Trains have been popular in cinema arguably since the beginning of film, when the Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” became one of the first movies ever made and commercially screened in 1896. From the silent Civil War movie The General to Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful Strangers on a Train to the quiet romance of Before Sunrise, trains propel narratives across genre and time. For the Japanese filmmaker Shinji Higuchi, an interest in trains on screen dates back to at least 1975, when he saw The Bullet Train as a fourth grader. Fifty years later, it remains one of his favorite films and he has directed its sequel: the action thriller Bullet Train Explosion, out April 23 on Netflix.
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Shinji recalls being particularly affected by The Bullet Train’s depiction of Japanese National Railway staff members. In the film’s press notes, he writes, “I liked watching ordinary workers, who had a strong sense of duty to do something about the unbelievable situation, give everything they had to perform their jobs.”
Speaking with TIME through an interpreter, Shinji says he wanted to make sure to give the original story its due when making the sequel.
“I really had to grapple with how I wanted to approach the themes that would be depicted in this film,” Shinji says. “It was quite an arduous task for me, and I had to put my all in it.”
Let’s break down the deep cinematic roots of Bullet Train Explosion, and how Shinji brought one of film’s first subjects into the modern action movie world.
Bullet Train Explosion’s direct inspiration
Netflix’s Bullet Train Explosion is a sequel to 1975’s The Bullet Train, which was directed by Junya Sato and stars Ken Takakura, Sonny Chiba, and Ken Utsui. The original film tells the story of a perilous trip undertaken by Hikari 109, a high-speed, first-generation bullet train traveling from Tokyo to Hakata. Shortly after Hikari 109’s departure, the railway security head is informed that a bomb has been planted. If the train slows below 80 kilometers per hour (roughly 50mph), it will explode. Railway staff and the police work to keep the 1,500 passengers safe, while a $5 million ransom is demanded.
In Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji keeps the same general premise as The Bullet Train, but ups the ante and expands the focus. In the 2025 sequel, the train’s speed can’t dip below 100 kilometers per hour or roughly 62 mph (the train can reach a top speed of 320 kilometers per hour, or roughly 199 mph), and the ransom is a whopping 100 billion yen (roughly $710,360,000). The mysterious ransomer asks the sum to be raised by the general public, depicting a social media culture that moves faster than the fastest of trains. Unlike the 1975 film, which focuses more on? we spend more time with those passengers, which include a scandal-embroiled politician (Machiko Ono), a YouTube celebrity (Jun Kaname), and a gaggle of teenage schoolchildren. On the staff side, train conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is as close to a hero-protagonist as we get in a story about the efficiency of working together.
Shinji’s adoration of both the original film and its depiction of Japanese railway culture shines through in Bullet Train Explosion, which eschews the classic arc of a Hollywood action movie for a Japanese tale of collective problem-solving and the benefits of being good at one’s job. It’s what Spider-Man 2 might have looked like if, instead of Peter Parker stopping a careening “L” train with only his sticky webs and superhuman strength, he was aided by an idealistic train conductor, a sleepy mechanic, and a dedicated team back at the Chicago Transit Authority—and if that was the whole movie.
With Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji also makes an effort to deepen the mechanical realism of the franchise, saying in the film’s press notes that the original movie was criticized for the way it portrayed trains. “As someone who likes both movies and railroads, I was really upset by this response,” he writes. “So when we started this project, I wanted to make something that wouldn’t face this same criticism. I talked to experts knowledgeable about bullet train designs and researched the actual mechanisms.”
Unlike the original film, the Netflix production included support from a major Japanese railway company, the East Japan Railway Company. “The [JR East] staff knew about the original film and wanted to show real bullet trains to people around the world,” Shinji explains in the press notes. “This feeling matched well with our intent to show real bullet trains on the screen.”
When filming on a real-size bullet train carriage was not possible for a scene, Shinji used miniature models. “As much as the budgeting allowed, we would make models that were as big as possible, model trains that would probably fit on maybe two tables,” he tells TIME. “And then we would wreck those models.”
How is Bullet Train Explosion connected to Speed?
If the shared premise of Bullet Train and Bullet Train Explosion sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen Speed, the 1994 Hollywood action movie classic starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. In it, an LA bus is held hostage by a bomber threatening to blow up the vehicle if it drops below 50 mph (80 kilometers per hour), or if a ransom of $3.7 million isn’t paid. The 20th Century Fox film was the fifth highest-grossing film of 1994, and had a 1997 sequel.
It seems hard to believe, but there is no direct connection between 1975’s The Bullet Train and 1994’s Speed. Speed screenwriter Graham Yost has gone on record saying the idea for Speed came from a 1985 American film called The Runaway Train. The film was recommended to Yost by his father, Elwy Yost, a Canadian TV personality who hosted TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies from 1974 to 1999. The Runaway Train was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and stars Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as two incarcerated men who escape prison only to end up on a train without brakes, careening across the frozen Alaskan wilderness.
The plot thickens because Runaway Train was based on an original screenplay from Japanese film legend Akira Kurosawa, known for medium-defining works such as Rashomon and Seven Samurai. In the 1960s, Kurosawa wrote a script, alongside frequent collaborators Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima, about a runaway train. Kurosawa was set to direct the international co-production in New York in late 1966, but shooting was canceled at the last minute due to difficulties with American financial backers. The script would be used for Runaway Train two decades later.
Shinji notes that a 1966 American TV movie called The Doomsday Flight was an inspiration for 1975’s The Bullet Train. Written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the film follows an airliner threatened by a bomb that will detonate if the plane drops below 4,000 feet. The Doomsday Flight was very popular. When it aired on NBC in December 1966, it became the most-watched TV film ever, up to that point.
