Launched in partnership with SANDOW DESIGN GROUP, the inaugural CDW Product Awards debuted at Clerkenwell Design Week in London, spotlighting standout products that represent the best of today’s design thinking and tomorrow’s possibilities. Winners were selected for their bold vision, thoughtful execution, and impact across disciplines—from sustainability and accessibility to technology integration and modular design. This year’s distinguished jury brought a wealth of expertise across architecture, design, and editorial leadership: • Linda Morey-Burrows, founder of MoreySmith Architects • Daniel MacInnes, director at PriestmanGoode • Shawn Adams, architect, writer, and founder of POoR Collective • Valeria Segovia, principal and design director, Gensler • AJ Paron, EVP and design futurist, Sandow Design Group • Avinash Rajagopal, editor in chief, *Metropolis* Magazine Click here to view all of the 2025 finalists. Accessories Manufacturer: Spacestor   |   Product: Valet Photo Credit: Thom Pitt   |   Visit Website Acoustics Manufacturer: Acoufelt   |   Product: Flow Ceiling Baffles Photo Credit: Grace Iguis   |   Visit Website Bath Fixtures Manufacturer: C.P. Hart Bathrooms   |   Product: Park Lane Photo Credit: Fima   |   Visit Website Best Craftsmanship Manufacturer: Woodesign di Primiceri Roberto e c sas   |   Product: VIVA by Roberto Primiceri Photo Credit: G. Surdo   |   Visit Website Best for the Planet Manufacturer: Arper   |   Product: Catifa Carta Photo Credit: Salva Lopez   |   Visit Website Best Material Innovation Manufacturer: Camira Fabrics   |   Product: ReSKU 2.0 Photo Credit: Camira   |   Visit Website Best of Clerkenwell Manufacturer: Camira Fabrics   |   Product: ReSKU 2.0 Photo Credit: Camira   |   Visit Website Best Product for Healthcare Manufacturer: Shaw Contract   |   Product: EcoWorx Resilient PVC free/ Art+Science Collection Photo Credit: Shaw Contract   |   Visit Website Best Product for Homes Manufacturer: Gaze Burvill   |   Product: Levity Photo Credit: Julie Skelton   |   Visit Website Best Product for Workplaces Manufacturer: Teknion   |   Product: Jotta Photo Credit: Teknion   |   Visit Website Carpet and Rugs Manufacturer: Milliken   |   Product: Pattern Play Carpet Tile Collection Photo Credit: Milliken Floor Covering   |   Visit Website Commercial Furniture Manufacturer: Humanscale   |   Product: Freedom 25 Photo Credit: Humanscale   |   Visit Website Hard Flooring Manufacturer: Bolon   |   Product: Elements Collection Photo Credit: Bolon, Elements, Wool   |   Visit Website Lighting Manufacturer: NordluxLimited   |   Product: Glossy Mini Photo Credit: Andreas From   |   Visit Website Most Inclusive Design Manufacturer: Mikomax Sp. z o.o. / Hushoffice brand   |   Product: hushFree line of acoustic pods Photo Credit: company materials   |   Visit Website Residential Furniture Manufacturer: Woodesign di Primiceri Roberto e c sas   |   Product: VIVA by Roberto Primiceri Photo Credit: G. Surdo   |   Visit Website Technology/ Power and IT Solutions Manufacturer: Blocks   |   Product: Blocks | smart lockers Photo Credit: company materials   |   Visit Website Textiles Manufacturer: Camira Fabrics   |   Product: ReSKU 2.0 Photo Credit: ReSKU 2.0 essentials shot : Camira   |   Visit Website Tile and Surfaces Manufacturer: Albion Stone   |   Product: Stone Brick ‘Specials’ Photo Credit: Will Pryce   |   Visit Website Wall Coverings Manufacturer: Orac   |   Product: WX210 Reed Photo Credit: Orac   |   Visit Website Manufacturer: Orac   |   Product: WX211 Flute Photo Credit: Orac   |   Visit Website #presenting #clerkenwell #design #week #product

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them. Read the full story.—Antonio Regalado Access to experimental medical treatments is expanding across the US —Jessica Hamzelou A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington, DC, for a gathering of scientists, policymakers, and longevity enthusiasts. They had come together to discuss ways to speed along the development of drugs and other treatments that might extend the human lifespan. One approach that came up was to simply make experimental drugs more easily accessible. Now, the state of Montana has passed a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. The passing of the bill could make Montana something of a US hub for experimental treatments. But it represents a wider trend: the creep of Right to Try across the US. And a potentially dangerous departure from evidence-based medicine. Read the full story. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O'Donnell at 1.30pm ET on Wednesday May 21 for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation exploring AI's energy demands now and in the future. Register here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 xAI has blamed Grok’s white genocide fixation on an ‘unauthorized modification’ Made by an unnamed employee at 3.15am.+ The topic is one the far-right comes back to again and again.+ Memphis residents are struggling to live alongside xAI’s supercomputer.2 Meta has delayed the launch of its next flagship AI model Its engineers are struggling to improve its Behemoth LLM enough.3 Elon Musk is tapping up friends and allies for federal jobs It’s creating an unprecedented web of potential conflicts of interests.+ Musk is posting on X less than he used to.4 The US is slashing funding for scientific research Such projects produced GPS, LASIK eye surgery, and CAPTCHAs.+ US tech visa applicants are under seriously heavy scrutiny.+ The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled.They’re focusing on improving chatbots’ memory—but critics are worried.+ AI agents can spontaneously develop human-like behavior.+ Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed.6 People keep making anti-DEI modifications for The Sims 4 And the gamemaker EA’s attempts to stamp them out aren’t working.7 This chatbot promises to help you get over your ex  Closure creates an AI version of ex-partners for users to vent their frustrations at.