Table of contents for April 24, 2026 in Newsweek

■ Economists like clean definitions, and for decades, the shorthand for recession has been simple: two consecutive quarters of negative growth. The trouble is timing; by the moment GDP delivers that verdict, households and businesses are usually already feeling the slowdown. That delay helps explain the growing fascination with early warning signals, and with the Vicious Cycle Index. Developed by Moody’s Analytics, it is designed to flag downturns before they appear in headline growth data, focusing less on output and more on stress inside the labor market. Rather than relying on the unemployment rate alone, the VCI also captures declines in labor force participation, which can mask weakening conditions as discouraged workers exit the job hunt. The VCI has now flashed red through the first three months of the year,…

“I feel like someone just told me how a magic trick works.” ■ First they came for Banksy. Then they came for Satoshi. Pop star Sia, consider this your warning. This spring, two of the greatest mysteries of the modern age were seemingly cracked open within weeks of each other. Reuters claimed graffiti artist Banksy was Robin Gunningham, a man from Bristol, England, living under an assumed name so ordinary—David Jones—that it feels like a joke at journalism’s expense. The New York Times, deploying AI-assisted linguistic analysis across 130,000 posts, pointed to British cryptographer Adam Back as Satoshi Nakamoto, the man behind Bitcoin. Both subjects responded with the same devastating weapon: silence. And the public? Largely unimpressed. “I feel like someone just told me how a magic trick works,” one…

THE PHONE RINGS AND FOR A MOMENT EVERY-thing is normal. The voice on the other end is warm and familiar. They remember how you take your coffee, recall a joke you shared years ago, ask how your week has been. It sounds, in every way that matters, like your loved one. Your dead loved one. This is not science fiction. It is Friday afternoon and Justin Harrison is on the phone with his mother. Harrison is the founder of You, Only Virtual, a California-based startup that builds AI replicas—“versonas”—of the deceased, trained on their texts, voice recordings and digital traces. When his mother, Melodi, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020, Harrison built one of her. He only calls it occasionally now; he says it has helped him grieve. “I…

Q _ You asked the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct? Shortly after their equivocal answers, two of them stepped down. Do you think that the institutions have changed since then? A _ My concern is the antisemitism that we’ve seen at our most elite higher education institutions; it goes deep, and it’s not just the leaders. Yes, you can change the presidents, but there’s a lot more work to do with higher education reform. Were you surprised to hear that University of Pennsylvania’s former president, Liz McGill, was just named dean of Georgetown Law? There seems to be a revolving door in higher education, and that is part of the problem. But this is…

■ In his latest track “Father,” Kanye West raps, “I used to be on Worldstar/Now I’m making Newsweek.” And he wasn’t wrong. Earlier this month, the U.K. banned him from entering the country to headline London’s Wireless Festival in July over past antisemitic remarks. The Home Office ruled his presence “not conducive to the public good” and the three-day festival was canceled. This came after West, also known as Ye, completed two nights at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium—his first major U.S. shows in nearly five years—billed as a comeback following a January Wall Street Journal apology in which he attributed years of inflammatory rhetoric to brain injury and mental health issues. Was Britain too harsh? Prime Minister Keir Starmer said West “should never have been invited” and vowed to “protect the…

■ China didn’t invent loneliness, but it is industrializing it. Nearly 20 percent of the population now lives alone —a figure heading toward 30 percent by the decade’s end—spawning a booming market in AI companions, both physical robots and app-based digital partners. In her totemic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt thought loneliness was more than sad. It was, she argued, the deepest precondition for the loss of freedom: not ideology, not propaganda, but the experience of being severed from the human world entirely. The Familiar Story The left blames the market for commodifying connection with love-bots. The right blames the collapse of community for making the market for these AI partners necessary. Both are describing the same phenomenon from opposite ends. Neither has much to say about where…

➽ “This was the Houston Astrodome, roofed wonder of the sports world, where the wants of 48,000 patrons had been anticipated and lavishly indulged,” said Newsweek. “There’s only one thing wrong…a built-in glare so dazzling that you can’t play an afternoon game of ball in it. Outfielders can’t even see the ball, much less catch it.… How in the modern world can it be possible to spend $31.6 million on a baseball park that ensconces the spectators in luxury and reduces the game itself to farce?” Today, as the Athletics plan a climate-controlled Las Vegas ballpark, architects are designing not just for spectacle but for sightlines, light control and the game itself—lessons learned the hard way inside Houston’s dazzling, impossible dome.…

