When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”

Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.

In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.

The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.

But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.

The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

The city of Phoenix said in a statement that it has “tirelessly focused on enhancing policy, training and accountability measures to ensure the best public safety for everyone who lives, works and plays in Phoenix.” In recent years, the city has enacted policy changes including employee training and the implementation of body-worn cameras.

Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.

“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.

Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.

After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.

Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.

ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.

Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.

Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.

“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.

Since President Donald Trump reentered the White House, politicians have opened the floodgates on conspiracy theories and unfounded claims against public figures, ranging from a fumbled release of documents surrounding victims of financier Jeffrey Epstein to hearings about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.

Now, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, has joined calls to free Tory Lanez, a Canadian rapper who was sentenced to prison after a 2020 altercation with rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The case itself has been scrutinized by online critics — despite Lanez’s conviction — who claimed Megan Thee Stallion’s testimony was fabricated, that powerful music executives have tried to orchestrate a “cover-up” and that the DNA evidence linking Lanez to a gun was inadmissible or flawed.

While Luna posted what she called evidence of Lanez’s innocence, Megan Thee Stallion’s team pushed back — and there’s no indication prosecutors are reopening the case. Lanez’s trial highlighted how often Black women who seek justice are doubted, by both the legal system and society. Luna’s attempt to draw attention to the case and assert that Lanez was wrongly convicted represents both a doubling down on that dynamic and an indication of how pop culture and politics combine in online spaces full of misinformation. 

As a member of the Oversight Committee, the House’s powerful main investigative branch, Luna told NewsNation this week that she had come across new DNA evidence that would disprove Lanez’s involvement and Ring camera footage that shows the case as “he-said-she-said.”

After receiving a tip from Amber Rose — a media personality who has strengthened her connections with the Republican Party in the past year, including speaking at their nominating convention — Luna said she has been working with members of the California delegation, including Democrats, to urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to pardon Lanez.

“[This was] pretty egregious, the way this was handled — I think it was largely driven by headlines,” Luna told NewsNation during an interview. “Obviously, domestic violence I take very seriously, but I also take very seriously the fact that I do believe, based on the evidence that I’ve seen, that Tory’s innocent.”

Police arrested Lanez during a traffic stop on July 12, 2020, after receiving reports of gunfire from a group leaving celebrity Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home in Los Angeles. At the time, Megan Thee Stallion, whose real name is Megan Pete, was taken to the hospital for a foot injury — one she initially told police was the result of stepping on broken glass and later said was actually the result of having been shot in the foot by Lanez. The surgeon who treated Megan Thee Stallion testified to seeing gunshot wounds in her foot, as well as seeing bullet fragments on X-ray imaging. 

Lanez was sentenced to 10 years in prison in August 2023 after a jury found him guilty of assault with a firearm, illegal possession and negligent discharge of the weapon. As a Canadian citizen, Lanez could also face deportation from the United States after serving his sentence. The judge had previously denied a request for a retrial.

But almost two years later, persistent theories and conspiracies, combined with doubts about evidence in the now-closed court case, continue to circulate online. Podcasters and social media users have tried to cast doubt on the fact that Megan Thee Stallion was actually shot for years, which prosecutors called a “weaponized information” campaign orchestrated by Lanez and his team. Other Black men celebrities currently facing claims of assault, abuse or trafficking — including producer Sean “Diddy” Combs, singer Chris Brown and rapper DDG — have seen similar waves of support across social media this week in the face of allegations against them.

Lanez’s case has reemerged after the artist was stabbed 14 times while in prison earlier this month.

Christine Scartz, director of the Family Justice Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law, said that while it’s good for people with influence, like lawmakers, to call attention to possible miscarriages of justice, she worries about what the attention on this case means for Megan Thee Stallion and other Black women.

“For Black women victims of violence, it’s not just a struggle for individual justice, but it’s a struggle against all these other competing priorities that people who either are not involved in the case directly or who don’t know exactly what it is they’re talking about or how the system works,” Scartz said. “You have to struggle against all these competing priorities for other people who are then going to shade you when you’re just looking for individual justice.”

Luna had never posted about his case on her official X account until May 19, when she started circulating a petition from the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety, a conservative effort run by TV host and Fox political analyst Gianno Caldwell. Attorney General Pam Bondi; Rep. Burgess Owens, a Black Utah Republican; and media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky are all on the Caldwell Institute’s board. Luna and Caldwell did not respond to requests for comment.

