Among the persistent mysteries of the 2024 election is the roots of the modern political gender gap, particularly among young people. Though their final vote choices were a bit more nuanced than some pre-election polls suggested, young men and women, aged 18 to 29, had the largest divergence in their vote among the age groups. Gen Z men supported Donald Trump by 14 percentage points; Gen Z women supported Kamala Harris by 17 points, per one post-election analysis.Those dynamics, particularly the aggressive rightward shift of young men, have raised some interesting questions: What was driving this divide? Was something in particular moving young men to the right while pushing young women to the left? Could it be the manosphere, economics, or old-school sexism?Or could it be something else, like the apparent resurgence of organized religion?As I’ve reported, the rapid decline of religiosity within the United States has been slowing down over recent years. Particularly since the pandemic, data shows Gen Z is no longer continuing the rapid decline in religious affiliation, particularly Christianity, that started with previous generations. If anything, religious belief has seen a small revival with that youngest cohort.That shift suggests a curious dynamic at play among America’s youth. As Gen Z has been getting more politically polarized along gendered lines, so too has their religious affiliation. Those trends suggest that modern politics and religious beliefs may be having a bit of self-reinforcing effect on each other: As young men find faith and religious belonging, their politics are drifting to the right too, in turn reinforcing their existing beliefs.The opposite seems to be true with young women: Religious customs are not jibing with their political and social beliefs, pushing them out of churches, and reinforcing that drift away from some organized religions.Those religious trends matter. As religious and political beliefs of young men and women move away from each other, it stands to complicate not just electoral choices, but the future of family life, dating, and social belonging.The religious gender gap is changing The last 10 years have seen American Christianity bottom out. After a steady decline in Christian religiosity since the 1990s, Christian belief began to stabilize at around 60 percent of the American adult population — still a historic low point — sometime around the turn of the 2020s.A key contributor to this slow-down appears to be Gen Z. After years of successive generations losing their religion, Gen Z seemed to get as irreligious as it could be. Now, what we’ve seen since 2020 is a kind of dead cat bounce: a slightly higher level of Christian religious affiliation among the youngest adults. Among the youngest cohort of Gen Z, those born between 2000 and 2006, the share who identify as Christian has increased since 2023, from 45 percent to 51, per the Pew Research Center. And overall, Gen Z seems to be more Christian than past trend lines predicted they should be: at 46 percent compared to a projected 41 percent. At the heart of that halt and slight reversal is a dual dynamic: Young women are leaving religious congregations, while young men’s religious identification and practice rises. These changes come across in a few ways. First, the gender gap in religious participation has not just evaporated in recent years, but reversed. The religious researcher and data scientist Ryan Burge has found in his analysis of survey data from the Cooperative Election Study that while women used to attend religious services more regularly than men, the reverse is now happening. Among the cohort born in the 1990s and 2000, it’s men who are now outpacing women in weekly attendance.Looking at other reference points suggests something similar. Young women are more likely than young men to say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life research. Young women are now as likely as young men to say religion is “not that important” to them — a significant development since women have traditionally been more fervent believers. And the religious gender gap among the youngest cohort appears to be narrowing in other ways, too: Regardless of which religion they identify with, young women and young men report about the same rates of daily prayer. For older generations, women greatly outpace men in praying daily.Is religion making men more conservative? We could still stand to get better data about what is happening. It could be that young men simply remain as religious as older generations of men are (while women lose religion), or that men are getting more religious in general, or that men are particularly loyal to organized religion. Some data suggest young women remain religious or spiritual but just don’t identify with organized churches in the same way men do. But the religious gender gap still appears to be changing among Gen Z.But is politics driving these changes in religious behavior and belief? Or is religion driving stronger political beliefs? The data is a little less definitive here, but two things seem to bear out: According to AEI’s Survey Center, young women who are leaving churches report doing so because their congregations’ beliefs are more conservative than the beliefs they hold. Churches are out of step with where most young women are. Additionally, young Christian women who remain in their churches are still more likely to be liberal and hold progressive beliefs than young Christian men. Even as they remain Christians, they are becoming more politically liberal.Underlying all of this is the fact that Gen Z women are more likely to identify as feminists, as LGBTQ, and as supportive of abortion rights. According to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, young Christian women are 13 points more likely than young men to say that abortion should be legal. They are 18 points more likely to support gay marriage and 26 points more likely to accept LGBTQ people.As the researcher Daniel A. Cox of the AEI’s Survey Center points out, these are all shifts from what young Christians believed 10 years ago. “The gender gap in views of abortion has since quadrupled,” he notes in a recent analysis, but when it comes to views on homosexuality and gay marriage, it seems like young men have moved right. “Young Christian women have hardly changed their views over the last decade, while young men have become less supportive.”On a range of other views of government, political parties, and ideology in general, what’s happening with non-religious young people is also happening among believers. Young Christian women are much more liberal, and more likely to be Democrats, than young Christian men. Cox notes that it might not be religion making these political views so different but the degree to which young Christian women have more connections and exposure to diverse communities and are consuming different kinds of media. Religious young men seem to be stuck in more homogenous environments, both in the digital and in the real world, he suggests.Still, while we can confidently say young women are becoming more liberal and less religious in that process, we can’t say the same for men. Religion may or may not be making young men more conservative, but it does seem likely that their conservative religious and political beliefs are at least keeping young men in churches. It appears to be slowing down their drift away from organized religion.All of which stands to complicate the future of not just Gen Z’s social and cultural bonds to each other but also those of future generations. It’s the youngest cohort of Gen Z, those born between 2000 and 2006, that is narrowing religious gender gaps while widening political ones. That poses issues for their social, romantic, and familial futures. Gen Z already reports struggles with socializing, dating, maintaining healthy relationships, and combating loneliness. Marriage rates continue to fall. So as young men and women drift away from each other, it’s hard to see how prospective partners breach these divides. And these dynamics may very well end up having electoral effects.See More:

