSF is currently a year. “That’s better than it used to be,” he added. “Until a few months ago, our waitlist was closed. We couldn’t fathom giving someone a date.”
So what I’m hoping to do here is not write yet another reproachful story about sleep, plump with misunderstandings and myths. Fixing sleep—obtaining sleep—is a tricky business. The work it involves and painful choices it entails deserve nuanced examination. Contrary to what you might have read, our dreams are seldom in black and white.
Whenever I interviewed a clinician, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, or any other kind of expert for this story, I almost always opened with the same question: What dogma about sleep do you think most deserves to be questioned?
The most frequent answer, by a long chalk, is that we need eight hours of it. A fair number of studies, it turns out, show that mortality rates are lowest if a person gets roughly seven hours. Daniel F. Kripke, a psychiatrist at UC San Diego, published the most famous of these analyses in 2002, parsing a sample of 1.1 million individuals and concluding that those who reported more than eight hours of sleep a night experienced significantly increased mortality rates. According to Kripke’s work, the optimal sleep range was a mere 6.5 to 7.4 hours.
These numbers shouldn’t be taken as gospel. The relationship between sleep duration and health outcomes is a devil’s knot, though Kripke did his best to control for the usual confounds—age, sex, body-mass index. But he could not control for the factors he did not know. Perhaps many of the individuals who slept eight hours or more were doing so because they had an undetected illness, or an illness of greater severity than they’d realized, or other conditions Kripke hadn’t accounted for. The study was also observational, not randomized.
But even if they don’t buy Kripke’s data, sleep experts don’t necessarily believe that eight hours of sleep has some kind of mystical significance. Methodologically speaking, it’s hard to determine how much sleep, on average, best suits us, and let’s not forget the obvious: Sleep needs—and abilities—vary over the course of a lifetime, and from individual to individual. (There’s even an extremely rare species of people, known as “natural short sleepers,” associated with a handful of genes, who require only four to six hours a night. They tear through the world as if fired from a cannon.) Yet eight hours of sleep or else remains one of our culture’s most stubborn shibboleths, and an utter tyranny for many adults, particularly older ones.
“We have people coming into our insomnia clinic saying ‘I’m not sleeping eight hours’ when they’re 70 years of age,” Michael R. Irwin, a psychoneurologist at UCLA, told me. “And the average sleep in that population is less than seven hours. They attribute all kinds of things to an absence of sleep—decrements in cognitive performance and vitality, higher levels of fatigue—when often that’s not the case. I mean, people get older, and the drive to sleep decreases as people age.”
Another declaration I was delighted to hear: The tips one commonly reads to get better sleep are as insipid as they sound. “Making sure that your bedroom is cool and comfortable, your bed is soft, you have a new mattress and a nice pillow—it’s unusual that those things are really the culprit,” Eric Nofzinger, the former director of the sleep neuroimaging program at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, told me. “Most people self-regulate anyway. If they’re cold, they put on an extra blanket. If they’re too warm, they throw off the blanket.”
“Truthfully, there’s not a lot of data supporting those tips,” Suzanne Bertisch, a behavioral-sleep-medicine expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, told me. That includes the proscription on naps, she added, quite commonly issued in her world. (In general, the research on naps suggests that short ones have beneficial outcomes and long ones have negative outcomes, but as always, cause and effect are difficult to disentangle: An underlying health condition could be driving those long naps.)
Even when they weren’t deliberately debunking the conventional wisdom about sleep, many of the scholars I spoke with mentioned—sometimes practically as an aside—facts that surprised or calmed. For instance: Many of us night owls have heard that the weather forecast for our old age is … well, cloudy, to be honest, with a late-afternoon chance of keeling over. According to one large analysis, we have a 10 percent increase in all-cause mortality over morning larks. But Jeanne Duffy, a neuroscientist distinguished for her expertise in human circadian rhythms at Brigham and Women’s, told me she suspected that this was mainly because most night owls, like most people, are obliged to rise early for their job.
So wait, I said. Was she implying that if night owls could contrive work-arounds to suit their biological inclination to go to bed late, the news probably wouldn’t be as grim?
“Yes,” she replied.
A subsequent study showed that the owl-lark mortality differential dwindled to nil when the authors controlled for lifestyle. Apparently owls are more apt to smoke, and to drink more. So if you’re an owl who’s repelled by Marlboros and Jameson, you’re fine.
Kelly Glazer Baron, the director of the behavioral-sleep-medicine program at the University of Utah, told me that she’d love it if patients stopped agonizing over the length of their individual sleep phases. I didn’t get enough deep sleep, they fret, thrusting their Apple Watch at her. I didn’t get enough REM. And yes, she said, insufficiencies in REM or slow-wave sleep can be a problem, especially if they reflect an underlying health issue. But clinics don’t look solely at sleep architecture when evaluating their patients.
“I often will show them my own data,” Baron said. “It always shows I don’t have that much deep sleep, which I find so weird, because I’m a healthy middle-aged woman.” In 2017, after observing these anxieties for years, Baron coined a term for sleep neuroticism brought about by wearables: orthosomnia.
But most surprising—to me, anyway—was what I heard about insomnia and the black dog. “There are far more studies indicating that insomnia causes depression than depression causes insomnia,” said Wilfred Pigeon, the director of the Sleep & Neurophysiology Research Laboratory at the University of Rochester. Which is not to say, he added, that depression can’t or doesn’t cause insomnia. These forces, in the parlance of health professionals, tend to be “bidirectional.”
But I can’t tell you how vindicating I found the idea that perhaps my own insomnia came first. A couple of years into my struggles with sleeplessness, a brilliant psychopharmacologist told me that my new condition had to be an episode of depression in disguise. And part of me thought, Sure, why not? A soundtrack of melancholy had been playing at a low hum inside my head from the time I was 10.
