The 2025 slate of Oscar nominees recognizes many writers, directors and actors whose scripts and performances dont necessarily reflect their own cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, both white, co-wrote Sing Sing, a story about rehabilitation through art in a maximum security prison where the characters are almost entirely people of color.
Meg LeFauve has now earned her second nomination for penning a script that gives voice the gamut of emotions surging through a young girl in Inside Out 2. Shes in her 50s.
The director of Conclave, Edward Berger, its writer, Peter Straughan, and its lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, are all self-proclaimed lapsed Catholics. Yet they brought to life a political thriller set in the Vatican.
The Brutalist was written entirely in English, but much of the films dialogue is in Hungarian, with two leads who are not native Hungarian speakers.
Most screenwriters endeavor to craft characters outside their own backgrounds and experiences. But concerns about authentic language representation and cultural accuracy persist, and accusations of cultural appropriation and lazy research are commonplace.
Emilia Pérez, for example, has been heavily criticized not only for unrealistic portrayals of gender transition but also for inauthentic depictions of Mexican culture and accents.
The films director, Jacques Audiard, has even claimed his lack of knowledge of Spanish has been an artistic benefit. He says it gives him a quality of detachment to emphasize emotion rather than focus too strongly on the accent, the punctuation.
His lack of interest in precise depictions of language and culture contrasts sharply with our recent research, which shows ample interest from practicing screenwriters in accurately representing dialects and accents in scripts.
Wanting to get it right
We surveyed over 50 current members of the Writers Guild of America, and they broadly told us that sensitivity to linguistic representation has increased since the 2010s.
Several commented that theres been more commitment to hiring writers who represent the characters voices and backgrounds. Theres also more freedom to include diverse characters and worlds but a commensurate emphasis on authenticity and a higher bar for what that means, as one writer explained.
Authenticity was consistently cited in our survey as a principal consideration when writing dialogue. Other concerns included scripts intelligibility, historical accuracy and believability.
In most cases, screenwriters aspire to write dialogue that sounds authentic. But its not easy and often requires collaboration to get it right. Writers noted how theyll adjust their dialogue based on production needs, such as budgetary concerns, input from actors and directors, and feedback from dialect coaches and historical consultants.
For example, spec scripts or noncommissioned film scripts are written before any casting or production decisions are made. The dialogue in these scripts will likely change once actors and other creatives are attached to the project.
Recipes for capturing linguistic nuance
In our study, we also reviewed screenwriting manuals published as far back as 1946.
Manuals didnt begin to raise explicit ethical concerns, such as the use of inaccurate linguistic stereotypes in dialogue, until the 1980s. For example, many older films, such as Gone with the Wind, often used phonetic spelling in their scripts, with features such as g-dropping quittin for quitting to mark only the speech of lower-class or racially marginalized characters, despite the fact that all people, regardless of background, have accents.
Writing in heavy phonetics is generally discouraged in modern screenwriting.
There are practical reasons for this. Scripts are read before theyre seen and therefore must first appeal to the not so general audience of executives who buy them. As one writer explained, My script is targeted towards them.
Take Trainspotting. Irvine Welshs 1993 novel about a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh was written with heavy phonetics to capture the characters Scottish dialect: ah wouldnae git tae watch it. But the screenplay uses lines without phonetics, such as, I wouldnt have bothered.
In this respect, theres a notable difference in novels and their respective adaptations. One surveyed writer avoids dialectal markers and will default to standard American English unless there is a reason not to.
That doesnt mean the actors in Trainspotting should speak in an American English accent. Instead, screenwriters might simply indicate the use of language and dialect when describing the scene in a script or, as one surveyed screenwriter explained, make a note in the parenthetical that Brynn speaks with a heavy West Virginia accent to flag the work that the actor, dialogue coach, and writer will need to do together.
This method is employed in The Brutalist. The film is partly in Hungarian, but writer and director Brady Corbet and his Norwegian co-writer, Mona Fastvold, wrote the Hungarian dialogue in standard English. They then used parentheticals to indicate any non-English delivery of dialogue. The films stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, worked with a dialect coach to hone their accents.
Anora, which tells the story of an eotic dancer in a whirlwind romance, features characters who speak Russian, Armenian and English with varying degrees of fluency. Even though the characters frequently switch between these languages, the entire script is in unbroken English. Code-switching is simply marked with Russian, Armenian or English in the script before a piece of dialogue.
But limiting oneself to standard U.S. English restricts diversity in the written dialogue itself. Some writers may want to use dialect or language to convey character authenticity on the page.
Our survey respondents described this as flavor the strategic use of dialectal words or phrases to create distinct voices, with limited phonetics. Jesse Eisenberg, in his Oscar-nominated script A Real Pain, lightly blends American English with occasional Yiddish words to great effect: landed in Galveston for some fakakta reason, or crazy reason.
AI chimes in
Attempts at authenticity can become muddied when AI gets involved.
When making The Brutalist, Corbet controversially used AI technology to refine the movies Hungarian dialogue.
Some questioned the films authenticity due to the use of AI, arguing that nothing can be authentic if its achieved artificially.
But the films creators, including editor and native Hungarian speaker Dávid Jancsó, defended this choice. They argued the technology actually enhanced the languages authenticity, particularly since Hungarians system of vowels and consonants is especially hard for nonnative speakers to capture accurately.
