The genetic testing company 23andMe — which allows users to spit in a tube and send away the sample for a detailed DNA analysis — is filing for bankruptcy.
The California biotech firm announced in a statement this week that it had entered the federal bankruptcy process with the goal of finding a buyer to address its ongoing money troubles. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki also has stepped down as CEO, and said in a post on X she hopes to purchase the company herself. The board rejected an offer she made earlier this month, according to a press release.
23andMe has faced financial hardship for years, struggling to overcome the fact that many people who went to the website for a one-time DNA test didn't become repeat customers. In November, the company laid off more than 200 employees, or roughly 40% of its staff.
The bankruptcy announcement also comes less than two years after 23andMe suffered a massive data breach affecting 6.9 million customer accounts.
The possibility that the company, once valued at $6 billion after it went public in 2021, could be sold has raised concerns about what would happen to the sensitive information of its more than 15 million users.
In its bankruptcy announcement, 23andMe said the data privacy of its customers would be an "important consideration" in any sale. But federal law does little to secure genetic information given over to a private company, two legal experts on data privacy said.
"Often, if there's so much personal data that a group has, it's maybe in a hospital setting or a research setting and can be governed by more meaningful safeguards," said Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"The scale of how much highly sensitive data 23andMe has is unique," she said.
Is your DNA data protected by law? It depends
For many 23andMe customers, the company holds two sensitive pieces of information: the user-provided saliva sample, and the detailed genetic profile created from it.
In an FAQ about the bankruptcy posted on its website, 23andMe said a new owner would have to abide by "applicable law" governing the use of user data, but data privacy experts say there isn't much on the books.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, applies to health care providers and insurers but not direct-to-consumers companies like 23andMe, according to Anya Prince, a University of Iowa law professor who studies health and genetic privacy. Another law called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bars employers and health insurance companies from discriminating against people due to genetic information.
"That's pretty much it on the federal level," Prince said.
Some states have adopted their own laws covering genetic privacy. At least 11 U.S. states have enacted laws giving consumers a say in how their genetic data is used, according to an article published by Prince in 2023. Those laws typically let users request that the companies delete their data and require law enforcement agencies to get a warrant or subpoena to access genetic information, Prince said. 23andMe already adheres to both of those policies, she added.
23andMe also says any genetic data it shares with researchers is stripped of identifying information, such as names and birth dates. In its bankruptcy FAQ, the company said it hopes to "secure a partner who shares in its commitment to customer data privacy."
How to protect your data, according to experts
23andMe will remain in operation through the bankruptcy proceedings, and the company says customers can still delete their data and shutter their accounts.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a consumer alert last week that residents should "consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material" the company has.
Bernstein of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said any concerned 23andMe customers should delete their data, request that their saliva sample be destroyed and revoke any permissions they may have given to use their genetic information for research.
"We would recommend taking those actions and advocating to your state and federal representatives to pass strong consumer privacy laws," she added, "as this is just the first example of a company like this with tremendous amounts of sensitive data being bought or sold."
Even before a possible sale goes through, Prince, the law professor, said she wonders how many people know what data 23andMe already shares and with whom. For example, the company has given over anonymized data to the pharmaceutical giant GSK for years to help it develop new drugs.
"Everybody's worried about what a new company can do with the data — and that is a concern — but frankly some of the things that people are worried about, 23andMe already can do or already does," Prince said.
Vermonters have learned the hard way not to get their hopes up about spring. The season here is long and cruel. Any stretch of warm, sunny weather will not be followed by more of the same, as it might be in other parts of the country, places where spring means green grass, flowers and confidently putting away one’s winter clothes.
In Vermont, warm days in early spring are just a tease of what is still months away. Between winter and actual spring, some Vermonters have lightheartedly identified five mini-seasons — “fool’s spring,” so named because it is soon followed by “second winter,” then “spring of deception,” “third winter” and finally “mud season.”
Thus it has apparently always been. A letter printed in the Vermont Gazette in February 1791 — a month before the state joined the Union — complained about the coming months during which Vermonters could do little. “(W)e cannot perform journeys by reason of the depth of the mud, our fields are not arable, sled(d)ing is at an end, and our grain is threshed: in a word there seems to be an interregnum of all business,” lamented the writer, who signed the letter with the pen name “Clergyman.” (Pseudonyms were frequently used in newspapers of the period for a variety of reasons, including trying to keep the focus on a writer’s ideas rather than their identity.)
During this pause, no work could be done, “save that of making sugar.” The writer was referring to maple sugar, the granular sweetener produced by cooking down maple syrup. At the time, maple sugar was more popular than syrup because it was easier to store and had a longer shelf life.
Clergyman’s letter was an impassioned plea — supported by economic and ethical arguments — for Vermonters to take up sugar making on an industry scale. The letter was timely, arriving as it did at the start of a national movement to promote domestic sugar production in the United States, which helped produce a maple sugar bubble.
European settlers in the Northeast had learned how to sugar from the indigenous population, who for untold ages had been tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap to distill its sugary goodness. But when Clergyman wrote his letter, most Vermonters who made maple sugar only produced enough to meet their own families’ needs. It was a wasted opportunity, he argued. “It is evident, at this time especially, that peculiar exertions ought to be made for the furtherance of the sugar manufactory,” he wrote.
Most people bought their sugar from the Caribbean. But a variety of factors — hurricanes, earthquakes and uprisings by the enslaved people who made the sugar — had recently restricted the supply and caused the price to double.
Clergyman considered sugar making an act of patriotism, since it produced goods in America and kept money in the nation’s economy rather than sending it to one of the European countries operating sugar plantations in the Caribbean. “(T)he old proverb forever holds true that a penny saved is as good as a penny earnt,” he added.
Clergyman hated that friends would sometimes apologize for serving homemade maple sugar: “It gives me pain, it destroys all the pleasure of the visit, when I set down at the teatable of a friend to hear the too common complaint, Oh we are poor folks, we have nothing to give you but homemade sugar.” As if maple sugar were inferior to imported cane sugar.
Worse still was when a friend would serve him imported sugar with pride. “(I)t gives me still greater pain when I sit down to a friend’s table, furnished with loaf-sugar [as Caribbean sugar was called], which I have no reason to doubt was the purchase of a drained purse, perhaps of the last shilling.”
Clergymen proposed a radical shift in how Vermont farms operated each spring: “Now suppose every husbandman in this state, at this leisurely time, should exert himself with all his labourers equally the same as he does in haying and harvesting, what would be the event?”
Answering his own question, Clergyman wrote: “Why this state, at a moderate calculation, would be four thousand pounds richer this present season!” It would be “commendable” for farmers to “take time by the foretop” — i.e. hurry — and buy more equipment to make more sugar.
It would be better for farmers to work within the local economy rather than engage in more distant trade. “Would it not be more commendable than to send their grain after rum, sugar and foreign molasses, with many other frivolous articles, which are purchased only because they are foreign. It is a lamentable consideration, that so many of our good citizens have such an itching desire, such an insatiable thirst after foreign and imported goods.”
New York State had recently appointed a committee to “enquire into the manufactory from the juice of the maple tree,” he wrote. If New York could see the value of locally made sugar, Clergyman asked, “Shall we then who are citizens of Vermont, who live in the very bowels of that kind of sweetness, be inactive? Shall we resemble the fool who has a price put into his hands but no heart to improve it; let us rather… now, in the dead of winter, exert ourselves in preparing our sap and store troughs. In this manufactory we neither rob nor injure any man, we only take what bountiful nature liberally bestows.”
Only at the very end of his letter, once he had made his long and strenuous economic argument for maple sugaring, did Clergyman mention the ethical reason for doing so.
“Another consideration may be mentioned, viz. that by stopping the importation of sugar from the West (I)ndies, we shall diminish the plea of necessity for enslaving the natives of Africa; by which we shall gratify the feelings of benevolence, and render essential service to the cause of freedom,” he wrote.
