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      How Did Simone Biles Become the G.O.A.T.?

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      To end the Olympics she once thought would never happen for her, Simone Biles began her floor exercise routine on Monday and did what she was made to do: flip and twist and thrill an arena filled with people there to watch her.Every time Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, landed one of her wildly difficult tumbling passes, the crowd seemed to shout, “Wow!” all at once. And when she was done, standing alone on the floor in her sparkly leotard, the spectators rose to honor her — perhaps as much for her entire career as for a brilliant but flawed floor routine.Biles stepped out of bounds twice during the routine, which was by far the most difficult that any of the finalists attempted. As a result, she did not win, as expected. Instead, she received the silver medal, while Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, her rival, won the gold by just over three one hundredths of a point. The American Jordan Chiles, one of Biles’s closest friends, won the bronze.When Chiles’s bronze medal was announced, she cried — and Biles smiled and laughed while hugging her.Three years earlier, Biles withdrew from nearly all of her events at the Tokyo Games after becoming disoriented in the air, a moment that prompted her to consider quitting the sport. On Monday, she finished the Paris Games with three gold medals and one silver. (Earlier in the day, she finished fifth on the balance beam after losing points because of a fall.)Her imperfect final performances did little to dull her luster at these Games. On each day she competed, celebrities dotted the stands, making gymnastics — already a marquee sport of the Olympics — seem like the hippest club in Paris. There were Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise and Ariana Grande, and sports legends like Serena Williams, Michael Phelps and Stephen Curry. After a day at the water polo venue, Flavor Flav, the rapper, said how much he admired Biles and wanted “to meet her, shake her hand and give her a hug and tell her how proud I am of her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance queda bajo el foco por críticas a los ‘momentos más débiles’ de Simone Biles

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      Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War

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      The Senate was set to pass the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uphill battle in the House because of censorship concerns.Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online.The teenagers told the staffs of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like L.G.B.T.Q. communities.“We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old rising high school senior from Bucks County, Pa., who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this looks like a censorship bill.”The effort was one of many escalations in recent months by those who oppose the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit, Fight for the Future, organized students to write hundreds of letters to urge lawmakers to scrap it. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by the former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.What was supposed to be a simple piece of legislation to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the bill could affect free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum worry could be weaponized under the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives are concerned about the same with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched onto the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the bill.The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can heighten cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and let them opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

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      In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he lived for some years with his elderly mother, Jo Ann, in a large house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course. The federal court that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One of these was that he must not speak to the media. Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care.After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder; his extravagantly strange and violent actions had been bound up in a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley’s treatment was successful, and the judge was satisfied that he presented a very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted. More than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — along with a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a police officer named Thomas Delahanty and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was left permanently disabled — he was, at 67 years of age, truly free. Hinckley had by then opened a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June 15, 2022, the day the restrictions were lifted, he posted the following: “After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!” His following grew, and he quickly began to use his platform to release music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of a dozen performances. Unsurprisingly, these shows got a lot of attention and began to sell out. But every single one of them was canceled before he could play, as a result of backlash, including anonymous threatening emails, received by the venues.This made Hinckley a figure of prurient interest on social media. When he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance, along with a selfie in which he stared directly at the camera with a glazed and entirely affectless expression, the replies were a chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a GIF of Travis Bickle clapping — a reference to Hinckley’s infamous inspiration for his crime, an obsession with “Taxi Driver” and with Jodie Foster, who played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. “Haven’t heard his new stuff but I like his earlier work,” read another. (Jokes about Hinckley’s “early work” follow him everywhere online.) For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption.Hinckley at his office in Williamsburg, Va., in June.Stefan Ruiz for The New York TimesThen, 43 years after that near assassination, in Butler, Pa., a 20-year-old loner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald Trump with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding the former president’s right ear and plunging an already dark and chaotic world even deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinckley now became the focus of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he posted the following message on the platform now known as X: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.” He was quoting his old hero John Lennon, who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a by-now predictable response. There were GIFs of Jodie Foster looking haunted (“Hope she sees this bro”) and of Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. There was an article in The Guardian headlined “Man Who Tried to Assassinate Reagan Says ‘Violence Is Not the Way to Go.’ ” Mostly, people seemed to be able to respond to the message only as evidence of the further derangement of things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Army Sees No Link to Blast Exposure in Maine Gunman’s Mental Issues

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      Investigators found lapses in the handling of a troubled reservist who went on to kill 18 people, but they rejected suggestions that his Army work had damaged his brain.An Army investigation into the October 2023 mass shooting committed by an Army Reserve soldier, Robert Card II, found that a number of factors contributed to the Army’s inaction as Mr. Card’s mental health careened toward violence, including procedural breakdowns, missteps by commanders and rules that restrict military authority over reserve soldiers when they are out of uniform.But the report said the Army saw no link between his mental health problems and the years he spent working as a grenade instructor, repeatedly exposed to explosions on the practice range.Every summer for eight years, Mr. Card taught cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to use heavy weapons, including machine guns and shoulder-fired anti-tank guns. For five of those years, he worked on the grenade range, where about 2,400 grenades exploded over a two-week period. By age 40, he wore hearing aids.Last July, he was supposed to run machine-gun training for cadets, despite having missed a mandatory training session in the spring, the report said. But he was behaving so erratically in July that his Army Reserve commander had him hospitalized at a civilian psychiatric hospital in New York.Lt. Gen. Jody J. Daniels said the blasts Robert Card II had experienced in his Army Reserve service were “relatively minor.” The general administered an oath to new service members at a football game in 2022.Julio Cortez/Associated PressThe hospital determined that Mr. Card was experiencing psychosis and homicidal thoughts and had a “hit list.” Doctors moved to commit the soldier involuntarily for treatment, but the effort was dropped by the hospital under what the Army report called “questionable circumstances,” and Mr. Card was released after 19 days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Moving In Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

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      A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.But what if other things are just as damaging?Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

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      A small new study shows reactions in the brain in people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting.If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.Sara Moser/Washington University School of MedicineThe image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Your Body and Mind Change in Midlife

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      Midlife, typically defined as ages 40 to 60, is an inflection point. It’s a time when our past behaviors begin to catch up with us and we start to notice our bodies and minds aging — sometimes in frustrating or disconcerting ways. But it’s also an opportunity: What our older years will look and feel […] More