Published: November 24, 2009 Last Updated: September 15, 2026
After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sights a Bahamian island on October 12, 1492, believing he has reached East Asia. His expedition went ashore the same day and claimed the land for Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, who sponsored his attempt to find a western ocean route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia.
Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. Little is known of his early life, but he worked as a seaman and then a maritime entrepreneur. He became obsessed with the possibility of pioneering a western sea route to Cathay (China), India, and the gold and spice islands of Asia. At the time, Europeans knew no direct sea route to southern Asia, and the route via Egypt and the Red Sea was closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Empire, as were many land routes.
Why Do We Celebrate Columbus?
Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, but he wasn’t Spanish. People claim he was Italian, but he wasn’t quite that either. So what exactly is his story?
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Contrary to popular legend, educated Europeans of Columbus’ day did believe that the world was round, as argued by St. Isidore in the seventh century. However, Columbus, and most others, underestimated the world’s size, calculating that East Asia must lie approximately where North America sits on the globe (they did not yet know that the Pacific Ocean existed).
With only the Atlantic Ocean, he thought, lying between Europe and the riches of the East Indies, Columbus met with King John II of Portugal and tried to persuade him to back his “Enterprise of the Indies,” as he called his plan. He was rebuffed and went to Spain, where he was also rejected at least twice by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. However, after the Spanish conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492, the Spanish monarchs, flush with victory, agreed to support his voyage.
On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina.On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and “Indian” captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.
During his lifetime, Columbus led a total of four expeditions to the “New World,” exploring various Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South and Central American mainlands, but he never accomplished his original goal—a western ocean route to the great cities of Asia. Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. He also unleashed centuries of brutal colonization, the transatlantic slave trade and the deaths of millions of Native Americans from murder and disease.
Columbus was honored with a U.S. federal holiday in 1937. Since 1991, many cities, universities and a growing number of states have adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday that celebrates the history and contributions of Native Americans. Not by coincidence, the occasion usually falls on Columbus Day, the second Monday in October, or replaces the holiday entirely. Why replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Some argue that the holiday overlooks Columbus’ enslavement of Native Americans—while giving him credit for “discovering” a place where people already lived.
There is a question older than medicine, and perhaps older than philosophy, that psychiatry has largely avoided: What makes us human?
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COMMENTARY
As a profession, we have focused—often wisely—on measurable symptoms, syndromes, and mechanisms. But that question is no longer merely philosophical.It is becoming increasingly clinical. We stand at a remarkable threshold.Artificial intelligence (AI) can compose music, write code, simulate empathy, pass professional examinations, and offer psychological advice. Gene editing challenges assumptions about identity and human enhancement. Human-derived brain organoids are being used for creating chimeras in mouse brains for growing xenocortical implants. Psychedelic-assisted therapies can alter boundaries of selfhood and meaning. Meanwhile, our diagnostic bible, the DSM,remains organized primarily around consensus-based descriptive symptom clusters, duration thresholds, and functional impairment. If psychiatry does not seriously engage with the question of human nature, others, including AI and transhumanistic technocrats, may answer it for us and our patients.
The field is already changing. The 2026 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting left us hopeful—not simply because speakers such as chief medical correspondent for CNN, Sanjay Gupta, and former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy emphasized psychiatry’s importance, but because the field appeared increasingly willing to debate its future.
And change is necessary. The era of “one neurotransmitter, one gene, one drug, one disorder” has passed. Psychiatric trajectories emerge from interactions among genes, brain circuits, development, lifestyle, trauma, social determinants, loneliness, climate change, technology, aging, brain health, and resilience.Our diagnostic system must begin to reflect that complexity. Many scientific and government organizations are starting to recognize the importance of the whole person health. For example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine defined “whole health” as physical, behavioral, spiritual, and socioeconomic well-being as defined by the individuals themselves. Brain health is another emerging all-encompassing concept that unites the fields of psychiatry, neurology neurosurgery, neuroscience, psychology, climate sciences, education, and many others.
The Pros and Cons of the DSM
Psychiatry occupies a unique position in medicine. We cannot confine ourselves to an organ or laboratory value. Psychiatry inevitably enters the territories of meaning, identity, suffering, relationships, morality, freedom, and consciousness.
The DSM historically prioritized reliability over philosophy for good reasons. DSM-III and subsequent editions introduced operational criteria, improved diagnostic agreement, enabled large-scale research, facilitated clinical trials, and created a common language for clinicians, researchers, policymakers, insurers, and patients. These were enormous achievements. But something was also lost.
Diagnosis increasingly became a taxonomy of observable symptoms separated from the lived context of the person experiencing them. Patients can meet diagnostic criteria yet feel fundamentally unseen. Clinicians can complete required checklists while missing the narrative architecture of a human life.
AI makes this limitation especially consequential. If diagnosis becomes primarily pattern recognition from a checklist, increasingly sophisticated algorithms may perform parts of that task extraordinarily well. The more important question is therefore: What can a human psychiatrist offer that an algorithm cannot?
Human Beings Are More Than Symptom Clusters
Human beings are meaning-making creatures embedded in relationships, cultures, histories, bodies, aspirations, and moral worlds. Suffering emerges not only from disturbed biology but also from fractured belonging, loss of purpose, humiliation, loneliness, trauma, and existential despair.
At the same time, people possess strengths—compassion, resilience, creativity, wisdom, attachment, hope—that remain poorly represented in diagnostic systems. Human species is labeled “Homo sapiens” or a wise person. Symptom reduction has too often displaced human flourishing as our ultimate goal.
Consider 2 people meeting criteria for major depressive disorder. One may be grieving the collapse of a decades-long marriage; another may experience profound melancholia relatively independent of circumstance. They may cross the same diagnostic threshold while inhabiting radically different human realities and requiring different therapeutic approaches. Lived experience is the needed context for the clinical decision making, not just “noise” in patient’s history.