Whether writers use phonetics or standard language, and whether producers use AI or dialect coaches, questions of ethics and linguistic authenticity will remain. Its important to research language choices and dialogue, and to consult the diverse speakers portrayed in scripts.
These are among the many essential checks and balances that are becoming bigger parts of the filmmaking process.
Chris C. Palmer is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University.
Mitchell Olson is an associate professor of screen and TV writing at Kennesaw State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
We love our social media, and more frighteningly, we love getting medical information from social media. Almost 20% of Americans say they trust TikTok as much as doctors, even though 45% of the medical information on TikTok is false or misleading.
Now, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open, the problem goes deeper: Social media might be promoting the overuse of medical tests such as MRIs. In some circles, such tests have even become a luxury status symbol.
What the new study found
Researchers analyzed a cross-section of 982 posts from account holders with more than 194 million combined followers on Instagram and TikTok. They selected posts referring to five different tests, which have evidence of being overused and failing to improve health outcomes when used for people who dont need them.
The tests included:
full-body MRIs
early-cancer detection
egg reserve tests (which get used as a proxy for fertility)
gut microbiome tests
low-testosterone blood tests
The researchers found that 87% of the posts mentioned the benefits of the tests, 84% had a promotional tone, and 51% encouraged the audience to go get tested.
Only 15% mentioned the harms of using the tests, while about 5% minimized the harms involved. A mere 6% of the posts cited evidence, while 34% cited personal anecdotes.
Overall, 68% of posters had a financial interest in the test they were promoting.
[Most] posts were promotional, were from account holders with some form of financial interest in promoting the test, and mentioned test benefits. . . . These posts have the potential to mislead the public to getting tested despite the lack of evidence to support these tests and the potential for harms related to overdiagnosis or overuse, the researchers wrote.
The Globeville, Elyria-Swansea and Commerce City communities in metro Denver are choked by air pollution from nearby highways, an oil refinery and a Superfund site.
While these neighborhoods have long suffered from air pollution, theyre not the only ones in Colorado.
Now, Colorado is taking a major step to protect people from air pollutants that cause cancer or other major health problems, called air toxics. For the first time, the state is developing its own state-level air toxic health standards.
In January 2025 as priority chemicals: benzene, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium compounds and hydrogen sulfide.
The state is in the process of setting health-based standards that will limit the amount of each chemical allowed in the air. Importantly, the standards will be designed to protect people exposed to the chemicals long term, such as those living near emission sources. Exposure to even low amounts of some chemicals, such as benzene, may lead to cancer.
As a researcher studying chemical exposure and health, I measure and evaluate the impact of air pollution on peoples well-being.
Colorados new regulations will draw on expert knowledge and community input to protect peoples health.
Communities know what needs regulation
In your own community, is there a highway that runs near your house or a factory with a bad odor? Maybe a gas station right around the corner? You likely already know many of the places that release air pollution near you.
When state or local regulators work with community members to find out what air pollution sources communities are worried about, the partnership can lead to a system that better serves the public and reduces injustice.
For example, partnerships between community advocates, scientists and regulators in heavily polluted and marginalized neighborhoods in New York and Boston have had big benefits. These partnerships resulted in both better scientific knowledge about how air pollution is connected to asthma and the placement of air monitors in neighborhoods impacted the most.
In Colorado, the process to choose the five priority air toxics included consulting with multiple stakeholders. A technical working group provided input on which five chemicals should be prioritized from the larger list of 477 toxic air contaminants.
The working group includes academics, members of nongovernmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund local government and regulated industries, such as the American Petroleum Institute.
There were also opportunities for community participation during public meetings.
At public hearings, community groups like GreenLatinos argued that air toxics because it can cause cancer.
Additionally, formaldehyde is emitted in some Colorado communities that are predominantly people of color, according to advocates for those communities. These communities are already disproportionately impacted by high rates of respiratory disease and cancer.
Other members of the community also weighed in.
One of my patients is a 16-year-old boy who tried to get a summer job working outside, but had to quit because air pollution made his asthma so bad that he could barely breathe, wrote Logan Harper, a Denver-area family physician and advocate for Healthy Air and Water Colorado.
How is air quality protected?
At the national level, the Clean Air Act requires that six common air pollutants, such as ozone and carbon monoxide, are kept below specific levels. The act also regulates 188 hazardous air pollutants.
Individual states are free to develop their own regulations, and several, including California and Minnesota, already have. States can set standards that are more health-protective than those in place nationally.
Four of the five chemicals prioritized by Colorado are regulated federally. The fifth chemical, hydrogen sulfide, is not included on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys hazardous air pollutant list, but Colorado has decided to regulate it as an air toxic.
State-level regulation is important because states can focus on air toxics specific to their state to make sure that the communities most exposed to air pollution are protected. One way to do this is to place air pollution monitors in the communities experiencing the worst air pollution.
For example, Colorado is placing six new air quality monitors in locations around the state to measure concentrations of the five priority air toxics. It will also use an existing monitor in Grand Junction to measure air toxics. Two of the new monitors, located in Commerce City and La Salle, began operating in January 2024. The remainder will start monitoring the air by July 2025.
When Colorado chose the sites, it prioritized communities that are overly impacted by social and environmental hazards. To do this, officials used indexes like the Colorado EnviroScreen, which combines information about pollution, health and economic factors to identify communities that are overly burdened by hazards.