A Japanese movie for global audiences
“I love bullet train carriages, so I regard the bullet train as a star in my film,” says Shinji. “How to aesthetically approach shooting the bullet train was very important to me.” From the perspective of someone living in the U.S.—where we’re still waiting for the launch of our next generation of high-speed trains, initially planned for 2021—the trains and train culture depicted in Bullet Train Explosion can feel like a science fiction film.
Shinji notes that the celebration of efficiency and teamwork is something that exists in the 1975 film. “It is [a theme] that we also aspire after [in Bullet Train Explosion]: people who are diligent, people who follow the rules, and people in uniform,” says Shinji. “Maybe it’s a very Japanese thing. Maybe the youngsters now are a bit different, but for boys of our generation, there was something wonderful about looking towards the same goal and growing up.”
While Shinji recognizes that, in some ways, Bullet Train Explosion is a Japanese story, he is not worried about its relatability for global audiences. “Of course, it is a domestic story, but I didn’t want to make something that would only resonate with the Japanese audience,” he says. “I wanted a universal touchstone in the emotions.”
Compared to some of the previous films Shinji has worked on, such as the live-action Attack on Titan or Shin Godzilla, it was easier to ground the story in a reality diverse audiences could recognize. “[With previous films], it was all about, how do I connect that gap between reality and something that’s far out there,” he says. “But this is something that could happen in reality. There are perhaps some eccentric characters in this film, but these are very real people that you would see next to you.”
It helps that, at its center, is a mode of transportation that is so thrilling, whether it is part of your culture or not. “It is indeed an extraordinary and exciting journey on the bullet train ride,” says Shinji. “So it’s quite different from other means of transportation, and we hope that we are able to deliver that excitement to you.”
The second and reportedly final season of Andor, easily the best Star Wars television show or film that LucasFilm has produced in years, is set to premiere on Disney+ on April 22. But it arrives at a moment of potential transition for the studio. Creator Tony Gilroy recently said he doesn’t think the streaming era can support shows like Andor. “No one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this,” he told Empire.
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So what does the future of Star Wars television—and film—look like? Eight years after The Last Jedi hit theaters, we haven’t gotten a single Star Wars film. Instead, Disney has churned out a glut of television series: The mega-hit The Mandalorian, the miraculous Andor, and many more shows of varying levels of quality. The Star Wars universe even expanded into the real world with a hotel at Disney World that invited its guests to play Jedi and Sith as they interacted with in-character hotel staff. The closure of that cosplay resort sparked a multi-hour long viral video analyzing why the concept failed.
The future of the franchise does seem to hinge on a successful return to the big screen. And many potential Star Wars movies from famous writers like Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Lost’s Damon Lindelof, and The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro have been announced and then scuttled. Meanwhile, President of LucasFilm Kathleen Kennedy is reportedly contemplating stepping down soon. Earlier this year, she told Deadline, “We’ll probably make an announcement [about my replacement] months or a year out, and I have every intention of sticking around to help that person be successful.”
Kennedy does have a couple films on the theatrical calendar. Iron Man director and Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau will helm The Mandalorian and Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series set to debut next year. And Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy will soon begin shooting Star Wars: Starfighter starring Ryan Gosling. Here’s where LucasFilm stands ahead of Andor’s final season.
From a critical perspective, Andor should be a blueprint for success at LucasFilm. In theory, the story could have been a rote Rogue One prequel: The show focuses on one of that film’s heroes, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and his indoctrination into the Rebellion. Instead, its a compelling spy thriller interrogating the reality of a gritty fight against totalitarianism. There are no Jedis, no secrets about Darth Vader’s past for Reddit sleuths to hunt down, no adorable creatures to slap on backpacks and lunchboxes. The show resists the temptation, to which so many of its peers have caved, to incessantly reference characters, objects, or plot points from its mother IP. (See: House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power’s obsession with flashbacks and Easter eggs.)
And while The Mandalorian is structured like a monster-of-the-week series with a new planet or challenge every episode or so, Andor is structured like well-crafted prestige television. Every few episodes, Cassian visits a new planet. Gilroy, who also wrote Rogue One, settles into each new location, meticulously builds character arcs there, and delivers an often crushing emotional blow at the end of each character’s story.
As I wrote of Season 1, Gilroy’s use of language is precise, and we’ll often hear the same turn of phrase uttered by both Empire stooges and the rebels, blurring the lines between good and evil. And the show’s focus on the daily, deadly, often stifling struggle against fascism strikes particularly hard at this moment: House of Cards’ Beau Willimon wrote a harrowing three-episode arc in Season 1 during which Cassian is picked up by authorities for a crime he didn’t commit and arbitrarily sentenced to years in a labor camp.
If there is a reason why Andor has succeeded creatively where other Star Wars TV shows have failed, credit must go to Gilroy, the writer behind Michael Clayton and the Bourne movies, as well as Willimon, who has become perhaps the most in-demand script polisher in Hollywood thanks to his work on both Andor and Severance.
Gilroy has credited the incredible commercial success of The Mandalorian, Disney+’s most popular series, with his ability to take creative risks with Andor. “The success of The Mandalorian gave us the platform to jump off,” he told Empire. “No Baby Yoda, no Andor. Seriously. Don’t think that we don’t know that.” And LucasFilm certainly deserves credit for trusting Gilroy and giving him ample funding even if his contemplative show didn’t reach the ratings highs of The Mandalorian. They were willing to take the risk because of the potential upside. Why the studio hasn’t found a similar collaborative approach with the likes of Lindelof or del Toro remains a mystery.
Star Wars’ struggles to find a footing on the big screen
Before LucasFilm even wrapped the Skywalker saga with 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, the studio seemed to be struggling with the cinematic direction of the franchise. Originally Colin Trevorrow was supposed to direct the ninth entry in the Star Wars series, then titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates. But LucasFilm replaced Trevorrow with J.J. Abrams, who had helmed The Force Awakens, the first of several director switch-ups for the franchise.