This anti-slavery argument was the main motivation behind the national movement. Given his chosen pen name, this might also have been the principal reason for Clergyman to write his letter. He might have wanted to leave the ethical argument until after he had, hopefully, won readers over with his assertion that maple would benefit them and their state financially.
Sugar had recently become a political tool. Antislavery activists in England organized a boycott of Caribbean sugar in 1788 to drive down the cost of sugar, thereby making the slave trade less profitable.
Prominent Americans took up the cause, some noting that, unlike the British, their countrymen had a ready substitute for boycotted sugar. William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, New York, and father of novelist James Fennimore Cooper, started a maple sugar business in 1789 and became a leading proponent of creating large-scale maple operations. That same year, Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the Society for Promoting the Manufacturer of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. Rush extolled the virtues of maple sugar in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. secretary of state, arguing that it would free the country from the need to import slave-produced sugar. Indeed, Rush wrote, the country might even create a maple sugar surplus to export. The anti-slavery argument resonated with Jefferson, although Jefferson’s deeds often fell short of his ideals: he himself continued to enslave hundreds on his Virginia properties.
Americans could soon even read about the moral virtue of maple trees and the sugar they yielded in a poem by diplomat David Humphreys, which included the lines: “Bleed on, blest tree! and as thy sweet blood runs,/ Bestow fond hope on Afric’s sable Sons.”
Four months after Clergyman’s letter appeared, two future presidents, Jefferson and then-Congressman James Madison, were visiting Vermont as part of a tour of New England and New York. At a dinner in Bennington, Jefferson spoke of the benefit that the new state’s abundant maple trees could bring to the young nation, freeing it from dependence on foreign sugar, then one of America’s largest imports.
News broke during Jefferson’s tour that a Dutch company had bought up land in Vermont to establish a major maple sugar operation. The scheme ultimately failed, however, apparently because Vermonters wanted to work for themselves, not a foreign company.
When he returned to Monticello, Jefferson had a grove of maple trees planted, not realizing that the Virginia climate was ill-suited for making maple sugar. He encouraged Americans to have their own maple groves to provide a ready supply of sugar.
That’s a sentiment that Clergyman would have shared. “For my single self,” he wrote in his letter to the Gazette, “I feel prouder to tell my friends, around my board, this is sugar of my own making, and with more pleasure I present them with the bowl thus filled, than with the most refined loaf-sugar.”
As a young professor of chemistry at Harvard in the 2000s, David Liu was trying to accelerate evolution.
This quest took place on the cellular level. Inside every cell in the body, molecules known as proteins act like tiny machines, carrying out biological functions—their efficiency honed by eons of natural selection. And scientists had discovered ways to engineer proteins that were even more efficient, or were built to fix specific problems.
But the work of changing the makeup of a protein was slow: a graduate student would chivvy evolution along by hand, painstakingly altering the experimental conditions once a week or so, and it would be a year before they’d know whether the whole thing had failed or succeeded.
Now, Liu turned a thought over in his mind: could a clever researcher press fast-forward on the process so dozens of new forms rose and fell in the space of a day?
Liu and his graduate student Kevin Esvelt envisioned a way to do this by using a phage—a type of virus that infects bacteria, whose life cycle, crucially, can be as short as 10 minutes. By giving a phage instructions to create a specific protein, then rewarding subsequent generations that successfully produced that protein, they were able to replicate the natural selection process with surprising speed.
In 2011, when the team announced their results in Nature, they could run 200 generations in about eight days. In less than one week, they evolved three new enzymes, their purposes custom-designed by Liu and his colleagues. This process, called phage-assisted continuous evolution, or PACE, has since become a powerful tool for scientists working to advance research and cure diseases. “[It] really reminds me of some of the real classics in the field,” says Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. ’89, S.D. 2023, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Since then, Liu—now Cabot professor of the natural sciences—has become a leading pioneer of inventive processes that operate on the molecular level in living organisms. He has also become renowned, in his lab and beyond, as a scientist who seems to be in perpetual motion: existing on little sleep, spinning off on side pursuits, and developing companies to springboard his laboratory insights into real-world use.
During the past 18 months alone, two treatments based on his research—one for a genetic lung disease, the other for a lethal metabolic disorder—have made headlines, as did advanced mouse studies focused on curing progeria, a disease that makes children age prematurely. And there’s more to come.
Today, Liu’s office at Harvard is decorated with things that move and toys and oddities that spin in the air. (Liu is also the Merkin professor at the Broad Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.) Their persistent energy matches that of the man himself—the same energy that was evident from his youth. Liu grew up in Riverside, California, where orange groves and desert stand side by side. He remembers his father, an aerospace engineer, leaving at 4 a.m. for a two-hour commute to El Segundo, the aerospace hub where his company was located. Liu’s mother, a physics professor, held down the fort at home with Liu and his sister and became one of the first female tenured faculty members in her department at the University of California, Riverside.
Liu’s parents didn’t exert pressure on their son to be a scientist. It was his childhood spent outdoors, watching the natural world, that set him on that path. All day at school he looked forward to going out into his backyard, a wilderness of weeds and insects. He was particularly fascinated by ants and their ability to somehow leave trails, invisible to humans, for each other to follow. Was it possible, he wondered, to remove whatever chemical it was they sensed and lay a new path to somewhere else? “I wanted to ask and answer my own questions,” he says. “I was curious about how things worked.”
At 18, Liu participated in the Junior Sciences and Humanities Symposium and won a trip to the 1990 Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm. There, he watched Harvard chemist E.J. Corey give his Nobel lecture. Corey is a mastermind of organic synthesis—the branch of chemistry that uses complex cascades of reactions to build molecules. Afterwards, Liu, then a freshman at Harvard, approached the Nobelist.
“I asked him a question about insect juvenile hormone,” Liu recalls. How could one part of this molecule change, while other parts, apparently identical, stayed untouched? Corey explained that he knew how the molecule would fold up, protecting some areas, exposing others to change.
“It was pretty awesome, which just made him seem even more like some kind of chemistry god to me,” Liu recalls. He exhales, a little self-consciously, and continues, “Then I asked him, while we were at this Nobel Prize lecture, if I could work in his lab.” Corey gently suggested that Liu take some organic chemistry classes first, then check in with him later.
With the help of his organic chemistry professor, Joseph Grabowski, Liu made Corey’s acquaintance again at Harvard, eventually joining his research group. With the elder scientist’s blessing, he decided that the place for him was where chemistry met biology. As a graduate student, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley with chemistry professor Peter Schultz, who had been tinkering with the genetic code to build proteins in a test tube that did not occur in nature.
Liu started working on getting such a system up and running in living cells, developing a process—which penalized cells with enzymes that functioned normally and rewarded cells with those that acted unusually—that would reshape protein evolution in the laboratory. Other scientists noticed: after earning his Ph.D. in 1999, he was hired at Harvard as an assistant professor.
“It was an interesting time. I had no idea what I was doing, which may have been the biggest source of awkwardness,” Liu recalls. “But also now, only five years after leaving Harvard as an undergrad, I was suddenly a colleague of all of these professors.”
He didn’t want to presume, so he defaulted to extreme deference. “I would say, ‘Oh, thank you, Professor Schreiber, for that comment. Thank you, Professor Corey.’ And I remember, after one of the faculty meetings in my first fall, one of the professors pulled me aside and said, ‘David, we think you should just call us by our first names.’”
As he got his research group off the ground, Liu wanted to continue evolving proteins. He was particularly inspired by a paper from Martin Wright and Gerald Joyce at the Scripps Institute, which focused on the molecules of RNA. Lab evolution of both custom proteins and custom RNAs had always taken a long time. But Wright and Joyce, remarkably, set up a system where all day and night, the RNA continuously evolved, spinning through about 300 generations in 52 hours. “I just thought the idea was so amazing,” Liu says, “and it remains one of the most beautiful papers I’ve ever read.”
He showed it to Esvelt as they brainstormed a way to evolve proteins with similar speed. Esvelt had the idea to start with a virus called the filamentous bacteriophage, which infects the bacterium E.coli. First, he put a gene for a protein he wanted to evolve into the virus. Then he took some of the machinery the virus needed to live and put it in E.coli. Finally, he engineered the E.coli so that it would only hand over what the virus needed if that targeted protein was produced at high levels.