The thing was: I became outrageously depressed only after my insomnia began. That’s when that low hum started to blare at a higher volume. Until I stopped sleeping, I never suffered from any sadness so crippling that it prevented me from experiencing joy. It never impeded my ability to socialize or travel. It never once made me contemplate antidepressants. And it most certainly never got in the way of my sleeping. The precipitating factor in my own brutal insomnia was, and remains, an infuriating mystery.
Sleep professionals, I have learned, drink a lot of coffee. That was the first thing I noticed when I attended SLEEP 2024, the annual conference of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, in Houston: coffee, oceans of it, spilling from silver urns, especially at the industry trade show. Wandering through it was a dizzying experience, a sprawling testament to the scale and skyscraping profit margins of Big Sleep. More than 150 exhibitors showed up. Sheep swag abounded. Drug reps were everywhere, their aggression tautly disguised behind android smiles, the meds they hawked called the usual names that look like high-value Scrabble words.
I’ve never understood this branding strategy, honestly. If you want your customers to believe they’re falling into a gentle, natural sleep, you should probably think twice before calling your drug Quviviq.
I walked through the cavernous hall in a daze. It was overwhelming, really—the spidery gizmos affixed to armies of mannequins, the Times Square–style digital billboards screaming about the latest in sleep technology.
At some point it occurred to me that the noisy, overbusy, fluorescent quality of this product spectacular reminded me of the last place on Earth a person with a sleep disorder should be: a casino. The room was practically sunless. I saw very few clocks. After I spent an afternoon there, my circadian rhythms were shot to hell.
But the conference itself …! Extraordinary, covering miles of ground. I went to one symposium about “sleep deserts,” another about the genetics of sleep disturbance, and yet another about sleep and menopause. I walked into a colloquy about sleep and screens and had to take a seat on the floor because the room was bursting like a suitcase. Of most interest to me, though, were two panels, which I’ll shortly discuss: one about how to treat patients with anxiety from new-onset insomnia, and one on whether hypnotics are addictive.
My final stop at the trade fair was the alley of beauty products—relevant, I presume, because they address the aesthetic toll of sleep deprivation. Within five minutes, an energetic young salesman made a beeline for me, clearly having noticed that I was a woman of a certain age. He gushed about a $2,500 infrared laser to goose collagen production and a $199 medical-grade peptide serum that ordinarily retails for $1,100. I told him I’d try the serum. “Cheaper than Botox, and it does the same thing,” he said approvingly, applying it to the crow’s-feet around my eyes.
I stared in the mirror. Holy shit. The stuff was amazing.
“I’ll take it,” I told him.
He was delighted. He handed me a box. The serum came in a gold syringe.
“You’re a doctor, right?”
A beat.
“No,” I finally said. “A journalist. Can only a dermatologist—”
He told me it was fine; it’s just that doctors were his main customers. This was the sort of product women like me usually had to get from them. I walked away elated but queasy, feeling like a creep who’d evaded a background check by purchasing a Glock at a gun show.
The first line of treatment for chronic, intractable sleeplessness, per the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I. I’ve tried it, in earnest, at two different points in my life. It generally involves six to eight sessions and includes, at minimum: identifying the patient’s sleep-wake patterns (through charts, diaries, wearables); “stimulus control” (setting consistent bedtimes and wake-up times, resisting the urge to stare at the clock, delinking the bed from anything other than sleep and sex); establishing good sleep habits (the stuff of every listicle); “sleep restriction” (compressing your sleep schedule, then slowly expanding it over time); and “cognitive restructuring,” or changing unhealthy thoughts about sleep.
The cognitive-restructuring component is the most psychologically paradoxical. It means taking every terrifying thing you’ve ever learned about the consequences of sleeplessness and pretending you’ve never heard them.
I pointed this out to Wilfred Pigeon. “For the medically anxious, it’s tough,” he agreed. “We’re trying to tell patients two things at the same time: ‘You really need to get your sleep on track, or you will have a heart attack five years earlier than you otherwise would.’ But also: ‘Stop worrying about your sleep so much, because it’s contributing to your not being able to sleep.’ And they’re both true!”
Okay, I said. But if an insomniac crawls into your clinic after many years of not sleeping (he says people tend to wait about a decade), wouldn’t they immediately see that these two messages live in tension with each other? And dwell only on the heart attack?
“I tell the patient their past insomnia is water under the bridge,” Pigeon said. “We’re trying to erase the added risks that ongoing chronic insomnia will have. Just because a person has smoked for 20 years doesn’t mean they should keep smoking.”
He’s absolutely right. But I’m not entirely convinced that these incentives make the cognitive dissonance of CBT-I go away. When Sara Nowakowski, a CBT-I specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, gave her presentation at SLEEP 2024’s panel on anxiety and new-onset insomnia, she said that many of her patients start reciting the grim data from their Fitbits and talking about dementia.
That’s likely because they’ve read the studies. Rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, that vivid-dream stage when our eyes race beneath our eyelids like mice under a blanket, is essential to emotional regulation and problem-solving. Slow-wave sleep, our deepest sleep, is essential for repairing our cells, shoring up our immune systems, and rinsing toxins from our brains, thanks to a watery complex of micro-canals called the glymphatic system. We repair our muscles when we sleep. We restore our hearts. We consolidate memories and process knowledge, embedding important facts and disposing of trivial ones. We actually learn when we’re asleep.
Many insomniacs know all too well how nonnegotiably vital sleep is, and what the disastrous consequences are if you don’t get it. I think of the daredevil experiment that Nathaniel Kleitman, the father of sleep research, informally conducted as a graduate student in 1922, enlisting five classmates to join him in seeing how long they could stay awake. He lasted the longest—a staggering 115 hours—but at a terrible price, temporarily going mad with exhaustion, arguing on the fifth day with an imaginary foe about the need for organized labor. And I think of Allan Rechtschaffen, another pioneer in the field, who in 1989 had the fiendish idea to place rats on a spinning mechanism that forced them to stay awake if they didn’t want to drown. They eventually dropped dead.