The Commerce City monitor is located in Adams City, a neighborhood that has some of the worst pollution in the state. The site has air toxics emissions that are worse than 95% of communities in Colorado.
Air toxics and health
The five air toxics that Colorado selected all have negative impacts on health. Four are known to cause cancer.
Benzene, perhaps the most well known because of its ability to cause blood cancer, is one. But it also has a number of other health impacts, including dampening the ability of the immune system and impacting the reproductive system by decreasing sperm count. Benzene is in combustion-powered vehicle exhaust and is emitted during oil and gas production and refinement.
Ethylene oxide can cause cancer and irritates the nervous and respiratory systems. Symptoms of long-term exposure can include headaches, sore throat, shortness of breath and others. Ethylene oxide is used to sterilize medical equipment, and as of 2024, it was used by four facilities in Colorado.
Formaldehyde is also a cancer-causing agent, and exposure is associated with asthma in children. This air toxic is used in the manufacture of a number of products like household cleaners and building materials. It is also emitted by oil and gas sources, including during fracking.
Hexavalent chromium compounds can cause several types of cancer, as well as skin and lung diseases such as asthma and rhinitis. A major source of hexavalent chromium is coal-fired power plants, of which Colorado currently has six in operation, though these plants are scheduled to close in the next five years. Other sources of hexavalent chromium include chemical and other manufacturing.
Finally, long-term exposure to hydrogen sulfide can cause low blood pressure, headaches and a range of other symptoms, and has been associated with neurological impacts such as psychological disorders. Some sources of hydrogen sulfide include oil refineries and wastewater treatment plants.
Jenni Shearston is an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Eighty-four Indonesians freed from scam centers in Myanmar were set to return home Friday as the repatriation of thousands of such workers after a crackdown strains regional resources.The Indonesians were among more than 7,000 people being held in the Myanmar border town Myawaddy following a crackdown on the scam centers by Thailand, Myanmar, and China. Two buses carrying the Indonesians arrived Thursday in the Thai border city of Mae Sot, where the passengers had health checks and their identities were verified.Hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been lured to work in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos to commit global scams through false romances, bogus investment pitches, and illegal gambling schemes. Many of the workers were recruited under false pretenses, only to find themselves trapped in virtual slavery.The Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry said the 84 Indonesians, which included 69 men and 15 women, were healthy and will fly to Jakarta on three commercial flights Friday. The ministry had said last week as many as 270 Indonesians were stranded in Myanmar after leaving the scam centers, but it was not clear why only 84 were being repatriated.Judha Nugraha, director of Indonesian citizen protection at the ministry, has said that approximately 6,800 Indonesians have fallen victim to illegal job scams, ending up in online gambling operations or bogus investment schemes in Myanmar and several other countries over the past few years.The crackdown on the scam centers in Myanmar followed a meeting in Beijing in early February between Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Chinese leader Xi Jinping where she said Thailand would crack down on the scam networks.Thailand has cut off electricity, internet, and gas supplies to several areas in Myanmar hosting scam centers along the border.More than 600 Chinese nationals were repatriated last week. Earlier, some 260 people from 20 countries, including Ethiopia, Brazil, and the Philippines, crossed from Myanmar into Thai custody. Many have returned home but more than 100 remain in Thailand awaiting repatriation, Thai officials said.The size and scale of the repatriation effort is straining Thai government resources and leading to delays for those waiting to go home. Officials from Thailand, Myanmar, and China were expected to meet Friday to address the logistics of the crackdown as concerns grow about a possible humanitarian crisis along the border.
Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
Jintamas Saksornchai, Associated Press
At a press conference in the Oval Office earlier this month, Elon Muska billionaire who is not, at least formally, the President of the United Stateswas asked how the Department of Government Efficiency manages potential conflicts of interest to ensure “accountability and transparency.” In response, Musk suggested that simply opening a browser tab would assuage the reporters concerns. “We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website,” he said. “So all of our actions are maximally transparent.”
One problem with this assertion: At the time, the DOGE.gov domain was more or less empty, an oversight that someone in Musks orbit had to hastily rectify. Now, nested beneath tabs on a white-on-black homepage is a “wall of receipts” tallying DOGEs alleged cost savings as it attempts to hollow out the federal government. (These “receipts” reportedly included 10 figures worth of math errors shortly after the wall debuted.) Other tabs provide information about the salaries of the approximately 2.3 million federal employees Musk is trying to fire (data borrowed from the Office of Personnel Management) and agency-by-agency information about federal spending (figures taken from publicly available Treasury Department reports). There is no better distillation of Musks brand of “efficiency” than tasking underlings with building sloppy, dark-mode versions of free government resources that already exist.
The “Regulations” tab, however, reveals the true nature of Musks project, which is not to deliver tax relief to working people, but to free wealthy corporations from pesky regulatory oversight. The page abandons dollars-and-cents metrics for something different: an Unconstitutionality Index that divides the number of regulations enacted by federal agencies by the number of statutes passed by Congress each year. Users can scroll down to see how many regulations these agencies”unelected bureaucrats,” as DOGE calls themhave published, and even how many hundreds of thousands of words those regulations run.
The clear implication is that the Code of Federal Regulations has become far too complicatedperhaps too complicated to be constitutionaland that only the fully optimized business brains at DOGE have the vision, courage, and managerial savvy necessary to wrangle this unruly mess.