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. Let people try drugs that might help them live longer, the argument went. Some groups have been pushing bills to do just that in Montana, a state whose constitution explicitly values personal liberty. A couple of years ago, a longevity lobbying group helped develop a bill that expanded on the state’s existing Right to Try law, which allowed seriously ill people to apply for access to experimental drugs (that is, drugs that have not been approved by drug regulators). The expansion, which was passed in 2023, opened access for people who are not seriously ill.  Over the last few months, the group has been pushing further—for a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. At the end of the second day of the event, the man next to me looked at his phone. “It just passed,” he told me. (The lobbying group has since announced that the state's governor Greg Gianforte has signed the bill into law, but when I called his office, Gianforte's staff told me they could not legally tell me whether or not he has.) 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. In the US, drugs must be tested in human volunteers before they can be approved and sold. Early-stage clinical trials are small and check for safety. Later trials test both the safety and efficacy of a new drug. The system is designed to keep people safe and to prevent manufacturers from selling ineffective or dangerous products. It’s meant to protect us from snake oil. But people who are seriously ill and who have exhausted all other treatment options are often desperate to try experimental drugs. They might see it as a last hope. Sometimes they can volunteer for clinical trials, but time, distance, and eligibility can rule out that option. Since the 1980s, seriously or terminally ill people who cannot take part in a trial for some reason can apply for access to experimental treatments through a “compassionate use” program run by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA authorizes almost all of the compassionate use requests it receives (although manufacturers don’t always agree to provide their drug for various reasons). But that wasn’t enough for the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian organization that in 2014 drafted a model Right to Try law for people who are terminally ill. Versions of this draft have since been passed into law in 41 US states, and the US has had a federal Right to Try law since 2018. These laws generally allow people who are seriously ill to apply for access to drugs that have only been through the very first stages of clinical trials, provided they give informed consent. Some have argued that these laws have been driven by a dislike of both drug regulation and the FDA. After all, they are designed to achieve the same result as the compassionate use program. The only difference is that they bypass the FDA. Either way, it’s worth noting just how early-stage these treatments are. A drug that has been through phase I trials might have been tested in just 20 healthy people. Yes, these trials are designed to test the safety of a drug, but they are never conclusive. At that point in a drug’s development, no one can know how a sick person—who is likely to be taking other medicines— will react to it. Now these Right to Try laws are being expanded even more. The Montana bill, which goes the furthest, will enable people who are not seriously ill to access unproven treatments, and other states have been making moves in the same direction. Just this week, Georgia’s governor signed into law the Hope for Georgia Patients Act, which allows people with life-threatening illnesses to access personalized treatments, those that are “unique to and produced exclusively for an individual patient based on his or her own genetic profile.” Similar laws, known as “Right to Try 2.0,”  have been passed in other states, too, including Arizona, Mississippi, and North Carolina. And last year, Utah passed a law that allows health care providers (including chiropractors, podiatrists, midwives, and naturopaths) to deliver unapproved placental stem cell therapies. These treatments involve cells collected from placentas, which are thought to hold promise for tissue regeneration. But they haven’t been through human trials. They can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and their effects are unknown. Utah’s law was described as a “pretty blatant broadbrush challenge to the FDA’s authority” by an attorney who specializes in FDA law. And it’s one that could put patients at risk. Laws like these spark a lot of very sensitive debates. Some argue that it’s a question of medical autonomy, and that people should have the right to choose what they put in their own bodies. And many argue there’s a cost-benefit calculation to be made. A seriously ill person potentially has more to gain and less to lose from trying an experimental drug, compared to someone who is in good health. But everyone needs to be protected from ineffective drugs. Most ethicists think it’s unethical to sell a treatment when you have no idea if it will work, and that argument has been supported by numerous US court decisions over the years.  There could be a financial incentive for doctors to recommend an experimental drug, especially when they are granted protections by law. (Right to Try laws tend to protect prescribing doctors from disciplinary action and litigation should something go wrong.) On top of all this, many ethicists are also concerned that the FDA’s drug approval process itself has been on a downward slide over the last decade or so. An increasing number of drug approvals are fast-tracked based on weak evidence, they argue. Scientists and ethicists on both sides of the debate are now waiting to see what unfolds under the new US administration.   In the meantime, a quote from Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, comes to mind: “Sometimes hope helps people do better,” she told me a couple of years ago. “But in medicine, isn’t it better to have hope based on evidence rather than hope based on hype?” 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.

The Parachute Memorial Day sale is almost as good as the long weekend itself, offering the perfect opportunity to stock up on their signature breezy home essentials and coastal classics just in time for summer. From now through May 28, you can score a solid 30% off everything sitewide and up to 75% off the clearance section. To sweeten the deal, shoppers get a free gift up to $249 in value for orders over $1,000.This is one of the best sales we’ve seen in a while, so if you’re due for a bedroom refresh and are ready for some luxurious sheets or a relaxed bedspread, the time to buy is now. It’s no secret that we love bath must-haves, decor, and, of course, mattress deals, and Parachute’s Memorial Day sale is no exception. To help you shop smarter, we’ve pulled a selection of AD-approved Parachute sale items worth shopping. Don’t delay: These dreamy discounts won’t last long.Our Top Picks for the Best Parachute Memorial Day Sale Deals:A brezy sheet set: Parachute Heirloom TENCEL Linen Sheet Set, $359 $252Best mattress deal: Parachute Eco Mattress, $1,500 $1,050For side sleepers: Parachute Down Side Sleeper Pillow, $160 $112A spa-inspired robe: Parachute Waffle Robe, $149 $105Best mattress topper: Parachute Down Mattress Topper, $390 $273Photo: Rachel FletcherParachute Waffle Bath TowelsYou can’t go wrong with a classic waffle bath towel, and this Parachute version is the proof. Commerce director Rachel Fletcher says the brand’s set is both soft and absorbent—with a drying time of just about five minutes. “These honeycomb weave, 100% long-staple Turkish cotton towels are really exceptional in terms of craftsmanship, which is immediately evident in the feel,” she adds. “I have very sensitive skin and a rough towel never does me well, but the Parachute towels feel great against the skin.”Parachute Linen Duvet CoverA duvet cover set we’re thrilled to see on sale, this linen find is perfect for spring and summer. A warm weather classic for a reason, linen is light and antimicrobial, in case you’re prone to getting a little warmer this season. Contributor Lila Allen seconds these sentiments. “I was pleasantly surprised at how soft this cover was—again, with linen, sometimes it can be a roll of the dice,” she says. “This set had the best of both worlds: super supple but still casually elevated.”Parachute Eco MattressWhile Parachute is one of our go-to bedding brands, it’s also a reliable retailer when it comes to mattresses-in-a-box. The brand offers a hybrid mattress that landed itself in our list of favorites thanks to a Goldilocks combination of tempered steel and six layers of pure New Zealand wool and organic cotton.Photo: Nashia BakerParachute Heirloom TENCEL Linen Sheet SetWhen it comes to Parachute sheets, AD writers are huge fans of the linen category—including