The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street directing team Phil Lord and Chris Miller were dismissed from 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, an origin story for Han Solo, midway through production and replaced by Ron Howard. Solo underperformed at the box office, and the sequels that were seeded in the movie never came to fruition.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said at a 2023 conference that the “disappointing” box office returns for Solo, “gave us pause…maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive.” He added that going forward, “we’re going to make sure when we make one, it’s the right one. So we’re being very careful there.”
And careful, they have been. Star Wars movies that were announced only to disappear include a Boba Fett film from A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold, a Jabba the Hutt movie directed by del Toro, a trilogy from Benioff and Weiss, and a movie from Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige. Films from Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi and Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins appear to be on indefinite hold. That’s a lot of big directorial names who have come and gone with nothing to show for it.
The Disney+ television glut
When Disney+ launched in November of 2019, just before the pandemic, they flooded the streaming service with content derived from the House of Mouse’s most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars (and, for children, Pixar). A few early shows were huge hits, including The Mandalorian and WandaVision, in part because they defied expectations of what paint-by-numbers franchise TV-making might be. Marvel’s high-concept WandaVision, for instance, spoofed sitcoms through the ages. And The Mandalorian featured a massive twist at the end of the first episode: the introduction of an adorable creature we on the internet collectively dubbed “Baby Yoda.”
But perhaps in an effort to churn out as much content as possible, the shows that followed often felt like pale imitations of what came before them—series that were less creative, less compelling, more dependent on the viewer having watched hundreds of hours of Marvel or Star Wars content just to keep up with the plots. For Marvel, the simultaneous glut in content and drop in its quality have had an impact on box office for its feature films, which have not performed as well as the studio had hoped post-Avengers: Endgame.
LucasFilm hasn’t suffered the same fate in theaters simply because the studio has not produced any Star Wars movies in six years. But they have continued to flood Disney+ with TV shows, including Ahsoka, The Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Bad Batch, and Boba Fett. None of these shows have quite captured the zeitgeist like The Mandalorian did or garnered the critical praise of Andor. The overall effect on fans, based on social media chatter, has been simultaneous Jedi fatigue on the small screen and a yearning for a larger, sweeping stories in the cinema.
What’s next for Star Wars
Star Wars fans shouldn’t despair. Disney’s shareholders will pressure the company to eventually get another film set in a galaxy far, far away into movie theaters. Two Star Wars projects currently have a firm release date. The Mandalorian & Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series starring Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda, is set for May 22, 2026. And Levy is directing a movie called Star Wars: Strarfighter starring Ryan Gosling, will debut in May 2027. That second film will star entirely new characters and be set about five years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker.
Meanwhile, after his Boba Fett movie fell by the wayside, Mangold is now reportedly working on a different Star Wars movie set 25,000 years before The Phantom Menace. And Simon Kinberg, who wrote many of the X-Men movies, has signed on to do a trilogy for the franchise.
The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson says he may or may not return to the Star Wars universe for a once-announced trilogy after the he finishes writing and directing the Knives Out franchise. Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron movie was originally set for 2023 and has been delayed for years. An announced Waititi film similarly seems to be trapped in development purgatory. Still, perhaps one of these movies will see the light of day.
LucasFilm also announced a movie—or perhaps even trilogy—based on Rey Skywalker. Initially, the studio hired Lindelof for a Rey project. Lindelof later said (with good humor) that he was “asked to leave the Star Wars universe.” LucasFilm then tapped Locke’s Steven Knight to replace The Leftovers creator, though Knight, too, left the project, which may now be in limbo. Intriguingly, frequent Lindelof collaborators Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Nick Cuse (The Leftovers and Watchmen) are reportedly working on a Star Wars live-action series. Though a separate project, it’s easy to imagine those writers might share Lindelof’s sensibility.
Amid all these announcements, in 2023, Dave Filoni was named Chief Creative Officer at LucasFilm and charged with planning the future of Star Wars films and shows. Filoni cut his teeth on Star Wars animated series like The Clone Wars before working on The Mandalorian with Iron Man director Jon Favreau. But beyond bringing his biggest TV project to the big screen, details on the other future plans remain scarce.
That’s a lot up in the air, and fans are hopeful that some of these tentative plans will firm up in the near future. Until then, at least we’ve got Andor.
A new study claims that AI models like ChatGPT and Claude now outperform PhD-level virologists in problem-solving in wet labs, where scientists analyze chemicals and biological material. This discovery is a double-edged sword, experts say. Ultra-smart AI models could help researchers prevent the spread of infectious diseases. But non-experts could also weaponize the models to create deadly bioweapons.
The study, shared exclusively with TIME, was conducted by researchers at the Center for AI Safety, MIT’s Media Lab, the Brazilian university UFABC, and the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio. The authors consulted virologists to create an extremely difficult practical test which measured the ability to troubleshoot complex lab procedures and protocols. While PhD-level virologists scored an average of 22.1% in their declared areas of expertise, OpenAI’s o3 reached 43.8% accuracy. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 37.6%.
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Seth Donoughe, a research scientist at SecureBio and a co-author of the paper, says that the results make him a “little nervous,” because for the first time in history, virtually anyone has access to a non-judgmental AI virology expert which might walk them through complex lab processes to create bioweapons.
“Throughout history, there are a fair number of cases where someone attempted to make a bioweapon—and one of the major reasons why they didn’t succeed is because they didn’t have access to the right level of expertise,” he says. “So it seems worthwhile to be cautious about how these capabilities are being distributed.”
Months ago, the paper’s authors sent the results to the major AI labs. In response, xAI published a risk management framework pledging its intention to implement virology safeguards for future versions of its AI model Grok. OpenAI told TIME that it “deployed new system-level mitigations for biological risks” for its new models released last week. Anthropic included model performance results on the paper in recent system cards, but did not propose specific mitigation measures. Google’s Gemini declined to comment to TIME.