DOGEs war on the very concept of regulation demonstrates just how little “innovation” Musk and his henchteenagers are bringing to the putative task of streamlining the federal governments workflow. Corporate interests, eager to shed even modest limitations on their ability to pay out executive bonuses and shareholder dividends, have spent decades arguing that regulations are unauthorized exercises of legislative power. At DOGE, Musk is simply repackaging these bog-standard, free-enterprise talking points with the trappings of Silicon Valley technobabble. In his position as this countrys de facto copresident, the more regulations he manages to scuttle, the more he and his cronies companies stand to profit.
To be clear, the regulations that Musk is demonizing here are simply the rules by which the executive branch, at Congresss direction, implements and enforces the laws that Congress passes. For example, when lawmakers passed the Consumer Product Safety Act, a 1972 law that aims to “protect consumers against unreasonable risk of injury from hazardous products,” they tasked a federal agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, with spelling out the nitty-gritty rules for making different kinds of products safe. The logic here is pretty intuitive: Setting standards for, say, the maximum amount of force necessary to open a refrigerator door from the inside is technical, complex work best left to mechanical engineers and child safety researchers, not, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In a sprawling country that is home to 340 million people, this system of delegation from professional politicians to subject-matter experts is what keeps air breathable, water potable, and kitchen appliances from becoming death traps for small children playing hide-and-seek. But it necessarily imposes costs on industry: Compliance with rules entails spending at least some money and forgoing at least some potential profit. As a result, the notion that regulation is evil and foolish has become an article of faith among pro-business groups and the Republican politicians they support, who argue that the proliferation of unnecessary, duplicative, burdensome rules stifles innovation and stunts economic growth.
Opponents often cite the increase in volume of rules over time as proof of their inherent illegitimacy, a sentiment the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once summarized using a memorably unsettling metaphor. “I dont want to abolish government,” he said. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The “Unconstitutionality Index” on DOGEs website is a fixture of the anti-regulation movement, created by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that recently celebrated “40 years of eliminating excessive regulation and unleashing human potential.” (Several CEI staffers are listed as contributors to Project 2025, the policy “blueprint” drafted by conservative groups in anticipation of President Donald Trumps reelection.) Organizations like CEI exist to raise the alarm about the dangers of bureaucracy; in congressional testimony last year, a CEI fellow told lawmakers that despite its best efforts, “unchecked regulation” is still “impeding economic efficiency and undermining progress.”
The Trump-Musk administration wasted little time delivering relief on this front: In an executive order last week, the White House announced plans to facilitate the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” The order instructs agency heads, “in coordination with” DOGE, to identify regulations to put on the chopping block, including those that “significantly and unjustifiably imped[e] technological innovation” or “impose undue burdens on small business and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship.” Suddenly, people who have spent decades framing regulations as an existential threat to their beloved free market have a White House willing to listen and eager to act.
Regulation has traditionally lagged behind the pace of the tech industry in particular, which is part of the reason Big Tech has remained so profitable despite doing all kinds of harm that rarely results in meaningful consequences. Maintaining this status quo is worth billions to the leaders of these companies, especially as they search out new sectors of the economy to upend in move-fast-break-things fashion.
By gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk has deftly greased the skids for X Money, a peer-to-peer payments service that Musk plans to roll out on his social media platform this year. As DOGE fires hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX engineers are quietly taking their places, and Musk is pushing for the agency to cancel a multibillion-dollar contract with Verizon and award it to his company instead. As sales stagnate, Tesla has taken to hyping its long-awaited driverless taxi business as the future of the company, a bet that becomes a little less risky with every regulatory hurdle that Musk manages to knock over between now and launch.
By enlisting Musk to go full Founder Mode on a dated federal bureaucracy, DOGE was pitched as the means of fulfilling every politicians favorite promise: to run government more like a business. “Were going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook,” Musk told rallygoers in October to rapturous applause. But there is nothing new about the DOGE playbook, other than the involvement of a celebrity tech executive who is amused by memecoin backronyms. It is a decades-long ideological project to empower people like Musk to make themselves even wealthier at the expense of everyone else.
Throughout February, a measles outbreak has been growing in West Texas. The potentially deadly disease, once eliminated from the United States in terms of its continuous transmission, has been making a comeback in recent years as vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine movements rise. Unfortunately, this outbreak has now had deadly consequences.
Earlier this week, it was reported that one unvaccinated Texas child has died as a result of the outbreak. The unfortunate event, along with the continued spread of the disease, has left many asking whether they need a measles vaccine booster shot. Heres what you need to know.
About the measles vaccine
The good news is that there is an effective vaccine against measles, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That vaccine is generally packaged with vaccines for other diseases, giving you protection from a variety of illnesses.
A measles vaccine is part of an MMR shot, which stands for measles, mumps, and rubella. The measles vaccine is also part of the MMRV shot, which stands for measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (chickenpox). The vaccines help protect against all three or four diseases, respectively.
To receive maximum protection from measles, youll need two doses of either the MMR shot or the MMRV shot. The dosing schedule depends on the age of the person.
In children, the CDC says the recommended schedule for the MMR vaccine is to have the first dose between 1215 months of age and the second dose between 46 years of age.