senior commerce editor Nashia Baker. She has the heirloom Tencel bundle in her bedroom, and unlike with her crisp percale sheet set, she loves the lightly wrinkled design of these for a relaxed, less-buttoned-up look. She also notes that their “soft and breathable feel” makes them the perfect cooling sheets to stay comfortable during hot summer nights.Parachute Waffle RobeFluffy, textured, and cozy, this stylish robe might make it hard to get your day going. Made of organic cotton, it’s one of Parachute’s bestsellers—meaning it’s the perfect gift for anyone who needs a good pampering. The square shape and 100% European flax linen relaxed fabric make for a structured yet casual look that emulates a day at the spa.Parachute Down Side Sleeper PillowCommerce editor Audrey Lee personally recommends this pillow from Parachute. “Designed with a 3.5-inch gusset to take the strain off your neck and shoulders, this is a great hotel-style pillow option that feels luxuriously lightweight but still densely filled,” she says.Julia HarrisonJulia HarrisonParachute Down Mattress Topper“This mattress topper is made from 750 feather fill and premium European white down, which, for those who don’t know their down, means this is the real deal,” says commerce writer Julia Harrison. “I would say this is solidly an inch and a half of down that makes for a plush experience no actual mattress can rival.” She recommends that anyone who prefers soft mattresses shop this indulgence over Memorial Day weekend.Parachute Classic Turkish Cotton Tub MatChances are your old bath mat is looking a little grubby, so why not upgrade to this luxe, earthy Parachute option made from Turkish cotton? “I was a little concerned that something so dense might be constantly damp or take forever to dry but I’ve found it to be quite the opposite after using it for more than a year,” Fletcher says. “I absolutely love Parachute’s waffle towels (they’re the only ones I’ll use!) so I was pleased that their bath mat was a high quality option too.”Parachute Matelasse CoverletAlso tucked away in Parachute Home’s Memorial Day deals is this comfy cotton coverlet. Not only is it lightweight enough to keep hot sleepers at ease, but the added details push it into must-have territory. “Its oatmealy color is a nice, natural neutral, but its stitched details are the true hero attribute,” says contributor Madeleine Luckel.

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. Let people try drugs that might help them live longer, the argument went. Some groups have been pushing bills to do just that in Montana, a state whose constitution explicitly values personal liberty. A couple of years ago, a longevity lobbying group helped develop a bill that expanded on the state’s existing Right to Try law, which allowed seriously ill people to apply for access to experimental drugs (that is, drugs that have not been approved by drug regulators). The expansion, which was passed in 2023, opened access for people who are not seriously ill.  Over the last few months, the group has been pushing further—for a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. At the end of the second day of the event, the man next to me looked at his phone. “It just passed,” he told me. (The lobbying group has since announced that the state's governor Greg Gianforte has signed the bill into law, but when I called his office, Gianforte's staff told me they could not legally tell me whether or not he has.) 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. In the US, drugs must be tested in human volunteers before they can be approved and sold. Early-stage clinical trials are small and check for safety. Later trials test both the safety and efficacy of a new drug. The system is designed to keep people safe and to prevent manufacturers from selling ineffective or dangerous products. It’s meant to protect us from snake oil. But people who are seriously ill and who have exhausted all other treatment options are often desperate to try experimental drugs. They might see it as a last hope. Sometimes they can volunteer for clinical trials, but time, distance, and eligibility can rule out that option. Since the 1980s, seriously or terminally ill people who cannot take part in a trial for some reason can apply for access to experimental treatments through a “compassionate use” program run by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA authorizes almost all of the compassionate use requests it receives (although manufacturers don’t always agree to provide their drug for various reasons). But that wasn’t enough for the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian organization that in 2014 drafted a model Right to Try law for people who are terminally ill. Versions of this draft have since been passed into law in 41 US states, and the US has had a federal Right to Try law since 2018. These laws generally allow people who are seriously ill to apply for access to drugs that have only been through the very first stages of clinical trials, provided they give informed consent. Some have argued that these laws have been driven by a dislike of both drug regulation and the FDA. After all, they are designed to achieve the same result as the compassionate use program. The only difference is that they bypass the FDA. Either way, it’s worth noting just how early-stage these treatments are. A drug that has been through phase I trials might have been tested in just 20 healthy people. Yes, these trials are designed to test the safety of a drug, but they are never conclusive. At that point in a drug’s development, no one can know how a sick person—who is likely to be taking other medicines— will react to it. Now these Right to Try laws are being expanded even more. The Montana bill, which goes the furthest, will enable people who are not seriously ill to access unproven treatments, and other states have been making moves in the same direction. Just this week, Georgia’s governor signed into law the Hope for Georgia Patients Act, which allows people with life-threatening illnesses to access personalized treatments, those that are “unique to and produced exclusively for an individual patient based on his or her own genetic profile.” Similar laws, known as “Right to Try 2.0,”  have been passed in other states, too, including Arizona, Mississippi, and North Carolina. And last year, Utah passed a law that allows health care providers (including chiropractors, podiatrists, midwives, and naturopaths) to deliver unapproved placental stem cell therapies. These treatments involve cells collected from placentas, which are thought to hold promise for tissue regeneration. But they haven’t been through human trials. They can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and their effects are unknown. Utah’s law was described as a “pretty blatant broadbrush challenge to the FDA’s authority” by an attorney who specializes in FDA law. And it’s one that could put patients at risk. Laws like these spark a lot of very sensitive debates. Some argue that it’s a question of medical autonomy, and that people should have the right to choose what they put in their own bodies. And many argue there’s a cost-benefit calculation to be made. A seriously ill person potentially has more to gain and less to lose from trying an experimental drug, compared to someone who is in good health. But everyone needs to be protected from ineffective drugs. Most ethicists think it’s unethical to sell a treatment when you have no idea if it will work, and that argument has been supported by numerous US court decisions over the years.  There could be a financial incentive for doctors to recommend an experimental drug, especially when they are granted protections by law. (Right to Try laws tend to protect prescribing doctors from disciplinary action and litigation should something go wrong.) On top of all this, many ethicists are also concerned that the FDA’s drug approval process itself has been on a downward slide over the last decade or so. An increasing number of drug approvals are fast-tracked based on weak evidence, they argue. Scientists and ethicists on both sides of the debate are now waiting to see what unfolds under the new US administration.   In the meantime, a quote from Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, comes to mind: “Sometimes hope helps people do better,” she told me a couple of years ago. “But in medicine, isn’t it better to have hope based on evidence rather than hope based on hype?” 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.