Nor should psychiatry perpetuate a false division between biology and meaning.Brains generate minds, but experience also reshapes brains and gene expression. Trauma alters neurobiology. Relationships affect physiology. Social isolation influences health. Meaning and purpose influence behavior and well-being, and ultimately longevity and mortality. Human experience is biological precisely because humans are biological organisms continually interacting with their environments.
The future DSM should therefore resist both reductionisms: mental illness is neither only brain disease nor merely social construction. A more sophisticated formulation would integrate symptom phenomenology with neurobiology, development and neurodiversity, trauma, functional impairment, culture, relationships, social and environmental context, resilience, strengths, brain health, aging, and existential meaning.
Equally important, psychiatry must distinguish psychopathology from normal suffering, existential crisis, socially produced distress, and adaptive emotional responses. A broader psychiatry should not become an excuse to medicalize the human condition.
AI and the Human Spirit
AI makes the question “What makes us human?” newly urgent. AI increasingly simulates language, reasoning, empathy, and psychotherapy-like interactions. Yet human beings are embodied, vulnerable, mortal, relational, and subjective. We do not simply process information. We experience existence. We suffer, love, hope, grieve, create, and seek meaning and transcendence.
Emerging technologies expose gaps in our diagnostic vocabulary. People can form emotionally significant relationships with AI companions, raising questions about attachment, intimacy, and what constitutes genuine recognition by another person.
Psychedelic-assisted therapies present another challenge.Patients may describe their experiences not merely as symptom reduction but as transformations in selfhood, connectedness, and meaning. Neuroplasticity and neural-network models are important, but they do not fully describe the lived experience.
Digital life and interactions with AI raise similar questions. The curated, performative self-constructed through social media may contribute to self-estrangement or symptoms resembling psychosis that conventional symptom categories capture only partially. Patients may not simply feel bad; they may feel unreal. Psychiatry needs language capable of addressing these experiences without automatically declaring them disorders.
Comments and Responses
The authors invite responses and discussion. These questions do not belong to any single editorial position; they belong to the field as a whole.
Toward a More Humanistic DSM
A more human-centered DSM need not abandon scientific rigor. Reliability remains essential. But reliability should be the foundation, not the endpoint. We compliment the new DSM Committee for the replacing term “Statistical” in its title “DSM” with “Scientific,” and for proposing to add social determinants of health and biomarkers to the manual. Our hope that the next iteration of the DSM will include not only symptoms and risk factors, but also protective resilience factors that will include patient’s strengths.
Future psychiatric diagnosis could become more dimensional and contextual rather than predominantly categorical. Psychological functioning exists along continua shaped by biology, development, environment, and experience. Narrative formulation should regain formal importance. Diagnostic criteria cannot substitute for understanding a patient’s story.
Social, relational, and economic determinants should become central rather than peripheral. Economic insecurity, chronic isolation, discrimination, community fragmentation, environmental stressors, poor food, and harmful screen-based technologies are not simply background variables; they can influence mental and brain health.
The DSM should also incorporate positive dimensions of functioning. Resilience, psychological flexibility, meaning, creativity, attachment, wisdom, and capacity for recovery matter clinically. Psychiatry should ask not only, “What is wrong?” but also, “What remains strong, and what can be strengthened?”
A future DSM might also incorporate phenomenological dimensions: continuity of self, meaning-making, quality of relatedness, experience of time, and existential orientation. Such dimensions require rigorous measurement and validation, but they deserve serious investigation.
The individual should no longer be treated as an isolated unit of analysis. Humans are fundamentally relational. A relational perspective could deepen our understanding of depression, trauma, personality, loneliness, environment, and emerging human-AI attachments.
Finally, future DSM development should draw on broader intellectual traditions. Psychiatrists and neuroscientists should work alongside psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, ethicists, patients, and caregivers. Cultural perspectives—including non-Western conceptions of personhood and interconnectedness—should challenge rather than merely decorate our existing assumptions.
Psychiatry’s Responsibility
Psychiatry truly occupies an extraordinary position among the human sciences and has the ability to influence the evolution of human species. We are medical and biological, but also psychological, social, relational, and interpretive. We listen to stories and attempt to make sense of suffering within the context of a life.If psychiatry defines human beings narrowly—as brains, behaviors, diagnoses, or datasets—we risk reinforcing a culture already drifting toward depersonalization. But if psychiatry can integrate neuroscience with meaning, biology with narrative, technology with wisdom, and diagnosis with dignity, it can preserve something essential.
Viktor Frankl argued that the search for meaning is among humanity’s most powerful motivations and that its frustration can produce profound suffering. Modern neuroscience does not make that insight obsolete. It gives us another level at which to understand it. The future DSM should therefore aspire to more than reliability; it should aspire to wisdom.
The ultimate question is not simply how accurately we classify mental disorders. It is whether our classifications leave room for the whole human being. The question of what makes us human will not be answered by neuroscience, evolution, technology, or philosophy alone. It is answered every day in the consulting room—in taking seriously what it means to suffer, love, lose, recover, create meaning, and live with mortality.
Psychiatry’s role in that conversation may never have been more important. It would be a historic missed opportunity if our next diagnostic system were not equal to the moment.
Dr Lavretskyis a professor in residence in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, Semel Scholar in Integrative Mental Health, and director of Brain Health Innovation. She is a past president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, and a fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. She is also on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.
Dr Jesteis director of the Global Research Network on Social Determinants of Mental Health and Exposomics, president elect of the World Federation for Psychotherapy, and editor-in-chief of the International Psychogeriatrics journal, and a former professor of psychiatry and distinguished researcher at the University of California in San Diego, and former president of the American Psychiatric Association.