If children are getting the MMRV shot instead, the CDC says the first dose should also be given between 1215 months of age and the second dose between 46 years of age. However, the agency notes that the second dose of MMRV can also be given 3 months after 1st dose.
As for older children, adolescents, and adults, the CDC says those who do not have evidence of immunity need 1 or 2 doses of MMR vaccine.
Should I get a measles booster shot if Ive already been fully vaccinated?
Its important to note that before making any medical decisions, you should always check with a doctor who is familiar with your unique medical history.
As noted by CBS, most people who have had two doses of the recommended vaccine will be protected as much as possible throughout their lives.
However, one group of people would likely benefit from another course of the vaccine. This group includes those who were first vaccinated against measles before 1968 and do not know which vaccine they received.
As the CDC explains, this is because, before 1968, some people received measles vaccines that contained an inactive (killed) strain of the virus, which was ineffective. Modern measles vaccines use a live strain of the virus to produce maximum protection in the body.
People who were vaccinated prior to 1968 with either inactivated (killed) measles vaccine or measles vaccine of unknown type should be revaccinated with at least one dose of live attenuated measles vaccine, the CDC states. This recommendation is intended to protect those who may have received killed measles vaccine, which was available in 19631967 and was not effective
Is the measles vaccine safe and effective?
Health authorities including the CDC say the measles vaccine is both safe and effective. When it comes to the efficacy rate of the MMR vaccine, the numbers are very good.
The CDC says one dose of the MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles. The efficacy increases to 97% after the second shot.
Furthermore, the health authorities say the MMR vaccine is safe for those who are breastfeeding and that there is no connection between autism and the vaccine.
There is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, the CDC notes. Scientists in the United States and other countries have carefully studied the MMR vaccine. None has found a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.”
While getting the vaccine does not fully protect you from measles, vaccinated individuals who do contract the disease generally experience milder symptoms and are also less likely to spread measles to others, according to the agency.
In a February 27 memo addressing the Texas outbreak that has killed one so far, the CDC says, Vaccination remains the best defense against measles infection.”
Even as paid family leave has stalled at the federal level, a growing number of states have taken up the issue in recent years. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have now passed legislation that makes paid leave mandatory, while a handful of other states have also introduced voluntary systems that leave it to private insurance companies and employers to opt into the benefit.
Despite those legislative wins, however, a new report by the nonprofit Moms First and McKinsey indicates that many eligible workers in states with mandatory paid leave are not taking advantage of their access to the benefit. The analysis focused on the paid-leave programs in New York, New Jersey, and Californiawhich were among the first states to offer the benefitand also surveyed over 2,000 parents in those states.
Who is eligible for paid leave
The vast majority of working parents were eligible for paid leave, in spite of the variation in state-specific requirements for wages or time worked. But the report found that only 40% of eligible parents actually used their paid-leave benefits in 2022, which were worth an estimated $6,000 to $10,000 per person. The families that did take advantage of those policies reported being nearly twice as satisfied with paid leave than they were with other state benefits; at the same time, parents were less likely to take paid leave when compared to similar government offerings like unemployment benefits.
Even as more states have adopted laws mandating paid leave, most workers across the country still lack access to it: As of 2024, only 31% of full-time employees in the U.S. had paid leave. There are a number of reasons why utilization of paid leave may be lower than expected, given how critical the benefit can be for families. First is a lack of awareness, which might explain why parents are more likely to use unemployment benefits; of the respondents who did not use paid leave, 60% said they did not know it was available.
Why workers don’t take paid leave
Other parents were aware of the benefit but didn’t feel comfortable using it, either due to concerns over job security or career progression. “I would have taken [paid family leave] if I could afford it and wouldnt lose my job,” one New York-based mother told Moms First. Low-wage workers were especially likely to worry about whether they could afford to take leaveeven in New York, where the paid leave law explicitly promises job protection. In some cases, there were concerns over wage replacement, since paid leave laws typically only cover part of an employee’s salary (anywhere from 60% to 90%, depending on how much they earn).
But the report also indicates that the very disparities that make paid leave so important play a role in why many parents are not fully utilizing the benefit. Since women are more likely to shoulder a greater share of childcare responsibilities, there are fewer women who are eligible for paid leave. In some cases, they may not meet the wage or time worked criteria mandated by state law. (Overall labor participation is also higher for men than it is for women.) In many cases, the cost of childcare can lead one parent to drop out of the workforce and stay home with their childrena burden that disproportionately falls on women.
On the other hand, while more men are eligible for paid leave benefits, they are less inclined to use themhalf as likely, in fact. (The unused parental leave captured by the report came to a total of six million weeks, with men accounting for four million.) A number of male respondents actually noted that they didnt think it was necessary to take leave if their partner was already doing so. Race, too, seems to play a role in how widely paid leave is utilized: On the whole, Latino and Black parents are less likely to be eligible for the benefit than white and Asian parents. When they do have access to it, however, Black parents are the most likely to use paid leave.
Administrative challenges
Another significant hurdle is the administrative burden of applying for paid leave. While many parents who used paid leave expressed satisfaction with the benefit after the fact, almost 60% who opted out said they were frustrated by the application process. Even when paid leave is provided by the state, the vast majority of parents relied on their employer to help guide them through a complicated process, which is likely easier to navigate at large companies that are better positioned to assist their workers.