+ The AI relationship revolution is already here.8 How this AI song became a viral megahit in JapanYAJU&U is completely inescapable, and totally nonsensical.+ AI is coming for music, too.9 Your future overseas trip could be by zeppelin If these startups get their way.+ Welcome to the big blimp boom.10 Are you a ‘dry texter’? 💬 It’s a conflict-averse teen’s worst nightmare.Quote of the day “It’s OK to be Chinese overseas.” —Chris Pereira, the CEO of iMpact, a communications firm advising Chinese companies expanding abroad, tells Rest of World that DeepSeek has given Chinese startups the confidence not to hide their origins. One more thingWe’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants. Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still don’t really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural hunger circuits into uncharted parts of the brain to try and find out. Their work could shed new light on the factors that have caused the number of overweight adults worldwide to skyrocket in recent years. And it could also help solve the mysteries around how and why a new class of weight-loss drugs seems to work so well. Read the full story. —Adam Piore We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day.+ Who knew—Harvard Law School’s Magna Carta may be the real deal after all.+ Early relatives of reptiles might have walked the Earth much earlier than we realised.+ New York University’s MFA Students are a talented bunch.+ The Raines sandwich sounds unspeakably awful 🥪 #download #first #personalized #geneediting #drug

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them. Read the full story.—Antonio Regalado Access to experimental medical treatments is expanding across the US —Jessica Hamzelou A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington, DC, for a gathering of scientists, policymakers, and longevity enthusiasts. They had come together to discuss ways to speed along the development of drugs and other treatments that might extend the human lifespan. One approach that came up was to simply make experimental drugs more easily accessible. Now, the state of Montana has passed a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. The passing of the bill could make Montana something of a US hub for experimental treatments. But it represents a wider trend: the creep of Right to Try across the US. And a potentially dangerous departure from evidence-based medicine. Read the full story. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O'Donnell at 1.30pm ET on Wednesday May 21 for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation exploring AI's energy demands now and in the future. Register here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 xAI has blamed Grok’s white genocide fixation on an ‘unauthorized modification’ Made by an unnamed employee at 3.15am.+ The topic is one the far-right comes back to again and again.+ Memphis residents are struggling to live alongside xAI’s supercomputer.2 Meta has delayed the launch of its next flagship AI model Its engineers are struggling to improve its Behemoth LLM enough.3 Elon Musk is tapping up friends and allies for federal jobs It’s creating an unprecedented web of potential conflicts of interests.+ Musk is posting on X less than he used to.4 The US is slashing funding for scientific research Such projects produced GPS, LASIK eye surgery, and CAPTCHAs.+ US tech visa applicants are under seriously heavy scrutiny.+ The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled.They’re focusing on improving chatbots’ memory—but critics are worried.+ AI agents can spontaneously develop human-like behavior.+ Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed.6 People keep making anti-DEI modifications for The Sims 4 And the gamemaker EA’s attempts to stamp them out aren’t working.7 This chatbot promises to help you get over your ex  Closure creates an AI version of ex-partners for users to vent their frustrations at.+ The AI relationship revolution is already here.8 How this AI song became a viral megahit in JapanYAJU&U is completely inescapable, and totally nonsensical.+ AI is coming for music, too.9 Your future overseas trip could be by zeppelin If these startups get their way.+ Welcome to the big blimp boom.10 Are you a ‘dry texter’? 💬 It’s a conflict-averse teen’s worst nightmare.Quote of the day “It’s OK to be Chinese overseas.” —Chris Pereira, the CEO of iMpact, a communications firm advising Chinese companies expanding abroad, tells Rest of World that DeepSeek has given Chinese startups the confidence not to hide their origins. One more thingWe’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants. Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still don’t really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural hunger circuits into uncharted parts of the brain to try and find out. Their work could shed new light on the factors that have caused the number of overweight adults worldwide to skyrocket in recent years. And it could also help solve the mysteries around how and why a new class of weight-loss drugs seems to work so well. Read the full story. —Adam Piore We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day.+ Who knew—Harvard Law School’s Magna Carta may be the real deal after all.+ Early relatives of reptiles might have walked the Earth much earlier than we realised.+ New York University’s MFA Students are a talented bunch.+ The Raines sandwich sounds unspeakably awful 🥪 #download #first #personalized #geneediting #drug