AI in biomedicine
Virology and biomedicine have long been at the forefront of AI leaders’ motivations for building ever-powerful AI models. “As this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the White House in January while announcing the Stargate project. There have been some encouraging signs in this area. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute published an algorithm capable of predicting which coronavirus variant might spread the fastest.
But up to this point, there had not been a major study dedicated to analyzing AI models’ ability to actually conduct virology lab work. “We’ve known for some time that AIs are fairly strong at providing academic style information,” says Donoughe. “It’s been unclear whether the models are also able to offer detailed practical assistance. This includes interpreting images, information that might not be written down in any academic paper, or material that is socially passed down from more experienced colleagues.”
So Donoughe and his colleagues created a test specifically for these difficult, non-Google-able questions. “The questions take the form: ‘I have been culturing this particular virus in this cell type, in these specific conditions, for this amount of time. I have this amount of information about what’s gone wrong. Can you tell me what is the most likely problem?’” Donoughe says.
And virtually every AI model outperformed PhD-level virologists on the test, even within their own areas of expertise. The researchers also found that the models showed significant improvement over time. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, for example, jumped from 26.9% to 33.6% accuracy from its June 2024 model to its October 2024 model. And a preview of OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 in February outperformed GPT-4o by almost 10 percentage points.
“Previously, we found that the models had a lot of theoretical knowledge, but not practical knowledge,” Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, tells TIME. “But now, they are getting a concerning amount of practical knowledge.”
Risks and rewards
If AI models are indeed as capable in wet lab settings as the study finds, then the implications are massive. In terms of benefits, AIs could help experienced virologists in their critical work fighting viruses. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, says that AI could assist with accelerating the timelines of medicine and vaccine development and improving clinical trials and disease detection. “These models could help scientists in different parts of the world, who don’t yet have that kind of skill or capability, to do valuable day-to-day work on diseases that are occurring in their countries,” he says. For instance, one group of researchers found that AI helped them better understand hemorrhagic fever viruses in sub-Saharan Africa.
But bad-faith actors can now use AI models to walk them through how to create viruses—and will be able to do so without any of the typical training required to access a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, which deals with the most dangerous and exotic infectious agents. “It will mean a lot more people in the world with a lot less training will be able to manage and manipulate viruses,” Inglesby says.
Hendrycks urges AI companies to put up guardrails to prevent this type of usage. “If companies don’t have good safeguards for these within six months time, that, in my opinion, would be reckless,” he says.
Hendrycks says that one solution is not to shut these models down or slow their progress, but to make them gated, so that only trusted third parties get access to their unfiltered versions. “We want to give the people who have a legitimate use for asking how to manipulate deadly viruses—like a researcher at the MIT biology department—the ability to do so,” he says. “But random people who made an account a second ago don’t get those capabilities.”
And AI labs should be able to implement these types of safeguards relatively easily, Hendrycks says. “It’s certainly technologically feasible for industry self-regulation,” he says. “There’s a question of whether some will drag their feet or just not do it.”
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, published a risk management framework memo in February, which acknowledged the paper and signaled that the company would “potentially utilize” certain safeguards around answering virology questions, including training Grok to decline harmful requests and applying input and output filters.
OpenAI, in an email to TIME on Monday, wrote that its newest models, the o3 and o4-mini, were deployed with an array of biological-risk related safeguards, including blocking harmful outputs. The company wrote that it ran a thousand-hour red-teaming campaign in which 98.7% of unsafe bio-related conversations were successfully flagged and blocked. “We value industry collaboration on advancing safeguards for frontier models, including in sensitive domains like virology,” a spokesperson wrote. “We continue to invest in these safeguards as capabilities grow.”
Inglesby argues that industry self-regulation is not enough, and calls for lawmakers and political leaders to strategize a policy approach to regulating AI’s bio risks. “The current situation is that the companies that are most virtuous are taking time and money to do this work, which is good for all of us, but other companies don’t have to do it,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s not good for the public to have no insights into what’s happening.”
“When a new version of an LLM is about to be released,” Inglesby adds, “there should be a requirement for that model to be evaluated to make sure it will not produce pandemic-level outcomes.”
During my childhood in the Midwest, I briefly possessed—with my parents’ hesitant blessings—an Eastern milk snake as a pet. One day, the snake escaped from its terrarium in the garage. It didn’t try to hide or make a jailbreak to the great outdoors. We found it lying in the one small square of sunlight on the garage floor that made it through a window, seeking the warmth we had failed to provide in its enclosure. It was trying to tell us something we were incapable of understanding, as snakes often do.
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The major celebrations ushering in the Year of the Snake have come and gone, but I’ve found myself thinking about that milk snake as we approach the 55th celebration of Earth Day. Serpents are almost nobody’s idea of a canary in the coal mine, not least because of how universally they’re loathed. But they are only 1 of 3 creatures in the Bible able to speak to humans, and they still might be trying to tell us something we’re incapable of understanding—about climate change, global warming, toxic environments, and habitat destruction. If we stop loathing them and start listening to them, we might learn something from them.
Perhaps the most important message from the roughly 4,000 different snakes slithering around the planet is that diversity is not only good, but necessary for survival. Snakes display an astonishing range of diversity. They inhabit niches on every continent except Antartica (yes, snakes can survive in the Arctic Circle). They thrive in burrows and dens, under rocks, up in trees, in arid deserts and inland swamps, in meadows and forests and Himalayan foothills, in freshwater rivers and saltwater seas. They may eat multiple times a day or once a year. As cold-blooded creatures (“ectomorphs” is the technical term), they cannot generate their own body heat and must rely on the external environment, sun and shade, to maintain body temperature. That is often viewed by us profligate, protein-burning, fat-loving energy spendthrifts as an inferior form of metabolism. But instead, it’s worth thinking of snakes as thermal savants, adjusting rapidly to changes in temperature. It’s a pretty nifty skillset to have in an era of unpredictable climate volatility.