In the absence of a federal lawwhich lost traction after the pandemicadvocates for paid leave have pushed for legislation at the state level, leading many progressive states to adopt mandatory policies over the past decade. But the Moms First report makes clear that without increasing utilization of paid leave, countless parents are not reaping the benefits, from offsetting the steep cost of childcare to improving health outcomes for mothers and children.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has dropped several enforcement actions against companies like Capital One and Rocket Homes, just weeks under new leadership and turmoil at the agency caused by orders from Trump administration.In notices of voluntary dismissals filed on Thursday, the CFPB dropped lawsuits it had brought against Capital One, Rocket Homes, Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, and others.Those suits were all filed under the agency’s previous director, Rohit Chopra, who President Donald Trump fired just weeks ago. The CPFB has since plunged into turmoilwith the White House later ordering it to halt nearly all its work. The administration also closed the agency’s headquarters and moved to fire scores of its workers.Trump has defended his administration’s broadside against the CFPBincluding recent claims about the agency being “set up to destroy people.” But supporters of the agency stress that it provides crucial oversight and protects consumers from being vulnerable to predatory business practices.Trump nominated former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation board member Jonathan McKernan to be agency’s new director, who faced a Senate committee hearing Thursday.The CFPB is tasked with creating rules and taking enforcement actions to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices by a wide range of businesses and other institutions. Since its founding, the bureau has said that it’s obtained nearly $20 billion in financial relief for U.S. consumersin the form of canceled debts, compensation, and reduced loans.Legal action from the CFPB often involves banks, mortgage servicers, credit card companies, student loan processors, payday lenders, money transfer providers, credit reporting agencies, and debt collectors.Last month, prior to Trump taking office, the CFPB sued Capital One for allegedly misleading consumers about its offerings for high-interest savings accountswith the bureau accusing the banking giant of “cheating” customers out of more than $2 billion in lost interest payments as a result. Meanwhile, its January 6 suit against Vanderbilt Mortgage accused the lender of pushing consumers into loans they couldn’t afford to buy manufactured homes. And the CFPB’s December complaint against Rocket Homes alleged a “kickback scheme” from the company to illegally steer prospective borrowers to Rocket Mortgage, which operates under the same parent company, and away from other competitors.But all those cases will now be discontinued with Thursday’s actions. Court filings in the Rocket Homes case notes that the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dismisses this action, with prejudice, against all Defendants.” Dismissing a case with prejudice means that it cannot be refiled. Similar wording was used in the dismissals of the CFPB’s Capital One and Vanderbilt Mortgage suits.In a statement Thursday, Rocket Homes welcomed its dismissal and said “it is good to see the truth come to light.” The company called the suit “an empty claim brought forth by former CFPB director Chopra for the sole purpose of seeing his name in headlines during the final days in public office.”Capital One welcomed the CFPB’s Thursday decision, too, noting that it had “strongly disputed” the action filed against the company. The Associated Press also reached out to Vanderbilt Mortgage for comment.The CPFB isn’t the only federal agency to signal a pullback on previous enforcement action under the new administration. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, has either closed or paused legal action against several cryptocurrency platforms in recent weeks, as the regulator tries to present itself as more crypto-friendly under Trump.Earlier this month, Binance and the SEC filed a joint motion to pause its high-profile lawsuit against the crypto exchange. And both Coinbase and Robinhood have said that cases against them have also been dismissed or closed, although the SEC declined to immediately comment further.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Associated Press
Democratic lawmakers demanded answers from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Thursday as concerns about who has access to America’s most sensitive information continue to dog Trump administration efforts to reshape the federal government.The systems accessed by Musk’s DOGE staffers include billions of data points about citizens and businesses, as well as potentially sensitive information about government payments and programs that, if assembled correctly, could reveal secrets about national security and intelligence operations to Russia, China, or another adversary.Musk and the White House so far have not convinced their critics and have offered few details about their cybersecurity measures as their tech-centered approach to shrinking government roils Washington.In a letter sent to Musk and the White House, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., demanded to know the details about security precautions and whether lapses in security may have exposed sensitive information. The letter asserts that reckless actions by DOGE present a “grave” threat to national security by exposing secrets about America’s defense and intelligence agencies.“DOGE employees do not appear to fully understand much of the information to which they have been given unfettered access and given the cavalier and incompetent ways that they have handled this data, these individuals represent a clear threat to national security and the nation’s economy,” wrote Warren and Connolly, who were joined on the letter by several other Democratic lawmakers.Musk and President Donald Trump have defended DOGE’s work, saying it’s led to billions of dollars in savings. In response to the concerns raised in Thursday’s letter, a spokesman for the administration said it’s vital that DOGE workers have access to federal databases.“It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Thursday. “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on.”If that information is mishandled, or security precautions fail, the information could be exposed to foreign intelligence services or common hackers, prompting significant worry among some national security and cyber experts.Groups worried about DOGE have challenged its actions in court, with a federal judge in Manhattan temporarily restricting DOGE from accessing some Treasury Department information until its members can be certified in cybersecurity. Another recent ruling blocked DOGE’s access to certain records at other agencies, too.Federal laws and regulations were written to tightly control the management of sensitive federal dataeven if it has little value to scammers or foreign spies. Certain officials only have access to certain data, and access to information from the same data set may be split among different people as an additional security measure.Classified data has always been subject to more stringent rulesdesigned to minimize the risk that it could fall into the wrong hands. Access to such information is tightly controlled, said Jeffrey Vagle, a law professor and cybersecurity expert at Georgia State University who has in the past worked on classified federal technology projects.It’s unknown what steps DOGE has taken to ensure security, Vagle said, which called worrying by itself. If they store data on flash drives, access it on a personal device or comingle systems, they could be creating huge security vulnerabilities, he said.