The virus faced enormous pressure to make this protein. At the same time, each generation provided a new chance for interesting new mutations in the gene to creep in. By speeding up or slowing down the flow of fresh host cells into a vessel called the lagoon, Esvelt controlled the pace of the evolution.
It was an intense period in Esvelt’s life—Liu, he says, seems to need only about four hours of sleep a night, and they were often trading emails and ideas at unusual times, racing to generate new data in order to apply for funding for the next phase of the PACE project.
“We never lost hope at the same time,” Esvelt says. “I persisted in the times when he had lost it, and he kept me going through the more frequent times when I was frustrated.”
With PACE, Liu had a way to evolve enzymes with custom purposes. Having done this, Liu set his sights on another ambitious target: editing the code of life itself. It was around this time that CRISPR-Cas9, a system for cutting the genome, was first being described—Doudna, one of its developers, recalls talking with Liu about it early on. CRISPR tools allow scientists to bind and snip DNA and introduce other genetic material.
CRISPR on its own is not a medicine, however. “I quickly realized that most of the genetic diseases that one might want to treat with genome editing could not be treated [only] by cutting DNA, because cutting DNA disrupts the gene,” says Liu. “Instead, they needed to be treated by correcting a mutation back to a healthy sequence.” What if, he wondered, we could make enzymes that would actually reverse a mutation chemically?
DNA can be pictured as two long ribbons of letters, running parallel to each other. Each letter stands for a particular type of nucleic acid base, and each base has its own partner on the matching ribbon: adenine (A) binds to thymine (T), and cytosine (C) binds to guanine (G). Many dangerous mutations are the result of a simple alteration of one pair of bases. Sickle cell anemia, for instance, is the result of an A turned to a T.
With postdoctoral fellow Alexis Komor, Liu discussed ways to alter a mutated base pair back to the healthy version. Komor brought three elements together: an enzyme that could alter a single C, a targeting system from CRISPR-Cas9 to aim it at the right part of the genome, and another protein that solidified the change. In 2016, she and Liu described using this setup to cleanly convert a C:G pair to an A:T pair in living cells, without the organism missing a beat; the double helix was never sliced.
A flurry of innovation filled the next few years. In 2017, Liu and graduate student Nicole Gaudelli described a technique for going the other way: making an A:T pair into a C:G pair, an effort Liu attributes to “heroic” work by Gaudelli. And in 2019, Andrew Anzalone and Liu published another method for tackling yet more mutations. Anzalone, also a graduate student, completed his complex project in a year and eight days.
The response from scientists exploring gene editing to correct diseases was immediate. “It’s a great tool for the field to be able to make targeted changes in one step,” Doudna reflected. There have been at least 23 clinical trials using the techniques, focusing on illnesses ranging from lung cancer to metabolic diseases.
Targeted editing could help with more than just genetic diseases. Because Liu’s techniques provide very precise, clean ways to alter DNA, they can improve existing treatments where DNA is edited, such as CAR-T-cell immunotherapy for cancer. In this treatment, a patient’s own immune cells are removed from the body and given genes that allow them to make antibodies against their specific type of cancer cells. When the immune cells are reintroduced into the patient’s body, they hunt down the cancer, often curing the disease altogether.
In 2021, Alyssa Tapley, a 12-year-old in England, was diagnosed with leukemia. Chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant failed. In 2022, she had a few weeks left to live when her hospital arranged for her to join a trial using Liu’s techniques. Her immune cells were altered so they could target the cancer cells, and Tapley lived. She is still alive and cancer-free. In April 2025, when Liu was awarded the Breakthrough Prize, a major international science award, Tapley attended the ceremony.
Liu brings the same kind of intensity he displays in his research to other aspects of life. His office is lined with geological specimens, labeled with information about where they were collected, which he gives away to his students as, one by one, they graduate. “When I first joined,” Esvelt recalls, “he had taken up painting and become quite good at that. Then he took up woodworking and installed a giant lathe system in his basement and made some really amazing wooden bowls out of various pieces of wood that he found while hiking or walking along the beach.”
Next came an exploration of photography and optics. “You can sort of sense,” Esvelt says, “he wants to be able to do everything.” (“Ask him about his skills in poker,” Doudna suggests.)
That ceaseless energy shapes the environment of his lab, where he long ago stopped hiring people for specific achievements but instead focused on bringing in researchers he thought would work well with others. Although the goal was never publishing for publishing’s sake, on average, he estimates, the lab publishes a paper nearly every 17 days and has maintained this pace for about five years.
“What made it so fruitful is that he just really allowed me and others to be who we are,” says Gaudelli. “There was a sense of freedom.” She felt that there was a current of quiet confidence running through the lab; if you could imagine something, you could build it.
“He has this internal locomotive,” Anzalone adds, “that really pushes him to get the most.” He laughs, remembering the time when he and Liu were preparing to submit their gene editing paper. Liu would wake up at 4 a.m. and edit Anzalone’s draft. During the day, Anzalone would perform more experiments, chasing down final details. At night, Anzalone would add to the draft, working until about 2 a.m. Two hours later, Liu would be up to work on it again.
In March, news broke that one of Liu’s editing techniques had helped do something remarkable: researchers had used it to cure a baby boy’s lethal metabolic disorder. It was an astounding achievement that demonstrated the potential that stems from basic science.
At the same time, the Trump administration was beginning its campaign against science funding. Billions of research dollars have since been frozen or canceled nationwide; a federal judge recently ordered the administration to reinstate more than $2 billion in funding to Harvard, though the White House said it plans to appeal the ruling. Now, Liu is very worried about how to protect the next generation of scientists from the storm. Students and postdoctoral researchers need time and freedom to think, he says, to live without fear that their institutional support will just evaporate.
Even before federal funding for research was suddenly stripped from labs across the country, the frailty of the support system for young scientists concerned him. In 2020, after fruitlessly exploring other avenues for securing better pay for his lab members, Liu quietly decided to start dividing his salary among them every year.
Liu has co-founded many companies, three of which are publicly traded. Anzalone, after finishing his doctorate, went on to help lead Prime Medicine, a new start-up co-founded by Liu to commercialize the gene editing technique they’d developed together. Along with CRISPR pioneers Doudna and Feng Zhang, Liu also helped found Editas Medicine, which explores ways to use this technology to treat serious diseases. Gaudelli joined Beam Therapeutics, where she spent the past few years advancing a gene editor that may be used to treat sickle cell anemia. (She has since moved on to become an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures.)
“Accumulating wealth is not anywhere in the top 100 things I want to do,” Liu says. “My students and the work that we do, and the patients who reach out, and the families like Alyssa [Tapley]’s—these are all so much more meaningful than how many digits are in a bank account.”
And while Prime, Beam, and Editas are vehicles that aim to produce treatments and medicines that change lives, he notes, they draw their strength from the academic science that was their inspiration. Their vigor is linked to the freedom scientists have to imagine things that have yet to exist.
“Science matters,” Liu says. “Universities matter.” Enormous dividends are paid over decades by the funding of young scientists just getting underway, just beginning to imagine what comes next, Liu says, “who will go on to make their own discoveries, or to teach, or to work in industry to help develop the next great drug.”
Gaudelli thinks back to the way the Liu lab seemed to encourage transformative thinking, such as the idea that a letter of genetic code could be changed almost as easily as a light switch can be flipped. “I was allowed to imagine something that seemed impossible,” she says. “And then, one day, it was not.”
MARION — Former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody probably committed a felony crime when he told a witness to delete text messages they exchanged before, during and after he led raids on a newspaper office and the publisher’s home, a district judge ruled Wednesday.
But Cody won’t be tried for the raids, which Marion County Record editor-publisher Eric Meyer says is the real crime.
A two-hour preliminary hearing revealed new details about the texts that Cody exchanged with Kari Newell, whose drunk driving record and request for a liquor license at her restaurant ignited an international drama two years ago. Newell took the stand and testified that Cody told her during a phone call to delete text messages between the two of them so that people wouldn’t get the wrong idea about whether they were romantically involved.