Dr Eyreis the executive director of the Global Brain Economy Initiative. He is the Harry Z Yan and Weiman Gao Professor of Practice at Rice University and Presidential Senior Fellow at The University of Texas Medical Branch.
A fat stock portfolio and an expensive car can both make you feel rich. Over the past three years, though, they did very different things to Americans’ finances.
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The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances revealed a striking split: Median net worth rose roughly 38% for households headed by someone 75 or older between 2022 and 2025, while falling 23% for those headed by someone under 35. Both figures account for inflation, according to an analysis by Nick Maggiulli, chief data officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of The Wealth Ladder.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the age split in a short post on what it called “the gold standard for measuring household wealth,” which the central bank releases every three years. Americans 55 and over now hold roughly $140 trillion, about three-quarters of the nation’s net worth, Fortune reported this month, citing a Bank of America Institute analysis of the Fed data.
The oldest households finished the period with a median net worth of $504,600, up from $366,288 in 2022, measured in 2025 dollars. For the youngest households, it fell from $42,725 to $32,820. The oldest group now has roughly 15x the wealth of the youngest, compared with about 9x three years earlier.
Across all families, inflation-adjusted median net worth rose just 2% between 2022 and 2025, reaching $215,900. That modest national gain concealed sharply different experiences at opposite ends of the age spectrum.
The findings also echo an argument Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn made in an interview with Fortune this summer about his book, Gerontocracy in America: The concentration of wealth among older Americans is not merely a matter of who has had longer to save. In his account, it also shapes whose interests the economy and political system serve.
Moyn describes an “oldigarchy,” in which older, disproportionately wealthy Americans hold outsize influence. His book argues that “aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios,” and that “the old rich have pulled away from everyone else.”
Asked about the latest Fed figures, Moyn responded by email that they further prove his thesis. “The question is whether the age correlation of the haves versus have-nots with the older versus the younger is fair,” Moyn ventured. “And it isn’t. So this is a case of the older getting richer, not just the rich getting richer.”
“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”
The Yale professor added that he does not expect the pattern to end here. Boomers, he wrote, “lucked out in acquiring a lot early and enjoying several asset bubbles along the way,” but the issue is older asset owners in general. “The pattern will increasingly be wealth concentrated towards the upper end of the age spectrum.”
The 75-and-older bracket is not purely boomers, to be sure. Households headed by someone that age in 2025 were born in 1950 or earlier, so it also includes the Silent Generation; the under-35 bracket mixes Gen Z with younger millennials. The survey also does not track the same households over time. Still, the youngest and oldest groups stood out. No other age bracket recorded a change in median net worth larger than 6% in either direction, according to Maggiulli, writing in his blog, Of Dollars and Data.
Boomers help explain why the oldest group’s gains look so large. Wealthier boomers aged into the 75-and-older bracket between surveys, lifting its median. Comparing households aged 72 and older in 2022 with those aged 75 and older in 2025, Maggiulli calculated a smaller—but still substantial—21% increase. That follows a birth cohort, not the same individual households.
The youngest households’ decline followed an unusually large pandemic-era gain. Their inflation-adjusted median net worth rose from about $18,000 in 2019 to nearly $43,000 in 2022—a roughly 140% jump that Maggiulli calls the largest on record—before falling to roughly $33,000 in 2025. Even after the setback, young households remained wealthier than their counterparts were before the pandemic. With stimulus checks gone and student loan payments back, Maggiulli suggests the drop may partly be a return to normal. But the figures still suggest that young adults up to age 35 feel 23% poorer since 2022.
The crucial distinction, Maggiulli argued, was ownership—not just how much people owned, but what they owned. Older households had more of their assets in homes and financial investments. Younger households were less likely to own a home and had a bigger share of their assets sitting in the driveway. As investments rose and vehicle values fell, those different starting points mattered.
Housing helps explain why. The share of under-35 households that owned a home fell from 38.5% in 2022 to 35.6% in 2025. Nearly two-thirds of young households therefore did not own an asset that accounted for a substantial share of homeowners’ wealth.
Older households that built wealth over the last few years didn’t necessarily have to do anything differently, Maggiulli continued. “Their wealth gains came from appreciating assets. There’s nothing wrong with that. But many younger households may not get the opportunity to build wealth in this way.”
The old rich pull away
When Fortune first talked to Maggiulli, in August 2025, about his book The Wealth Ladder, he said there’s “something weird” going on in the economy, a problem of too much affluence and numbers that do not always match how people feel. “The economy wasn’t built to handle this many people with this much money,” he told Fortune. More recently, he described an “upper-middle-class trap,” in which even high earners find themselves working harder to buy declining-quality products and services.
His latest analysis gets at another version of that disconnect: Rising asset prices can make the economy look prosperous while leaving younger households behind. If you already have a house and a portfolio, your wealth can grow without much additional effort. If a large share of what you own is your car, the same economy can deliver a very different result.
The divide also fits a longer-running pattern. A 2025 paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research by Edward Wolff found that average wealth among households under 35 fell from 21% of the national household average in 1983 to 16% in 2022. That measures relative wealth, not an outright decline in dollars, but it shows younger households falling further behind the country as a whole.
Even within wealthy families, Moyn told Fortune, the timing can work against younger generations. “We have this syndrome even within wealthy families of folks waiting around on their parents to inherit them,” he said. “It’s so late. It’s the wrong time in life for people to come into their house or their wealth.”
The wealth gap has political stakes, too
That sense of waiting for an opportunity has electoral relevance. Young men were among the groups that swung sharply toward Trump in 2024. More than half of men under 30 supported him, according to AP VoteCast, after a similar share backed Joe Biden four years earlier. They were an important part of his winning coalition, though not the only group responsible for his victory.
