2026-11-13 06:55:00
The first big sex scandal of the AI era has taken down Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and longtime CEO. Nvidia’s board of directors announced his resignation on Thursday morning and named CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO.
Huang has been making headlines all week after news broke Friday that he had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singaporean tech firm Megaspeed who the US government alleges was also a Chinese spy.
The revelation Wednesday of a second extramarital affair, this time with an Nvidia employee reporting to Huang directly, added to the pressure, and another affair came to light later on Thursday after Huang’s ouster.
The scandal has implications far beyond one company: Huang’s central role in the AI race can’t be overstated. It was his vision of an AI future that led him to pivot Nvidia from a small company making video game chips into the dominant player in making the chips that serve OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s computing needs.
Huang is close friends with President Donald Trump’s and a leading voice in resisting efforts to slow AI progress. And he has pushed for the US to take a less hawkish position toward China’s own AI goals, a stance now called into question by his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy. Among its other impacts, the news has revived efforts on Capitol Hill to further restrict chip exports to China.
To break down the national security implications of Huang’s departure, how the Trump administration is involved, and what it says about US AI industry writ large, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Garret De Vynck, a technology reporter at the Washington Post.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Nvidia has been called the central bank of AI, which is why it’s so important that we figure out what Jensen Huang may have disclosed to this alleged spy. How long has the president known about this, as far as we know?
As far as we know, the president has known about the fact that Jensen Huang was in a relationship with someone that the US government thought was a spy for about a year. This circulated within the administration, and the decision was made not to tell Jensen.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was automatically some kind of corrupt decision of President Trump protecting Jensen Huang. There’s all sorts of reasons why you might not want to tell someone they’re being spied on, the number one being that they might blow up the operation. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you suspect that the person themselves knows that they’re being spied on and is willingly sharing information and you need some more time to gather that. It’s unclear why the US government specifically chose not to pull in Jensen Huang.
It’s also a little bit unclear whether he knows he was being spied on, or whether maybe he was told through some kind of back channel. He has said that he did not know that she was a spy and he is admitting to the affair, to the infidelity. He’s admitting to essentially breaking Nvidia’s code of conduct by sleeping with one of its customers, but he is not admitting at all to knowing that she was a spy and definitely not admitting to sharing any information willfully.
It feels like this is the kind of thing that the government would investigate. There’s been reporting that the Commerce Department was involved with some kind of investigation, but that investigation came to an end and no one really knows why.
The context here is that the United States and China are in an AI race. Going back to the first Trump administration, there’s been pretty aggressive export controls saying, “We don’t want China to get our tech so that they can develop AI.” And the Biden administration continued that. He increased the export controls on China. China was complaining very loudly about this. They said, ‘We don’t care. We want to win AI and we need to slow you guys down.’
When Trump came in, he actually lifted his foot off the gas a little bit. They didn’t throw the gates open and say, “You can have whatever you want. All American companies can sell whatever they want to China.” But he said, “Some AI chips that are less powerful than the state of the art. We can send those to Chinese companies.“
The other thing that national security experts have pointed out is that the Trump administration could theoretically have been doing more to stop the smuggling of computer chips to China. And that’s where this story gets so important for national security.
Megaspeed is accused of essentially being a front for Chinese companies to get access to computer chips. Journalists have gone to Megaspeed’s office in Singapore where it’s based, and there were only a couple of people working there. It didn’t really seem like there was a lot going on. Nvidia has said all through this process over the last couple of years that, “No, we’ve checked it out, Megaspeed is a legitimate company and we’re not breaking the law when it comes to this.”
There are a lot of questions and what everyone is focused on finding out, both journalists and I would say congressional Democrats when they come into office in the new year is, is there something more going on here? Is there something where the Chinese either convinced Jensen Huang to sell more chips to them or Jensen Huang himself, who has been advocating for selling more chips to China, essentially did this himself?
“I think there’s this real question of: Do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond?”
He’s been pressuring the president, he’s been donating to him, he’s been glad-handing with the president and the president has been listening more to this corporate executive who is his friend and who donated him a bunch of money rather than listening to China hawks or national security experts who say we should be limiting what China is able to access.
That’s really where the locus of this investigation is going to be. It’s not so much that Jensen Huang had an affair. It’s more the fact that he himself is someone who has said we need to sell more computer chips to China and he was involved with an alleged Chinese spy, and he’s very close to the president and had influence on the president.
You mentioned the Democrats. Have they said anything? Are they going to call him in front of Congress for an investigation?
Going forward, there are two big things here. One of them is these investigations into Jensen Huang and this whole situation. The company is likely going to continue to investigate. Maybe more information will come out there. Jensen Huang has been called to speak later this month in Congress. And congressional Democrats have also said that when they come into power in January, they will be asking him.
The second big thing that comes out of this is, what does America do when it comes to China and AI? Now that one of the biggest advocates for being a bit more friendly towards China when it comes to selling them things that they need for AI is out of the room and completely discredited, I think that the China hawks, those who say we need to crack down more aggressively, we need to limit China’s access to AI computer chips, they’re really coming into ascendance here and they’re in the Republican Party, they’re in the Democratic Party, some of them, people like Marco Rubio, are even in the Cabinet.
I think there’s this real question of: Do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond? There’s all sorts of geopolitical things that could sort of spin out of this CEO affair.
I’m old enough to remember when a board tried to get rid of Sam Altman and then he was just back a week later. Elon Musk is already offering Jensen Huang a job. Is there a fair chance that he just goes somewhere that’s not that concerned about espionage affairs or getting with your VP of health or whatever it is? Is he just going to go work for China?