So these are the kinds of facts a person doing CBT-I has to ignore.
Still. Whether a patient’s terrors concern the present or the future, it is the job of any good CBT-I practitioner to help fact-check or right-size them through Socratic questioning. During her panel at SLEEP 2024, Nowakowski gave very relatable examples:
When you’re struggling to fall asleep, what are you most worried will happen?
I’ll lose my job/scream at my kids/detonate my relationship/never be able to sleep again.
And what’s the probability of your not falling asleep?
I don’t sleep most nights.
And the probability of not functioning at work or yelling at the kids if you don’t?
Ninety percent.
She then tells her patients to go read their own sleep diary, which she’s instructed them to keep from the start. The numbers seldom confirm they’re right, because humans are monsters of misprediction. Her job is to get her patients to start decatastrophizing, which includes what she calls the “So what?” method: So what if you have a bad day at work or at home? You’ve had others. Will it be the end of the world? (When my second CBT-I therapist asked me this, I silently thought, Yes, because when I’m dangling at the end of my rope, I just spin more.) CBT-I addresses anxiety about not sleeping, which tends to be the real force that keeps insomnia airborne, regardless of what lofted it. The pre-sleep freaking out, the compulsive clock-watching, the bargaining, the middle-of-the-night doom-prophesizing, the despairing—CBT-I attempts to snip that loop. The patient actively learns new behaviors and attitudes to put an end to their misery.
But the main anchor of CBT-I is sleep-restriction therapy. I tried it back when I was 29, when I dragged my wasted self into a sleep clinic in New York; I’ve tried it once since. I couldn’t stick with it either time.
The concept is simple: You severely limit your time in bed, paring away every fretful, superfluous minute you’d otherwise be awake. If you discover from a week’s worth of sleep-diary entries (or your wearable) that you spend eight hours buried in your duvet but sleep for only five of them, you consolidate those splintered hours into one bloc of five, setting the same wake-up time every day and going to bed a mere five hours before. Once you’ve averaged sleeping those five hours for a few days straight, you reward your body by going to bed 15 minutes earlier. If you achieve success for a few days more, you add another 15 minutes. And then another … until you’re up to whatever the magic number is for you.
No napping. The idea is to build up enough “sleep pressure” to force your body to collapse in surrender.
Sleep restriction can be a wonderful method. But if you have severe insomnia, the idea of reducing your sleep time is petrifying. Technically, I suppose, you’re not really reducing your sleep time; you’re just consolidating it. But practically speaking, you are reducing your sleep, at least in the beginning, because dysregulated sleep isn’t an accordion, obligingly contracting itself into a case. Contracting it takes time, or at least it did for me. The process was murder.
“If you get people to really work their way through it—and sometimes that takes holding people’s hands—it ends up being more effective than a pill,” Ronald Kessler, a renowned psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard, told me when I asked him about CBT-I. The problem is the formidable size of that if. “CBT-I takes a lot more work than taking a pill. So a lot of people drop out.”
They do. One study I perused had an attrition rate of 40 percent.
Twenty-six years ago, I, too, joined the legions of the quitters. In hindsight, my error was my insistence on trying this grueling regimen without a benzodiazepine (Valium, Ativan, Xanax), though my doctor had recommended that I start one. But I was still afraid of drugs in those days, and I was still in denial that I’d become hostage to my own brain’s terrorism. I was sure that I still had the power to negotiate. Competence had until that moment defined my whole life. I persuaded the doctor to let me try without drugs.
As she’d predicted, I failed. The graphs in my sleep diary looked like volatile weeks on the stock exchange.
For the first time ever, I did need an antidepressant. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Paxil and a bottle of Xanax to use until I got up to cruising altitude—all SSRIs take a while to kick in.
I didn’t try sleep restriction again until many years later. Paxil sufficed during that time; it made me almost stupid with drowsiness. I was sleepy at night and vague during the day. I needed Xanax for only a couple of weeks, which was just as well, because I didn’t much care for it. The doctor had prescribed too powerful a dose, though it was the smallest one. I was such a rookie with drugs in those days that it never occurred to me I could just snap the pill in half.
Have I oversimplified the story of my insomnia? Probably. At the top of the SLEEP 2024 panel about anxiety and new-onset insomnia, Leisha Cuddihy, a director at large for the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine, said something that made me wince—namely, that her patients “have a very vivid perception of pre-insomnia sleep being literally perfect: ‘I’ve never had a bad night of sleep before now.’ ”
Okay, guilty as charged. While it’s true that I’d slept brilliantly (and I stand by this, brilliantly) in the 16 years before I first sought help, I was the last kid to fall asleep at slumber parties when I was little. Cuddihy also said that many of her patients declare they’re certain, implacably certain, that they are unfixable. “They feel like something broke,” she said.
Which is what I wrote just a few pages back. Poisoned, broke, same thing.
By the time Cuddihy finished speaking, I had to face an uncomfortable truth: I was a standard-issue sleep-clinic zombie.
But when patients say they feel like something broke inside their head, they aren’t necessarily wrong. An insomniac’s brain does change in neurobiological ways.