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More LangChain, one of the leaders in the AI framework and orchestration space, plans to remain committed to the open source ecosystem, particularly as it reinforces its vendor-agnostic stance.  Harrison Chase, Langchain co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat that the success of its different platforms can be attributed to developers demanding model choice and not staying in a closed provider.  “The power of the LangChain framework is in its integrations and the ecosystem,” Chase said. “The scale of the ecosystem is enormous, and much of that is made possible by the framework being open source.” Chase said LangChain downloads reached 72.3 million last month, compared to competitors like OpenAI’s Agents SDK. He added that the LangChain Python and JS frameworks “have 4,500 contributors, that’s more contributors than Spark.” LangChain, founded in 2022, has grown beyond its initial framework, which helped developers build AI applications. In February last year, it released the testing and evaluation platform LangSmith, a second framework called LangGraph and LangGraph Platform to help deploy autonomous agents.  LangChain remained open source and agnostic to vendors and models throughout its growth. For example, it’s partnered with multiple companies, like Google and Cisco, around agent interoperability. As enterprises began experimenting with AI agents, Chase said LangChain saw an opportunity to offer deployment options that considered developer choices. “Over the past year and a half or so, more and more enterprises and companies are just looking to go into production. So we matured all of our offerings, not just the open source LangChain, but all of our offerings collectively as a company to meet that demand and make it as easy as possible to build agentic applications,” he said.  LangGraph Platform extends open-source offerings One of LangChain’s new open-source platforms is the LangGraph Platform, which became generally available this week. The LangGraph Platform lets developers manage and begin deploying long-lasting or stateful agents. These agents build on what Chase calls “ambient agents,” or agents that work in the background and are triggered by certain events.  “We’ve tried to focus a lot on some of the harder infrastructure problems that surround these agents,” Chase said. “LangGraph is good for long-running stateful agents, so if you’re deploying a simple application, you don’t want to use LangGraph Platform.” He added that the company wants to bet big on ambient or long-running agents, finding this more independent, autonomous agent a more interesting infrastructure challenge.  Through the LangGraph Platform, organizations can deploy agents with one-click deployment, horizontal scaling to handle “bursty, long-running traffic,” a persistence layer to support agentic memory, API endpoints for customization and native access to LangGraph Studio to debug any agents.  Organizations might find themselves bringing more and more agents online. LangGraph Platform includes a management console that lays out all the agents currently deployed and lets users find agents, reuse common agent architectures and create multi-agent architectures.” “One of the big benefits of LangGraph is that it gives the builder of the agent full control over the cognitive architecture. If there’s an [large language model] LLM action that must be done right, a good tool you have to enforce quality is to create an in-the-loop evaluation directly in your LangGraph app,” Chase said.  Chase added that with LangGraph, developers can access “a good orchestration framework” to build agents and bring these reliable agents into LangGraph Platform for deployment.  During the best test, Chase said over 370 teams used LangGraph Platform. LangChain offers three tiers to use LangGraph Platform, with pricing dependent on how developers plan to host the service.  The broader LangChain open-source ecosystem For Chase, one of LangChain’s strengths is its ability to create an entire application and agent development ecosystem.  LangSmith, the company’s testing and observability platform, works with LangGraph and LangGraph Platform to track agent metrics. Since many agents built and run with LangGraph Platform are longer-running, enterprises need to check whether they continue to perform to specifications constantly.  Chase boasted that LangGraph “is the most widely adopted agent framework” and claimed it’s downloaded more than AutoGen from Microsoft and the CrewAI agentic platform, once again citing the open-source value for its success. “LangGraph is most often selected by teams that need to build end-user facing or highly trafficked agents (LinkedIn, Uber, GitLab) – the reason is that you won’t scale off of LangGraph because it’s very low-level and controllable, which is needed for reliable agents. CrewAI and Autogen are often used because they have a less steep learning curve – these frameworks make more decisions for the user, so you’re trading ease of adoption for power,” he said. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.