Luna posted that she had “compelling evidence” proving Lanez’s innocence, claiming that the singer had not received due process. She then posted a thread, tagging Newsom, listing concerns she had with the trial process, citing the First, Sixth and Fourteenth amendments. On Thursday, she posted another thread, claiming a new affidavit from a bodyguard “shatters the original narrative used to convict” Lanez.

“This guy’s an innocently incarcerated man,” Luna told a reporter Wednesday. “When the evidence was brought forward and presented to me, I was pretty baffled that he was even charged after what I saw.” 

She also said she spoke with the rapper Tuesday, saying that once Lanez gets a pardon — which Luna said she is confident will happen — he will work on prison reform.

On Thursday, Megan Thee Stallion’s lawyers released a 31-page report seeking to dismantle “unsworn rumors being spread as fact,” dismissing the circulating Ring camera footage and claims about DNA evidence.

“Despite Mr. Lanez being convicted at trial by overwhelming evidence (that included his own admission of his guilt), he and his team — flanked by any ignorant person they can find — have pushed whatever misleading narrative they can,” said Alex Spiro, Megan Thee Stallion’s lawyer, who headed the report.

Profiles in Courage is a series honoring the extraordinary women and men who have transformed American institutions through principled public service. At a time when trust in government is fragile, these stories offer a powerful reminder of what ethical leadership looks like—from those who litigate for civil rights and resign on principle, to those who break military barriers and defend democracy on the front lines.

This month, we spotlight women in the Department of Justice, federal agencies and the military whose careers have been defined by integrity, resilience and reform. Their quiet heroism—often at personal cost—reaffirms the enduring role of public servants who choose justice over self-interest. Through their stories, Ms. pays tribute to a tradition of service that safeguards democracy and inspires the next generation to lead with courage.

When Colonel Susan Meyers assumed command of Pituffik Space Base, America’s northernmost military installation, in July 2024, she inherited more than a remote outpost carved from the Arctic ice. She inherited an unbroken 70-year alliance with Denmark and Greenland, 200 airmen and guardians under her care, and a delicate diplomatic balance in an era of rising political tension.

Meyers, an officer who had spent nearly two decades in the Air Force before transferring to the U.S. Space Force in 2021, understood that every flag flown at Pituffik signified a hard-won partnership in one of the planet’s harshest environments.

On March 29, 2025, that equilibrium was shaken. Vice President JD Vance, visiting to promote President Donald Trump’s renewed push to annex Greenland, publicly rebuked Denmark for “neglecting” Greenlanders and hinted that military force might be justified. The remarks ignited unease among Danish officials, Greenlandic leaders and the American service members posted at Pituffik who had long worked side-by-side with their allies.

The Email That Cost a Command

Three days later, following a weekend spent assessing base morale, rereading Vance’s statements and listening to her international partners, Colonel Meyers drafted an email addressed to every member of her garrison:

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base … For as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly—together.”

Her message neither mentioned annexation nor invoked partisan language. It simply reaffirmed the base’s long-standing commitment to a non-political military partnership with Denmark and Greenland.

However, in an environment where senior leaders had been warned to remain “scrupulously nonpartisan,” the email was perceived as an act of defiance.

Immediate Repercussions

On April 10, 2025, the U.S. Space Force relieved Colonel Meyers of command, citing “a loss of confidence.” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted on X, writing: “Actions [that] undermine the chain of command or subvert President [Donald] Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense.”

Meyers was replaced within hours by Colonel Shawn Lee.

In Washington, some hailed her firing as necessary discipline, while others condemned it as the politicization of a uniformed officer who merely upheld the long-held values of joint defense. In Copenhagen and Nuuk, Danish and Greenlandic leaders quietly praised her “steadfast professionalism.”

An Arctic Command, a Defining Stand

Commanding Pituffik involves dealing with constant winter darkness, encountering 24-hour daylight during summer, and facing temperatures that can plunge below –60°F. It also necessitates protecting crucial satellite tracking radars and missile warning systems that bolster North American defense. Colonel Meyers achieved this while honoring the treaty commitments that have sustained the base as sovereign Danish territory since 1951.

Her decision to speak—measured, nonpartisan, yet unmistakably principled—was rooted in a conviction that military loyalty to allies transcends political cycles. She did not seek confrontation with her civilian leadership; rather, she aimed to steady a shaken force and reassure partners who felt blindsided by annexation rhetoric.