AMERICA BUILT THE AI REVOLUTION. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, NVIDIA —names that define the technology—were born in the United States, nurtured by its universities, bankrolled by its venture capital and celebrated by its politicians. The pace of this growth, however, has not been matched by its policymakers. After years of fractured debate, the White House’s AI master plan arrived in March...at a meager four pages. The “National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” commits the administration to “winning” the AI race and takes aim at the more than 1,000 state-level AI laws now on the books, pushing instead for a “national standard—not 50 discordant ones.” It is a proposal, not a law. Turning it into one could take years. Across the Pacific, it’s a different story. China has its own AI…

“SOMETIMES I BRING SWEETS AND PUT A box in the middle of the street, and the children just stand there and look. They don’t immediately grab them because they don’t believe it’s real,” says Pavlo Kulushik, who drives into some of the most dangerous parts of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region with food and supplies. More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, civilians continue bringing food, medicine and other necessities to families cut off by the war, traveling along roads scarred by shelling and through villages where homes have been burned or abandoned. Kulushik, 27, is one of the shrinking number of volunteers still willing to travel to these high-risk areas. He shared with Newsweek how the situation has changed over the years and what volunteering on the front…

AMERICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A LAND OF GRIFTERS. INSIDE DEALERS, pay-to-play schemers, elected officials in both parties whose investment portfolios had an uncanny habit of outperforming the market. What’s new about that? Let’s start with the brazenness. The almost performative shamelessness of it. As though the old norms didn’t just erode but were suddenly bulldozed away, like the remnants of a wing of the White House: visible for all to see, if not publicly debate. Welcome to the golden era of corruption. Bring cash. Or, better yet, well-timed futures contracts. At 6:49 a.m. ET on Monday, March 23, someone—we’ll probably never know who—placed roughly $500 million in oil and equities futures trades, betting that oil prices were about to fall and the broader market would rally, per market data reviewed…

You’ve built a successful business out of just being yourself. Did you ever expect that? No, because I am an actor, I studied to be an actor. I never thought that any part of myself, other than playing characters, would be what I’m known for today. Your book, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, is now a New York Times bestseller. What made you finally decide to write it? I didn’t want to write it at first when they came to me. I’d already written a couple of books. When they came around this time I said, “No, I’m good.” And they said, “We think you have a lot more to say.” I said, “If I’m going to do this, I have to tell my side of the…

LOS ANGELES PRIMATE LEGACY Primatologist Biruté Galdikas may not have gained the same public profile as her “trimates” Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey, but her impact on science was just as profound. The Canadian, who died in Los Angeles last month aged 79, spent more than five decades studying orangutans in Borneo, transforming understanding of the apes’ social lives and vulnerability. Orangutan Foundation International said Galdikas’ death “marks the end of an era of legendary conservation icons.” UKRAINE SECOND FLIGHT Hundreds of bats rescued from war-damaged areas of Ukraine have been released back into the wild as conservationists marked the arrival of spring. The mammals had been rehabilitated after losing hibernation sites to shelling and urban destruction. Ukraine has 28 bat species, all of which are legally protected. Wider efforts…

■ The script used to be simple: go to college, get a degree, get a job, buy a house. In that order. But a quiet generational revolt is rewriting the sequence—and this time, parents are leading it. According to a Northwestern Mutual survey, 74 percent of people with children living at home would consider—or have already started—financially planning to help their kids buy a home. More striking, 29 percent said that helping them onto the property ladder matters more to them than helping children pay for college, while 55 percent said it was equally important. The diploma, it turns out, is losing its spot at the top of the family balance sheet. This isn’t sentiment. It’s arithmetic. Tuition costs have roughly doubled in 30 years. Student debt has become a…

WHAT CONSTITUTES “MAGA” TODAY HAS become increasingly difficult to define—especially now that it controls the very institutions it once fought against. “MAGA is me,” President Donald Trump said in a January NBC interview. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.” However, for a movement facing Trump’s term limit in under three years, that definition may no longer be enough. If the people who make up MAGA are supposed to be living in a “Golden Age of America,” as Trump likes to say, maybe the acronym’s meaning needs an update to Made America Great Again. But is the movement, focused as much on retribution and grievances as it is, even capable of rejoicing in its own triumphs? The Conservative Political Action Conference has long been the…

“IT DOESN’T MEAN BECAUSE YOU HAVE A PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT I’M GOING TO MISS OUT; IT DOESN’T MEAN BECAUSE YOU GET MORE, I GET LESS.” EMMA GREDE HAS BUILT COMPANIES in industries defined by exclusivity, yet one of the biggest constraints she sees facing women isn’t access itself. Rather, it’s the scarcity mindset—the belief that money, knowledge and opportunity are limited, and that one person’s success must come at another’s expense. The British entrepreneur and retail powerhouse, well-known for her businesses with the Kardashian sisters, tells Newsweek that one of the most important shifts women can make is abandoning the idea that someone else’s access somehow leaves less for everyone else, and to stop treating knowledge like something to be hoarded. “It doesn’t mean because you have a piece…