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. Let people try drugs that might help them live longer, the argument went. Some groups have been pushing bills to do just that in Montana, a state whose constitution explicitly values personal liberty. A couple of years ago, a longevity lobbying group helped develop a bill that expanded on the state’s existing Right to Try law, which allowed seriously ill people to apply for access to experimental drugs (that is, drugs that have not been approved by drug regulators). The expansion, which was passed in 2023, opened access for people who are not seriously ill.  Over the last few months, the group has been pushing further—for a new bill that sets out exactly how clinics can sell experimental, unproven treatments in the state to anyone who wants them. At the end of the second day of the event, the man next to me looked at his phone. “It just passed,” he told me. (The lobbying group has since announced that the state’s governor Greg Gianforte has signed the bill into law, but when I called his office, Gianforte’s staff told me they could not legally tell me whether or not he has.) 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. In the US, drugs must be tested in human volunteers before they can be approved and sold. Early-stage clinical trials are small and check for safety. Later trials test both the safety and efficacy of a new drug. The system is designed to keep people safe and to prevent manufacturers from selling ineffective or dangerous products. It’s meant to protect us from snake oil. But people who are seriously ill and who have exhausted all other treatment options are often desperate to try experimental drugs. They might see it as a last hope. Sometimes they can volunteer for clinical trials, but time, distance, and eligibility can rule out that option. Since the 1980s, seriously or terminally ill people who cannot take part in a trial for some reason can apply for access to experimental treatments through a “compassionate use” program run by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA authorizes almost all of the compassionate use requests it receives (although manufacturers don’t always agree to provide their drug for various reasons). But that wasn’t enough for the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian organization that in 2014 drafted a model Right to Try law for people who are terminally ill. Versions of this draft have since been passed into law in 41 US states, and the US has had a federal Right to Try law since 2018. These laws generally allow people who are seriously ill to apply for access to drugs that have only been through the very first stages of clinical trials, provided they give informed consent. Some have argued that these laws have been driven by a dislike of both drug regulation and the FDA. After all, they are designed to achieve the same result as the compassionate use program. The only difference is that they bypass the FDA. Either way, it’s worth noting just how early-stage these treatments are. A drug that has been through phase I trials might have been tested in just 20 healthy people. Yes, these trials are designed to test the safety of a drug, but they are never conclusive. At that point in a drug’s development, no one can know how a sick person—who is likely to be taking other medicines— will react to it. Now these Right to Try laws are being expanded even more. The Montana bill, which goes the furthest, will enable people who are not seriously ill to access unproven treatments, and other states have been making moves in the same direction. Just this week, Georgia’s governor signed into law the Hope for Georgia Patients Act, which allows people with life-threatening illnesses to access personalized treatments, those that are “unique to and produced exclusively for an individual patient based on his or her own genetic profile.” Similar laws, known as “Right to Try 2.0,”  have been passed in other states, too, including Arizona, Mississippi, and North Carolina. And last year, Utah passed a law that allows health care providers (including chiropractors, podiatrists, midwives, and naturopaths) to deliver unapproved placental stem cell therapies. These treatments involve cells collected from placentas, which are thought to hold promise for tissue regeneration. But they haven’t been through human trials. They can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and their effects are unknown. Utah’s law was described as a “pretty blatant broadbrush challenge to the FDA’s authority” by an attorney who specializes in FDA law. And it’s one that could put patients at risk. Laws like these spark a lot of very sensitive debates. Some argue that it’s a question of medical autonomy, and that people should have the right to choose what they put in their own bodies. And many argue there’s a cost-benefit calculation to be made. A seriously ill person potentially has more to gain and less to lose from trying an experimental drug, compared to someone who is in good health. But everyone needs to be protected from ineffective drugs. Most ethicists think it’s unethical to sell a treatment when you have no idea if it will work, and that argument has been supported by numerous US court decisions over the years.  There could be a financial incentive for doctors to recommend an experimental drug, especially when they are granted protections by law. (Right to Try laws tend to protect prescribing doctors from disciplinary action and litigation should something go wrong.) On top of all this, many ethicists are also concerned that the FDA’s drug approval process itself has been on a downward slide over the last decade or so. An increasing number of drug approvals are fast-tracked based on weak evidence, they argue. Scientists and ethicists on both sides of the debate are now waiting to see what unfolds under the new US administration.   In the meantime, a quote from Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, comes to mind: “Sometimes hope helps people do better,” she told me a couple of years ago. “But in medicine, isn’t it better to have hope based on evidence rather than hope based on hype?” 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.

Amazon recently unveiled a new warehouse robot that can “feel,” according to the company.  Called the Vulcan robot, the two-armed beast is already working in Amazon fulfillment centers in Spokane, WA, and Hamburg, Germany, where it’s handled more than half a million orders. The Vulcan’s sense of touch comes from force-sensitive grippers and sensors on its joints, which provide data to its AI about the edges, contours, and resistance of the items it picks up, moves, and places in a new location. With this faculty, Vulcan can grip a soft bag of candy gently, but a heavy coffee table book more firmly without crushing the candy or dropping the book.  One way to look at the benefit of a robot that can detect what it’s gripping is that it provides flexibility, enabling a wider range of products to be handled. According to Amazon, Vulcan can handle about 75% of the million or so products in a typical Amazon warehouse. Aaron Parness and his roughly 250-person robotics team at Amazon created the Vulcan robot. The company revealed it to the world on May 7 at its “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany.  Mixed feelings about tactile robots Vulcan is the first Amazon robot with what the company calls a “genuine sense of touch,” thanks to force feedback sensors and AI-powered software that lets it “feel” items, not just see them (cameras are the main sensors on most Amazon robots).  If you’re familiar with my views on anthropomorphicization (i.e., “humanizing”) of robots and AI, you might guess what I’m about to say. Amazon says its Vulcan robot can feel (without quotation marks). This isn’t true.  