With midterm elections weeks away, Republicans face signs that some of those gains are slipping. Recent midterm polling shows young voters moving toward Democrats, and surveys of young men also indicate a Democratic advantage in congressional voting preferences.
The Fed’s wealth figures provide a financial backdrop to that shift, not proof of what caused it. The survey does not isolate young men or measure political attitudes. But a rising stock market is a very different advertisement for the economy when you have a substantial portfolio than when you have little invested.
Moyn said “there is absolutely a connection” between these wealth figures and waxing and waning support for Trump among young men. Reasoning that young people are “far more liberal” on the whole, he argued that the swing to Trump is partly explained as “youthful desperation in a society organized around the old and their advantages.” Younger people know deep down, he added, that “gerontocracy isn’t just a matter of old politicians but unfair policies.”
“The boomers have created a new American system of rule, which reserves power—including in the form of wealth—for later life,” he told Fortune. “And that is the wrong time for power, including in assets and resources.”
Fortune Daily breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. The show transforms Fortune’s trusted reporting into actionable, conversational, and entertaining insights for an emerging class of business leaders. Watch here.
Gaining access to a fictional character’s inner remorse activates perspective-taking mechanisms that help readers forgive real-life grievances. Credit: Neuroscience News
Reading Fiction Can Rewire Real-World Forgiveness and Empathy
Reading stories that employ “internal focalization”, granting readers direct access to a character’s private remorse, sparks genuine empathy that leads to forgiveness of fictional misdeeds. Researchers found that this psychological shift does not remain on the page: readers consistently extend that same forgiveness to real-life individuals who have wronged them.
Key Facts:
The Power of “Internal Focalization”: Revealing a transgressor’s private thoughts of regret (e.g., thinking an apology rather than merely speaking it) significantly increased both decisional and emotional forgiveness among readers across three studies with 1,563 participants.
The Real-Life Spillover Effect: Forgiving a fictional wrongdoer served as a psychological prerequisite that directly prompted participants to forgive actual offenders who had committed personal transgressions in their own lives.
Precision Over Broad “Literary Fiction”: Rather than treating literature as an ambiguous whole, the research pinpointed a specific, 2,000-year-old narrative technique that reliably triggers Theory of Mind and reconciliatory empathy where broad replication attempts previously struggled.
Source: The Ohio State University
Holding onto a personal grudge can take an immense psychological and cardiovascular toll. Yet, with global surveys indicating that more than one in five individuals routinely experiences chronic anger, finding reliable cognitive tools to release resentment remains an enduring challenge in mental health.
Now, a cognitive narrative study from The Ohio State University suggests that a specific storytelling technique refined over millennia of literary history may offer an accessible prescription for emotional healing.
Publishing in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative demonstrated that transporting readers into the remorseful inner world of a fictional character not only inspires forgiveness for a fictional mistake, but actively helps readers forgive real-life people who have wronged them.
Pinpointing the Mechanics of Narrative Empathy
For thousands of years, philosophers and critics have asserted that literature fosters empathy and helps individuals see beyond their personal viewpoints.While an influential 2013 paper claimed that reading literary fiction systematically enhances Theory of Mind, the ability to infer others’ beliefs and desires, subsequent replication efforts by independent laboratories and the original authors yielded mixed results.
To address these inconsistencies, senior author Angus Fletcher, PhD, professor of English at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, teamed up with social psychologist Mark Matthews, PhD. Instead of evaluating “literature” as an undefined monolith, they isolated a single, concrete narrative technique: internal focalization.
Internal focalization occurs when a storyteller opens a direct window into a character’s private consciousness, allowing readers to witness unspoken thoughts rather than merely hearing spoken dialogue.
The team designed a narrative centered on Mary, an 85-year-old woman who adopted a puppy to heal from the lifelong grief of watching her childhood dog get killed by a car. When she hires a repairman, she explicitly warns him to keep the front door shut. Despite the warning, the repairman leaves the door open, and the puppy runs out into danger.
Participants were exposed to variations of the scenario. In some conditions, the repairman appeared careless; in others, distracted by home emergencies. Crucially, the researchers altered how remorse was expressed:
The External Condition: The repairman spoke aloud: “The repairman said to Mary, ‘I wish I didn’t leave the door open.’”
The Internally Focalized Condition: The narrative revealed his private, internal regret: “The repairman thought to himself, ‘I wish I didn’t leave the door open.’”
To prevent modeled behavior from skewing the results, the story ended before participants learned whether Mary forgave the man.
The Bridge from Fiction to Reality
Across three experiments involving 1,563 participants, internal focalization dramatically reshaped reader responses. Experiencing a transgressor’s private, unvarnished regret authenticated the sincerity of his remorse, allowing readers to move past righteous indignation and grant forgiveness.
The most striking finding, however, emerged when participants were subsequently prompted to reflect on an unresolved grievance in their personal lives. Readers who forgave the fictional character were significantly more likely to extend forgiveness to their real-world offenders.
Importantly, statistical modeling showed that fictional forgiveness had to occur first—acting as a cognitive primer that unlocked real-world reconciliation.
“If you just give people a story without the empathy technique, they’re not likely to forgive a character. But if you put the technique in, they not only forgive the character, but are then more likely to forgive other people in their actual life,” said Fletcher.
The researchers discovered that this narrative mechanism elicited both decisional forgiveness (a conscious choice to let go of bitterness) and emotional forgiveness (the genuine restoration of positive regard and emotional warmth).
“Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it,” Matthews explained. “They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having. As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more.”
The investigators emphasize that narrative empathy is not limited to printed pages; the same psychological mechanisms apply to film, theater, and character-driven television.
In an era saturated with short-form digital content and digital outrage, returning to deeply focalized narrative art may serve as an underutilized, non-clinical intervention for emotional resilience.