I don’t think he’s going to go work for China. This is definitely the wildest corporate story since Sam Altman was fired as CEO and brought back three or four days later. It’s a very different situation. That was a startup where you essentially have five or six investors who get to make the call about who the CEO is, and the employees at that company overwhelmingly wanted to bring Sam Altman back. I think they wanted more continuity of the company, but they also wanted to make sure that their company didn’t go under and go bankrupt and get disappeared, which was sort of on the table at that point in time.
Nvidia’s not going anywhere. Obviously employees have lost a lot of money in terms of the stock value already coming down due to the situation. So employees are probably shocked. They’re probably upset. Jensen Huang is broadly loved at Nvidia, and so I can definitely see that employees would be doing petitions, asking for him to return.
But this is a giant public company and the board makes a decision here. Jensen Huang was untruthful publicly and I think that also will make other public companies hesitant before rushing to bring him on as CEO.
As we’ve talked about many times in the show, half of our economy is staked on AI at this point. How concerned should we be that one of the most important people in this industry was so easily duped in this honeypot situation? Are these the people we should be trusting with the future of our society?
It’s a really good reminder that people are people. I think that we like to lionize individuals and say that they are the ones who are going to take us into the future and they are inventing the future and it’s so incredible. And I do think Jensen Huang gets a lot of credit for making sure that the companies kept up in AI, but at the end of the day, it was also a lucky break for them that the computer chips they were making just happened to work well for the math that is required by artificial intelligence.
I do think that this speaks to something that a lot of people across the country and maybe even the world really feel. They do not want to sign off the future to a dozen dudes in Silicon Valley and their collaborators in the Trump White House. I think that is a view that a lot of people increasingly have. I think it was one of the factors in the midterms, maybe not the most important one, but people are concerned about concentration of power. They’re concerned about AI and they don’t see it as something that they themselves have control over.
I think that this is just going to be another thing that sort of adds skepticism to the idea that people like Jensen Huang should be the ones making the final decision when it comes to artificial intelligence.
2026-11-13 06:25:00
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
I don’t know how much time you spend in the more feverish right-wing corners of the internet, but some conservative commentators are growing very alarmed about a specific Democratic policy proposal that could be nearing fruition.
It’s not abolishing ICE. It’s not nationalizing grocery stores. It’s not even investigating President Donald Trump over his reported failure to act on intelligence about his newly jobless/disgraced pal, Nvidia ex-CEO Jensen Huang.
Instead, they’re concerned about a wonky electoral workaround called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would essentially sidestep the Electoral College. (And in the words of one right-wing commentator, “effectively [rig] the system so Democrats could never lose again.”)
NPV isn’t quite as nefarious as that (Trump won the popular vote just two years ago!), though it would revolutionize how the United States conducts presidential elections. The compact is basically an agreement between states to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of how their own state voted. Once enough states sign on, their combined electoral votes would guarantee the presidency to whoever wins the national popular vote.
The compact has laid dormant for two decades, however, while its backers lobby to sign on more states and their electoral votes. Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have signed on thus far, representing 222 votes.
But with Democrats soon controlling state governments in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, NPV could finally gain the critical mass to become reality. Politico reported on Tuesday that lawmakers in several states, including Pennsylvania, are already discussing the possibility.
There’s just one problem: Conservative influencers aren’t the only ones worried about the plan. In fact, even one of its architects has come to regard NPV as a “doomsday machine” that could trigger gigantic constitutional problems.
My colleague Andrew Prokop called up this conflicted architect, the Yale University professor Akhil Amar, earlier this week. Andrew has been writing and thinking about NPV for years. But Amar has been thinking about it even longer — since the aftermath of the 2000 election that made George W. Bush president.
Famously, Bush was elected even though he lost the popular vote, which Al Gore won by roughly half a percentage point. Amar thought the Electoral College was historically and inherently flawed, but only a constitutional amendment could abolish it.
Recognizing the long odds there, Amar and his brother instead sketched out a quick thought experiment — the broad strokes of what is now the NPV compact. The concept was later picked up and championed by the computer scientist John Koza and his group National Popular Vote Inc.
Koza has had quite a lot of success getting states to sign on to this workaround. But all the signees so far have leaned Democratic, which concerns Amar. The institution of the Electoral College doesn’t inherently favor one party over the other (in fact, both parties nearly got rid of it after the 1968 election), and the NPV wasn’t designed to tilt the scales, either. But as the discourse on right-wing social media suggests, Trump’s 2016 victory with a popular vote minority has only further hardened views on each side, and all the Democratic signatories have made it look like a partisan proposition.
There’s another problem too, Amar says. The compact leaves each participating state to calculate the national total, without a centralized body to oversee a nationwide count or recount. A very close election could leave states disagreeing over who won. But in the current environment, it’s actually hard to imagine a centralized body that both parties would find credible: People just don’t trust institutions the way they did in, say, 2000.
That puts NPV advocates in a tricky spot: The political process may finally favor the compact, but it faces significant cultural problems that could undermine its legitimacy.
Amar, for his part, thinks that even the small risk of electoral disruption outweighs the benefits of NPV. Especially since the Electoral College does actually work, whatever its shortcomings.
“The one thing we really do need to avoid as the stabilizing superpower in the world is constitutional chaos,” he told Vox. “And because this is sort of a new plan, even if it’s in principle likely to be better in all sorts of scenarios, if in a certain small percentage of cases it would lead to chaos, that’s something we need [to] seriously consider.”