Legacy of Integrity

Colonel Susan Meyers now joins a lineage of officers who accepted personal costs to uphold the apolitical ethos of the U.S. armed forces. In the frozen expanse of northwest Greenland, where auroras are as typical a sight as radar domes, her brief command will be remembered for a single email affirming that allied flags fly together or not at all.

In an age when strategic competition converges once more on the Arctic, her stand serves as a stark reminder that “true” command is not measured solely by tenure but by the courage to defend the principles that unite allies on the world’s most remote frontiers.

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Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man.

The SheiniSheinFounded in China in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, Shein is a fast fashion brand that grew rapidly through exposure on social media.READ MORE India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction in a market where Amazon and Walmart have been fighting neck-to-neck for nearly a decade. Downloads for Shein India nosedived from 50,000 a day shortly after its launch in early February to 3,311 in early April, according to AppMagic, a U.S.-based app performance tracker.

In April, when U.S. tariffs hit China, the app saw renewed interest as it was in the news, but experts are unclear on whether this growth is sustainable.

“Unlike earlier times, now … [the] market is saturated with multiple options and offers, and user interest can quickly dwindle,” Yugal Joshi, partner at global research firm Everest Group, told Rest of World.

Kushal Bhatnagar of Indian consulting firm Redseer, however, sees the late-April spike as a healthy sign, given that Reliance has yet to run paid marketing campaigns for Shein. 

Reliance Retail declined to respond to Rest of World’s queries about its partnership with Shein.

Reliance launched Shein for India five years after the original Shein app was banned in the country over border tensions with China. But the Shein that has returned is entirely separate from Shein’s global platform: Rather than selling made-in-China clothes and accessories directly to consumers, Shein now operates as a technology partner, while Reliance Retail handles the heavy lifting — from sourcing and manufacturing to distribution. All consumer data is managed by the Indian company.

The partnership is part of Ambani’s broader effort to overhaul his retail business, whose valuation fell to $50 billion in 2025 from $125 billion in 2022. Although the company has made a push into digital platforms like JioMart, Ajio, and most recently Shein India, the bulk of its retail revenue still comes from its 18,000 physical stores.

Lagging behind Amazon and Walmart-backed FlipkartiFlipkartFlipkart, founded in 2007, is one of India’s oldest e-commerce companies, and is owned by Walmart.READ MORE, which together control nearly 60% of India’s e-commerce market, Reliance has spent years trying to break into the sector. Between 2020 and 2025, Ambani’s group acquired majority stakes in companies spanning digital services, online pharmaceuticals, and quick commerce. But the investments have yet to position Reliance as a serious challenger to Amazon and Flipkart. 

Analysts say the Indian behemoth hopes to leverage Shein’s artificial intelligence-powered trendspotting and automated inventory systems to pursue an ambitious goal: capturing a major share of India’s e-commerce market, projected to hit $345 billion by 2030.

According to Kaustav Sengupta, director of insights at VisionNxt, an Indian government-funded initiative that uses AI to forecast fashion trends, such a model is likely to make good use of Reliance’s humongous customer data sets: more than 476 million subscribers for its Jio telecom brand, 300 million users for e-commerce platform JioMart, and 452 million subscribers for its news and entertainment portfolio, consisting of 63 channels, a streaming service, and digital news outlets.

“With these data points, Reliance wants to now sell fashion products, so all it needs is a system where it can feed all these data points,” Sengupta told Rest of World. He said the model would be able to predict best-selling products and suggest the right prices for them.

The original Shein app uses AI-driven models for intelligent warehousing and to spot customer trends before manufacturing a new product. It scales the manufacturing up or tweaks the designs based on the feedback. At any given time, the Shein website has a catalogue of more than 600,000 items. Its Indian iteration does not match up, according to reviews on the Google Play store. Several customer reviews for Reliance’s Shein app are critical of higher prices and reduced options. The app’s rating hovered at 2 out of 5 until February; in May, it climbed to 4.4, but reviews were still a mixed bag. 

As of April 25, Reliance Retail said only 12,000 products were live on Shein India, a stark contrast to the 600,000 items available on Shein’s global platforms. While Shein is reportedly set to debut on the London Stock Exchange this year, Ambani’s years-old promise to take Reliance Retail public remains unfulfilled.