“I think most ecologists that work with snakes end up being astonished by their flexibility and plasticity, their ability to change some of the things they do in response to novel challenges,” says Rick Shine, a world-renowned Australian herpetologist. For supposedly primitive animals, he adds, snakes have evolved some mind-blowing biochemical adaptations.
Snakes tell us that adaptation to a hostile environment is both possible and necessary. Take, for example, a species of sea snake that inhabits the inland bays of New Caledonia, an island in the Pacific Ocean. The coastal waters are a tropical stew of pollutants—industrial wastes including arsenic, cobalt, manganese, nickel, selenium, zinc, and seven other trace metals. Shine led a research team that discovered that, in response to these environmental toxins, turtle-headed sea snakes (Emydocephalus annulatus) have evolved a very neat decontamination trick. The pigments of their skin became darker, or melanistic; the melanin in their skin snags and sequesters the environmental toxins before they can harm the animal. The snakes slough off the toxins every time they shed their skins.
Another tale of rapid adaptation has been writing itself in South Florida, where invasive Burmese pythons have settled quite comfortably in the Everglades. A severe freeze event in 2010 devastated reptile populations; frozen iguanas dropped from trees and dead pythons littered roads. But genomic research by computational biologist Daren Card and his colleagues suggested that the survivors of the freeze event possessed, among other genetic endowments, a robust form of cold hardiness. And that rapid genetic adaptation has coincided with a northward march of the pythons, which have now been detected—at least through detection of their DNA in environmental droppings—well beyond Lake Okeechobee. More evidence that few creatures thermally read the environmental room as deftly as snakes.
Snakes tell us that alternative, complex, and frankly mind-blowing biology can be cooked up by seemingly simple creatures. Todd Castoe, associate dean for research at the University of Texas at Arlington, has been studying the genome of Burmese pythons for more than a decade. He and his colleagues have teased apart an astonishing biochemical pathway in pythons that allows them to regenerate organs, including the heart and intestine, while overcoming the cellular stress and huge amounts of insulin that accompany growth after their infrequent meals (they can eat as little as once a year). The pythons—perhaps evolution’s pioneers in intermittent fasting—can enlarge and shrink internal organs on demand precisely because they run through molecular stop signs that in other creatures (including humans) would halt growth and prevent insensitivity to insulin, a hallmark of diabetes. As Castoe distills the findings, published in 2024, pythons can regenerate their organs by avoiding getting Type II diabetes. “It’s nuts!” he says.
If snakes are telling us all these things, why aren’t we listening? Probably because most people fear and loathe them, often killing the messenger. But that wasn’t always the case.
Long before snakes were demonized in the Book of Genesis, when God declared eternal “enmity” between all serpents and all descendants of Eve, ancient cultures feared, respected, and in many cases venerated snakes as special ambassadors of Nature—not just the glorious Nature of picture postcards and exhilarating hikes, but the indifferent Nature that unleashed unpredictable and terrible violence upon the land and its inhabitants. Snakes abound in the megaliths unearthed at the archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in present-day Turkey, where Neolithic peoples attached special significance to serpents roughly 10,000 years ago. The far-flung cult of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, often consecrated new sanctuaries with a live snake—a ritual described by Ovid in The Metamorphoses. Nearly 2000 years ago, the empire of Teotihuacan in Mesoamerica embraced the symbolic centrality of snakes in creation myths, both revered and feared for their ability to traverse the boundaries between the natural world and the afterworld.
Especially around the time of Earth Day, it’s worth recalling that in many of these ancient cultures, snakes among all creatures were particularly associated with meteorological powers: lightning, thunderstorms, floods, droughts, wildfires, agricultural fertility, agricultural famine. The intermingling of climate, environment, and serpentdom might seem like a stretch to modern sensibilities. But if we step back, snakes might be imparting some lessons about our worldview. John Shine described to me a research trip to the hostile mountain environs of Tasmania, where snakes stay under cover except for the 20 or 30 warm days each year. “The only time that they’re out there doing anything, it’s warm and sunny and it’s lovely! And the rest of the time basically doesn’t exist. So we walk around as these sort of constant-rate, warm-blooded creatures thinking, ‘This is a god-awful, horrible environment—how can anything live here?’ And as far as they’re concerned, they’re living in the villa by the sea in a warm climate, because that’s the only time they’re active.”
Finally, we might ponder the lesson of another Australian serpent, the file snake (Achrocordus arafurae). During a succession of poor wet seasons, the females postpone reproductive maturation up to 10 years and may produce a litter only once a decade. “You do things based on resource availability, and your ability to wait out the bad times because your metabolic processes are low,” Shine explained. “You can just sit around there and wait until the world gets better.”
He kept up with the latest apps, seeing them as opportunities to reach Catholics wherever they are. Though he stopped watching television in 1990, he joined Instagram in 2016, setting a record with 1.4 million followers in less than 12 hours. In the final days of his life, he was on weekly WhatsApp and video calls with a parish in the war zone of Gaza.
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Young Catholics found him relatable, and it helped that the leader of the largest Christian church was also a fan of the world’s most-watched sport, soccer. He grew up rooting for the club San Lorenzo from his native Buenos Aires and met with legendary Argentine players Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona.
Though his days as nightclub bouncer (true) ended decades ago, he knew how to party. Tango, he said in 2010, “comes from deep within me.” In 2014, hundreds of couples danced it in St. Peter’s Square, in a show of appreciation for him.
As with other newly anointed celebrities, it took Francis a while to get used to being in the spotlight. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” he told an interviewer in 2015. So the Pope ordered in; in 2017, he blew out a candle on a 13-ft.-long mozzarella and tomato pie for his 81st birthday.
The only thing he loved more than pizza was sweets. Friends from Argentina would bring him alfajores, Argentine cookies filled with caramel and covered in chocolate. In February 2014, he posed with a life-size chocolate statue of himself, a gift made out of 1.5 tons of cocoa. His go-to caffeinated drink was maté, and he would accept a cup whenever one was offered on a rope line.
What social media users ate up were his photo ops. True to his eponym St. Francis of Assisi’s love of animals, and his role as shepherd of more than 1 billion Catholics, he went viral in 2018 posing with a baby lamb around his neck at a live nativity scene.
After homilies, Francis was always game to pose for selfies, especially with teens. And though he once described the Internet as “a gift from God,” he also worried that the social media platforms designed to keep people connected were making them more isolated, stating in 2018, “The world of virtual communication is a good thing, but when it becomes alienating, it makes you forget to shake hands.” It’s a lesson that can apply to adults too.
Pope Francis, the reform-minded Roman Catholic leader who guided the church through an era of crisis, died Monday, April 21, a day after appearing at St. Peter’s Square to offer members of the public an Easter blessing. He was 88 years old.
“Dear brothers and sisters, it is with profound sadness I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in announcement.“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church.”
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Francis’ papacy marked a number of firsts: the first pope from the Americas; the first non-European pope; the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere; the first pope from the developing world; the first Pope to attend a G7 summit; the first Pope to visit Iraq; the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope to take the name Francis after Saint Francis of Assisi, who was famous for his ministry to the poor.
His papacy also reflected a first in terms of his willingness to hear out different points of view on controversial issues including marriage, sexuality, the priesthood, and celibacy in the church that his predecessors weren’t willing to debate. While none of the major church traditions were tossed out during his tenure, and at a time when the child sex abuse scandal that has plagued the church for years created a crisis of conscience particularly among young Catholics, Francis stood out for exuding a certain level of empathy, humility, and mercy that people felt connected to in a way they said they never felt with past popes. He served as the world’s conscience. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he strongly urged President Vladimir Putin to “stop this spiral of violence and death” and avoid the “absurd” risk of nuclear war. During the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, he condemned the air strikes and called for peace, even keeping up his regular chats with a Catholic parish in Gaza while hospitalized for pneumonia. As TIME explained when it chose Pope Francis as its 2013 “Person of the Year,” he “changed the tone and perception and focus of one of the world’s largest institutions in an extraordinary way.”
Early life
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, the eldest of accountant Mario Bergoglio and Regina Sivori’s five children. His parents were Italian immigrants who fled Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, and his grandmother Rosa Margherita Vassallo di Bergoglio was active in Catholic Action, formed by Italian bishops who wanted to maintain their independence from Mussolini’s authoritarian rule. His grandmother had the biggest influence on him, according to biographer Austen Ivereigh, who wrote in Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church that “it was an austere but happy lower middle-class family life.” Grandma Bergoglio would take him to Mass, educated him about the saints and the rosary, and introduced him and his siblings to Italian literature and his favorite novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.
His family retained their love for Italian culture, and Bergoglio grew up listening to opera and watching every Italian movie that came to town. His love for soccer dates back to this period, when he followed the small Buenos Aires soccer team San Lorenzo with his father.
Bergoglio first contemplated the priesthood as a preteen, writing to one girl he admired, Amalia Damonte, “If I don’t become a priest, I’ll marry you.” The epiphany came a few years later, at age 16. At 9 a.m. on Sept. 21, 1953, he was en route to meet classmates from the vocational school where he studied chemistry when he passed San José de Flores Church in Buenos Aires. He went into the confessional booth, and came out of it convinced that he should become a priest. “I felt I had to enter: It was one of those things one feels inside and one doesn’t know why,” he said in a 2012 Buenos Aires radio interview. “I felt like someone grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional,” he also said. He ended up going home instead of going out with his friends because he felt “overwhelmed.”
Despite that realization, he later admitted he continued to contemplate his future before entering the seminary. “God left the door open for me for a few years,” he says in the 2010 compilation of interviews Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio by Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin. “Religious vocation is a call from God to your heart, whether you are waiting for it consciously or unconsciously.”
On Dec. 13, 1969—four days before his 33rd birthday—he was ordained as a priest with the Society of Jesus, the largest religious order for Catholic men better known as the Jesuits. He continued his studies at University of Alcalá in Spain, and then returned to Argentina to a seminary in the city of San Miguel, where he oversaw the new seminary students and taught theology.
Before the Papacy
As pope, he was noted to have an openness to his decision-making that differed from his papal predecessors. His style can be traced back to moments when he made unpopular decisions in Argentina, which led to a personal evolution.
A few years into the priesthood, in 1973, he became the leader, or Provincial, of the Jesuits in Argentina at just 36 years old. Soon after, he was embroiled in a crisis that could have jeopardized his career amid one of the most tumultuous periods in Argentina’s history.
During the so-called “Dirty War” from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s that took place in Argentina, two Jesuits serving in slums—Father Orlando Yorio and Father Francisco Jalics—were among those seen as rebels. After a military coup on March 24, 1976, overthrew the country’s president and replaced it with a military dictatorship, Yorio and Jalics were kidnapped for five months and subjected to torture. Bergoglio was accused of not doing all he could to protect them, though he testified in a court case that stemmed from the kidnapping that he did meet military officers privately and pressed for their release.
“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he said as he reflected on that period in an interview with the Jesuit and Catholic magazine America published in September 2013 after becoming pope.
His leadership style was further shaped while serving as rector of the Colegio de San José in Buenos Aires from 1980 to 1986. There, he had his students work on farms—harvesting crops and milking cows to feed the city’s poor—but he grew unpopular among those who emphasized more classroom time. He was eventually forced out of the role, and relocated to Córdoba in 1990, where the 53-year-old spent two years living in a tiny room in a Jesuit residence, essentially in exile. It was “a time of great interior crisis,” he said.