“There is something in the neurons that’s changing during sleep in patients with significant sleep disruptions,” said Eric Nofzinger, who, while at the University of Pittsburgh, had one of the world’s largest databases of brain-imaging studies of sleeping human beings. “If you’re laying down a memory, then that circuitry is hardwired for that memory. So one can imagine that if your brain is doing this night after night …”
We know that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, our body’s first responder to stress, is overactivated in the chronically underslept. If the insomniac suffers from depression, their REM phase tends to be longer and more “dense,” with the limbic system (the amygdala, the hippocampus—where our primal drives are housed) going wild, roaring its terrible roars and gnashing its terrible teeth. (You can imagine how this would also make depressives subconsciously less motivated to sleep—who wants to face their Gorgon dreams?) Insomniacs suffering from anxiety experience this problem too, though to a lesser degree; it’s their deep sleep that’s mainly affected, slimming down and shallowing out.
And in all insomniacs, throughout the night, the arousal centers of the brain keep clattering away, as does the prefrontal cortex (in charge of planning, decision making), whereas in regular sleepers, these buzzing regions go offline. “So when someone with insomnia wakes up the next morning and says, ‘I don’t think I slept at all last night,’ in some respects, that’s true,” Nofzinger told me. “Because the parts of the brain that should have been resting did not.”
And why didn’t they rest? The insomniac can’t say. The insomniac feels at once responsible and helpless when it comes to their misery: I must be to blame. But I can’t be to blame. The feeling that sleeplessness is happening to you, not something you’re doing to yourself, sends you on a quest for nonpsychological explanations: Lots of physiological conditions can cause sleep disturbances, can’t they? Obstructive sleep apnea, for instance, which afflicts nearly 30 million Americans. Many autoimmune diseases, too. At one point, I’ll confess that I started asking the researchers I spoke with whether insomnia itself could be an autoimmune disorder, because that’s what it feels like to me—as if my brain is going after itself with brickbats.
“Narcolepsy appears to be an example of a sleep disorder involving the immune system,” Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders at UCSF, told me.
What? I said. Really?
Really, he replied. “There are few things I know of,” he said, “that are as complicated as the mammalian immune system.”
But insomnia-as-autoimmune-disorder is only a wisp of a theory, a wish of a theory, nothing more. In her memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, the novelist Samantha Harvey casts around for a physiological explanation, too. But after she completes a battery of tests, the results come back normal, pointing to “what I already know,” she writes, “which is that my sleeplessness is psychological. I must carry on being the archaeologist of myself, digging around, seeing if I can excavate the problem and with it the solution—when in truth I am afraid of myself, not of what I might uncover, but of managing to uncover nothing.”
I didn’t tolerate my Paxil brain for long. I weaned myself off, returned to normal for a few months, and assumed that my sleeplessness had been a freak event, like one of those earthquakes in a city that never has them. But then my sleep started to slip away again, and by age 31, I couldn’t recapture it without chemical assistance. Prozac worked for years on its own, but it blew out whatever circuit in my brain generates metaphors. When I turned to the antidepressants that kept the electricity flowing, I needed sleep medication too—proving, to my mind, that melancholy couldn’t have been the mother of my sleep troubles, but the lasting result of them. I’ve used the lowest dose of Klonopin to complement my SSRIs for years. In times of acute stress, I need a gabapentin or a Unisom too.
Unisom is fine. Gabapentin also turns my mind into an empty prairie.
Edibles, which I’ve also tried, turn my brain to porridge the next day. Some evidence suggests that cannabis works as a sleep aid, but more research, evidently, is required. (Sorry.)
Which brings me to the subject of drugs. I come neither to praise nor to bury them. But I do come to reframe the discussion around them, inspired by what a number of researcher-clinicians said about hypnotics and addiction during the SLEEP 2024 panel on the subject. They started with a simple question: How do you define addiction?
It’s true that many of the people who have taken sleep medications for months or years rely on them. Without them, the majority wouldn’t sleep, at least in the beginning, and a good many would experience rebound insomnia if they didn’t wean properly, which can be even worse. One could argue that this dependence is tantamount to addiction.
But: We don’t say people are addicted to their hypertension medication or statins, though we know that in certain instances lifestyle changes could obviate the need for either one. We don’t say people are addicted to their miracle GLP-1 agonists just because they could theoretically diet and exercise to lose weight. We agree that they need them. They’re on Lasix. On Lipitor. On Ozempic. Not addicted to.
Yet we still think of sleep medications as “drugs,” a word that in this case carries a whiff of stigma—partly because mental illness still carries a stigma, but also because sleep medications legitimately do have the potential for recreational use and abuse.
But is that what most people who suffer from sleep troubles are doing? Using their Sonata or Ativan for fun?
“If you see a patient who’s been taking medication for a long time,” Tom Roth, the founder of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital, said during the panel, “you have to think, ‘Are they drug-seeking or therapy-seeking ?’ ” The overwhelming majority, he and other panelists noted, are taking their prescription drugs for relief, not kicks. They may depend on them, but they’re not abusing them—by taking them during the day, say, or for purposes other than sleep.
Still, let’s posit that many long-term users of sleep medication do become dependent. Now let’s consider another phenomenon commonly associated with reliance on sleep meds: You enter Garland and Hendrix territory in a hurry. First you need one pill, then you need two; eventually you need a fistful with a fifth of gin.
Yet a 2024 cohort study, which involved nearly 1 million Danes who used benzodiazepines long-term, found that of those who used them for three years or more—67,398 people, to be exact—only 7 percent exceeded their recommended dose.
Not a trivial number, certainly, if you’re staring across an entire population. But if you’re evaluating the risk of taking a hypnotic as an individual, you’d be correct to assume that your odds of dose escalation are pretty low.
That there’s a difference between abuse and dependence, that dependence doesn’t mean a mad chase for more milligrams, that people depend on drugs for a variety of other naturally reversible conditions and don’t suffer any stigma—these nuances matter.
“Using something where the benefits outweigh the side effects certainly is not addiction,” Winkelman, the Harvard psychiatrist and chair of the panel, told me when we spoke a few months later. “I call that treatment.”
