Crypto appeared on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s radar not long after her presidential campaign fizzled out in 2019. The more she learned, she said, the more frustrated she became that lawmakers seemed content to leave it alone. In 2025, Gillibrand was the lead Democratic sponsor of the GENIUS Act, which laid down federal rules for stablecoins. This year, she played much the same role for the CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s great unfinished legislative project, pressing fellow Democrats for their votes. The sweeping bill would have moved much of digital-asset trading out of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s securities-law regime and into a new framework overseen by the chronically underfunded and much weaker Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “In my opinion, the CLARITY Act was a financial crisis waiting to happen,” says Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank of New York official. When FTX collapsed in 2022, the damage remained largely contained within crypto because digital assets still had relatively few connections to banks and traditional markets. CLARITY, Reiners argued, would have helped erase that separation: “Certainly, if CLARITY had passed, it would have supercharged the integration of crypto into the financial system.” Gillibrand now finds herself in a crypto-related ethical morass. Her 22-year-old son, Theo, is the head of a start-up backed in part by crypto investors — including one who donates to his mother — that is seeking regulatory approval to bring a crypto-native trading product into conventional financial markets. Her campaign coffers are stuffed with crypto money, while former aides have rotated between her office and the industry. Nate Weisberg reports on one of crypto’s most important Democratic allies and what happens if Gillibrand succeeds in making crypto easier to use and more deeply embedded in ordinary finance:

To the AI community, an Anthropic employee believing that the technology their company is developing might end the world is not exactly news — Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who believed OpenAI, if left unchecked, would do just that. But an Anthropic employee publicly quitting in protest, as 27-year-old Jacob Coxon did last month, is. Afterward, a debate broke out: If you’re a lab employee who sees these risks, what should you do? Is it best to leave in protest? Or is it better to agitate from the inside, close to the seat of power? And how would the choice affect your friendships and community? And Coxon wasn’t alone. He was joining a small set of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind who, over the years, chose to walk away. We, in collaboration, with Asterisk Magazine, brought together eight of them. They left for different reasons. A few wanted to call attention to the risks of accelerating AI progress. Others objected to their employers’ partnership with the Department of Defense or felt frustrated as what had once been an idealistic nonprofit turned into a corporate juggernaut. And some simply felt that their work — whether it was on safety or widespread job loss — would be more valuable on the outside. Read some of Coxon’s conversation with Daniel Kokotajlo, who left OpenAI in 2024, and more interviews:

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon have killed over 4,000 and displaced over 1 million people. Under this pressure, any health-care system would struggle. But in Lebanon, as in Gaza, medical workers are themselves targets, too. Since March 2, the World Health Organization has documented attacks that killed 135 health-care workers and injured 405 more. “The paramedics Israel is targeting in Lebanon are volunteers — jeopardizing their lives not to earn a living, but to help in their spare time,” writes Mary Turfah. “Many of them have day jobs or are enrolled in university. They work on rotation." The risks they’re taking are clear. And they are offered the option to leave. Very few of them do. As a doctor with family members who have been wounded in Lebanon by Israel’s bombs, Turfah wanted to visit the paramedics doing this vital work, and ask them why they risk their lives. “We started on this path to help people,” a 24-year-old medic named Hussein told her. “As much as we’re under threat, if I leave and someone else leaves and someone else leaves, who is going to rescue people?” Read Turfah’s full dispatch from Lebanon, where she spends time with the medics risking their lives to save the people around them:

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: