Maybe we need new emotions. The human experience has changed a lot lately: Creativity can be outsourced to AI, culture lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Perhaps the words we use to describe basic, primordial feelings—joy, sadness, anger, and those other names for Inside Out characters—no longer suffice. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to describe mind states, like brain rot, or Eusexua.

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Becoming a public-health expert means learning how to envision humanity’s worst-case scenarios for infectious disease. For decades, though, no one in the U.S. has had to consider the full danger of some of history’s most devastating pathogens. Widespread vaccination has eliminated several diseases—among them, measles, polio, and rubella—from the country, and helped keep more than a dozen others under control.

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When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded.

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build.

A second Trump administration was sure to come down hard on whichever Latin American country first defied it—few in the region expected otherwise. But Colombia was perhaps the United States’ most steadfast friend in South America, and the speed with which a 100-year relationship seemed to crumble last night was frightening.
Or perhaps exhilarating, if you were a Chinese diplomat in Latin America observing the presidential spat.
First, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, refused to allow U.S.