The problem, he told me, is when the benefits stop outweighing the downsides. “Let’s say the medication loses efficacy over time.” Right. That 7 percent. And over-the-counter sleep meds, whose active component is usually diphenhydramine (more commonly known as Benadryl), are potentially even more likely to lose their efficacy—the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises against them. “And let’s say you did stop your medication,” Winkelman continued. “Your sleep could be worse than it was before you started it,” at least for a while. “People should know about that risk.”
A small but even more hazardous risk: a seizure, for those who abruptly stop taking high doses of benzodiazepines after they’ve been on them for a long period of time. The likelihood is low—the exact percentage is almost impossible to ascertain—but any risk of a seizure is worth knowing about. “And are you comfortable with the idea that the drug could irrevocably be changing your brain?” Winkelman asked. “The brain is a machine, and you’re exposing it to the repetitive stimulus of the drug.” Then again, he pointed out, you know what else is a repetitive stimulus? Insomnia.
“So should these things even be considered a part of an addiction?” he asked. “At what point does a treatment become an addiction? I don’t know.”
Calvinist about sleep meds, blasé about sleep meds—whatever you are, the fact remains: We’re a nation that likes them. According to a 2020 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, 8.4 percent of Americans take sleep medications most nights or every night, and an additional 10 percent take them on some. Part of the reason medication remains so popular is that it’s easy for doctors to prescribe a pill and give a patient immediate relief, which is often what patients are looking for, especially if they’re in extremis or need some assistance through a rough stretch. CBT‑I, as Ronald Kessler noted, takes time to work. Pills don’t.
But another reason, as Suzanne Bertisch pointed out during the addiction-and-insomnia-meds panel, is that “primary-care physicians don’t even know what CBT-I is. This is a failure of our field.”
Even if general practitioners did know about CBT-I, too few therapists are trained in it, and those who are tend to have fully saturated schedules. The military, unsurprisingly, has tried to work around this problem (sleep being crucial to soldiers, sedatives being contraindicated in warfare) with CBT-I via video as well as an online program, both shown to be efficacious. But most of us are not in the Army. And while some hospitals, private companies, and the military have developed apps for CBT-I too, most people don’t know about them.
For years, medication has worked for me. I’ve stopped beating myself up about it. If the only side effect I’m experiencing from taking 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin is being dependent on 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin, is that really such a problem?
There’s been a lot of confusing noise about sleep medication over the years. “Weak science, alarming FDA black-box warnings, and media reporting have fueled an anti-benzodiazepine movement,” says an editorial in the March 2024 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. “This has created an atmosphere of fear and stigma among patients, many of whom can benefit from such medications.”
A case in point: For a long time, the public believed that benzodiazepines dramatically increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, thanks to a 2014 study in the British Medical Journal that got the usual five-alarm-fire treatment by the media. Then, two years later, another study came along, also in the British Medical Journal, saying, Never mind, nothing to see here, folks; there appears to be no causal relationship we can discern.
That study may one day prove problematic, too. But the point is: More work needs to be done.
A different paper, however—again by Daniel Kripke, the fellow who argued that seven hours of sleep a night predicted the best health outcomes—may provide more reason for concern. In a study published in 2012, he looked at more than 10,000 people on a variety of sleep medications and found that they were several times more likely to die within 2.5 years than a matched cohort, even when controlling for a range of culprits: age, sex, alcohol use, smoking status, body-mass index, prior cancer. Those who took as few as 18 pills a year had a 3.6-fold increase. (Those who took more than 132 had a 5.3-fold one.)
John Winkelman doesn’t buy it. “Really,” he told me, “what makes a lot more sense is to ask, ‘Why did people take these medications in the first place?’ ” And for what it’s worth, a 2023 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people on stable, long-term doses of a benzodiazepine who go off their medication have worse mortality rates in the following 12 months than those who stay on it. So maybe you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Still, I take Kripke’s study seriously. Because … well, Christ, I don’t know. Emotional reasons? Because other esteemed thinkers still think there’s something to it?
In my own case, the most compelling reasons to get off medication are the more mundane ones: the scratchy little cognitive impairments it can cause during the day, the risk of falls as you get older. (I should correct myself here: Falling when you’re older has the potential to be not mundane, but very bad.) Medications can also cause problems with memory as one ages, even if they don’t cause Alzheimer’s, and the garden-variety brain termites of middle and old age are bummer enough.
And maybe most generally: Why have a drug in your system if you can learn to live without it?
My suspicion is that most people who rely on sleep drugs would prefer natural sleep.
So yes: I’d love to one day make a third run at CBT-I, with the hope of weaning off my medication, even if it means going through a hell spell of double exhaustion. CBT-I is a skill, something I could hopefully deploy for the rest of my life. Something I can’t accidentally leave on my bedside table.
Some part of me, the one that’s made of pessimism, is convinced that it won’t work no matter how long I stick with it. But Michael Irwin, at UCLA, told me something reassuring: His research suggests that if you have trouble with insomnia or difficulty maintaining your sleep, mindfulness meditation while lying in bed can be just as effective as climbing out of bed, sitting in a chair, and waiting until you’re tired enough to crawl back in—a pillar of CBT‑I, and one that I absolutely despise. I do it sometimes, because I know I should, but it’s lonely and freezing, a form of banishment.
And if CBT-I doesn’t work, Michael Grandner, the director of the sleep-and-health-research program at the University of Arizona, laid out an alternative at SLEEP 2024: acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. The basic idea is exactly what the name suggests. You accept your lot. You change exactly nothing. If you can’t sleep, or you can’t sleep enough, or you can sleep only in a broken line, you say, This is one of those things I can’t control. (One could see how such a mantra might help a person sleep, paradoxically.) You then isolate what matters to you. Being functional the next day? Being a good parent? A good friend? If sleep is the metaphorical wall you keep ramming your head against, “is your problem the wall?” Grandner asked. “Or is your problem that you can’t get beyond the wall, and is there another way?”