When a robot like Vulcan “feels” something, it uses sensors that measure force, pressure, and sometimes texture or shape, turning these signals into data that AI can interpret. Vulcan’s sensors are built into its gripper and joints, so when it touches or grasps an object, it detects how much force it’s applying and the contours it’s encountering. Machine learning algorithms then help Vulcan decide how to adjust its grip or movement based on this feedback. By contrast, a person feels with a network of millions of nerve endings in the skin, especially in the fingertips. These nerves send detailed, real-time information to the brain about pressure, temperature, texture, pain, and even the direction of force. The human sense of touch is deeply connected to memory, emotion, judgment, and consciousness. Robots like Vulcan can now match or even exceed humans in detecting pressure or identifying textures, but their “feeling” is purely mechanical and digital. They don’t experience sensation or emotion, and they only know what their sensors can measure and their software can interpret. Humans, on the other hand, feel in a way that’s physical, emotional, and conscious. With that caveat out of the way, it has to be said that Vulcan is pretty amazing.  Giving warehouse workers a hand Parness says Vulcan’s sense of touch is a breakthrough because it brings “physical intelligence” to robots, and that’s the categorical breakthrough here. The main advance robots will undergo over the next decade or two will involve sensors increasingly being able to detect and adapt to real conditions in the real world and being trained in virtual physical AI environments.  Despite the advanced state of Vulcan’s technology, its main job is actually limited:  to pick products from bulk storage and pack them into movable shelves, a task that used to require human dexterity.  Vulcan is neither a humanoid robot nor is its hand modeled after human hands. I’ve weighed in before about how modeling factory robots after human body parts makes no sense.  Vulcan’s “hand” combines a conveyor belt gripper with a spatula-like tool, both of which are fitted with sensors that constantly measure pressure and torque. A ruler-like tool attached between the paddles acts as a spatial guide, nudging existing items in storage bins to create space for the new items it is laying into place.  The robot’s AI, trained on thousands of hours of physical interaction data, calculates the right amount of force for each object in real time. Vulcan can work up to 20 hours a day without ever taking a coffee break or using the bathroom, moving at speeds comparable to a human worker, but always behind a safety fence in case it suddenly goes bananas like that Chinese robot in the TikTok video people have been talking about and misinterpreting. (It just malfunctioned. It didn’t try to “attack” people.)  The Vulcan robot has real limitations. For example, it’s too weak to lift anything heavier than 8 pounds and can only move products from one place to another. If the robot encounters an unfamiliar item or something that exceeds its 8-pound weight limit, it flags a human worker for help. Grasping the importance of tactile robots Vulcan isn’t the only robot with a sense of touch. RoboTact and RoboTouch sensors, developed over decades and now used in everything from humanoid robots to service bots, give machines the ability to sense contact, pressure, and even the shape of objects, allowing for delicate and precise handling.  Sanctuary AI enhanced its Phoenix robot with tactile sensors that let it handle complex, touch-driven jobs. Their technology means Phoenix can detect things like slippage or excessive force, even when it can’t see what it’s doing.  Meta created its Digit 360 sensor, a fingertip-shaped device that can register forces as tiny as one millinewton and pick up details down to seven microns. The sensor is still in the lab, but Meta’s partnership with GelSight and Wonik Robotics is helping to eventually bring these sensors into real-world use.  Eventually, robots with a sense of touch will revolutionize robotics and enable them to perform a wide range of tasks that robots currently cannot do, like picking strawberries, performing surgery, and defusing bombs. But for now, Amazon is using some of the most advanced tactile robots on the planet to help ship bathrobes, books, and batteries to customers.

Including, the fire-nado. An excerpt from issue #31 of befores & afters magazine. Replicating natural phenomena was ILM’s central task on Twisters. The visual effects studio would need to analyze the reference, then consider the science behind storms and tornadoes, and finally develop new tools for simulation and rendering to bring what were key ‘characters’ to life. The ILM Art Department also had an early role in crafting keyframe art to help visualize some of the more epic scenes in Twisters. Senior concept artist Brett Northcutt then continued the design process for specific tornadoes. “At first,” he says, “I wasn’t sure how much help I would be as there is a ton of amazing real storm chaser footage online. At that point, ILM visual effects supervisor Florian Witzel told me that director Lee Isaac Chung wanted each tornado to be like a monster, each with its own characteristics.  That really resonated with me as I could play with size, lighting and visibility for each tornado.” Concept art. “We also looked at a lot of real footage and I quickly learned how much variation they can have aesthetically,” adds Northcutt. “For scenes where our heroes are scientifically chasing storms we could use clarity and front lighting to show them as less threatening. However, for scenes where our heroes are in peril, we could backlight them or hide them in weather so the actual threat level wasn’t entirely clear.  The greatest movie monsters, like in Jaws or Alien, aren’t seen very clearly and are therefore much more scary.” ILM began the 3D tornado building process by breaking down the different elements that make up a storm and a tornado, while also giving distinct personalities to each of the ten tornadoes that appear in the film. This look and feel to the weather also came directly from the director, as production visual effects supervisor Ben Snow points out. “At the beginning we knew there were these six major sequences and that tornadoes went through different phases. I said to Isaac, ‘Look, I’d really like to get one or two key images from all of this amazing material that we’ve collected. Let’s just choose a couple of images for each tornado to get the character. So we went through and did that, and we ended up with a pretty good focused set of material.” Plate. Roto. Layout. Final. “In addition,” says Snow, “there were key beats in the film where Isaac would have looked at YouTube footage or footage from the storm-chasers, and he’d say, ‘This is the sort of feeling I want for this sequence, this is the quality of light I want. Not just for visual effects, but also for special effects and for the DP Dan Mindel and production designer Patrick Sullivan. Here are the key feelings I want, based on footage that we found.’” That gave Snow and the team at ILM two sets of creative inputs to start crafting the look of the storms and tornadoes, alongside the storm-chaser footage and the imagery produced by Giles Hancock. “What the VFX artists would have to do is start by trying to get it to match that reference and that look,” states Snow. “We ultimately had a development cycle for each tornado, with iterations. Even though we were using science and weather-based systems to do the simulations, there was still an artistic component to all this. We still got to sculpt, shape and add to them. And actually what that ended up giving us, too, was a library of clouds shapes and sky pieces and other parts of weather that could be combined together. I think it became key to both achieving realism and achieving the creative side to those tornadoes as well.” The outcome of this analysis of the tornadoes was a break-up of the general structure that needed to be depicted on screen. Tornadoes had a funnel, a thin layer of vapor surrounding the funnel, a debris field of dirt picked up from the ground, rigid debris objects and a shelf cloud connecting to the sky. “Our simulations are not just a tornado alone, there’s a lot more than that,” details ILM associate visual effects supervisors Charles Lai. “We have the wall cloud that connects