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual.The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer. The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them. Read the full story.—Antonio Regalado Access to experimental medical treatments is expanding across the US —Jessica Hamzelou A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington, DC, for a gathering of scientists, policymakers, and longevity enthusiasts. They had come together to discuss ways to speed along the development of drugs and other treatments that might extend the human lifespan. One approach that came up was to simply make experimental drugs more easily accessible. Now, the state of Montana has passed a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. The passing of the bill could make Montana something of a US hub for experimental treatments. But it represents a wider trend: the creep of Right to Try across the US. And a potentially dangerous departure from evidence-based medicine. Read the full story. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech’s appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate?Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O’Donnell at 1.30pm ET on Wednesday May 21 for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation exploring AI’s energy demands now and in the future. Register here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 xAI has blamed Grok’s white genocide fixation on an ‘unauthorized modification’Made by an unnamed employee at 3.15am.+ The topic is one the far-right comes back to again and again.+ Memphis residents are struggling to live alongside xAI’s supercomputer.2 Meta has delayed the launch of its next flagship AI modelIts engineers are struggling to improve its Behemoth LLM enough.  3 Elon Musk is tapping up friends and allies for federal jobsIt’s creating an unprecedented web of potential conflicts of interests.+ Musk is posting on X less than he used to.4 The US is slashing funding for scientific researchSuch projects produced GPS, LASIK eye surgery, and CAPTCHAs.+ US tech visa applicants are under seriously heavy scrutiny.+ The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled.5 Big Tech wants its AI agents to remember everything about you They’re focusing on improving chatbots’ memory—but critics are worried.+ AI agents can spontaneously develop human-like behavior.+ Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed.6 People keep making anti-DEI modifications for The Sims 4And the gamemaker EA’s attempts to stamp them out aren’t working.7 This chatbot promises to help you get over your ex Closure creates an AI version of ex-partners for users to vent their frustrations at.+ The AI relationship revolution is already here.8 How this AI song became a viral megahit in JapanYAJU&U is completely inescapable, and totally nonsensical.+ AI is coming for music, too.9 Your future overseas trip could be by zeppelinIf these startups get their way.+ Welcome to the big blimp boom.10 Are you a ‘dry texter’? It’s a conflict-averse teen’s worst nightmare.Quote of the day “It’s OK to be Chinese overseas.” —Chris Pereira, the CEO of iMpact, a communications firm advising Chinese companies expanding abroad, tells Rest of World that DeepSeek has given Chinese startups the confidence not to hide their origins. One more thingWe’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants. Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still don’t really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural hunger circuits into uncharted parts of the brain to try and find out. Their work could shed new light on the factors that have caused the number of overweight adults worldwide to skyrocket in recent years. And it could also help solve the mysteries around how and why a new class of weight-loss drugs seems to work so well. Read the full story. —Adam Piore We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day.+ Who knew—Harvard Law School’s Magna Carta may be the real deal after all.+ Early relatives of reptiles might have walked the Earth much earlier than we realised.+ New York University’s MFA Students are a talented bunch.+ The Raines sandwich sounds unspeakably awful #download #first #personalized #geneediting #drug

Scholars for decades believed Harvard's document was a copy written in 1327. Credit: Lorin Granger / Harvard Law School Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1946, Harvard Law School purchased an early copy of the Magna Carta for Even adjusting to about in today’s valuation, the historic document described as “somewhat rubbed and damp-stained” was a pretty solid deal. Initial estimates dated the artifact to 1327, just 27 years after King Edward I’s initial proclamation.  For decades, Harvard’s rare edition of the seminal governing document offered a potent written symbol of society’s journey towards recognizing inalienable human rights—but a recent reevaluation has shocked historians, as well as the document’s current owners. It turns out the university’s Magna Carta “copy” is actually one of now seven original manuscripts penned in 1300. Researchers reviewed the document using multispectral imaging and UV light scans. Credit: Harvard Law School “This is a fantastic discovery,” David Carpenter, a medieval historian at King’s College London said in the announcement from Harvard Law School. “deserves celebration, not as some mere copy, stained and faded, but as an original of one of the most significant documents in world constitutional history…” Carpenter is a major reason the document received a fresh examination. While recently perusing unofficial Magna Carta copies online, he paused on the law school’s digitized version on its website. Although the archive listed it as a copy, certain aspects stuck out to him. For one, its described dimensions of 489 by 473 millimetersmatched those of the six previously confirmed originals. Then there was the penmanship itself—particularly the large capital “E” on the first word, “Edwardus,” as well as the initial line’s noticeably elongated lettering. Carpenter and colleagues then used UV lights and spectral imaging to compare the Harvard edition with the six originals. Any textual variations between a supposed “copy” and the real documents would prove it to be an unauthorized later edition.  According to Carpenter, Harvard’s Magna Carta passed “with flying colors.”