“Chief Cody had stated that he felt it would be in my best interest to delete those,” Newell said.
About six weeks after the raids, Newell texted Cody to say she was concerned about having deleted their earlier messages, she said. Cody replied that she was being paranoid.
Their exchange coincided with widespread scrutiny of the police raids in August 2023 of the newspaper office in flagrant disregard for the First Amendment and legal protections for journalists. Kansas Reflector first reported on the chilling raids.
Cody, working in coordination with the sheriff’s office, county attorney and Kansas Bureau of Investigation, had investigated whether Meyer and reporter Phyllis Zorn committed identity theft and other crimes by looking up Newell’s driving record in a public online database. A magistrate judge, ignoring the absence of evidence and state law, authorized the police raids of the newspaper office, Meyer’s home, and the home of city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother died in distress a day later.
Police exceeded the scope of the search warrants by seizing reporters’ personal cellphones, work computers, and other equipment. Video showed Cody reviewing a reporter’s file on allegations that had been made against him.
At the KBI’s request, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation conducted a yearlong inquiry into whether Cody or anyone else had committed a crime. Special prosecutors Marc Bennett, of Sedgwick County, and Barry Wilkerson, of Riley County, cleared all law enforcement of any wrongdoing in carrying out the raids, which spawned five ongoing federal lawsuits.
However, CBI special agent John Zamora learned from talking to Newell that she had deleted text messages at his request, spanning a period of one week before to one week after the raids.
The prosecutors presented an exhibit at Wednesday’s preliminary hearing that totaled 31 pages of text messages, including one where Cody said he was working with a publisher to write a book about the experience.
Zamora testified that he interviewed Newell in person in December 2023.
“Just tell me what’s happening,” he recalled telling her. “What’s going on here?”
Newell told him she agreed to delete texts, at Cody’s request, because she was worried that her now ex-husband would accuse her of having an affair with Cody, Zamora said.
Wilkerson asked Zamora, who has 30 years of law enforcement experience, if he had ever directed a witness to delete messages or documents.
“No,” Zamora said.
After talking to Newell, Zamora said, he obtained the deleted text messages from Jennifer Hill, the attorney who is defending the city and county from federal lawsuits over the raid. Cody, who had given her his cellphone, had not deleted the text messages himself.
Cody’s attorney, Sal Intagliata, of Wichita, cross-examined Zamora about his investigation. According to Intagliata, the special agent told Hill that he was just trying to “check all the boxes.” Zamora said he didn’t remember making the comment.
When Newell took the stand, she said she has had no communication with Cody since leaving town amid the controversy two years ago.
Zorn and Meyer sat front and center in the courtroom, with Zorn tightlipped and taking notes and Meyer in an incredulous slouch, newspaper tucked in his pants pocket.
Cody, who now lives in Hawaii, appeared by Zoom. He sat expressionless with his chin on his hand for most of the hearing.
District Judge Ryan Rosauer rejected Intagliata’s argument that it was “a legal impossibility” to blame Cody for deleting texts that he ultimately turned over himself. The judge found probable cause that Cody had committed the low-level felony crime of interfering with the judicial process by inducing a witness to withhold information in a criminal investigation.
Cody entered a not guilty plea, and Rosauer scheduled a trial for February.
If convicted, because he has no criminal history, Cody’s sentence would be presumptive probation.
In an interview after the hearing, Meyer said he was worried about the “big picture.”
“None of this has anything to do with the crime,” Meyer said, referring to the raids on his newsroom and home.
“This is not even about the case,” Meyer said. “This is about what he did after the case.”
He also said he was concerned that Cody was being made a scapegoat for the raids, despite the widespread involvement of other people and law enforcement agencies.
“We still want some statement, an official judgment of the court, that this was wrong, so that no one can use this excuse anymore that, ‘Oh, we aren’t sure that it’s illegal to raid newsrooms, and because we’re not completely sure, we can still do it,’ which seems like a stupid excuse to me,” Meyer said.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.
The ruling is a harsh verdict on the rise of giant technology companies that have used their roots in the internet to influence the way we shop, consume information and search online — and indicates a potential limit of Big Tech’s power. It is likely to influence other government antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The last significant antitrust ruling against a tech company targeted Microsoft more than two decades ago.
“This is the most important antitrust case of the century, and it’s the first of a big slate of cases to come down against Big Tech,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school who studies antitrust. “It’s a huge turning point.”
The decision is a major blow to Google, which was built on its search engine and has become so closely associated with online search that its name has become a verb. The ruling could have major ramifications for Google’s success, especially as the company spends heavily to compete in the race over artificial intelligence. Google faces another federal antitrust case over ad technology that is scheduled to go to trial next month.
Monday’s ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.
What the Judge Said in His Ruling
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
Judge Mehta’s ruling capped a yearslong case — U.S. et al. v. Google — that resulted in a 10-week trial last year. The Justice Department and states sued in 2020 over Google’s dominance in online search, which generates billions in profits annually. The Justice Department said Google’s search engine conducted nearly 90 percent of web searches, a number the company disputed.
The company spends billions of dollars annually to be the automatic search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google paid Apple about $18 billion for being the default in 2021, The New York Times has reported.
“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” Jonathan Kanter, the top Justice Department antitrust official, said in a statement. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company would appeal the ruling.
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
During the trial, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, testified that he was concerned that his competitor’s dominance had created a “Google web” and that its relationship with Apple was “oligopolistic.” If Google continued undeterred, it was likely to become dominant in the race to develop artificial intelligence, he said.
Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, countered in his testimony that Google created a better service for consumers.
Users choose to search on Google because they find it useful, and the company has continued to invest to make it better, the company’s lawyers said.
“Google is winning because it’s better,” John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead courtroom lawyer, said during closing arguments, which were held months later in May.
The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with its search engine. Instead, Google collected more data about consumers that it used to make its search engine better and more dominant.
Judge Mehta sided with the government, saying Google had a monopoly over general online search services. The company’s agreements to be the automatic search engine on devices and web browsers hurt competition, making it harder for rivals to challenge Google’s dominance.
For more than a decade, those agreements “have given Google access to scale that its rivals cannot match,” Judge Mehta wrote.
The government also accused Google of protecting a monopoly over the ads that run inside search results. Government lawyers said Google had raised the price of ads beyond the rates that should exist in a free market, which they argued was a sign of the company’s power. Search ads provide billions of dollars in annual revenue for Google.
Judge Mehta ruled that Google’s monopoly allowed it to inflate the prices for some search ads. That, in turn, gave the company more money to pay for its search engine to get prime placement, he said.
“Unconstrained price increases have fueled Google’s dramatic revenue growth and allowed it to maintain high and remarkably stable operating profits,” he said in the ruling.
Judge Mehta ruled in Google’s favor on some lesser claims. Google offers advertisers many tools, including one that they use to manage advertising on different search engines. State attorneys general argued during the trial that Google had illegally excluded Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, from aspects of those tools. But Judge Mehta ruled against their claim.
Legal scholars expect this decision to influence government antitrust lawsuits against the other tech giants. All of those investigations, conducted by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, began during the Trump administration and have ramped up under President Biden.
The Justice Department has sued Apple, arguing that the company made it difficult for consumers to ditch the iPhone, and brought the other case against Google. The F.T.C. has separately sued Meta, claiming the company stamped out nascent competitors, and Amazon, accusing it of squeezing sellers on its online marketplace.
With those cases, the government is testing hundred-year-old laws originally used to rein in utility and other monopolistic companies like Standard Oil.
A victory for the government provides credibility for its broader attempt to use antitrust laws to take aim at corporate America, said William Kovacic, a former chairman of the F.T.C.
“It creates momentum that supports their other cases,” he said in an interview in June.
Google has also faced antitrust scrutiny in Europe, where officials charged the company last year with undermining rivals in online advertising.