from the top of the funnel to the sky, but that also has to be connected to the shelf cloud. So, we also built that shelf cloud, and that is moving a little bit slower, and that has to be connected to the HDRI panel that’s in the background. So, there’s a whole lot of little pieces that go into it. And then, not only are we simulating the tornado and those separate pieces, we’ve got a lot of ground effects that showcase that spiral inflow, and we pretty much had to do it for all our sequences.” “There’s so much more to it than just the tornadoes,” notes Witzel. “We’re essentially inside this dense soup of weather. There are varying levels of moisture and fine particulates in the air that diffuse the background, so you can’t just drop in an element and expect it to work. You constantly have to balance how the object or background is being affected and diffused. That was always an important thing to get right in each shot.” After the initial layout phase, the animation team was equipped with a flexible rig and toolset to define the base motion of each tornado. “The anim department blocked out the overall performance without breaking physical accuracy,” Witzel explains. “With the twin tornadoes, for instance, we could choreograph the timing and when they split apart. How they spiral around each other, how wide are they, how they relate to each other or how fast they move. All of these foundational choices help guide the simulation and effects teams. Once that framework is there, we hand it off to the fluid solver to do its simulation, and then you refine it from there.” “With the tornadoes, they were not always perfectly vertical,” adds Lai. “When you see these massive wedges on screen, you could believe, sure, it is just a massive vertical column. But, when we worked on some of the smaller tornadoes that were just trying to touch down, they often curved around and touched down. I think that’s where it was really valuable to be able to have the animation rigged that way and to show animatics in that form and just get quick buy-offs on, screen-space wise. It let us art direct them.” ILM used the latest iteration of its proprietary fluid solver, ILM Pyro, to simulate the tornadoes. “ILM Pyro started out several years ago as a wrapper around Houdini’s Pyro, just to make things easier for artists,” explains Witzel. “Over time, it evolved. Today its core is completely replaced with proprietary microsolvers and custom tools. The idea was always to create a system that gave artists both an easy entry point and deep artistic control.” With ILM Pyro, artists could manage a wide range of forces – as well as detailed emission and dissipation, pressure, buoyancy, gravity, and temperature bands – to sculpt the look and behavior of each tornado. The resulting velocity fields were then used to advect additional environmental effects like debris, smoke, and fire. “We’re essentially guiding the volumetrics,” says Witzel. “But when you do that, it’s easy to lose energy and detail. Other solvers can get soft and blurry very quickly. With ILM Pyro, we put a lot of emphasis on maintaining that energy. We use techniques like reflection solvers to preserve vorticity and confinement. It’s all about keeping the tornado’s energy and details alive.” The scale of the weather systems, especially supercells and the larger storm structures, often exceeded what a single simulation could handle efficiently. To manage this, ILM adopted a wedging workflow, splitting simulations into smaller blocks that were reassembled at render time. To retain fine detail, a secondary narrowband particle simulation was layered in, adding localized noise and complexity. “We’d run a core sim first,” Witzel explains, “then layer in another sim with added wavelet turbulence. Or we’d run a narrowband sim focused on the tornado’s edge, where the core was coarse, but the outer layers had much higher resolution.” Lighting the synthetic clouds proved compute-intensive, especially allocating for volumetric rendering time (rendering was generally handled in Mantra and Katana, with Katana XPU rendering done towards the end of production). To speed up the renders for clouds, ILM developed a workflow that pre-baked the light scatter on the clouds while being sampled directly at render time in the shader. This gave renders a six-time speed increase but preserved the desired look. One particular tornado seen in the film was unlike anything previously witnessed in Twister. This is the ‘fire-nado’ at the oil refinery. Snow worked directly with the previs team from The Third Floor, led by James Willingham III, on the refinery sequence. “We did a lot of work on what it was going to look like,” says Snow, “and we’d printed out little diagrams of what the imagined landscape might be like to take with us to Oklahoma. But we actually hadn’t come to a final agreement about what the scene should be.” The intervening Hollywood strikes in 2023 provided an opportunity to revisit the fire-nado sequence. “What we were trying to bring was a sense of mystery to the whole thing,” relates Snow. “We thought, let’s have them drive into a fog bank so they lose visibility, all of their GPS has gone out because of the storm, they don’t have knowledge that they’re next to this big refinery, which would make it more scary and creepy.” Anim. Creature dev. FX. Final. Owing to the time of the year that they could finally shoot the refinery scenes, the plates tended to be in bright daylight, necessitating a complex layering in of atmosphere and fog in visual effects. “One of our compositing supervisors, Ben O’Brien, came up with a really beautiful fire-lit fog look that we were able to bring into play in that end sequence.” Bluescreen photography for the sequence of the actors in their vehicles saw Scott Fisher fire off a series of pyro events for interactive lighting. “This really helped tie in the bluescreen plates to what we had filmed already,” notes Snow. “Scott also built these really cool rotisserie rigs and ways to flip the cars over with the actors inside that could then be dragged around, which happens in that storm.” Meanwhile, in the ILM Art Department, Brett Nortcutt worked with a 3D model of the refinery developed by model supervisor Bruce Holcomb to help art direct the scenes. “Even though the model was a work in progress, it was already an amazingly detailed model that I could start with,” notes Nortcutt. “For the low-angle image, I started with plate photography of the caravan on the road but ended up replacing everything but the road. The real challenge was showing a massive tornado interacting with an oil refinery as well as heavy fog. I imagined the wind forces of the tornado twisting and pulling apart the tanks and pipes of the oil refinery while also sucking fire and fog into its funnel. To add more chaos, I added sparks, explosions, and an indication of wind forces pulling everything into it across the terrain from the foreground.” “While I rendered Bruce’s 3D model of the refinery for these concepts,” continues Northcutt, “I knew that the only way I was going to be able to quickly create tornado variations for each concept was to digitally paint them. I developed a technique in Photoshop using three different brushes that allowed me to quickly vary the edges and thickness of each tornado. I then had great success adding a long exposure waterfall texture on top at a very low opacity that looked very similar to the texture of real tornadoes. It’s always fun to find something that you wouldn’t expect helps more than the real thing.” For the final fire-nado, the concept was that the nearby oil refinery accelerates the tornado, making it grow larger and more intense. “That meant,” says Witzel, “we had to layer in all kinds of elements. Crude oil fires, butane tanks exploding. We imagined a mix of chemicals being sucked into the atmosphere, creating this real Frankenstein’s monster of a storm. We had to build the entire refinery asset in detail, then destroy it, and on top of that, the whole scene was blanketed in fog. It was incredibly complex.” The post ‘Twisters’: what went into a storm appeared first on befores & afters.