“What’s really great about literature is you don’t have to be at a crisis point to use it,” Fletcher noted. “It’s something that you can just use a little bit to help get you through daily anger, daily depression, daily pessimism, daily anxiety. The right literature, once you learn how to use it, can help pop you out of that, can give you more joy, more optimism, more love, more empathy, all of these positive effects.”
By identifying the exact linguistic and cognitive triggers that foster empathy, the researchers aim to bridge the humanities and neuroscience to develop narrative-based strategies for conflict resolution and emotional well-being.
Editorial Notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
Original Research is Open Access:Frontiers in Psychology (Oct 1, 2026). “Internal focalization influences real-life empathy: a literary contribution to wellbeing.” Authors: Angus Fletcher and Mark Matthews.
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Getty Images
President Trump is carrying his insatiable appetite for controversy into the most unforgiving stretch of the electoral calendar, fortified by a decade of political survival, Axios’ Zachary Basu writes.
“Bottom line, it’s gonna all work out. You know why? It always does,” Trump told reporters this week.
Why it matters: Gone are the days of a single “October surprise.” It’s been swallowed by a barrage of scandals, provocations and shattered conventions that have persisted in the closing weeks of Trump’s final midterm election.
The big picture: Axios has documented Trump’s steady demolition of presidential norms in his second term, from the transition through his first 100 days and first year in office.
This year, even the threat of losing Congress — and with it, much of his ability to pursue his agenda over the next two years — has done little to temper the pace or audacity of Trump’s presidency
Consider the first 15 days of October alone, and the succession of controversies that might have shaken the foundation of a more conventional presidency:
Raid on a political opponent: Federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) home and seized her phone as part of an investigation aimed at stripping the sitting member of Congress of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deporting her, The Wall Street Journalreports.
Calls to shoot leakers: Trump declared at an Arizona campaign rally that officials who leak sensitive military information “should be shot,” invoking an earlier era when he claimed the government routinely executed leakers.
Concessions to Vladimir Putin: Trump eased sanctions on Russian diesel, demanded the ouster of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pressured Kyiv to stop attacking Russian refineries, even as Moscow continued bombing Ukrainian infrastructure.
Federal crackdown on the press: The Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC after the networks suspended White House TV pool coverage to protest Trump’s ban on three news organizations.
$5,000 election promise: Trump pledged to send every adult American a $5,000 check if Republicans retain control of Congress, explicitly tying more than $1 trillion in proposed federal payments to the outcome of the midterms.President Trump greets former NFL and University of Georgia star running back Todd Gurley at a campaign rally in Dalton, Ga., yesterday. Photo: Eric Lee/Getty Images
The other side: Three October episodes forced Trump into rare retreats.
A televised execution: Trump scrapped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a convicted mass murderer’s execution by firing squad after bipartisan outrage.
An ambassador’s downfall: Trump forced Kimberly Guilfoyle — who was engaged to his son for four years until 2024 — to resign as ambassador to Greece after reports that she solicited $100,000 from a political donor to cover personal credit-card bills.
A five-day press secretary: Trump ousted Katie Zacharia amid scrutiny of her legal credentials and a widely criticized debut. Axios reports Trump was blindsided to learn that Zacharia — whom he had introduced as an attorney — had never passed the bar exam.
What they’re saying: Far from seeing October as a month of political peril, the administration is celebrating it as a continuation of Trump’s record.
White House assistant press secretary Allison Schuster told Axios: “Since Day 1 of his administration, President Trump has boldly and consistently fulfilled his campaign promises to protect national security, make America beautiful, secure the border, crack down on crime, ensure free and fair elections, and make life more affordable.
“The bottom line: Trump is treating a moment of maximum political vulnerability like business as usual, betting that the instincts that carried him this far won’t fail him now.
Nearly half of Americans identify as independent. So why are millions unable to participate in the primary elections that help determine who represents them? Jeremy Gruber, Senior Vice President of Open Primaries, joins Michael Smerconish for a conversation about America’s primary election system, political polarization, and the role independent voters play in our democracy. Gruber argues that closed primaries exclude independent voters from taxpayer-funded elections, leaving a relatively small group of party-affiliated voters with enormous influence over which candidates advance to the general election. But would opening primaries actually change our politics? Michael challenges Gruber on some of the biggest questions surrounding election reform: Would open primaries weaken political parties? Could voters manipulate opposing parties’ elections? And is there evidence that opening primaries produces more moderate candidates? Gruber makes an important distinction: The goal isn’t necessarily moderation. It’s better representation. They also examine the different primary systems used across the country, including recent changes in New Mexico and alternative approaches in California, Washington, Nebraska, and Alaska. With the 2026 midterms approaching, the conversation raises a fundamental question: Should political parties decide who gets to participate in primary elections, or should every voter have a voice? Watch Michael Smerconish’s conversation with Jeremy Gruber and share your thoughts in the comments. Subscribe for more independent political analysis, interviews, and conversations about the issues shaping America. #MichaelSmerconish#JeremyGruber#OpenPrimaries#IndependentVoters#ElectionReform
Psychedelic psychiatry gains momentum as clinicians weigh evidence, safety, and stigma.
CONFERENCE REPORTER
Psychedelic research is in a renaissance, said Gus Alva, MD, as work that began in the middle of the last century draws renewed attention.1The transformative potential of these agents made the field compelling, and Alva noted that researchers are actively working on further elucidating the validity of psychedelics.Reactions to the field ranged from concern to hope, with some clinicians approaching it with caution and others with optimism. Alva noted that any patient who wanted to potentially benefit from a psychedelic required that the terrain be fully vetted for safety and tolerability.2
Attitudes toward psychedelics were often shaped by the era in which clinicians were educated, Alva said. He added that outside societal influences had created a tenor around the field through misinformation implying that problems would be encountered by everyone who tried a psychedelic, which was not accurate. Such early messaging could unconsciously suggest whether a given agent was worth pursuing, even when the question was one of evidence rather than perception.