The last major U.S. court ruling on a tech antitrust case — in the Justice Department’s 1990s lawsuit against Microsoft — cast its own shadow over the Google arguments. Judge Mehta repeatedly pressed lawyers to explain how the specifics of the case against Google could fit into the legal precedents.
The Microsoft antitrust case alleged that the tech giant combined practices like bullying industry partners and leveraging the popularity of its digital platform, from which users typically didn’t switch, to stifle competition.
A District Court judge initially ruled against Microsoft on most counts of possible antitrust violations and ordered a breakup of the company, but an appeals court reversed some of those decisions. President George W. Bush’s administration settled with the company in 2001.
The Ancient Greek philosophy has acquired a new generation of acolytes. USC Dornsife philosophy professor Ralph Wedgwood explains its appeal.
In 2012, Penguin Random House sold 12,000 copies of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, reflections influenced by the Ancient Greek philosophy Stoicism. In 2019, the book sold 100,000 copies.
YouTube channels devoted to “Modern Stoicism” have millions of subscribers, and Silicon Valley tech millionaires expound its wisdom. What prompted a 2,300-year-old philosophy to stage a comeback in such spectacular fashion?
It may be that Stoicism’s ancient framework for managing emotions feels particularly relevant for navigating modernity’s crises. Our phones buzz ceaselessly with alarm about rising authoritarianism, the threat of nuclear war, or AI’s impending takeover, yet responding constructively to all of these disasters feels impossible.
Enter Stoicism, which urges you to ignore the rage bait, put down the phone and think more constructively. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them,” says the Stoic Epictetus in his Handbook.
“Stoics think that each of us are finite, limited beings. There are a few things we can control and other things we can’t control, and we should keep track of those things and have different attitudes towards those domains,” says Ralph Wedgwood, director of the School of Philosophy and professor of philosophy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “That’s the goal of life, to have this accurate understanding, and to be guided by this.”
Stoicism: The phoenix philosophy
Stoicism was born from disaster and has rerisen, rather Phoenix-like, for centuries. Around 300 B.C., a shipwreck bankrupted a merchant named Zeno and landed him in Athens, Greece. There, he began studying philosophy, eventually developing and teaching his own. He held forth at the Stoa Poikile, a columned walkway from which his acolytes, Stoics, would later draw their name.
For nearly 500 years, the philosophy held great influence in both Greece and the Roman Empire. It was eclipsed over the years by other branches of philosophical thought, and then Christianity. A millennium passed, and Stoicism became mostly forgotten, the vast majority of its texts lost or destroyed, including those of Zeno. (Most of what remains is Roman like the Meditations.)
In the 15th century, the Renaissance’s renewed interest in classical antiquity sent excited scholars diving into the archives to dredge up older ideas. One of these was Stoicism. The debut of the printing press in the 1440s made broad distribution of ideas easier, and Stoicism gained a more permanent cultural foothold, although its popularity would continue to wax and wane over the years.
Although Stoicism’s ascendance seems relatively recent, it’s actually been a somewhat steadily growing, subliminal influence since the 1970s.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of talk therapy that encourages patients to rethink their emotional reactions, was directly inspired by Stoicism. Its founder, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck, told an interviewer in 2007, “I also was influenced by the Stoic philosophers who stated that it was a meaning of events rather than the events themselves that affected people.”
CBT is now one of the most popular forms of mental health treatment. Small wonder, then, that Stoicism’s popularity has grown alongside the widespread clinical use of its philosophical relative.
Stoicism as a tool for the warrior scholar
However, unlike traditional therapy, which often conjures up visions of pastel couches and comforting Kleenex, Stoicism has a reputation for tactical, mindful hardiness.
Aurelius wrote down his reflections while planning military campaigns. Navy Officer James Stockdale famously deployed its teachings to help him endure years of torture and imprisonment during the Vietnam War. Stockdale turned in particular to the lectures of Epictetus, who himself suffered as a slave in ancient Rome.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that its current revival has sprung up in large part from the “manosphere” of male podcasters, YouTubers and Substack writers, an association that has some poo-pooing its revival as just a toxic return to repression of male emotions.
Wedgwood, whose USC Dornsife courses include “The Ancient Stoics” (PHIL 416), says that’s an inaccurate understanding of the philosophy. “It’s not about tamping down feelings. For Stoics, it’s about achieving an emotional intelligence, trying to change your habits so they’re not so destructive,” he says.
Stoics criticized emotions like anger, which they regarded as misleading. They analogized the beginnings of anger to being splashed with cold water, the jolt of which makes you feel you must immediately react. “This is an illusion, that somehow revenge would fix the wrong,” says Wedgwood. “Rather than raging or fuming, you should try to have feelings that are productive. We should think of the future rather than avenging the past.”
Women will find the philosophy’s wisdom just as useful; Stoics themselves made a number of egalitarian arguments, observes Wedgwood. “The later Stoics are not social reformers, but they believed women should receive the same education as men and insisted they have the same capacities as men for courage, wisdom and self-control.”
Stoics offer “circles of concern” to guide priorities
In addition to better management of emotions, Stoics offer helpful insight into how to prioritize demands on our time and resources, says Wedgwood. Such a framework may be increasingly helpful in an era in which we’re grappling with how to best respond to the crises of the entire world.
Consider the debate over rebuilding Notre Dame: Effective altruists decried the millions spent to fund the reconstruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral, arguing that the money would have been better spent on lifesaving mosquito tents in Africa. In recent discussions around immigration, Vice President JD Vance revived St. Augustine’s notion of “Ordo Amoris” (“Order of Love”) as a guide to how we deploy our attention and resources.
Stoics have been contemplating the best way to order our priorities since Zeno himself. They proposed that humans inhabit a nested set of circles, a framework of affinity dubbed “Oikeiosis.” The innermost circle was our soul, next came one’s physical body, then various layers of family, after that one’s community, and so on, to the entirety of humankind.
Closer circles are usually given more weight, but those closer to the edge of the ring can still be valued. We may even strive to collapse some of the difference between outer circles at times by treating them as if they inhabited a more inner ring. “For the Stoics, we do not belong to just one whole, we are part of many wholes, called to serve all those many communities,” says Wedgwood.
Belgium's Olympic team forfeited from Monday's mixed competition triathlon after one of its triathletes, Claire Michel, became sick after swimming in the Seine last Wednesday — a river that's faced frequent water quality and safety concerns.
"The Belgian Hammers will not start in the Mixed Relay competition at the Paris Games," the Belgian team said in a release. "Michel, one of the athletes in the mixed relay team, unfortunately has to withdraw from the competition due to illness."
While the Olympic team did not describe Michel's illness nor blame the Seine, Belgium newspaper De Standaard reported that the triathlete was hospitalized and treated for an E. coli infection Sunday. The bacteria can cause serious intestinal and medical issues.
Meanwhile on Sunday, Olympic organizers canceled a planned practice swim for triathletes after poor water quality test results. In a release obtained by NPR, organizers said "heavy rains" on Wednesday and Thursday led to the practice-swim cancellation. Heavy rains can overwhelm the city’s antiquated sewer system, leaking untreated sewage into the Seine river — increasing rates of E. coli bacteria.
In the years leading up to the Paris Olympic games, France spent more than $1 billion to clean the Seine river, which had been illegal to swim in for more than a century. It has long been considered too contaminated for human use. On July 17, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo jumped into its murky waters and declared, "we did it!"
Olympic triathletes — including Michel — last competed in the Seine on Wednesday. As it stands, Olympians are set to swim in the Seine on Monday for the mixed competition triathlon, without the Belgian team. Daily river testing will continue ahead of the Monday triathlon and the marathon swimming races scheduled for Thursday and Friday.
"Belgian Triathlon hope that lessons will be learned for future triathlon competitions," the Belgian team release said. "We are thinking of training days that can be guaranteed, competition days and formats that are clear in advance and circumstances that do not cause uncertainty among athletes, entourage and fans."
Hydraulic mechanics may have indeed been the driving force behind the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.
In a preprint paper, scientists concluded that the Step Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, Egypt—believed to be the oldest of the seven monumental pyramids and potentially constructed about 4,500 years ago—offers a remarkable blueprint for hydraulic engineering.