In June 1992, Pope John Paul II named Bergoglio auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, on the recommendation of the city’s archbishop Antonio Quarracino, to whom he had grown close. He succeeded Quarracino upon his death in 1998, became a cardinal in 2001 and president of the Argentine bishops conference in 2005. He was Buenos Aires archbishop until Pope Benedict XVI resigned.
Setting a new tone as Pope
On Feb. 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to announce his resignation in about 600 years, since Gregory XII in 1415. The College of Cardinals elected Bergoglio on March 13th on the fifth ballot in one of the fastest papal conclaves.
“Clearly the Cardinals were looking for something and someone different, and so his very otherness may have been appealing,” James Martin, the Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America,wrote for TIME.com two days after Bergoglio was elected pope. “Particularly in light of the Vatileak scandals, the Cardinals may have been searching for someone who could take a fresh look at things and move the bureaucracy in a new direction. On the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, as he addressed the crowd, Pope Francis joked about his Latin American origins. It seemed, he said, that the Cardinals had to go to the ‘ends of the earth’ to find a Pope. But often someone from the margins is just what the center needs.”
Initially there was concern about whether he could breathe new life into the church if he was missing a lung—the Vatican clarified that part of his lung was removed after a bout of severe pneumonia when he was a 21 year old seminary student—but Francis hit the ground running. His actions in his first year made clear that business as usual was not going to be sufficient. For example, within his first year as Pontiff, a commission to investigate the Vatican bank was created. The commission conducted an audit, which led to the bank’s first financial report in 125 years.
He was also seen as more openminded—less doctrinaire—on pressing lifestyle questions among churchgoers. While Pope Benedict described homosexuality in 2005 as “an objective disorder” and “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” Francis made headlines in 2013 for saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” In December 2023, Pope Francis approved a new rule allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, though that didn’t mean the Vatican approved of same-sex marriage. Throughout his papacy he maintained that gay marriage is not marriage. In his first major document on family issues, the 2016 Amoris Laetitia, he stated that “de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage.”
In a move toward reform, the document also represented a milestone for encouraging church communities to be more welcoming of divorced people. He also loosened red tape in the process for couples seeking annulments. Though the document maintained that divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment aren’t supposed to receive communion at Mass, he reiterated in a footnote a line he has said in the past, that “the Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” He also wrote that “No one can be condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel! Here I am not speaking only of the divorced and remarried, but of everyone, in whatever situation they find themselves.”
He also aimed to more fully acknowledge women in the church, hailing “unknown and forgotten” mothers and grandmothers and the “genius” of female saints. In January 2019, he appointed the first woman to hold a senior managerial position in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State office by naming layperson Francesca di Giovanni to be a point-person for diplomatic relations. His 2018 Apostolic Exhortation (meaning a statement issued by a pope) “Gaudete et Exsultate” (“Rejoice and Be Glad”), featured women in a way that some papal watchers found progressive—such as by acknowledging that “unknown or forgotten women … sustained and transformed families and communities”—but he took them down a peg by also writing, “Their lives may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.”
Thus, Jamie L. Manson, a self-described queer Catholic pundit at National Catholic Reporter, argued the pope was merely “reasserting … his belief that women’s most essential vocation, and her true path to holiness, comes in motherhood and nurturing her family.”
He was also firm that priests are supposed to be men. He expressed some openness to female deacons—and in August 2016 created a commission to explore that option—but a couple of months later he maintained, “On the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last word is clear.” He was also tentatively open to the idea of allowing married men to become priests in areas where they’re desperately needed, and in October 2019 a meeting of bishops convened by Pope Francis endorsed this exact idea in the Amazon region. But the pope tabled that proposal in a letter revealed in February 2020.
The next month, Pope Francis found himself leading a global church during a global pandemic. On Mar. 27, 2020—with the Vatican in lockdown, and church services livestreaming worldwide—the Pontiff delivered a special blessing to an empty, rain-covered St. Peter’s Square, urging Catholics feeling “afraid and lost” to maintain their faith.
Addressing the sex abuse crisis
The child sex abuse scandals have been a black eye on the Catholic Church over the past two decades, and the issue was far from resolved during Pope Francis’s tenure. He faced accusations that he didn’t do enough or was still part of an antiquated system that protected accused priests at the expense of victims.
About a year into his papacy, he claimed that “no-one else has done more” than the church in cracking down on pedophiles in the clergy, hailing its “transparency.” During his first meeting with the people who had been sexually abused by priests in July 2014, he characterized those clerics as a “sacrilegious cult.”
As bombshell revelations about victims continued, it became clear that the pope’s “legacy is at stake” with his approach to the sex abuse scandal “and the viability of the Catholic Church itself,” as Christopher J. Hale, who helped run Catholic outreach for President Barack Obama put it in a Feb. 2018 op-ed for TIME.
Hale’s op-ed came on the heels of the pope’s first visit to Chile the month prior, when he came under fire for standing by Juan Barros, the Chilean bishop he appointed to head the diocese of Osorno, Chile; Barros was accused of covering up for his mentor Rev. Fernando Karadima, who, in 2011, was found guilty of sexually abusing minors in Chile and sentenced to a “life of prayer and penitence. Francis said he was “convinced” of Barros’ innocence in this matter and called the accusations that Barros covered up for Karadima “calumny” and said “there is not a single proof against him.” He called for a Vatican investigation. After listening to dozen of testimonies, he publicly apologized in April for “serious mistakes” in reading the situation. “I was part of the problem,” Pope Francis reportedly told Chilean victims of sexual abuse who visited the Pope at the Vatican in May 2018. Barros resigned the next month.
He did take decisive actions on the issue over the next year. He made history in February 2019 by de-frocking Theodore McCarrick, an ex-cardinal accused of sexual abuse. It appeared to mark the first time a cardinal has been expelled over such allegations, and the first time an American cardinal has been banned from the priesthood. To enable clergy to report sex abuse claims to law enforcement, he also nixed a 2001 decree that had allowed church officials to classify sex abuse allegations as “pontifical secrets”—the most secretive of church doings.