“A foreign agent wouldn’t even have to try that hard,” Vagle said.Information in federal systems includes Treasury payments that could be used to figure out the details of intelligence programs or health and personnel records that could reveal the identities of agents or the responsibilities of clandestine officers.An adversary like China could use artificial intelligence to analyze these kernels of data to create a picture of covert U.S. activities, said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.“In the intelligence business, information is the coin of the realm,” Warner said. “These bits of information could unravel the very sources and methods our nation relies on to keep Americans safe. And it could literally get people killed.”In their letter, lawmakers cited concerns that DOGE staffers used unauthorized servers and unknown AI programs to analyze and store the data. They noted that despite assurances that the DOGE website will not reveal information from intelligence agencies, material from the National Reconnaissance Office was easily found.The Democrats also said they worried DOGE was cutting spending without understanding its purpose, pointing to a recent incident in which the government tried to bring back workers it had fired who worked on nuclear weapon programs.Earlier this week, more than 20 DOGE staffers resigned, saying they would not use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.” In a joint resignation letter, they warned that many of those brought in by Musk are political ideologues who lack the necessary skills or experience for the job.U.S. intelligence agencies have, so far, escaped the same scrutiny or level of cuts that DOGE has leveled at other agencies. Employees at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were told they didn’t need to comply with Musk’s demands for federal employees to list their recent accomplishments or risk termination.Some of the concerns raised about DOGE may be motivated by politics and concerns about its rapid pace, said Zach Edwards, senior threat researcher at Silent Push, a cybersecurity firm that worked on President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.But Edwards said DOGE’s tech-centered approach could lead to mistakes that would have been caught in the old system.“They’re moving fast and breaking things,” Edwards said, quoting the popular tech catchphrase. “With government, if you break things, it can take a long time to fix it.”
David Klepper, Associated Press
Last Energy, a nuclear upstart backed by an Elon Musk-linked venture capital fund, says it plans to construct 30 microreactors on a site in Texas to supply electricity to data centers across the state. The initiative, which it says could provide about 600 megawatts of electricity, would be the company’s largest project to date and help it develop a commercial pipeline in the U.S.
Set on a 200-acre site Last Energy has obtained in Haskell County, in northwest Texas, the project still faces likely years of regulatory and public scrutiny. The Washington, D.C.-based company hasnt yet disclosed customers or the details of its financing, or announced a timeline for the effort. But once construction starts, the firm says it could deliver the plants within 24 months, using its modular, factory-built design.
Texas is Americas undisputed energy leader, but skyrocketing population growth and data center development is forcing policymakers, customers, and energy providers to embrace new technologies, said Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy. Nuclear energy is “the most effective way to meet Texas demand, but our solutionplug-and-play microreactors, designed for scalability and siting flexibilityis the best way to meet it quickly.”
The plans are a response to overwhelming demand from data center developers in the state and elsewhere. U.S. tech giants are increasingly turning to nuclear to meet the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence and the data center boom, investing billions in traditional nuclear projects and an array of new ones, including fusion. Of Last Energys existing commercial agreements, which entail deploying over 80 microreactors across Europe, half are set to serve data centers.
By powering data centers on-site, behind the meter, in addition to linking to the electrical utility, the plants could help sidestep the restraints and price volatility of a grid thats already stretched thin. They could also be a proving ground for an unprecedented legal gambit: in December, the company joined Texas and Utah in filing suit against the U.S. government over its nuclear regulations. The outcome of that case could speed up this and future projects in the US.
Until now, Last Energy’s focus has been on signing up customers in Europe, where lighter regulations and an aversion to Russian natural gas have helped accelerate a push toward nuclear power. The firm says it has development agreements for more than 50 nuclear reactor facilities in Europe, including a $400 million project at a former coal power plant in Wales that could come online in 2027. In December, the firm received a tentative offer of $103.7 million in debt financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to build the first of that project’s four small modular reactors, or SMRs. The Texas plant would be the company’s first in the U.S.
In Texas, surging energy demand has prompted officials to step up efforts to court the nuclear industry. Already the nation’s leader in fossil fuel production, as well as renewables and battery storage, the Lone Star State currently gets only 10% of its electricity form nuclear power. But a November study by the public utility commission, done at the behest of Gov. Greg Abbott, urged the state to deploy “a coordinated nuclear power strategy to enhance energy security and grid reliability, and identified 61 sites suitable for small modular reactors.
Texas is the energy capital of America, and we are working to be No. 1 in advanced nuclear power, said Abbott in a statement. Last Energys microreactor project in Haskell County will help fulfill the states growing data center demand. Texas must become a national leader in advanced nuclear energy. By working together with industry leaders like Last Energy, we will usher in a nuclear power renaissance in the United States.
With 30 of the company’s shipping-container-sized microreactors each producing 20 megawatts, the site would generate about 600 megawatts, enough electricity for about 150,000 homes on the hottest summer days. A Last Energy spokesperson said the company had initiated the process of grid connection with the state utility, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), and begun pre-application engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to obtain an Early Site Permit for the site. The first reactor is estimated to cost approximately $100 million, the company says, with costs expected to drop as it iterates.