➨ Stop subway scrolling. If social media feels exhausting and overwhelming to you — which it does to me, often — try to stop logging on from public places. “People feel more lonely when they use social media while in transit, around people they have close relationships with, and when they are in nature,” says Vox contributor Shayla Love. “In contrast, when people use social media for shorter periods when they are alone at home or in study locations, it doesn’t have as much of a negative effect.”
2026-11-13 05:45:00
Last week’s blue tsunami carried a lot of white coats: At least seven newly elected Democrats have medical degrees or nursing careers. Pediatrician Annie Andrews of South Carolina scored one of the most shocking Senate victories of election night for Democrats, while Abdul El-Sayed (who earned a medical degree before working in public health) won the all-important Michigan Senate race. In the House, Democrats will soon welcome pediatrician Richard Pan of California, emergency room physician Amish Shah of Arizona, surgeon Adam Hamawy of New Jersey, emergency nurse Mitchell Berman of Wisconsin, and oncology nurse practitioner Kristina Knickerbocker of Ohio.
Like many Democrats, these candidates campaigned on lowering costs, expanding health coverage, and confronting the drugmakers and healthcare corporations that they accuse of putting profits ahead of patients. They have endorsed big ideas to make healthcare better, from a public insurance option to Medicare-for-all, alongside targeted changes to drug prices and health insurance denials.
With President Donald Trump still in the White House, Democrats’ healthcare agenda faces obvious obstacles in the short term. But I spoke with Pan and Shah this week to learn how they hope to influence the healthcare conversation in Washington going forward.
They may be politicians, but they have seen America’s broken healthcare up close. They’re hoping to help some of their new colleagues, who may not have those same experiences and may be prone to thinking of policy issues in abstract terms, understand the urgency and the human toll of our messed-up medical system. And as lawmakers try to come up with solutions to fix those problems, they’ll be there to make sure those policies actually make sense in practice.
“For us, these policy discussions are not abstract,” Pan said. “As a practicing physician, I know what it’s like to be on the front lines and have to look a patient in the eye and even tell them that, well, these programs either exist or don’t exist, and we’re not going to be able to get you help. And those are the types of things I have to deal with each time I see a patient.”
The new members will join a small but notable group of providers-turned-politicians: The Congressional Doctors Caucus, founded last year, had six Democratic members before last week’s midterms. Shah, who previously served in the Arizona legislature, told me that he believed his medical career had given him a valuable outlook for thinking about how to serve in political office.
“The core function of practicing medicine is to care for people,” Shah said. “The same should really be true about politics.”
He’s experienced the shocking inequities of US healthcare, and seen its impact on people’s well-being, firsthand. Earlier this year, Shah said, an uninsured woman came into his emergency room department with an allergic reaction. His team treated her successfully. But she was worried about the bill, asking if she might have to pay a $10,000 charge after she was discharged. And Shah told me that he had to be honest with her that she might.
That’s when he learned that his patient was her family’s breadwinner — and that she actually worked in a nearby emergency department. Somebody who helped provide emergency care to others couldn’t afford it herself.
“It’s a tragedy that those of us who actually go out to help others and be part of the team that saves lives can be left without insurance,” Shah said.
Pan, a former California state senator, described a similar experience while treating kids in primary care. He has seen all the ways US health care is lacking: children who don’t get the mental health support they need to excel in school, families that struggle to afford stable housing or find healthy food. His ability to help depended on decisions made well outside his examination room.
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“These are all things that certainly have potential policy solutions, but it’s not just theoretical,” he told me. “It is very real and tied to very specific patients that I’ve seen.”
But while these experiences have made them eager to change things, the newly elected physicians are also mindful about how proposed changes could disrupt ongoing patient care. Pan said he wants to push his colleagues about both the intended and unintended consequences or new policies: Who will get help? What happens to people whose needs don’t fit neatly into boxes? As any doctor will tell you, every patient is unique.
That’s especially true for people with chronic conditions, he said, who may have spent years finding the right doctors and treatments. Lawmakers have to strike a balance: identifying ideas that will improve the health system in the long term, without jeopardizing the care that people need right now.
Shah said he hopes his experience as a physician can help Congress find a middle ground between the patients demanding reform and the providers who are wary of big changes. After decades in medicine and a stint in the state legislature, he knows the different players and their concerns.
“I speak the language of healthcare,” he said. “I’ve earned the trust of a lot of those stakeholders that I will not take an axe to the system, but rather reform it in a way that really improves it and centers the patient. So that gives me a unique ability to improve this at the congressional level.”
These Democratic doctors, like their party’s leaders, have a clear No. 1 priority when they take office next year: reversing the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that Republicans passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.
“Given all the damage the Republicans did in the past two years, first we got to triage to stop the bleeding,” Pan told me. He wants to repeal the OBBBA’s Medicaid work requirements, restore the lapsed Affordable Care Act tax credits that helped reduce premiums for millions of Americans, and protect Medicare payments. Those were common themes across these physician-politicians: Andrews, Berman, and El-Sayed endorsed the same policies as part of their campaign platform, while Knickerbocker likewise pledged to protect Medicaid, Medicare, the ACA, and children’s health coverage.
Beyond reversing the Republican cuts, the newcomers want to cover more people, though they have different ideas about how to do it.
“You have these real stories that then drive the legislation, and give you the ideas to solve the problems for people.”