The hydraulic-powered mechanism could have maneuvered the oversized stone blocks forming the pyramid, starting from the ground up. The research team says the Step Pyramid’s internal architecture is consistent with a hydraulic elevation mechanism, something that’s never been reported before at that place or in that time.
By lifting the stones from the interior of the pyramid in what the authors call a “volcano fashion,” the water pressure from the hydraulic system could have pushed the blocks into place. If proved out, this research shows the Egyptians had a powerful understanding of advanced hydraulic systems well before modern scholars believed they did. That begs the question: Was this the first major use of the system, or had it been in play previously?
No matter the answer, pulling it off at the Step Pyramid would have been no easy feat.
The team believes that based on the mapping of nearby watersheds, one of the massive—and yet unexplained—Saqqara structures, known as the Gisr el-Mudir enclosure, has the features of a check dam with the intent to trap sediment and water. The scientists say the topography beyond the dam suggests a possible temporary lake west of the Djoser complex, with water flow surrounding it in a moat-like design.
As a Nile tributary fed the area, a dam could have created a temporary lake, potentially linking the river to a “Dry Moat” around the Djoser site, helping move materials and serving the hydraulic needs.
“The ancient architects likely raised the stones from the pyramid center in a volcano fashion using the sediment-free water from the Dry Moat’s south section,” the authors write.
In one section of the moat, the team found that a monumental linear rock-cut structure consisting of successive, deep-trench compartments combines the technical requirement of a water treatment facility—and a design still often seen in modern-day water treatment plants—by including a settling basin, retention basin, and purification system.
“Together, the Gisr el-Mudir and the Dry Moat’s inner south section work as a unified hydraulics system that improves water quality and regulates flow for practical purposes and human needs,” the authors write. The team believes the water available in the area was sufficient to meet the needs of the project.
In the last year, Saru Jayaraman has been asked to tip baristas in Berkeley. She’s been asked to tip a florist in New York City. And, at the airport, she’s been asked to tip by a self-serve checkout kiosk manning a concession stand, no human employees in sight.
“Who exactly am I tipping?” she asks.
It’s exhausting, but she sees the upside.
For decades, Jayaraman has advocated for fair wages for restaurant employees. And tipping fatigue is helping to garner a groundswell of support for her cause.
For the last two years, we’ve been talking about tip fatigue. There are reams of data to back up what feels like an onslaught of asks: a Bankrate survey found 2 in 3 Americans feel negatively about tipping. Seven out of 10 Americans think tipping is expected in more places than ever, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of Americans believe businesses are swapping out employee salaries for tips, passing responsibility for workers’ wages onto the customer.
It’s exactly that problem that Jayaraman is fighting against. In 43 states, there’s an exemption called the subminimum wage that means if your employees make over the federal minimum wage in tips, you can pay them less because the tips will make up the difference.
“It’s a disease that comes from corporate greed,” she says. “These corporations are trying to fool all of us into thinking it’s okay for them not to pay people.”
Wage wars
Jayaraman spent her childhood in India, swathed by the smells of her great-grandfather’s restaurant. When she was a teen, her parents immigrated to the U.S., and she eventually attended Yale Law School.
She’s never worked in a restaurant, but when 73 employees of the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center were killed on September 11, she was asked to help start a relief fund and center for displaced workers and the victims’ families.
Over time, that effort evolved into One Fair Wage, a national organization run by Jayaraman that advocates for the elimination of a subminimum wage.
It started a fight that would come to define her life. “It very much has become my life passion,” she says.
Current tipping culture is offering her an unexpected assist, raising awareness for how opaque tipping can be.
For one, there’s no way to tell if employers are using tips to offset their employees’ wages. And two, there’s no way to tell if the money you’re paying when you hit “20%” on the screen is making its way to employees at all.
And in tandem with post-pandemic economic recovery, and a proliferation of companies trying to get in on the subminimum wage, One Fair Wage is scoring some wins.
They’re on the ballot this year in Massachusetts, Arizona, and Michigan, and Washington D.C. and Chicago last year passed ordinances requiring restaurants to follow the minimum wage regardless of tips on top. (Square reports 60% of restaurants in Chicago are already doing this, despite a five-year phase-in grace period.)
“The Chicago restaurant industry has not tanked,” she says. “Business is booming.”
Why we tip
Tipping began with the best of intentions. Back in the Middle Ages, it was a way for feudal lords in Europe to show their appreciation for their vassals and serfs.
Wealthy American tourists, traveling to Europe on steamer ships, brought it back with them in the 1850s. After slavery was abolished in 1865, employers used tips as a way to justify paying no wages to newly freed slaves who found work as servers, barbers, and porters.
In 1938 when the U.S. set the first nationwide minimum wage, the exemption for tipped workers was codified into law. Employers didn’t have to pay their workers the same as everyone else if they earned tips. There’s still a federal subminimum wage today in 43 states. It’s $2.13 an hour.
Americans have hated tipping for almost as long as they’ve practiced it. In 1899, the New York Times called it the “vilest of imported vices.” William Scott, in The Itching Palm, called it “a moral disease.”
They still do:
35% of Americans think tipping culture is out of control, according to a 2024 Bankrate survey
25% of U.S. customers will actually tip less when presented with suggested tip amounts on a touch screen
Research from Cornell University indicates people tip not from generosity but to avoid feeling guilty or ashamed of contravening a social norm
29% of Americans see tipping as an obligation, according to Pew, rather than a choice (21%)
So why has tipping been so polarizing? In part, because it draws on our basest — and most inhumane — instincts. Some research shows quality of service doesn’t determine a tip — inherent bias does. White servers make more than servers of color and younger servers make more than older ones.
“Living on the largesse of customers also means living on the biases of customers,” Jayaraman says.
Despite all that, research from servers themselves shows that they’ll pick voluntarily tipping every time.
Cortney Norris, an assistant professor of hospitality at Oklahoma State University, says the idea of controlling one’s own destiny every day is a powerful one.
When she interviewed servers for her research, many said they’d forgo even the automatic gratuity on large parties, opting instead to gamble for the possibility of more.
“They feel they have autonomy over their income: I can do a really great job, pull out the charm, and I can make a lot more money than whatever it is they’ll pay me an hour.”
It leaves Norris wondering, what can we implement that’s fair?
“It’s the only industry where the customer supplements employee wages,” she says.
Boiling point
For years, restaurants have experimented with no-tip policies, largely without success. In 2015, Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack owner Danny Meyer announced he’d get rid of tipping at all his restaurants. Losing staff and facing down the aftershocks of the pandemic, he walked those policies back five years later.
Jayaraman argues eliminating tipping at a few restaurants, even influential ones, isn’t enough because it creates an uneven playing field. Her solution to a system that’s been broken for 200 years? Change the law.
Jayaraman’s views are controversial. The National Restaurant Association, the trade organization that lobbies for the $551B restaurant industry, has worked tirelessly to keep the subminimum wage as is.
“We have our work cut out for us,” NRA president Michelle Korsmo told Bloomberg in May. “The important thing for us is to get out early and say that this business model for the restaurants that employ it, it actually allows for them to keep prices on the menus lower and provide a really well-paying job.”
The NRA has 40k+ members from 500k of the ~750k restaurants across the country.
(A New York Times investigation last year found the group, which represents owners and operators, was using unwitting workers’ own money to lobby for keeping their own wages down.)
Each side flings data back and forth. The association argues raising wages will mean raising prices, which will deter restaurant-goers and ultimately lead to fewer tips and lower earnings.
Jayaraman says in California, one of the seven states that pays all workers against the same minimum, that hasn’t happened.
The NRA says since Washington D.C. adopted a higher minimum wage, full-service restaurants have cut 2.8k+ jobs.
For her part, Jayaraman calls the group “the other NRA.”
Will we ever agree? Probably not.
“We’re starting to ask ourselves more questions as consumers about where this is going and why,” Norris says.
“Tipping fatigue is the start of this journey to change.”