Last has already built two full-scale prototypes in Texas with local manufacturing partners, and says it has secured its first full core load of low-enriched uranium fuel, scheduled to arrive in September 2026. In January it became a founding member of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, which aims to make Texas the nuclear capital of the world. The company says its also exploring projects in Utah.
With the deal, Last Energy joins a number of companies that have announced plans to fuel data centers voracious electricity demands with nuclear power. Earlier last year, Amazon said it would build a hyperscale data center next to a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In September, Microsoft said it would pay Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island that was closed in 2019. And in October, Google and SMR builder Kairos Power inked a deal for 500 megawatts of nuclear power, with the first reactor set to be delivered in 2030.
Meta is also going nuclear. In December, the Facebook parent said it was asking developers to submit proposals to deliver 1 gigawatt to 4 gigawatts of reactor capacity, starting in the early 2030s, as it looks for a reliable energy source for its data centers.
In January, Meta also signed four purchase agreements with Spanish renewable energy developer Zelestra to build four solar projects that can help power Metas data centers in the region, currently located in Temple and Fort Worth. The projects, with a combined capacity of 595 megawatts, will deliver electricity to the ERCOT grid, which will then power the data centers.
In Texas, even four years after a deadly, storm-linked blackout, the state utility has continued to struggle to add enough capacity and flexibility to meet a surge in demand. That already includes over 340 dta centers which consume nearly 8 GW of power and make up about 9% of all Texas electricity demand; those in the Dallas area alone are expected to need an additional 43 gigawatts of power in the coming years. As with much of the state’s energy consumption, much of the electricity in those data centers is needed just to keep all those hot chips and servers cool.
Smaller, ‘less scary’ reactors
Last is one of a new class of nuclear firms building small-modular reactors (SMR) in ways intended to lower the cost and speed of constructing new plants while enhancing simplicity and safety features. Traditional nuclear plants are hulking installations, providing 1,000 megawatts or more but often beset by cost overruns and construction delays that can stretch to many years. The U.S.s newest fission reactors, commissioned in 2023 and 2024 in Georgia, were seven years late and more than $17 billion over budget.
SMR startups like Last are attempting to use mass production techniques to bring down costs and speed construction, with reactors that are small enough to be transported by truck. Last tries to advance the technology of the conventional pressurized water reactor with a modular design, factory-built parts, and tools and expertise borrowed from the oil-and-gas industry. The company also hopes to overcome nuclear skepticism with a number of passive safety features, an underground containment system, and a futuristic design meant to look less scary.
By using the pre-arranged price contracts typical to renewable projects, Last Energy also seeks to reduce financial risk and unlock private financing, avoiding the uncertainties that come with typical utility-scale nuclear plants. Under its model, the company owns and operates the reactors and sells the power to the customer under long-term contracts.
“Technology from the nuclear industry, the business model from renewables, and the constructability from oil and gasthat was the founding idea behind Last Energy, Kugelmass told Fast Company in 2023.
The company has raised a total of $64 million since its 2019 founding, including a $40 million Series B round last year led by the Austin-based VC Gigafund. The heavyweight fund was the first investor in Elon Musks SpaceX and its founder, Luke Nosek, now sits on both companies boards.
Venture capital has shown interest in other microreactor designs, too. Last year, Aalo Atomics raised $27 million to scale up a 85-kilowatt design from a Department of Energy program, and Deep Fission, which aims to bury microreactors a mile underground, raised $4 million led by 8VC, a venture firm founded by Joe Lonsdale.
Why Last Energy, Texas, and Utah sued the U.S.
Before Texas, Last Energy had avoided the NRC’s pre-application process, which the agency says can help expedite NRC review. But the pre-application process itself can last years, ahead of a formal application process that can take two years or longer.
More than a dozen next-gen nuclear developers have begun pre-application work for NRC review, but since December 2023, the agency has approved only three reactors: two low-power, grid-connected test reactor facilities in Tennessee, built by Kairos, and a 1-megawatt research microreactor built by Natura Resources at Abilene Christian University. The regulator approved its first SMR design in January 2023, from NuScale Power, but determined further review was needed, a process it expects to complete in June.
Last Energy is also working on accelerating its regulatory journey. In December. it joined the states of Utah and Texas in suing the NRC over the 69-year-old rule that underpins nuclear reactor licensing in the U.S. The rule, the suit argues, exceeds the agencys statutory authority and creates an unreasonable burden for microreactor developers.
The plaintiffs asked the Eastern District of Texas court to exempt Last Energys 20-megawatt reactor design and research reactors located in the plaintiff states from the agencys definition of nuclear utilization facilities. That designation subjects all U.S. commercial and research reactors to strict regulatory scrutiny. The suit asks the court to order NRC to develop a more flexible definition for use in future licensing.
Until now, Last Energy has focused on projects abroad, in order to access alternative regulatory frameworks that incorporate a de minimis standard for nuclear power permitting, the company said in its lawsuit.
Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, told Utility Dive last month that, regardless of its merits, the lawsuit underscores the need for continued discussion around proportional regulatory requirements . . . that align with the hazards of the reactor and correspond to a safety case.