Amish Shah, emergency room physician elected in Arizona
Shah said he supports letting people buy into Medicare. Andrews, Berman, Knickerbocker, and Shah have also endorsed a public option: a government-backed health insurance plan that would compete with private plans. El-Sayed and Hamawy, meanwhile, say they favor Medicare-for-all, guaranteeing comprehensive coverage without premiums or out-of-pocket costs.
“I want to see every United States citizen covered, and I’d like to see the premiums drop,” Shah said.
But even the people who have health insurance often struggle to pay for medical care. Andrews, Berman, El-Sayed, and Hamawy have all proposed expanding the government’s negotiation of prescription drug prices. Andrews and Berman want to extend Medicare’s $35 insulin cap to private insurance. Andrews, Berman, and Hamawy also want to crack down on private equity ownership and consolidation among healthcare providers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these doctors were not afraid to get into the weeds of healthcare policy on the campaign trail. Andrews’s detailed plans include limits on some hospital prices and changing Medicare payments so the same service costs the same regardless of where it is performed. Berman’s agenda draws on his own nursing experience: He wants nurses to help set staffing standards, more funding for nursing education, and enhance workplace safety for medical workers, a goal he shares with Shah. In Arizona, Shah worked on protections for healthcare workers, and he wants Congress to focus on the problem too.
Pan also wants to figure out how to restore trust in public health after two years of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. undermining faith in vaccinations and other medical science. He helped write California laws tightening exemptions from school vaccination requirements; in Congress, he wants stronger oversight of the administration’s healthcare agencies, including probing any possible corruption, and stronger protections for scientific decision-making. He told me that lawmakers may want to consider creating new safeguards into law so future administrations have less latitude to overhaul public health policy.
“The American people need accurate information from their government,” Pan said. “We might want to rethink how to put better guardrails so that someone like an RFK Jr. in the future couldn’t…basically upend everything.”
Andrews and Shah have also placed a lot of emphasis on fixing prior authorizations, one of the most common frustrations for patients and providers alike.
Shah recalled that he once met a Republican constituent who said he was completing prior authorization paperwork on behalf of the doctor treating his son, who had muscular dystrophy, because the doctor’s office was overwhelmed. He was shouldering an absurd administrative burden as a layperson, just so his child could get the care he needed.
And so, Shah worked on legislation to streamline the prior authorization process. A 2021 law standardized prior authorization forms and limited their length to two pages, excluding supporting medical documentation. He sees his state work as a possible model for federal legislation.
“We really need to start looking at these denials,” he said. He wants more scrutiny of decisions that are later overturned and of automated and increasing AI-driven systems that reject people’s claims without meaningful review.
It’s another example of how these freshman members will be ready to dive into the weeds of fixing healthcare. The question will be whether the new lawmakers can translate their direct experience with patients’ frustrations into changes that make getting healthcare care easier.
“You have these real stories that then drive the legislation,” Shah said, “and give you the ideas to solve the problems for people.”
2026-11-13 04:45:00
The world is full of unanswered questions and strange ideas. Do parallel universes exist? What would it look like if a pandemic wiped out life as we know it? Is time travel possible?
I host the science podcast Unexplainable, where we often speak to scientists about their attempts to puzzle through life’s greatest mysteries, but academic researchers aren’t the only people wrestling with these concepts.
On the latest episode of the show, I spoke with Emily St. John Mandel, the award-winning author of Station Eleven, about her new book, Exit Party, which grapples with the question of the multiverse. We talked about how she approaches science in her fiction, and how, even if we never get clear answers to some of these strange ideas, they can still help us think deeply about ourselves and our world.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for clarity and length. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch us on Netflix.
Emily, you are often writing about really interesting scientific ideas. Why do you put these scientific concepts at the heart of the books that you write?
Because they’re so interesting. I don’t have an educational background in science. I didn’t study it in school. I did work in a cancer research lab for years, so I’ve definitely hung out with scientists. I was great with grant budgets. But I could not actually tell you the mechanisms by which microRNA 335 impacts breast cancer metastasis,
Neither can I.
But you know what? Science is interesting to me. I like reading about ideas in the fringes of science. But my understanding is that physicists are more or less evenly split on the question of whether we’re living in a multiverse.
Where do you start with exploring these concepts?
It’s really book by book. Sea of Tranquility was the first book I wrote that had more of a hard sci-fi component, because I do have a time-traveling detective in that book.
And what that came out of was it was the spring of 2020. The pandemic hit. I was promoting The Glass Hotel on Zoom, and I thought that for my own sanity, it might be nice to be immersed in the grand project of a book. That can be good for you sometimes when everything is chaos, like in the early days of a pandemic.
I’ve always loved time travel novels as a reader and a fan. The problem with the time travel narrative, though, is that it falls apart instantly.
What do you mean?
If you think about it for a second, it’s like, if I walk out of this podcast studio and I’m transported back to 1812, was I not always going to walk out of the studio and be transported back to 1812? And doesn’t reality break upon my arrival? That raises other questions like immortality — am I always going round and round in time? The causation gets really complicated and weird.
But I felt like, you know what? I’m going to write whatever I want. So I start writing about my time-traveling detective, and then I run into the time travel narrative problem, the loops and the paradoxes and all the rest of it.
And my solve for that, I thought, “What if I added a whole other layer of science fictional weirdness to try to make that work?” Enter the simulation hypothesis, which is the hypothesis that all of our reality is a simulation. And something I love about that is you can find really smart people convincingly arguing either side.