Because there often is another way. To be a good friend, to be a good parent, to be who and whatever it is you most value—you can live out a lot of those values without adequate sleep. “When you look at some of these things,” Grandner said, “what you find is that the pain”—of not sleeping—“is actually only a small part of what is getting in the way of your life. It’s really less about the pain itself and more about the suffering around the pain, and that’s what we can fix.”
Even as I type, I’m skeptical of this method too. My insomnia was so extreme at 29, and still can be to this day, that I’m not sure I am tough enough—or can summon enough of my inner Buddha (barely locatable on the best of days)—to transcend its pain, at once towering and a bore. But if ACT doesn’t work, and if CBT-I doesn’t work, and if mindfully meditating and acupuncture and neurofeedback and the zillions of other things I’ve tried in the past don’t work on their own … well … I’ll go back on medication.
Some people will judge me, I’m sure. What can I say? It’s my life, not theirs.
I’ll wrap up by talking about an extraordinary man named Thomas Wehr, once the chief of clinical psychobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, now 83, still doing research. He was by far the most philosophical expert I spoke with, quick to find (and mull) the underlayer of whatever he was exploring. I really liked what he had to say about sleep.
You’ve probably read the theory somewhere—it’s a media chestnut—that human beings aren’t necessarily meant to sleep in one long stretch but rather in two shorter ones, with a dreamy, middle-of-the-night entr’acte. In a famous 2001 paper, the historian A. Roger Ekirch showed that people in the pre-electrified British Isles used that interregnum to read, chat, poke the fire, pray, have sex. But it was Wehr who, nearly 10 years earlier, found a biological basis for these rhythms of social life, discovering segmented sleep patterns in an experiment that exposed its participants to 14 hours of darkness each night. Their sleep split in two.
Wehr now knows firsthand what it is to sleep a divided sleep. “I think what happens as you get older,” he told me last summer, “is that this natural pattern of human sleep starts intruding back into the world in which it’s not welcome—the world we’ve created with artificial light.”
There’s a melancholy quality to this observation, I know. But also a beauty: Consciously or not, Wehr is reframing old age as a time of reintegration, not disintegration, a time when our natural bias for segmented sleep reasserts itself as our lives are winding down.
His findings should actually be reassuring to everyone. People of all ages pop awake in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep. One associates this phenomenon with anxiety if it happens in younger people, and no doubt that’s frequently the cause. But it also rhymes with what may be a natural pattern. Perhaps we’re meant to wake up. Perhaps broken sleep doesn’t mean our sleep is broken, because another sleep awaits.
And if we think of those middle-of-the-night awakenings as meant to be, Wehr told me, perhaps we should use them differently, as some of our forebears did when they’d wake up in the night bathed in prolactin, a hormone that kept them relaxed and serene. “They were kind of in an altered state, maybe a third state of consciousness you usually don’t experience in modern life, unless you’re a meditator. And they would contemplate their dreams.”
Night awakenings, he went on to explain, tend to happen as we’re exiting a REM cycle, when our dreams are most intense. “We’re not having an experience that a lot of our ancestors had of waking up and maybe processing, or musing, or let’s even say ‘being informed’ by dreams.”
We should reclaim those moments at 3 or 4 a.m., was his view. Why not luxuriate in our dreams? “If you know you’re going to fall back asleep,” he said, “and if you just relax and maybe think about your dreams, that helps a lot.”
This assumes one has pleasant or emotionally neutral dreams, of course. But I take his point. He was possibly explaining, unwittingly, something about his own associative habits of mind—that maybe his daytime thinking is informed by the meandering stories he tells himself while he sleeps.
The problem, unfortunately, is that the world isn’t structured to accommodate a second sleep or a day informed by dreams. We live unnatural, anxious lives. Every morning, we turn on our lights, switch on our computers, grab our phones; the whir begins. For now, this strange way of being is exclusively on us to adapt to. Sleep doesn’t much curve to it, nor it to sleep. For those who struggle each night (or day), praying for what should be their biologically given reprieve from the chaos, the world has proved an even harsher place.
But there are ways to improve it. Through policy, by refraining from judgment—of others, but also of ourselves. Meanwhile, I take comfort in the two hunter-gatherer tribes Wehr told me about, ones he modestly noted did not confirm his hypothesis of biphasic sleep. He couldn’t remember their names, but I later looked them up: the San in Namibia and the Tsimané in Bolivia. They average less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night. And neither has a word for insomnia.
DENVER — Riverside County Sheriff's Office issued a press release Monday afternoon that confirmed what 9NEWS reported Friday -- that the investigation into the fatal golf cart crash that claimed the life of John Elway's longtime friend Jeff Sperbeck had concluded with the finding no criminal charges would be filed.
"Following a thorough investigation into the death of Jeff Sperbeck, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has determined that the incident was a tragic accident with no evidence of criminal activity or intent,'' Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco stated Monday in a press release. "Consequently, no criminal charges will be filed at this time, and the case will be documented as an accidental death."
Sperbeck's family and Elway can move forward with some closure as the law enforcement agency has closed its investigation into the fatal golf cart incident that occurred in late April in a gated Southern California community.
“It’s over,’’ Bianco told 9NEWS on Friday. “We’ve talked to everyone involved and we found nothing new. There was nothing criminal, it was what we’ve been saying all along that this was a tragic accident.”
The incident occurred April 26 as Elway, the Hall of Fame quarterback and three-time Super Bowl-champion as a Broncos player (1997-98) and general manager (2015), was driving a golf cart out of the Madison Club toward his home a quarter-mile away. Sperbeck fell off the back of the golf cart and suffered a fatal head injury.