Evidence should be the standard applied to psychedelics, as it is with any treatment, Alva emphasized. “In the space of medicine, we need to have good evidence as to whether something is safe, whether it works or doesn’t,” he said. Whether an agent was safe and whether it worked were separate questions that each required answers. He summarized that psychedelics remain a field in which clinicians needed to learn more, stay up to date, and understand the data before forming a position.
Patients will continue to ask questions about psychedelics regardless of a clinician’s stance, according to Alva. “We need to be educated as to how to best advise patients regarding their options and whether we feel positive or negative about it,” he said. Remaining informed was therefore important for clinicians, whether their views of these agents were positive or negative, because patient questions would arise either way.
Dr Alvais a board-certified psychiatrist and the Mood Disorders Section Editor for Psychiatric Times.
‘A new kind of power’: investigation reveals spread of Palantir’s influence across Europe
The most revealing report yet into the AI company’s business across the continent, by a consortium led by Follow the Money, shows it holds €1.4bn of contracts – but that, as in the UK, doubts are growing about it as a partner. Sebastiaan Brommersma reports, with an introduction by Carole Cadwalladr
This report, painstakingly compiled over months by a consortium of European journalists, is essential reading for us here in Britain. Palantir, the controversial data surveillance firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, is finally facing pushback in the UK. The British government is its most important customer outside the US, a vast lucrative business which the Nerve revealed last month has now grown to nearly £1bn worth of contracts.
But that business is now in jeopardy. The most sensitive of those contracts – running the NHS’s federated data platform – is up for renewal and the mood music out of No 10 is that Andy Burnham is considering UK alternatives. That is also the context in which Palantir has hired a high profile politician to fight its corner: Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, and now Lord Watson of Wyre Forest. The man who previously took on Rupert Murdoch and spoke up about “surveillance capitalism” during the Cambridge Analytica scandal is now providing cover for a man who believes freedom and democracy are “incompatible”.
Three weeks ago, Watson sent Clive Lewis, the Labour MP leading the pushback against Palantir in parliament, a letter in which he revealed the company had been monitoring his statements about the company, and this week he’s been tweeting misleadingly over a news item about Palantir and the Met police.
The firm had initiated high court proceedings against City Hall claiming it contravened its own rules when it blocked a £50m Met police contract. That case has been settled – with Palantir forced to pay its own legal costs – and, however Watson tries to spin it, it’s a small but significant victory for the mayor’s office. This report, led by the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money (FTM), reveals it’s also part of a pattern.
It shows how governments and public bodies across Europe are successfully pushing back against the company – from Switzerland, where the military repeatedly rejected the use of Palantir’s software on national security grounds, to Spain, where the government is declining to renew its sole contract, to Denmark, where Trump’s threats against Greenland led to the country dropping a major purchase of Palantir technology, despite being in advanced talks.
This summer, Palantir’s controversial CEO and co-founder Alex Karp told shareholders that Europe was lucky to have the services of his company, Palantir.
“We’re supporting lots of institutions in Europe … I mean clandestine institutions,” he said. “Without our products, they’d have rampant terrorism and their problems – their migration problems – and the results would be 10 times worse.”
Palantir does not disclose who its European clients are, what they purchase or to what extent they are dependent on those products. But research by journalists across the continent reveals that Palantir has offices in 14 European countries, including the UK, and does business with national governments – ministries, armed forces and national police forces – in at least 11 of them. The company also has an office in Israel and Palantir works closely with the Israeli army.
The figures cited cause concern among experts. They describe Europe’s reliance on Palantir for parts of its digital infrastructure as “dangerous”.
Palantir poses a threat, experts say, because of the company’s connection to the White House, and the anti-democratic ideology of Karp and his co-founder Peter Thiel.
Since its foundation in 2003, Palantir has been intertwined with the US intelligence services and the Pentagon, but after Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, the ties between the company and the US government became closer.
Palantir secured billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts in the US for software used, among other things, to implement Trump’s Maga policy through the immigration agency ICE and the war in Iran.
In Iran, the company has been linked to a bombing of a girls’ school in which more than 120 children were killed because the army’s targeting software was not up to date.
In public statements, Palantir and Karp make no secret of the fact that they want to make America the dominant power in the world. This year Karp said that, in the event of capacity issues, his company would always “prioritise US warfighters above everything else”.
Palantir’s tools
Palantir’s tools are designed to link large amounts of data from various sources, make it searchable, and analyse and present it in such a way as to reveal connections that would otherwise have remained hidden.
Palantir’s best-known tools are Gotham and Foundry. Foundry makes it easier to manage work processes in the commercial sector, while Gotham is specifically designed for law enforcement, defence and intelligence.
Another well-known product is the Maven Smart System. This serves as the US army’s central software platform and was also acquired by Nato in March 2025.
Nato uses Maven as a central command system to ensure, among other things, that member states’ weapon systems communicate quickly and effectively during military operations. The system was awarded the highest security accreditation and runs on the part of Nato’s network that carries classified information.
Maven can process large amounts of data from satellites, drones, cameras, sensors, weather systems, telephone calls and countless other sources almost in real time to locate and take out targets.
The system can carry out this process almost entirely autonomously. It identifies targets, devises a plan of attack, checks weapon stocks and – following human intervention in the form of a press of a button – neutralises opponents: “find, fix, finish”, in military jargon.
According to the CEO of Palantir UK, Louis Mosley, Nato utilises this capability.