I thought it was a cool idea, and I realized that I could use that to make time travel work. And so that’s what got me into that little branch of science for Sea of Tranquility.
And then Exit Party, I had an idea about writing about doppelgängers. I’d been thinking about it for years — the idea of a counter life.
Counter life?
The life you did not live, where you moved to a different city or took a different job or married a different person — any of those inflection points. I wondered if doppelgängers could be thought of as a sort of embodiment of a counter life. It’s another you who has lived a different life in a different version of reality. That’s what got me to the multiverse idea. But then I was also thinking, “Okay, well, I’ve thought about the counter life of the individual. What is the counter life of the state?”
And that can be a really interesting thought experiment. There are some very obvious inflection points in our recent history, but every country has them. You know, the election that went a different way or the decision made to go to war or not. A policy that was enacted or not enacted and the fallout from that, and any of those inflection points create a somewhat different country. It was thinking about counter lives and doubling, and that’s what got me to this idea of the multiverse.
You’re talking about these ideas almost like, “It’s a fix to this problem that I created.”
It often is. Exit Party opens with a woman going to a party, two doppelgängers show up, and somebody else disappears. I realized pretty early on, wait a minute, at some point I am going to have to account for where the doppelgängers came from, so in that case, it was definitely a fix. But it was also thinking about the double life of a state — the state that you could live in if things had gone a different direction at some inflection point.
Something that interested me as a thought experiment in writing this book is: How might the tropes of science fiction map onto actual lives? Doppelgängers are very science fictional. But we all have counter lives, so imagine those as the embodiment of the counter life. Or later in the novel, there’s a conversation about time travel. And the character says something to the effect of, “I think if you live long enough, you become a time traveler. It’s like you’re a migrant from another timeline.”
“I want to focus on how people respond in these interesting scenarios I’m putting them in.”
There’s nothing more science fictional than a time traveler. That is the definition of a trope, basically. But that is how adulthood works, or how time works. You learn to navigate the world as an adult, and then you look up one day and realize that world is long gone.
If you’re lucky enough to get to live for a while, if you live into your 80s or potentially even older, that world that you learned is really gone.
You get to a certain point in your life, you look back, and you realize you’re not really looking back at a life singular. It’s really one life after another, isn’t it?
I wanted to express that. You were a different person 10 years ago and living a different life, and I wanted to follow a character, Ari in this case, from one life into another.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, you drop us into a fairly dystopian world.
I mean, I collapse the United States in the first sentence…
I was almost expecting that we were going to enter into another world where we made different choices and everything worked out so wonderfully.
I mean, my wife wishes I would write a utopia.
No, it’s true. I do then present an equally dark vision. I think the key, though, and where I find hope personally in my life, but also in this book, is in transience — this idea that nothing lasts forever and everything ends.
There’s such obvious grief and loss attached to that idea, but I think there’s also a lot of hope. Because if I look at it through the lens of my personal life, the worst moments of my life did not last forever. You move through them, and there’s something else after that. Or if you look at it at a larger scale, the worst moments in your country’s life don’t last forever either.
In the second universe of the book, the authoritarian state, I was thinking in terms of modern-day surveillance states, but I was also thinking about East Germany and the Stasi system of citizen informants.
And you know, here’s where transience and hope intersect. A lot of what I know about them I learned in the DDR Museum in Berlin, because the Stasi are gone. We make museums about them. They’re both fairly dark visions, but in both sides of the book, we are moving through them toward something else.
You won’t always be in a terrible situation. You also won’t always be in a good situation. That’s where the loss comes in.
How did you go about trying to think through what the fractal parallel universes would look like?
I was thinking about that with the character Ari. She’s got this character defect. She’s pulled toward criminality. It’s this deep, fundamental proclivity that she has, and there’s a world where somebody like that just goes toward criminality and becomes a criminal, as she did in a previous part of her life.
But what if that same person were growing up in a much more repressive state where the consequences were much worse for breaking the rules? Maybe that interest in criminality pulls a person toward law enforcement, and it was interesting to think of that as almost two sides of the same coin.
When you’re borrowing these scientific concepts, do you feel trapped by the science of it all? Do you feel like you have to stay within certain boundaries?
I don’t, which may annoy some readers of sci-fi, but I think there’s a really interesting choice that you have to make if you’re writing speculative fiction, and that’s how accurate do you want to be, or how deep into the weeds do you want to go with your science fictional technology?
On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got an author like Cixin Liu, who wrote The Three-Body Problem. I really love his work. He gets so granular about those technologies. When I first started working on Sea of Tranquility, I thought, “I want to figure out how the time machine works.” I guess it was a bit of insecurity on my part. So I spent some time reading about current ideas and technologies that I imagine eventually evolving into time traveling. I was reading about the quantum blockchain, and then after I’d spent a bit of time in that rabbit hole, I realized I don’t actually care.
I had this realization: If I’m not describing how a car engine works in the 2020 section, why do I care about the mechanics of the time machine? It’s literally just transport.
And that was kind of liberating, realizing that I care more about the characters. I want to focus on how people respond in these interesting scenarios I’m putting them in. So honestly, the level of scientific detail I’m aiming for is “plausible within the context of a literary novel,” which is a low bar.
For this parallel universe stuff, did you look into some of the physics debates about this?
A little bit. Like the simulation hypothesis, you can find smart people on either side. I feel very unqualified to participate in the debates.
But as a novelist, I’m like, This is interesting. I can work with this.