"This has been a very difficult situation for everyone,'' Elway's attorney Harvey Steinberg told 9NEWS on Monday. "We always knew John had done nothing wrong, but that doesn't lessen the sadness associated with this situation.
The Riverside coroner’s bureau found Sperbeck’s cause of death to be “blunt force trauma,’’ the manner of the death was “an accident” and the cause of the accident was the “passenger fell from the golf cart.”
“I’ve looked at video 100 times and there’s no explanation as to why he fell off, he just fell off,’’ Bianco said.
Bianco initially was going to wrap up the investigation in late-May but decided to wait until it contacted 18 additional residents with video in the private golf course neighborhood before concluding that matter. That part of the investigation was concluded with nothing new revealed.
Sperbeck had been an NFL agent to more than 100 players, coaches and executives. He was the type of agent and marketing rep who stayed in touched with his clients long after the NFL careers ended.
When one of Sperbeck's clients, former Broncos and Peyton Manning quarterbacks coach Greg Knapp, was killed four years ago while riding his bicycle by a driver distracted by his cellphone, Sperbeck helped Knapp's wife Charlotte not only with service arrangements, but in helping to found the Coach Knapp Memorial Fund that promotes distracted driver awareness and reform. The cause includes an annual stadium stair climb by NFL coaches as running the stadium stairs was part of Knapp's pregame routines.
Elway and Sperbeck were partners in several businesses, most notably 7 Cellars wine. Sperbeck had been Elway’s marketing representative since the latter’s prime as the Broncos’ superstar quarterback in the early 1990s, a relationship that grew into a close friendship.
When Elway was the Broncos’ general manager from 2011-2020, and the team was playing a road game out West, Sperbeck, who had a home in Southern California, would almost always accompany him.
They were together over the final weekend in April. According to sources who spoke to 9NEWS, Elway, his girlfriend, his son Jack and his wife, the Sperbecks and their friends left a private function sponsored by Vuori clothing line at the Madison Club in La Quinta on Saturday, April 26. They did not attend the outdoor Stagecoach country music festival in nearby Indio, as had been reported initially.
They did go to Stagecoach the night before, but it was windy and uncomfortably cold. They decided at the function on April 26 not to go again because of the inclement weather. Instead, a caravan of three or four golf carts with a total of 10 to 15 people set out to make the quarter-mile trip to Elway’s house at the private golf resort’s community.
Elway’s son Jack and his group were in a cart ahead; Elway was driving his cart at the rear of the caravan. His girlfriend was seated next to him with Sperbeck’s wife, Cori, was seated on the outside. Sperbeck and Johnny Devenanzio, who is also known by his stage name Johnny Bananas, stood in the back of the cart. Elway was following the carts ahead when Sperbeck fell off, sources said.
There was no swerving or horseplay, according to sources. No one was drunk, according to multiple sources. The cart didn’t hit anything. It had been a smooth ride.
Indications were that Sperbeck fell straight back and hit his head immediately. He had no other injuries, according to a source.
After Sperbeck fell off the cart, Devenanzio yelled up to the front. Elway stopped the cart as Cori Sperbeck rushed to her husband. Sperbeck was breathing, but it was immediately apparent he had suffered a significant injury, a source said.
Elway called 9-1-1, according to a source, and paramedics arrived quickly, but little could be done. Sheriff Bianco said he could tell by the 9-1-1 call that Elway was in no way impaired.
“I listened to the entire 9-1-1 call,’’ Bianco said told 9NEWS in May. “He was very articulate. He was very responsive. He was not slurring his words. He was not hesitating in his response with the dispatcher. It was a normal urgent conversation.”
Sperbeck was rushed to a local hospital with a brain injury. He died four days later. His organs were donated.
Elway released a statement upon his friend’s death: “I am absolutely devastated and heartbroken by the passing of my close friend, business partner and agent Jeff Sperbeck. There are no words to truly express the profound sadness I feel with the sudden loss of someone who has meant so much to me. My heart and deepest sympathies go out to Jeff’s wife, Cori; his children Carly, Sam and Jackson; and everyone who knew and loved him. Jeff will be deeply missed for the loyalty, wisdom, friendship and love he brought into my life and the lives of so many others.”
Sperbeck’s Celebration of Life was held June 7 at the gymnasium of his high school alma mater, Jesuit High School in Sacramento. Elway was among the hundreds who attended.
Is every civilization destined to rise… only to eventually fall?
Is there such a thing as a perfect form of government that can stop that fall?
Why do some civilizations thrive for centuries, while others vanish without a trace?
These are the kinds of questions that have haunted humanity for thousands of years.
And more than two thousand years ago, they deeply fascinated a Greek historian named Polybius.
He wasn’t just some dusty scholar tucked away in a library. Polybius had a front-row seat to history. Exiled to Rome as a political hostage, he didn’t waste away in a prison cell. Instead, he found himself living among Rome’s elite — right in the heart of a rising empire. Rather than just observing history, he tried to make sense of it. And in doing so, he asked one of the most powerful questions in political thought:
Can there be anyone, so apathetic or lacking in curiosity to have no desire to understand , by what means & under what form of government the Romans conqured the entire inhabitat world & brought in under absolute control in a time span of barely 53 years?
Like many ancient thinkers, Polybius believed civilizations behaved like living organisms. They go through a natural life cycle: birth, growth, maturity, stagnation, decline, and death. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had explored similar ideas, but Polybius took it a step further. He laid out a detailed theory — a cycle of seven political stages — called Anacyclosis.
Anacyclosis: The Political Life Cycle
Stage 1 → No Political Structure
In the beginning, early humans had no political system. No kings, no councils — just small groups struggling to survive in a lawless world. Decisions were made by necessity or mutual understanding, with no long-term leadership.