Reliance Retail, which accounts for around 30% of the conglomerate’s overall business, is facing a slowdown in annual growth. Its sales rose just 7.9% in the fiscal year ending March 2025, down from 17.8% the previous year. Meanwhile, shares of rival Tata Group’s retail and fashion arm, Trent, have soared by 133%.

“Reliance would have looked at reviving that momentum and riding on it, while for Shein, adding India back on its portfolio of markets could be a plus point before its proposed public listing,” Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a brand management consultancy that has worked with various global e-commerce brands including Ikea, told Rest of World.

A Reliance Retail official privy to information about its fast fashion expansion plans told Rest of World the partnership with Shein also hinges on global manufacturing ambitions as the Chinese company is trying to “source its products from other countries like India” to meet the “additional demand that is coming from newer markets.” Reliance Retail has tapped a network of small and midsize Indian manufacturers to locally source products, and its subsidiary Nextgen Fast Fashion Limited is leading the charge. “We need to first scale up our domestic manufacturing, before our partnership starts manufacturing for global markets. Let us see how that goes, first,” the official said, requesting anonymity as he is not authorized to share this information publicly. 

India’s Gen Z population is at 377 million and counting, and their spending power is set to surpass $2 trillion by 2035, according to a 2024 report by Boston Consulting Group. Every fast-fashion retailer wants to capture this market, but it “is very new even for Reliance,” Rimjim Deka, founder of Indian fast-fashion platform Littlebox, told Rest of World.

Deka said smaller brands like hers “just see [a trend] and implement it,” which could take a large conglomerate months to do, by which time the trend may have lost relevance.

Reliance’s previous attempts to attract young shoppers with clothing brands like Foundry and Yousta failed to find much success. Anandita Bhuyan, who works in trend forecasting and product creation for fast-fashion clients like Urbanic and Myntra, told Rest of World the company has struggled to effectively leverage consumer data and target India’s youth.

According to the Reliance Retail official, the company is confident that if “there are 10 existing brands, the 11th brand will also get picked up as long as there is value and there is fashion.”

“Shein already has a recall among the youth. It gives us yet another brand in our portfolio through which we can cater to the youth,” the official said.

Shein was built in China on the back of more than 5,400 micro manufacturers — a scattered and loosely organized network of small and midsize factories.

In January this year, on a visit to China, Deka met with manufacturers working for Shein and Temu. On the outskirts of Guangzhou, Deka saw factories set up in areas that appeared residential, with “women sitting inside houses” making clothes.

“The tech is built in a way that somebody sitting there is able to see that, okay, next 15 days or next one month, how much I should be making … that is the kind of integration they have done,” Deka said.

Deka told Rest of World this model is easier to replicate at a smaller scale. “Me, coming from [the] supply chain industry, I understand that it is much easier for a brand like us because we are at a very smaller scale. We can still go to those people, we can still build it in a very unorganized way and then pull it off,” she said. Her company’s annual net revenue is 750 million Indian rupees ($8.6 million).

“[But] somebody like Reliance, they just cannot go haphazard here. … It has to be always organized,” Deka said.

Shein moved its headquarters to Singapore sometime between late 2021 and early  2022, a strategic departure to distance itself from its Chinese origins and facilitate hassle-free international expansion amid the U.S.-China trade war.

India is part of Shein’s wider strategy to diversify its supply chain — one that also includes a newly leased warehouse near Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and efforts to establish alternative manufacturing hubs in Brazil and Turkey.

But in India, Reliance needs Shein as much as Shein needs Reliance for its global pivot. According to Bloomberg, Reliance Retail is focusing on creating leaner operations to weather a wider consumption slump in the Indian economy.

“It remains to be seen whether the Reliance-Shein combine can deliver on the brand’s promise with a wide range of products, fast and on-trend,” Dutta said. “In the years that Shein has been absent, the Indian market has evolved further, competition has intensified, and past goodwill is not enough to provide sales momentum.”

It is tempting to think of the callbacks in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning as an aggressive exercise in franchise nostalgia, a near-30-year series flexing a little to remind folks that even someone with as little screentime as a CIA tech with an upset tummy in the initial outing is a classic character worthy of redemption by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team.