But in the meantime… how much do we tip?
Early this week, Diane Gottsman sat at home in San Antonio, Texas, with her poodle Marty and her maltipoo Wilson, watching a technician setting up her new computer.
It took hours to get the machine up and running properly. He struggled with a finicky wifi connection, and kept Marty and Wilson company when someone else dropped by and Gottsman had to answer the door.
When he finished, Gottsman handed him a $20 bill.
“When we do something, it should feel good to us,” she says. “Did I have to give him anything? No. Would I have felt bad if I didn’t? No. It was a form of gratitude.”
Gottsman is a national etiquette expert and the founder of The Protocol School of Texas, and she suffers from tip fatigue just like anyone else. But she has no qualms about hitting “no tip” when the screen spins toward her and the prompts offer their gentle nudge.
Despite the proliferation of asks, Gottsman says, it’s important to remember that tipping is discretionary.
Whether it’s coming from a coffee shop regular or a feudal lord, at its best it’s an opportunity to say thank you for your service.
There is, Gottsman says, another reason behind years of tip fatigue. We’re using more services more often.
“Years ago, we didn’t take our pets to the groomer, we took them outside with the hose,” she says.
When a client asked angrily whether he had to tip each of the four times he frequented his local coffee shop in a day, Gottsman gently suggested he invest in a Keurig.
Before Thanksgiving 2023, Thomas Crooks' online life was fairly routine for a 20-year-old. He'd scroll through social media, listen to music on Spotify, visit news sites and peruse Reddit.
But a plan for mass violence was brewing, and in order for it to succeed, Crooks had to compartmentalize his life. It was something he was already comfortable doing from a childhood in which he let few people get close.
Friends knew little about his home and tight-knit family. They were rarely invited over to the Crooks home to play or, as they got older, hang out. In late 2023, he pivoted to keeping a new set of secrets -- building homemade improvised explosive devices in his bedroom and planning an assassination, while pursuing a career in engineering.
On July 13, 2024, Crooks would take aim at a rally for President Trump in the small town of Butler, Pennsylvania, firing from a rooftop eight shots that came within inches of dramatically altering the course of American history. He left no manifesto, no explanation for why he tried to kill the former and future president. In the year since the shooting, investigators and those who knew him have been trying to piece together what led him to climb that roof in Butler, with frustratingly few answers.
This CBS News investigation provides the most comprehensive portrait yet published of the insular young student. It draws from interviews with more than two dozen friends, professors, law enforcement officials and others, as well as open records requests to half a dozen agencies and a review of thousands of documents.
The young man who died in the assassination attempt crafted a furtive double life in the months leading up to the attack, unbeknownst to the people closest to him.
he "nice" boy who "kept to himself"
Crooks was born in 2003 and lived his entire life in a suburban home purchased by his parents before he and his older sister came along, tucked along a leafy street in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. Growing up, Crooks loved Legos, his cat, building and creating model airplanes, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers and cooking with family.
His parents were both social workers, and took pride in their work and family. In 2008, his father, Matthew, filled out an online registry for a family coat of arms, writing that he hoped to pass down to his young children a sense of family unity and instill in them the virtues of generosity, sincerity, hope, joy and service to the country.
Crooks and his mother, who is visually impaired, often prepared dinner together. During holidays, everyone helped out. "For Thanksgiving, me and my dad will cook turkey and mashed potatoes together. At Christmas, me and my mom will bake dozens of cookies together, and on New Year's Eve, my mom and I will bake the pork and the sauerkraut together," Crooks said in a video he recorded for a college class.
In kindergarten, Crooks met Tristan Radcliffe. They ate lunch together frequently throughout most of elementary, middle and high school, and kept in touch after they both enrolled at the same college.
"I've known Tom, like, all of my life," Radcliffe said. "He was cool. You know, he was kind of just Tom to me."
There were many things about Crooks that stayed familiar and consistent through the years: his tight jeans, his tidy shirts and his bespectacled smooth face beneath neatly parted hair. But there was plenty, Radcliffe said, that he never knew about his friend, even though they saw each other nearly every day.
He was never invited to Crooks' home, and Crooks rarely talked about his family. Radcliffe said Crooks was a "nice" boy who "kept to himself." Crooks' neighbors said the family didn't interact much with folks on their block, and the children rarely had visitors.
Radcliffe wasn't bothered by it. To him, Crooks seemed like he had more on his mind.
"He always seemed like he focused on his work more, you know, like he came off smart," Radcliffe said.
Crooks' grades and test scores supported that. Crooks scored 1530 on his SAT exam, putting him in the 99th percentile nationally. He enrolled in the Community College of Allegheny County in 2022, and told an adviser he was saving money before pursuing a four-year engineering program.
As the tight quarters and crowded classrooms of high school gave way to the sprawl and remote coursework of commuter college, Crooks' social connections largely evaporated, allowing his secret life to go largely unnoticed.
A star student walking two paths
A diligent college student, Crooks routinely contacted professors to make sure his grades remained high.
His teachers were impressed with his work, often lauding his effort and dedication. One emailed to compliment Crooks for "getting such an early start" on a project. Another wrote to thank him for his contributions to class all semester.
Crooks stood out among his peers, according to former engineering professor Patricia Thompson.
"I thought he was a star student. He had his head on straight and he was on a path [to] success," Thompson said.
She recalled showing other professors in her department one of Crooks' projects which exceeded her expectations. He designed and 3D-printed a unique chessboard, engineered for players with visual impairments.
For many others contacted by CBS News, Crooks did not leave a lasting impression. Several former students said they did not realize he had been in the same class. Even some who had emailed and worked on projects with Crooks said they couldn't recall interacting with him.
For one assignment, Crooks was called upon to record a speech in front of an audience of five adults. He emailed his professor seeking to be excused from that requirement.
"I currently only live with my Mom and Dad. There are no other adults in my house and I have one sister who lives nearby that could potentially come over to be part of this audience," Crooks wrote. "I do not have access to any other adults."
In the summer of 2023, Crooks bought a rifle from his dad for $500 and signed up for a membership at a local shooting range. He became a regular at Clairton Sportsmen's Club, about nine miles from his home, signing in to use the rifle range more than 40 times in the last 11 months of his life, records show. Around that time, records obtained by CBS News show he started using encryption services that masked some of his internet use, mixing those with more typical visits to sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.
His habits started to rapidly shift that fall. To his professors, he still appeared focused on getting straight A's and preparing to apply to the engineering programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University. But his online activity suggests his attention was elsewhere. He began to more frequently use an encrypted email service called Mailfence and a virtual private network called Mullvad. Both would shield his online life from anyone who might pry.
An analysis by CBS News of Crooks' internet routines shows he developed an increasing interest in news, explosives and ammo, and secrecy. The records include nearly a year of Crooks' activity on his college's wireless internet network. They show hundreds of visits to websites ranging from his academic email account and discussion boards, to his bank, news sites, gaming platforms, social media, weapons blogs and Steelers fan sites.
Logs of Crooks' on-campus internet activity, which CBS News obtained through a public records request, indicate that in the last months of his life, he became increasingly rigid about secrecy, shrouding his activities through encrypted services.
Two particular days -- Dec. 6, 2023, and Jan. 24, 2024 -- stand out. On Dec. 6, 2023, Crooks checked various news sites and the White House website's archives from Mr. Trump's first administration, followed by visits to firearms websites. The following month, on Jan. 24, Crooks showed the single largest number of internet requests in the logs, at 1,364. He started to consistently use the VPN after that day.
On some days, he left little trace of his activity, choosing instead to first turn on Mullvad. Virtual private networks, known as VPNs, route a user's web traffic through encrypted tunnels, hiding their activity from prying eyes, such as a college's web tracking security software. While Crooks was using Mullvad, his browsing history was effectively sealed off.
Mullvad CEO Jan Jonsson told CBS News that the VPN service used by Crooks was designed to "provide anonymity, censorship circumvention and surveillance protection."
"This sadly also means that if somebody abuses the service for nefarious purposes, we cannot block that individual user and unfortunately can't provide any additional information about them," Jonsson said.