Discord's overlay is one of its most useful features, and earlier this year, it got a huge revamp. Now, you can respond to notifications, watch your friends' streams, and have video chats all without leaving your game. All the new functionality comes with a couple new quirks, so let's break down how it all works.If you're not familiar, the Discord overlay is a part of the desktop application that can draw on top of the games you play. Its most common use is to see who's on and speaking in the team chat, by showing small profile icons in the top left of your screen. Due to the change in how the overlay works, you might've noticed this disappear, or be replaced by a new prompt asking you to give the overlay permissions. How does the new Discord overlay work?The older Discord overlay only worked with some games, and in a few cases, it might require some finagling to get it to work right. The new overlay is rebuilt to get around a lot of these compatibility issues by drawing the overlay on top of the game you're playing.We don't need to get into the nitty gritty of how it works, but this means the new Discord overlay is kind of like another window that's sitting on top of your game window. Much like how you'd stack two browser windows overlapping each other.That means it's technically compatible with every game, but there's just one hitch: You have to play the game in borderless windowed mode. Most of the time, that won't really be an issue, but there are a few games—particularly graphically intensive competitive games like Marvel Rivals—where using fullscreen mode can sometimes get you better performance. What does the new Discord overlay do?To access the new Discord overlay, press Shift+` (the key to the left of the 1 key). Here, you'll see a set of customizable regions with a few different functions. The Voice region shows the participants in the voice channel you're in. Notifications will show you any pings you've received in text channels, and the Video and Streams regions will display any video calls or your friends' streams.You can pin any of these regions so they are always visible on top of whatever game you're playing. Most of them are unpinned by default, except usually the Voice region, and you can pin or unpin them by pressing the overlay shortcut and clicking their purple pin icon.With the full overlay open, you can drag any of the regions around to wherever they're most convenient for you—which is nice since I really don't need my friends' faces covering up my killfeed. Each region also has a few settings you can customize to get the layout you want.Most importantly, there's one region you can't pin: the Discord control bar. By default this is in the middle of the top of your screen. Here, you'll find controls for muting yourself, deafening Discord audio, enabling your camera, streaming to a channel, and…a soundboard. Try not to abuse the privilege.What if I can't see the new Discord overlay?There is a decent chance you might've turned off the overlay in the past or never enabled it to begin with. If you're curious and want to try it out, click on the "User Settings" gear in your Discord client, scroll down to Game Overlay, and click Enable Overlay.The overlay can also be disabled on a per-game basis, so if you're still not seeing it, click the arrow to the right of the Enable Overlay toggle. Below, you might see a list of games you've played and a separate toggle next to them. This is called the "per-game override" and disabling the toggle here will turn off the overlay for just that game, rather than turning it off entirely.The per-game override is handy if you only have one or two games that you play where you might be in voice or video chat, but not most other games. For example, I need to talk to my teammates in Overwatch 2, but I don't need any distractions while playing Pathologic 3.What if I don't want to see the new Discord overlay?Not everyone is super thrilled with the new Discord overlay. Some don't care for all the new features; some think the new icons are too small (you can customize this by clicking the Settings gear on the voice region in the overlay). And some people just don't like change because it's an unwelcome reminder of the inevitable forward march of time. Relatable.Regardless, it's pretty simple to disable the new overlay. Click the User Settings gear in your Discord client, scroll down to Game Overlay, and disable the Enable Overlay toggle. That's it. It should be gone forever. Or at least until another update changes things again.What if I want the old Discord Overlay back?Great news, you can do that, too! Well, sort of. Enabling it is the same process as before: Click User Settings, scroll down to Game Overlay, and click the Enable Legacy Overlay toggle. You can technically have both enabled, though it seems like Discord will still default to the new one if you do this.In my experience, the legacy overlay is a bit patchy. In some games, I couldn't get it to load at all, and it didn't seem to play nice with using the new overlay with some games and the legacy overlay for others. You can technically choose per-game overrides for each, but it can get tedious keeping track of which overlay is enabled for which game.Your mileage may vary, but my advice is to use the Legacy Overlay option as a compatibility option for games that don't play nice with the new overlay, rather than a way to hold onto the past. Even if it works well for now, the old overlay will probably go away at some point.

Hideo Kojima, known for his unconventional approach to game design, does not seem to believe in crowd-pleasers. Despite that, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach might become a mainstream hit. VGC reported that in a recent interview with Edge Magazine Kojima said, “I do wish I was a bit more controversial,” reflecting on the positive reaction Death Stranding 2 received from internal playtesters. He contrasted the internal reception for Death Stranding 2 to the original Death Stranding: “In fact, I did a lot of monitoring tests for the original Death Stranding. I’d find that four out of ten people would love the game, but six would say it was a terrible game. For me, I think that’s a good balance. But with the playtests for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, everyone seems to be positive.” Edge 411 is out today, featuring Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. For our 16-page cover story, Simon Parkin visits Kojima Productions to play the studio’s most ambitious game to date and discuss its creation with Hideo Kojima, who explains why it is more Aliens than Alien. pic.twitter.com/AUyceJyBOA— Edge (@edgeonline) May 15, 2025 That type of pre-release praise is normally music to a game studio founder’s ears, but Kojima is different. “I’m not interested in making something that appeals to everyone,” he said in the Edge interview. While the original Death Stranding — with its bold package delivery premise — was not a hit right out of the gate, more critics came around to it with its Director’s Cut edition. Amid a warming reception to the original Death Stranding, it makes sense that play testers for Death Stranding 2 are more ready to buy in. Well, there’s that improving climate, and there’s also the fact that Death Stranding 2 looks like it’s building on the first game’s already ambitious base. Natural disasters like earthquakes and sandstorms create new challenges for traversing the world. On top of highways, players can also now set up efficient, but expensive, trade routes through monorails. Combat is becoming more core to the experience, with a new arsenal of sniper rifles, assault rifles, grenade launchers, and more. Even Sam’s backpack can be put down, allowing for more nimble combat and infiltration sequences. All together, it looks like Death Stranding 2 promises more freedom in how to overcome obstacles. With all that packed inside an already unforgettable world, it is no surprise that play testers are responding positively. Balancing the desire for originality with more widespread success is a key consideration for Kojima, he said. “Of course, I can’t afford to make a failure, either. I must take care of my studio, my staff, and our production budget. But in essence, I don’t want to simply recreate something that’s already in the world,” Kojima said. “I want to make something new.” Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is set to be released June 26, 2025 on PlayStation 5.