But there’s more to the return of William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) than simple fan service. His secure CIA database in the first movie way back in 1996 was notable not just for its impenetrability—to all except Luther (Ving Rhames), aka Phineas Phreak, naturally—but also its inaccessibility. It was offline, secure in part because it couldn’t be reached by hackers. You remember the scene: Ethan dropping by wires so as not to touch the pressure-sensitive floor; obsessively controlling his own body heat so as not to trip the temperature sensors. The names of the agents on that database were protected by being kept from the digital ether, period. Breaching those analog defenses with digital weaponry in that first film was like letting the snake into Eden.

The series has grown up with the internet alongside the rest of us; in hindsight, there’s a funny moment where we learn the villain’s email is “Max@Job 3:14,” an address that would totally work. But only in hindsight for most of us, given the levels of digital penetration in 1996, when AOL was still a relatively unusual luxury and only one in five Americans was online. Between the time that movie was filmed and its sequel debuted in 2000, Pew reports that more than half of the country was online. Twenty-five years later, everyone walking into Final Reckoning—a rousing conclusion to the first major franchise of the digital age—carried the internet into the theater with them in their pocket.

At this, “the Entity” might smile.

A preoccupation with the internet and its effects pervades both The Final Reckoning and its predecessor in the series, Dead Reckoning. The Entity—an unholy offspring created when an American spy program mated with a Russian super-submarine, a combination that makes roughly as much technical sense as an email address with a biblical verse in the place of a domain name—can run so many computations and so accurately work percentages that it can, functionally, see the future. More importantly than that, though, it can change the past. Or, at least, how we perceive the past, what we believe to be real about the past.

“Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth. The concepts of right and wrong can be clearly defined for everyone for centuries to come,” says Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), another character returning from the initial entry in the series. The nation in control of this manufactured truth will gain access to Earth’s “dwindling resources”; everyone else will be forced to choke on the ashes. And we see that manipulation of the truth in The Final Reckoning’s opening moments, the Entity changing images of school buses into tanks. Or vice versa, perhaps. Who can say? As one character puts it in the early moments, ominously sounding a bit like Galadriel in the opening voiceover of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The world is changing. Truth is vanishing. War is coming.” Though how much control of the truth matters is in some question, since the Entity has seized control of half of the world’s nuclear powers’ armaments. Only the United States, China, Russia, and Great Britain remain unaffected, and those nations are falling off the big board in rapid succession, unable or unwilling to take their own arsenals offline because, in a post-truth society, no one knows whom to trust.

What the Entity wants and how it hopes to achieve it are, frankly, immaterial; what matters are the images we see and then don’t see, the information it can create and blink out of existence. At one point, the Entity subjects Ethan to a barrage of future images in a sarcophagus-like tank; as he spills out of it, shaking from exhaustion and terror, he asks and then exclaims, “You’re real? You’re real!” as he holds on to Grace (Hayley Atwell). It feels like fate that this movie would drop the same weekend that Google’s Veo 3 granted folks the ability to create news broadcasts out of whole cloth, a tool making it easier than ever to manufacture untrue truths, one that will cripple our intellectual defenses and divide people with falsehoods via text prompt.

For all the gadgets and doodads, Mission: Impossible has always been an analog series struggling within a digital world. Yes there are digital head-up displays and hacks, but the series’s best bit has always been the masks, a physical tactile thing that agents pull off of their faces at surprising moments, proving their mastery at in-person infiltration. More than that, though, is the physicality of the filmmaking itself, Tom Cruise’s near-maniacal insistence he do his own stunts (or, at least, as many of them as are physically feasible) rather than rely on digital fakery. From hanging off the side of a speeding airplane to diving hundreds of feet to recover a submarine core to running (always running, forever running), Ethan Hunt is a man in motion, either under his own power or hanging off of something with a motor.

The series as a whole has often treated the plot as little more than an excuse to get to the stunts, but it feels like there’s something a bit more urgent in Final Reckoning, that Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie have more to say. This is one reason the film is a little long; it’s overstuffed with ideas and supporting characters and side missions. Yet it never really feels long, at least in part because Cruise has assembled an all-star class of supporting actors; Trammel Tillman, most recently of Severance fame as Mr. Milchick, is the standout here, generating appreciative laughs as a stern submarine captain. Indeed, there’s a sly sense of humor to the whole proceedings, another reason it flies along; at one point late in the film, Ethan climbs up the undercarriage of a conveyance and gives its operator—who is staring at the IMF agent, mouth agog—an almost apologetic shrug of the shoulders as if to say “I don’t know, man, your guess is as good as mine as to what I’m doing up here.”