‘Woefully naive’
In eight of the 11 European countries where Palantir operates at national level, the ministry of defence and/or the armed forces are clients of the company. These include countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
The UK is by far Palantir’s largest market outside the US. According to the Nerve, between 2012 and 2025 the company secured contracts worth nearly £1bn there with organisations including the Ministry of Defence, the National Health Service (NHS), the nuclear agency and the financial regulator.
Security experts described the idea that the sensitive data involved in these deals would be secure as “woefully naive”.
The Swiss army repeatedly rejected the company’s advances. There were not only ethical objections – the risks of dependency and the leakage of government data to the US were also deemed too great
Many of these European countries are also part of military alliances, such as Nato and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF).
Because Palantir’s software is deployed within these alliances, some countries automatically make use of it – even if they do not have direct contracts with Palantir.
The Dutch ministry of defence uses both Gotham and Foundry to manage, execute and evaluate classified military operations carried out by the country’s special operations forces. Within the Nato framework, the Dutch ministry of defence deploys Maven to enable the interoperability of weapon systems during military missions.
Palantir’s software therefore processes highly sensitive information. In June, FTM revealed that, despite security measures, company employees had access to this classified data.
The national police forces in at least five countries use Gotham: Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Demark. In Germany and the UK, the police use the software at federal or regional levels.
The Danish national police force uses Gotham under the name Pol-Intel and has even extended its use to Greenland, as discovered by the Danish newspaper Børsen.
This Greenland roll-out came at precisely the moment that Trump was calling for the US to annex the autonomous territory. The call prompted the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) to label the US as a threat.
Earlier this month, the Danish news outlet Altinget reported that, due to the US threat and the close ties between Palantir and the White House, the Danish army had been instructed to halt the advanced talks on the purchase of Maven and to focus on a European alternative – despite the recent deal between the US, Greenland and Denmark.
According to Intelligence Online, the Danish intelligence services were considering discontinuing the use of Palantir’s Gotham for the same reasons at the end of last year.
The British government, Palantir’s biggest customer in Europe, has spent a total of £992m on the software. But millions are also being spent elsewhere.
In Lithuania, various contracts the government has signed with the company are set to be worth more than €67m by 2031. In Germany, the amount spent on the use of the software is between €47m and €86m.
In Norway, the police and customs authorities have so far paid a combined total of 555 million Norwegian kroner (€52m) to the company, and the Danish police have paid over 211 million Danish kroner (€28m). The Spanish ministry of defence spent €16.5m on Palantir, while its Italian counterpart spent €6.2m.
Millions also flowed to Palantir from Brussels. Europol, which used Gotham between 2012 and 2021 for – among other things – operational analyses and data visualisations, paid more than €4m. According to a spokesperson, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency transferred €4.7m between 2017 and 2023.
At today’s exchange rates, the total amount that these authorities collectively paid to Palantir therefore amounts to €1.4bn.
The actual figure is higher, as the governments of some countries, including the Netherlands and Sweden, are unwilling to comment on this matter.
Monitoring Ukrainians
Palantir’s European operations are not limited to the law enforcement and security sectors.
In Lithuania, the state data agency has in recent years signed contracts with the company with a value that could go over €67m.
Through this contract, the software is used by Lithuanian customs, among other bodies of government. In Norway, customs are so pleased with Palantir that the existing contract, which was due to expire in 2025, has been extended until 2030.
In Ukraine, alongside the army and the military security service, the ministry of digital transformation and the public prosecutor’s office also use Palantir’s software.
The Polish family, labour and social policy, and home affairs ministries engaged the company from 2022 to 2025, among other things to record the movements and whereabouts of Ukrainian refugees – including minors – who had fled to Poland.
Previously, a Palantir spokesperson confirmed to FTM that the company’s software had been used to support the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees in various European countries.
Our survey found, meanwhile, that contact between Palantir and European governments occurred with striking frequency in the aftermath of a disaster.
In France, for example, the company gained a foothold following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and its collaboration with the UK’s NHS and the Lithuanian state data agency came about around the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Setbacks
Despite Karp’s claim that, without Palantir’s products, countries would have “rampant terrorism”, many nations have declined the services of the US company.
Palantir’s attempts to sell its software to the Austrian ministry of defence came to nothing – despite a pilot project in 2018 – the Austrian outlet Der Standard reported. Nor did the country’s ministry of the interior make a deal, despite repeated attempts.
The same applied to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the notorious Israeli intelligence unit Unit 8200, and the Shin Bet security service. According to the Israeli newspaper Globes, despite Palantir’s close ties with the IDF, the services decided after a trial not to enter into a partnership with the company.
The Swiss army repeatedly rejected the company’s advances, as revealed by the Swiss investigative platform Republik in late 2025 on the basis of internal documents. There were not only ethical objections – the risks of dependency and the leakage of government data to the US government were also deemed too great.
In Germany, the head of the Bundeswehr’s Cyber and Information Space Command told Handelsblatt in April that the country’s army should not do business with the company at all. This was to prevent Palantir employees from gaining access to sensitive defence data.
Despite its recently opened office in Brussels, Palantir has not received a warm welcome from the Belgian government either. In June, the Belgian ministers of defence and foreign affairs told parliament they do not do business with Palantir and have no plans to do so.
The country’s federal police had already taken a similar stance.
The Belgian ministers did not give a formal reason, but it can be inferred from their written statements to parliament, seen by FTM, that the importance of European digital sovereignty carries significant weight.
‘Unacceptable point of weakness’
A desire for digital autonomy is prompting some governments to review their ties with Palantir.
In June, the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced that his domestic intelligence service would not renew the contract – which had been extended as recently as December 2025 – a further time. This was to avoid strategic dependence.
The Norwegian national police also decided not to renew its contract, which is due to expire in 2027. However, according to the Morgenbladet newspaper, this was because use of the software failed to get off the ground due to local privacy laws that prevented the integration of the necessary databases.