In December 2023, a month before Crooks' final semester started, his life began to split in two. He was focused on his college applications, and at the same time fixated on mass violence. One day, he emailed himself to review his personal statement for his application; on another, he emailed customer service to complain that the explosive fuel he ordered had not yet shipped. Investigators later concluded he would have been able to engineer bombs in his bedroom without his parents knowing.
Around this time, some in Crooks' life did notice erratic behavior.
Crooks' father told investigators that, in retrospect, he spotted signs of his son's declining mental health, according to excerpts of a Pennsylvania State Police report. Those excerpts were first made public in December by a House of Representatives task force on the attempted assassination.
"Crooks' father explained that within the last year he observed several instances of his son dancing in his bedroom throughout the night," a Pennsylvania investigator wrote. "He would occasionally see Crooks talking to himself with his hands moving, which he expressed as uncommon and had become more prevalent after he had finished his last semester."
Radcliffe noticed similar changes when he bumped into Crooks on campus.
"He would always move his legs around a lot, and he would kind of talk pretty fast," Radcliffe recalled.
Crooks graduated from community college in May 2024. On June 14, less than a month before the assassination attempt, he sent one last email from his community college account.
It was to the registrar. Crooks wanted to know when he'd receive his diploma.
Searching for the opening he needed
In the month before July 13, Crooks turned his attention to the presidential campaign, researching the candidates online more than 60 times, including searches on July 5 for "DNC convention" and "when is the RNC in 2024," according to the FBI. He visited the Butler Farm Show grounds in person on July 7, and searched for "butler farm show photos," according to investigators. He also researched AGR International, a company with buildings adjacent to the grounds.
The day before the attack, July 12, Crooks made one last visit to the rifle range.
On the morning of the attack, Crooks drove to the Butler Farm Show grounds, and stayed for a little more than an hour before driving home.
Investigators said that at about 1:30 p.m., Crooks got his rifle from the house. It was the gun he had purchased from his dad the year before. Crooks' father told investigators he believed his son was going to the range.
In addition to the rifle, Crooks put a drone and two homemade bombs in his trunk, along with remote transmitters capable of detonating them from more than 1,000 feet away. He left a partially assembled explosive device in his bedroom.
Crooks went to a store near his home and bought ammunition, according to investigators, and then returned to the Butler Farm Show grounds. As Trump supporters lined up to enter the highly publicized rally in the height of the presidential campaign, Crooks took a drone out of his car and flew it over the rally site for nearly 12 minutes, beginning at 3:51 p.m., potentially using the drone's cameras to view the podium where Mr. Trump would soon speak.
Three local police officers first noticed Crooks around 5 p.m. One officer, a sniper, said Crooks "stood out." Crooks was alone, the officers noted, and he wasn't paying attention to the campaign festivities.
"He was walking around the grassy area between AGR and the secondary fence line, kept looking up, looking at the building. One point that is what raised my suspicion is he was looking directly at the window I was positioned at," the sniper told investigators. The AGR building was approximately 150 yards from where Mr. Trump was speaking.
Local officers began keeping tabs on Crooks. One saw him using a rangefinder and snapped photos of him. At 5:39 p.m., one officer suggested notifying the Secret Service about the suspicious young man.
A Pennsylvania State Police sergeant later told investigators that he alerted Secret Service personnel to the suspicious person. Congressional task force investigators said there's no indication that message reached Secret Service personnel on the stage or in charge of security.
Just after 6 p.m., an officer saw Crooks near a picnic table, and watched him grab a backpack before he "took off running," one local officer told investigators. Officers began to leave their posts to look for Crooks, who had seemingly disappeared between two buildings.
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said in an interview with CBS News that poor planning and communication gave Crooks the opportunity he had been seeking.
"Local police weren't apprised of the Secret Service's security plan until the afternoon of the shooting," Goldinger said. "It was never specified to local law enforcement that they were assigned to secure the area where Crooks was able to climb onto the building."
Secret Service deputy director Matt Quinn said the agency tasked with protecting Mr. Trump bears responsibility for what happened next.
"I would ask Americans to understand that it was an organizational failure within the Secret Service, and we are laser focused on making sure that it never happens again," Quinn said.
At 6:02 p.m., Mr. Trump took the stage. Crooks ascended to the rooftop three minutes later. Panicked bystanders began calling the police.
At 6:11 p.m., moments before Crooks opened fire, a Butler detective decided to pursue Crooks on the roof. He later described to congressional investigators the look on Crooks' face as the detective began to pull himself up.
"I see Crooks facing downrange towards the stage, but his eyes are back at me as I'm coming up. And I would say, like, his facial expression was surprised. His eyes were very big, like, what are you doing up here?" the local detective said.
Crooks turned his gun toward the detective, who fell backwards and immediately radioed that the suspect was armed. The message never made it to the security detail for Mr. Trump.
A few seconds later, Crooks fired eight shots, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore, injuring Mr. Trump and two others. A Secret Service sniper returned fire, hitting Crooks in the face and killing him.
"The shooter is down. He's down hard," a local police officer radioed. Mr. Trump was swarmed by Secret Service agents trying to remove him from the stage.
"Wait," Mr. Trump said, before he stood, raised his fist and yelled to the crowd, "Fight! Fight! Fight!"
Unanswered questions remain
Law enforcement soon descended on Bethel Park, tracing Crooks via the gun he purchased from his father. By 10:45 p.m., covert surveillance of the Crooks home was in place, but just 11 minutes later, his father called 911. He said he was worried because his son had not returned after saying much earlier in the day he was going to the local gun club. When agents knocked on his door, Matthew Crooks asked, "Is it true?" He said someone from CNN had called and said his son "shot Trump."
Investigators questioned him and Crooks' mother. They fanned out across Bethel Park, Butler and Pittsburgh, interviewing Radcliffe and Thompson -- seemingly anyone who had ever interacted with Crooks. They checked with the local library, and learned Crooks didn't have a library card. A grand jury subpoenaed his online activity and coursework from college, the same material later reviewed by CBS News.
Investigators visited the gun club, the store where Crooks bought ammo and one where he purchased a ladder that day. They scoured videos from before, during and after the campaign rally, as well as local and federal law enforcement communications.
Details emerged about Crooks' planning. But nearly a year later, many unanswered questions about his motivation remain. Crooks left no known written explanation. His political leanings remain unclear. Was the Butler rally just a convenient option for a young man planning mass violence, or was he committed to shooting Mr. Trump? Did he have a plan for his bombs? Did he understand he was on a suicide mission?
Already isolated before the shooting, Crooks' parents are now rarely seen outside during daylight hours. A neighbor said there are only a few clues to suggest the family even still resides at the home. Another neighbor described the Crooks family's presence on their street as "ghostlike."
Crooks' parents did not respond to interview requests. Their attorney declined to speak on their behalf.
A postal employee said the mailbox is always empty when he delivers each day's mail. He and the neighbors speculated that the couple leave their home under the cover of darkness. Their house, which now has multiple security cameras, is blurred on Google Maps, an option homeowners concerned about privacy can request from the search giant.
Mary Crooks submitted her resignation from the job she's held for nearly three decades in December. The resignation letter, first reported by The New York Times, alludes to the shooting as the reason for her departure.
"Certain circumstances have left me with no other option than to vacate a position I have been proud to hold for the past 27 years," she wrote. She and her husband let their social work licenses expire in February.
thers in Crooks' life are still haunted by their connection to him.
Thompson compiled Crooks' discussion responses and projects from her class into one document. She studied it, looking for answers.
"Why would this kid who had his whole future, you know, laid out for him, [a] positive future -- why would he do something like this?" she asked.
Radcliffe recalls seeing Crooks' image from Butler blanketed across the airwaves the day of the shooting. The kempt scrawny kid replaced by a man whose wispy hair ran to his shoulders, a faint goatee over a t-shirt for a gun enthusiast's YouTube channel.
"I'm still in disbelief about the whole thing to be honest. Because it really just doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever," Radcliffe said.