What Ethan’s doing, of course, is saving the day. And what Cruise is doing is trying to save the entire industry of filmmaking as we know it, as if his exertions can prove the importance and the viability of the star-driven blockbuster, as if the wind blowing into his cheeks as he straddles a biplane’s landing strut, hundreds of feet in the air, can also blow life back into the artform he has dedicated his life to.

Cruise feels like the last of a certain kind of star, at least at his wattage. He happened to be in my town, Dallas, yesterday, and I wanted to see the effect he had. I’d gotten word he was going to be at one theater for an outro and an intro, and I pulled up to the theater just in time to see his convoy—four or five black SUVs with a multi-vehicle police escort shutting down side streets, calling to mind a vice-presidential motorcade for this former D.C. resident—speeding away. Still, I popped in to see how audiences had taken being graced with his presence and it’s fair to say that the mood was one of swooning.

Most of the day’s action took place at the AMC Northpark, one of the busiest movie theaters in the country. The buzz Cruise brought to the venue was almost palpable; I spend a lot of time at the Northpark, and I’ve never seen it like this. The staff was in a tizzy too; one worker I chatted up briefly said they’d been working for AMC for more than a decade and “it’s never been like this. It’s good to have this kind of excitement.” Cruise and the folks at Paramount had commandeered the IMAX theater for private screenings and he and McQuarrie were popping into some showings to say hi, so lots of folks were just kind of milling around hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the last living megastars.

I was one of the millers, wandering around a bit and soaking it all up while sipping on a beer waiting for the 8:30 screening I had a ticket for to start. And then, all of a sudden, security stepped in to clear a path and there he was, ducking out of one auditorium, into a private lounge area. Flashing the smile. Accompanied by McQuarrie, who always looks a little bemused by the pomp and circumstance of being next to one of the most recognizable men in the world. Cruise was out in the open for about four seconds and the energy it generated among the assembled is almost embarrassingly hard to describe.

I don’t know what the future of movies and movie theaters holds. Maybe it’ll all disappear soon. If it does, I’ll miss these splashes of energy, these moments of weird camaraderie as strangers gather to experience a communal event in multiplexes around the country.

Sarah and I talked about this ChatGPT stuff on the Secret pod, in addition to talking about Harvard, LaMonica McIver, and Trump’s South Africa meeting.

The show is here.

We talked about this New York magazine story briefly yesterday, but I want to go deep on it today. Short version: Kids in high school and college are using AI to do their homework, write their essays, and take their tests at a scale you can’t believe.

Cheating with ChatGPT in 2025 is like smoking pot in 1975. Everyone is doing it.

Is this good? Or bad? I have complicated thoughts. And what I really want from today is a conversation with you guys, in the comments.

Let’s ride.

Cards on the table: My college experience looked absolutely nothing like what is described in this piece.

The New York article talks almost exclusively with students who write papers and essays.

I wrote one paper in college. It was for a graduate-level immunobiology course and it was highly technical. I can’t be certain, but I do not believe I read a single book in college. Not a real book, anyway. Textbooks and scientific articles? Sure. I went through them by the dozen. But a book with prose in it?

Zero.

I spent all of my time in labs and working on problem sets. Math. P-chem. Orgo. Physics. We’d have problem sets to turn in every week. Tests a couple times a semester. And then finals.

ChatGPT would have been of no use to me. I could have used AI to help with problem sets, I suppose. But then I would have had to check everything by hand anyway, since these were questions with right and wrong answers. And the exams?

AI would have been utterly useless. We sat in a lecture hall for three hours, staring at exam packets filled with equations and formulas and chemical reactions and had to solve them with nothing but the Holy Spirit and a pencil.

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I understand that my experience was not the universal one. But we can start by observing that, generally speaking, there are two branches of study: Real subjects STEM and fake subjects liberal arts.

AI poses some challenges to STEM education, especially in computer science, where it can be used to write code. But in the main, kids can’t use ChatGPT to get around differential equations or fluid dynamics, because at the end of the day you have to sit in a room with a pencil and solve equations. You can either do that, or you can’t.

But liberal arts studies? That’s the nightmare. Legitimately, I cannot think of a way to stop AI from completely disrupting liberal arts education.

And yet, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing? In fact, I’m kind of on the side of the cheaters? I’m Ron Burgundy?

Let’s talk about it.