In the UK, several police forces have recently distanced themselves from Palantir, and the possibility of terminating the NHS’s mega-contract is being investigated.
In early October, the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, announced that he intended to replace Palantir with a home-grown alternative. A UK parliamentary committee described the growing reliance on the company as an “unacceptable point of weakness” and stated that Palantir represented a “clear mismatch” with the country’s values.
The committee also noted that, following Palantir’s public endorsement of CEO Karp’s controversial political views, the US company can no longer be regarded as apolitical.
In September, a group of more than 120 European NGOs, trade unions and European institutions from 30 countries called on governments in an open letter to sever ties with the company. In doing so, they referred, among other things, to the issues of dependency and the allegations of human rights violations.
‘By hiring former civil servants and embedding engineers within government agencies, Palantir gains control over governments’ core systems. This creates a dependency that is almost impossible to undo’
Prof Francesca Bria, UCL
Nevertheless, there appears to be no sign of a radical transformation as yet.
The Polish ministry of defence signed a letter of intent with Palantir in 2025 for the development of artificial intelligence, and the Lithuanian ministry of defence signed a memorandum of understanding with the company in 2023 for a central data management platform.
Furthermore, around the time of the UN General Assembly in New York in September, the presidents of Poland and Lithuania also spoke with Karp about the possibility of turning their countries into a hub for the development of military technology and the protection of Nato’s eastern flank.
‘How far does this influence extend?’
Elke Schwarz, a professor of political theory at Queen Mary, University of London, researches the development of military AI and autonomous weapons.
According to her, European countries’ dependence on Palantir is problematic, particularly because of its close ties to the White House “Certainly when it comes to national security, dependence on a company that openly states that another state – in this case the US – has undisputed priority [is a problem].”
As more government bodies in a country do business with such a company, these problems grow, Schwarz said. “The temptation is there, because the promise is that their systems work better if you link more data streams together, but the downside is that you make yourself increasingly dependent and therefore more vulnerable.”
Schwarz added: “We know that Palantir develops close ties with government officials wherever it goes.” She pointed to the large number of civil servants the company recruited in the US and the UK, after which it managed to secure contracts with their former employers. “The question then is, is Palantir able to influence decision-making this way, and if so, how far does its influence extend?”
According to Francesca Bria, this is part of a deliberate strategy. Bria is a professor at University College London and leader of the EuroStack initiative for European digital sovereignty. “By hiring former civil servants and embedding engineers within government agencies, Palantir gains control over governments’ core systems,” she said. “This creates a dependency that is almost impossible to undo.”
Bria also criticised the secrecy surrounding governments’ contracts with Palantir.
“When it comes to national security, you can’t disclose everything,” she said. “But if you’re managing a country’s critical infrastructure, you have a duty to make it clear who controls the data flowing through it, who bears ultimate responsibility, and who can shut down the system. Governments have a responsibility to their citizens, not to American oligarchs.”
According to her, the reliance on Palantir in critical infrastructure touches on a fundamental issue in particular: “A company so deeply intertwined with the US government and its mission of American supremacy is a critical component of the infrastructure of a new kind of power – one built on technology and dependence. Europe has entrusted its most sensitive systems to a company that will never put Europe’s interests first.”
Bria added: “It’s dangerous that their software, of all things, is embedded deep within the fabric of our society and processes the data of millions of Europeans, while the software itself – because it’s a commercial enterprise – is not transparent. Not even to European governments. This makes democratic oversight impossible. That’s not how critical public systems are supposed to work.”
It doesn’t have to be that way, she concluded. “The countries that don’t work with Palantir and are re-evaluating their position prove that Europe can do without it. Countries that do buy into it aren’t just purchasing software – they’re giving up their sovereignty.”
FTM presented the results of this investigation to Palantir and asked detailed follow-up questions on its findings. A spokesperson for the company did not address those questions but said in a statement:
“There is a serious debate to be had about how Europe safeguards its sovereignty as technology plays an ever-greater role in our security, economies, and daily lives. But that debate should be grounded in facts.
“Technological sovereignty should ultimately be measured by who controls the data, the decisions, and the mission – not simply by the nationality of the software provider.
“Since 2011, Palantir has worked with Europe’s democratically elected governments and institutions to increase hospital capacity, speed up cancer diagnosis, safely resettle refugees, tackle organised crime, protect victims of domestic violence, and respond faster to floods and other emergencies.”
In an earlier response to FTM, Palantir denied the allegations of involvement in human rights violations.
Additional reporting by Rosanne Kropman and Elias Rutten. This piece was first published onFollow the Money, 15 October 2026.
Notes
Led by Follow the Money, journalists from 18 countries across Europe surveyed governments that had entered into partnerships with Palantir.
Reporters drew on public sources, submitted questions and – on occasion – made requests under freedom of information acts.
The collaborative project included journalists from De Tijd (Belgium), Børsen (Denmark), Der Standard (Austria), Republik (Switzerland), WAV Recherchekollektiv (Switzerland), Morgenbladet (Norway), the Nerve (United Kingdom), El País (Spain), Netzpolitik.org (Germany), Il Domani (Italy), Dagens ETC (Sweden), Siena (Lithuania), Haaretz (Israel), Telerama (France), Helsingin Sanomat (Finland), Delfi Meedia (Estonia), Inside Story (Greece) and Frontstory.pl (Poland).
The Nerve is a fearless, independent media title launched by five former Guardian / Observer journalists: investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter and creative director Lynsey Irvine. We cover culture, politics and tech, brought to you in twice weekly newsletters on Tuesdays and Fridays (sign up here). We rely on funding from our community, so please also consider joining us as a paying member. You can read more about our mission here.
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