2026-11-13 04:40:00
This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
Deep-blue, regulation-happy California is not usually imagined as factory farm country. But the state leads the US in agricultural output, and it is, by a wide margin, America’s top producer of dairy, one of the most brutal sectors in our food system. And it turns out that one of the most foundational, most disturbing practices found in modern dairy farming may already be illegal under a California animal cruelty law — but state officials have shown little inclination to look into it.
At any given time, 9 million to 10 million dairy cows populate farms across the US, and California is home to 1.7 million of them, the vast majority of whom are raised on mega dairies. Because cows, like other mammals, must give birth to produce milk, dairy farming is organized around continuous cycles of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. Dairy cows typically give birth around once a year; their calves are then promptly taken from them. Depending on their sex, the calves will eventually join a milking herd or be raised for beef.
But whatever their ultimate market destination, the overwhelming majority of baby cows born in the dairy industry, in California and nationwide, spend their first few months of life housed alone, in individual crates or enclosures. Many of them look like this:
Earlier this year, I wrote at length about that practice. These wooden crates provide each calf about 13 square feet of living space, less than one-tenth the size of a typical parking spot. “We’re talking roughly the size of a coffin,” Vanessa Shakib, a lawyer and co-founder of the Los Angeles-area nonprofit Advancing Law for Animals, told me. Confining calves in this manner is not dissimilar to the use of gestation crates in the pork industry — tiny metal enclosures where pigs barely have room to move. Gestation crates have sparked intense national controversy that’s reached the halls of Congress and the US Supreme Court. But the extreme confinement of dairy calves has not received anywhere close to as much legal and political scrutiny.
In California, there’s an obvious legal problem with calf crates. The state has a plain-English law, Section 597t of its criminal code, that mandates that confined animals be provided an “adequate exercise area.” Though it doesn’t define what constitutes such an area, Shakib and other farm animal advocates argue that it strains credulity to believe the minuscule, barren crates provide one. The practice “is squarely at odds with the plain meaning of the words,” Shakib said.
But California has never enforced that law against calf crates in the state’s powerful dairy industry, where millions of newborn calves have been kept in extreme confinement (nor, apparently, has the law been enforced against any factory farm). It’s a prime example of agricultural exceptionalism — the doctrine running through American legal and political culture, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella has written, that effectively absolves agribusiness from having to play by the same rules as everyone else.
Shakib and her organization are now hoping to change that.
They’re leading a lawsuit against Hettinga Dairy, a Southern California farm that has kept thousands of calves in individual crates, alleging that it’s violating Section 597t. If the case succeeds, it could create a blueprint for similar challenges statewide, and even spark a broader reckoning within America’s dairy industry.
Advancing Law for Animals just filed suit on behalf of the Caru Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a California animal protection nonprofit seeking a court ruling that the calf crates violate state law. The case names Hettinga Dairy and related defendants in connection with a San Jacinto, California, facility that specializes in raising calves. The most recent available records from California’s State Water Resources Control Board report the farm’s animal population as 4,200 calves.
Such facilities, often known as “calf ranches” or “calf nurseries,” have become increasingly central to the US dairy business — as we wrote earlier this year, they “raise calves on dairy farms’ behalf during the fragile infant stage in which they’re too young to bring in any revenue.”
Caru SPCA (which is formerly known as the Animal Legal Defense Fund Cruelty Prevention Unit) flew drone cameras over the Hettinga facility earlier this year to document the calf housing there, filming the small wooden crates that are common in California and the Southwest, typically providing less than 15 square feet of space per calf. Many dairy farms and calf ranches use a different, plastic hutch design that provides more space, but the smaller wooden hutches remain widespread.
Calves typically spend about two months in these hutches before being moved into larger group pens; the lawsuit alleges that Hettinga keeps them in crates for around nine weeks.
“Calves are trapped for months, even in summer heat, unable to stretch their limbs or move freely,” the lawsuit alleges. Under 597t, “animals have a statutory right to minimal movement, and Defendants systematically violate that right daily, creating immense and ongoing suffering.”
That San Jacinto farm is part of a broader network of dairy farms and calf-raising facilities linked to the Hettingas, a prominent dairy family whose farms collectively confine thousands of calves and cows across California, according to state public records. Most consumers have never heard of Hettinga, nor of the hundreds of other industrial dairies and calf-raising farms across California that operate largely out of public view. But the Hettingas also have a presence on grocery store shelves: According to the brand’s website, the family also owns Sarah Farms, a mass-market milk label in the Southwestern US.
Vox emailed a list of questions about the allegations in the lawsuit to multiple contacts associated with Hettinga businesses. An employee at GH Processing, a Hettinga family-associated dairy plant in Arizona, confirmed receiving the email and said she would pass it on to colleagues in California. No one responded to Vox’s questions by publication time.
A representative from the California water board told Vox that the 2024 annual report for the San Jacinto calf facility identified Hein and Ellen Hettinga as the farm’s operators. But state regulators have not received the 2025 report, which was due in January 2026, and could not verify the facility’s current ownership. Hein Hettinga, who built the family’s dairy empire, died in 2023; Ellen, his wife, is one of the defendants named in the lawsuit.
Dairy industry trade groups often defend calf crates, arguing that they allow farmers to provide each animal with individualized care and reduce their exposure to pathogens. Whether that’s true is contested — some industry veterinarians endorse that view, while others maintain that it’s based on a narrow view of calves’ well-being and that properly managed social housing need not harm their physical health. Even within the industry, there’s growing acknowledgement that isolation is harmful to calves, and that it would be better for dairy farms to transition to a different system.