“This uniformity provides new evidence for Magna Carta’s status in the eyes of contemporaries. The text had to be correct,” he said. Harvard’s Magna Carta is now the seventh original known to still exist. Credit: Harvard Law School After reviewing additional historical accounts about the few remaining original documents, Carpenter believes Harvard’s edition to be a long-lost Magna Carta originally presented to a former parliamentary borough in Westmorland, England. That variant eventually was put up for auction in 1945 by Forster “Sammy” Maynard, an air vice-marshal and former World War I flying ace. Maynard previously inherited the document  from the archives of leading 18th century abolitionists, Thomas and John Clarkson. One of the Clarksons likely received the Magna Carta at some point in the early 1800s from William Lowther, the hereditary lord of Appleby manor. “Given where it is, given present problems over liberties, over the sense of constitutional tradition in America, you couldn’t invent a provenance that was more wonderful than this,” said Nicholas Vincent, a collaborator on the reevaluation project and a medieval historian at the University of East Anglia. “The work we do in the law, and pass on to new generations of students, is not simply the consistent application of logical principle,” explained Harvard Law School’s vice dean for Library and Information Services, Jonathan Zittrain. “It’s understanding how rare and precious self-governance across many differences can be, and how important it is to preserve and deliver upon it.” #harvard #paid #magna #carta #copy

OpinionMay 14, 20254 min readScience Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a DictatorshipThe red flags abound—political research tells us the U.S. is becoming an autocracyBy Dan Vergano President Donald Trump delivers address to a joint session of Congress, split image seen from watching television, March 4, 2025. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty ImagesAs president, Donald Trump pretty much checks all the warning boxes for an autocrat. Last September Scientific American warned of Trump’s “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” that he “ignores the climate crisis” and has fondness for “unqualified ideologues,” whom he would appoint should he become president again. It’s now May and sadly, that all checks out.The U.S. is in a bad place, and scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse.Worse even than Trump’s relentless attacks on science have been his administration’s assaults on the law. His officials have illegally fired federal workers, impounded congressional appropriations and seized people off the street for deportations to foreign prisons, threatening the same for all U.S. citizens. “The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime,” law professor David Pozen of the Columbia University School of Law told the New York Times in April.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We should all be worried that the U.S. is headed toward an autocracy—government by one person—even without political science offering a warning. But scholarship on how nations descend into this unfortunate state, seen in places like Turkey and Hungary, might not surprise you with what it suggests about the U.S.“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country has embarked on the slippery slope toward autocracy,” concludes political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa, in a May report in Politics & Policy. Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of TU Dresden. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power.“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. “If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. The courts would likely resist such a move, as the Supreme Court did under the Bush administration in 2008, and whether the Trump administration abides by judicial decisions will determine whether the fourth step has occurred.Warnings of the fifth step on the road to autocracy, securing long-term power, come in Trump’s musing of seeking an unconstitutional third term as president. The final step, the infringement of basic rights and freedoms, also is flashing warning signs, says Stockemer. These are already evident in executive orders that disengage the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, remove transgender service members from the military and privilege Christianity. He predicts that attacks on minority voting rights in 2026 and 2028 would be an expected outcome of this step.A simpler “competitive authoritarianism” yardstick for measuring democratic collapse comes from political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt earlier this month. “We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government,” they write in the New York Times. By that measure, they add, the U.S. has already crossed that line, ordering Department of Justice investigations into perceived political enemies, donors to the Democratic Party and news outlets ranging from CBS News to the Des Moines Register. “The administration’s authoritarian offensive has had a clear impact. It has changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice,” they added.The good news is that the slide into autocracy isn’t inevitable for the U.S. The courts may hold, Congress may start listening to protestors as Trump’s approval rating slides, and the Republican coalition, described as “Big Tech on one side, white nationalists on the other,” in the Boston Review, may fracture.Even so, the damage already done is real: “It is very easy to destroy something such as USAID, but it takes a long time to rebuild it both physically and also in a trust sense, both in America and abroad,” says Stockemer, noting the rapid plummet of Canadian attitudes toward the U.S., from positive to sharply negative. “I can tear down a house in a day, but it will take a year or longer to rebuild it.”This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. #science #tells #heading #toward #dictatorship