↓
Stage 2 → Kingship
Eventually, from this power vacuum, a strong and capable leader emerges — someone brave and wise enough to bring order. He earns the people’s trust, protects them, and builds structure. In gratitude, they grant him authority. Kingship is born.
But over time, the king’s descendants inherit power without earning it. Arrogance creeps in. Justice fades. Kingship begins to rot.
↓
Stage 3 → Tyranny
Kingship decays into tyranny. Rulers start to govern through fear and cruelty, not wisdom. They exploit the people for personal gain. Discontent simmers.
↓
Stage 4 → Aristocracy
Eventually, the noblest and wealthiest citizens overthrow the tyrant. They don’t install a new king. Instead, they share power among themselves. An aristocracy is formed.
In its early days, this elite class governs with the public’s interests in mind. But their children grow up pampered, entitled. The noble mission gives way to selfishness.
↓
Stage 5 → Oligarchy
Aristocracy slips into oligarchy — the selfish rule of a powerful few. Power is hoarded, and inequality deepens. The people suffer under neglect and oppression.
↓
Stage 6 → Revolution → Democracy
Eventually, the people have had enough. They rise up, overthrow the oligarchs, and swear never to give unchecked power to the few again. They decide that power must lie with the people. Thus, democracy is born — founded on freedom, equality, and collective voice.
For a time, things improve. Prosperity returns. But nothing lasts forever.
↓
Stage 7 → Democracy Corrupted → Mob Rule
Future generations, born into rights they never fought for, begin to take them for granted. Division spreads. Greed grows.
Charismatic leaders — demagogues — rise. They speak the people’s language but serve only themselves. They inflame anger, manipulate fear, and break down reason.
Democracy unravels. Chaos takes hold.
↓
Stage 8 → Anarchy → Rise of a New Strongman
Out of the chaos, either anarchy reigns — or a new strongman takes control. He promises order, restores discipline, and begins the cycle anew.
And so, the wheel turns once again.
This is Anacyclosis — Polybius’s theory of a repeating cycle in which each form of government inevitably decays into its corrupted version. Monarchies become tyrannies. Aristocracies turn into oligarchies. Democracies dissolve into mob rule.
It sounds dramatic, but when you look at history, the pattern… kind of checks out.
Take Athens, the crown jewel of ancient Greece. Legend says it began under wise kings like Theseus — the same guy who defeated the Minotaur. Over time, Athens grew wealthier and stronger but fell into the hands of tyrants. Eventually, the people rose up and handed power to aristocrats.
After more political evolution, Athens developed into a direct democracy by the late 5th century BCE — at the height of its cultural and military might.
But then came corruption. Demagogues, pretending to be men of the people, took power and made reckless decisions. The result? A crushing defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the slow death of the Athenian empire.
In the next century, all of Greece ended up ruled by kings again — Alexander the Great and his successors. Full circle. Back to monarchy.
So why did Rome break the cycle — at least temporarily?
That’s the puzzle Polybius tried to solve in his famous Histories. How had Rome conquered the Greek world so easily?
His answer? Rome didn’t get stuck on the Anacyclosis wheel like everyone else.
Rome began with kings, like most civilizations. But by the 6th century BCE, they overthrew their monarchy and built a Republic — run by aristocrats at first, but gradually expanded to include ordinary citizens. And by the 2nd century BCE, during Polybius’s lifetime, the Roman Republic had evolved into something entirely different: a mixed constitution.
Rome’s system blended elements of monarchy (executive magistrates), aristocracy (the Senate), and democracy (popular assemblies and elected officials). Each branch could check the power of the others.
As Polybius wrote:
“Rome’s constitution has three branches, each with its own political power. These powers are distributed and balanced so carefully that you can’t say for sure whether Rome is a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy.”
In modern terms, we’d call this a system of checks and balances. Each branch depended on the others, and none could dominate without being restrained.
He explained further:
If one branch tries to overstep its bounds, the others can block or restrain it. This balance keeps the whole system stable.”
To Polybius, this was Rome’s secret sauce. They hadn’t abolished the political cycle — they’d transcended it by blending the strengths of all forms of government.
But here’s the twist.
Polybius was writing at the height of the Roman Republic — when it still looked like it might last forever.
History, though, had other ideas.
Just about a hundred years later, in the 1st century BCE, Rome’s Republic imploded. And guess what? It collapsed almost exactly the way Polybius had warned.
Discontent was everywhere — among veterans, allies, poor citizens, and even parts of the elite. They all felt cheated out of the rewards of Rome’s success.
Into this chaos stepped power-hungry figures: Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and finally Julius Caesar. They manipulated the system, built personal armies, and turned political conflict into full-blown civil war.
And then came Octavian — Caesar’s adopted heir. He crushed his rivals, took total control, and rebranded himself as Augustus. With him, the Republic died — and the Empire began.
So did Polybius get it wrong?
Not really.
He had just underestimated one thing: nothing lasts forever.
Even Rome, with its clever mixed constitution, couldn’t escape the wheel forever. It just delayed the inevitable.
And that brings us to today.
Polybius’s theory doesn’t just feel ancient — it feels timeless.
Take Nepal, for example. In just a few decades, it transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, fell into civil war, flirted with dictatorship, and eventually became a democratic republic in 2008.
Yet, even now, the system faces instability, infighting, and disillusionment.
The wheel turns.
So maybe Polybius wasn’t just talking about Rome.
Maybe he was talking about us — about human nature, about power.
We like to think history moves in a straight line — always forward. But maybe it’s a circle.
Maybe it’s a story we keep rewriting. Different names, different systems, different flags…
But the same patterns.
Call it history.
Call it politics.
Call it what it really is:
The oldest game we still don’t know how to stop playing.
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.