A 2023 assessment of calf welfare from the European Food Safety Authority — the EU agency that provides scientific guidance on animal welfare — found “no locomotor play behavior possible” for calves given a space allowance of about 16 square feet each. A calf in such confinement “is expected to spend most of its time lying down because no other activities can be performed,” the review states. To fully express natural behaviors like galloping, jumping, and kicking, it recommends that calves housed alone be allotted 318 square feet each, and calves housed in groups be allotted 215 square feet each, though it notes that even smaller increases in space could meaningfully improve their welfare.
Guidelines from Calf Care and Quality Assurance, a US industry-created animal care program, state that “individually housed calves have a harder time coping with changes in housing and diet and may have cognitive and developmental disadvantages, including poor learning skills and deficient social skills.” Temple Grandin, the famed livestock scientist at Colorado State University, has written that “calves should be raised with other calves, not in isolation.” They are, after all, intensely social herd animals.
Regardless of the industry’s opinion on the practice, though, 597t makes no exception for livestock industry standard practices, the way some states’ animal cruelty laws do. “It doesn’t matter whether this defendant or whether the dairy industry believes solitary confinement of baby animals serves a useful purpose,” Shakib said. “California law here is crystal clear — it requires an adequate exercise area. Industry custom or convenience does not erase that requirement.”
The ubiquitous confinement of dairy calves in tiny crates remains poorly understood by the general public, and even, to some extent, within the animal protection movement. That is because, for many years, animal advocates focused their campaigning against extreme confinement in the dairy industry on veal, the notorious specialty meat made from male dairy calves.
Those efforts helped bring about California’s Proposition 12, a landmark law passed in 2018 that bans certain forms of extreme confinement, including tiny crates that used to be the norm in veal production. Any veal raised or sold in California must now come from calves allotted at least 43 square feet of living space each. But the overwhelming share of California’s dairy calves are not raised for veal and thus get no protection under Prop 12, even as many members of the public may assume the problem of extreme confinement of calves has been solved.
In the last few years, however, a small wave of animal advocates have been drawing attention to the continued plight of dairy calves. The animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) over the last year has documented and mapped calf confinement across California, including at Grimmius Cattle Company, the largest calf raiser in the state and the subject of Vox’s earlier reporting. This fall, DxE investigator Lewis Bernier obtained footage showing calves from a dairy farm that the group said supplies to Land O’Lakes being transported to Grimmius, where the newborn animals are raised in the same standard, approximately 13-square-foot wooden hutches. Land O’Lakes did not respond to requests for comment.
Beyond extreme confinement in crates, DxE’s investigations have surfaced allegations of overt abuse of calves — including animals being kicked, punched, and pulled by their ears and tails — at calf ranches and dairy farms throughout California.
Drone footage taken earlier this year at a dairy farm that DxE linked to Leprino Foods — a major cheese supplier that reportedly sells to Domino’s, Papa John’s, and Pizza Hut, among others — shows calves being kicked, pushed, pulled by their ears, and thrown to the ground. In one clip, a calf appears to be kicked in the face. One of DxE’s investigators followed a milk truck from that farm to a Leprino plant, the group said. Leprino Foods did not respond to requests for comment.
DxE has also captured drone footage of calf and dairy facilities that California records list as operated by members of the Hettinga family, separate from the one that is being sued by Advancing Law for Animals. At one of the calf ranches, in San Bernardino County, Robert Drummond, a member of DxE’s Los Angeles chapter, filmed handlers who appear to be whipping frightened calves and pulling them by their tails. Hitting calves and pulling them this way are both considered “unacceptable” handling practices by the industry’s own calf-raising guidelines. DxE reported those findings to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which did not provide comment for this story.
An annual report filed with the California water board identifies Gerben Hettinga as the operator of that farm, a representative from the agency told Vox. Vox attempted to reach Hettinga using the email addresses and phone number listed for him in state records but received no response.
Advancing Law for Animals’ lawsuit is not the first time animal advocates have accused California’s dairy industry of violating 597t. “There’s a long history of animal activists and organizations trying unsuccessfully to enforce this law,” Will Lowrey, founder and legal counsel at animal advocacy legal nonprofit Animal Partisan, told me in an email. His organization has also sought enforcement of 597t in the dairy industry.
DxE has sent criminal complaints about calf crates, citing 597t, to eight law enforcement agencies throughout California; the group says that none of them have taken enforcement action. In March, the sheriff’s office of Tulare County, in the heart of the Central Valley’s dairy industry, rejected one of these complaints and stated in its reply to DxE that calf confinement did not violate the law because “the facilities reviewed do not raise calves for veal production.” But 597t doesn’t exclusively apply to veal; it applies to all confined animals. The sheriff’s office may have confused it with Prop 12. The office did not respond to a request for comment.
DxE has also met with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office about calf confinement, and office staff asked the group questions about its investigative findings, DxE director of communications Cassie King told me. Responding to Vox’s request for comment about whether 13-square-foot crates are permissible under 597t, the attorney general’s press office said, “we cannot provide a comment at this time.” DxE plans to rally outside Bonta’s office in Sacramento this week calling for enforcement of that law against Grimmius Cattle Company. The group submitted a packet of documents to the attorney general, including a statement from more than a dozen veterinarians about the animal welfare harms of small calf crates.
“The California dairy industry seems inclined to act like [597t] doesn’t exist and no law enforcement officer, prosecutor, or judge that I have come across seems inclined to enforce the law as written,” Lowrey wrote to me. “It’s hard to imagine that this is for any other reason than deference to the state agriculture industry.”
The law enforcement officials that have rejected these complaints haven’t explained how calf crates could satisfy 597t’s requirement for an adequate exercise area; they largely sidestep the question altogether. For non-livestock animals, meanwhile, California has enforced the law more readily. A state appeals court recently upheld 597t convictions against two people who had continuously kept German shepherds in kennels measuring 48 to 50 square feet. For hundreds of thousands of calves kept in cages one-quarter of that size, though, the protections offered by California’s animal cruelty laws have proven illusory.
Police and prosecutors have broad discretion to decline to pursue criminal complaints, but a lawsuit like Caru SPCA’s may be harder to brush aside. The question will now be addressed by a judge, and California’s dairy industry could finally face an on-the-merits ruling on whether these crates are legal. “At some point, I believe a judge will find that the law says what it says and will decide that a California dairy keeping calves in hutches [is] in violation of Penal Code 597t,” Lowrey wrote. “It’s just a matter of time and maybe—hopefully—Caru v. Hettinga is that case.”
It’s understandable that state officials may hesitate to enforce a law that could upend a linchpin of the dairy industry, whose products are consumed by nearly every American and woven into virtually every corner of our food system. But animal agriculture has a long history of warning that animal welfare regulations will devastate its business, only to adapt when regulation takes effect.
And although California has earned its reputation for overly burdensome regulation in other domains, giving newborn calves enough room to move hardly seems like an unreasonable imposition (especially considering that dairy farming makes up only a tiny share of the state’s massive economy). Freeing them from this form of solitary confinement would amount to one of the most consequential animal welfare advances in California’s history. And it need not require passing any new laws — the state merely needs to hold the dairy industry to a standard already in place.
2026-11-13 04:35:00
Editor’s note, November 12, 3:35 pm ET: This story was originally posted on November 9 and is being republished today in light of Jensen Huang’s resignation as Nvidia CEO.
The movie version of Jensen Huang’s jaw-dropping affair basically writes itself.
Cast BD Wong as 63-year-old Huang, the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies and a close friend of President Donald Trump. Kelly Hu can play Alice Huang, Jensen’s paramour and — even better — a purported agent of the Chinese government.
The role of Trump himself, who reportedly knew about Huang’s undercover girlfriend but on Sunday said Huang “probably has an excuse for it,” can be played by Alec Baldwin. (Or a flightless duck — your pick.) However you cast it, this whole sordid affair has “serialized Netflix drama” written all over it.
But in all seriousness…the possibility that one of the world’s most powerful men was targeted by Chinese intelligence is a big deal on multiple scores. Nvidia has opened its own investigation into whether Huang was compromised, and congressional leaders have requested he brief them in a closed-door session.
Nvidia supplies much of the computing power behind the AI boom, giving it enormous influence over the broader economy. “If they sneeze, everybody else catches a cold,” the writer and economic commentator Kyla Scanlon told Vox’s Today, Explained podcast last year. That makes this whole episode a little more weighty than your standard billionaire’s affair.
Nvidia is the most valuable company on Earth — but in many households, it’s still not a household name.
Huang and two other electrical engineers founded the now-$4.5-trillion company in 1993 with the fairly niche and nerdy goal of making high-powered chips that could render the 3D graphics for a new generation of video games.
Then, in 2006, the company released software tools that let programmers use its chips for other demanding computing tasks, like mining cryptocurrency and training AI models. When companies like OpenAI began developing tools like ChatGPT, they immediately turned to Nvidia.
That made the company a cornerstone of America’s AI buildout and a major economic force. In 2024, Nvidia alone accounted for more than a fifth of the S&P 500’s total return. And the rush to build out AI infrastructure has accounted for much of America’s recent economic growth, according to St. Louis Fed researchers.
Nvidia’s influence extends to the White House, too, where Huang is a regular guest of Trump. The two became fast friends after having dinner together at Mar-a-Lago last year, and Huang has said Trump regularly calls him late at night to discuss topics like “protecting national security” and “creating more jobs.”
But Huang’s ambitions have run up against one major obstacle: US restrictions on selling Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China. US officials worry that their enormous computing power could help Beijing develop weapons, strengthen its military, expand surveillance, and otherwise rival US military and technological dominance.
That helps explain why China (allegedly) sicced a spy on Huang: They really want these chips. The New York Times reports that China’s top intelligence agency recruited Alice Huang both to learn more about America’s advanced chip industry and to potentially influence Nvidia’s push to lift export restrictions. Alice Huang, it should be noted, was a data center executive in her own right, and her company has been investigated for purportedly helping to smuggle Nvidia chips into China.
All these investigations will hopefully, eventually, reveal whether their affair compromised anything beyond Huang’s marriage. They may also test how dependent Nvidia is on his leadership.
With Huang out as CEO, uncertainty over the company’s future could unsettle investors and trigger wobbles in the wider market. That’s the problem with concentrating so much power in any one person or company: One person’s (very) personal business can somehow become everybody’s problem.
➨ Get a hobby. But not just any hobby: something that’s intentionally imperfect, unproductive or unquantified. There’s a tendency in American culture to try to optimize or commodify our leisure, the writer Jenny Odell explains. But that undermines some of leisure’s biggest benefits — like cultivating a sense of joy, wonder, or learning.
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