Championing climate change
Living up to Francis of Assisi’s recognition as the patron saint of ecology and the poor, the pope released a groundbreaking June 2015 climate encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, arguing climate change was undeniable and disproportionately impacting developing countries. It came ahead of the Paris climate accords. Addressing a community of the faithful divided on whether humans caused climate change or whether climate change is a serious problem, the 184-page document said humans feel “entitled to plunder her [the Earth] at will” and described climate change as “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day” and “a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods.”
Top economist and sustainable development expert Jeffrey Sachs described it as playing a “huge role” in getting predominantly Catholic nations onboard with the Paris Agreement, according to Ivereigh.
The ‘world’s parish priest’
His modest lifestyle was also part of his appeal. Dating back to taking public transportation as archbishop in Buenos Aires and opting for apartment living, as pope he chose to live in a penthouse apartment in Saint Martha’s house, adjacent to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, because he thought the Apostolic Palace was too extravagant. He was nicknamed the “world’s parish priest” for his modesty, and he demonstrated it with acts including washing the feet of a dozen local inmates in the walk-up to Easter—noting that bishops must be servants. On Sep. 4, 2016, he proclaimed Mother Teresa, famous for serving the poor in Calcutta, India, a saint.
Just as Saint Francis of Assisi traveled to Egypt to try and stop the Crusades, Pope Francis traveled to the region to promote tolerance between Christians and Muslims. In February 2019, he became the first pope to visit an Arab Gulf state by going to the United Arab Emirates and leading what is believed to be the largest act of Christian public worship on the Arabian peninsula. He and Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar and the equivalent of the Pope to Sunni worshipers, co-signed a landmark “The Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” in an effort to set a new tone for peaceful relations between Islam and Christianity, the world’s biggest religions, at a time when the migrant crisis exacerbated anti-Muslim sentiment that escalated after the September 11th terror attacks.
Pope Francis also tried to repair the church’s relations with indigenous groups. In July 2022, he embarked on a week-long “pilgrimage of penance” in Canada, publicly apologizing for residential boardings schools run by church missionaries, notorious for decades of physical and emotional abuse. “I’m here to remember the past, and to cry with you,” he told an audience of indigenous Canadians and survivors, before receiving a high honor usually reserved for indigenous chiefs.
Pope Francis sets Instagram record—and becomes ‘cool’
He embraced social media to reach worshippers worldwide. He was the first Pope to host a Google Hangout and when he joined Instagram in 2016, he set a record for most followers gained in a single day after racking up over 1.4 million followers in less than 12 hours. His presence on social media earned him a reputation as a “cool” pope. “People will approach me to say, ‘I’ve been away from the Church for a year but Pope Francis is drawing me back,’ or ‘I’m not a Catholic, but I sure love this pope,” as Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, put it in a 2018 interview. “He’s helping people take a fresh look at the Catholic Church.” At the same time, he recognized that social media theoretically makes it easier to put a message out to worshippers—even as he fretted about shorter attention spans. “The technological and cultural shifts that have marked this period of history have made the transmission of faith increasingly difficult,” he says in Ivereigh’s book.
In October 2019—six years after becoming pope and at age 82—he took steps seen as shoring up his legacy: appointing 13 new cardinals on a similar wavelength in terms of policy priorities, and hailing from diverse countries like Morocco, Indonesia, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He even talked openly about dying. On a 2014 flight from South Korea to the Vatican, in response to a question about how he feels about global fame, he told reporters, “I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, not to become proud. Because I know it will last only a short time. Two or three years and then I’ll be off to the Father’s house.” Of course, he lived longer, but in a video message to a gathering of youth in Mexico City in October 2019, he talked about a more timeless philosophy of death as a reality check and making the most of what you do while alive: “It is death that allows life to remain alive! … It is a slap in the face to our illusion of omnipotence.”
“Another day, another old story,” said Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell in a statement. But while the news he was responding to on Sunday may have sounded familiar, it was in fact new.
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After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Cabinet officials were revealed last month to have discussed U.S. military strikes on Yemen in a Signal chat group that mistakenly included the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, new reports suggest Hegseth may have shared similar attack details in another chat on the same commercial messaging platform—this time, with a group that reportedly included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
The New York Times first reported on Hegseth’s second sensitive Signal chat, citing four unnamed sources with knowledge of the chat. CNN also reported on it, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the chat, while the Associated Press confirmed the Times’ reporting, citing an anonymous source familiar with the chat’s contents and participants.
Hegseth and the Trump Administration faced heavy criticism about the implications for national security after the initial leak report last month, with some Congress members even calling on the Defense Secretary to step down. The Administration and GOP allies, however, downplayed the controversy, with President Trump himself accusing critics of making “a big deal” out of his Administration’s “only glitch in two months.”
“The details keep coming out,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X after the latest reports. “We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk. But Trump is still too weak to fire him. Pete Hegseth must be fired.”
Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson who was also reportedly a member of the second chat group, insisted there was “no classified information in any Signal chat” and that the reports are evidence that the “Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda.”
Here’s what to know.
What information was in the second Signal chat?
The Times reported that some of the information in the newly revealed Signal chat group, which was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” included flight schedules for F/A-18 Hornet combat aircraft targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The report described it as “essentially the same attack plans” that Hegseth had shared in the Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group” that included top national security officials as well as the Atlantic’s Goldberg.
Hegseth reportedly accessed the chat on a private phone distinct from his government-issued device. He created it to discuss “routine administrative or scheduling information,” according to two of the Times’ sources, who noted that the Defense Secretary did not typically use the chat to discuss sensitive military operations.
Who was in the second Signal chat?
Besides Hegseth and Parnell, the “Defense | Team Huddle” chat also reportedly included Hegseth’s younger brother Phil, who works in the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security senior adviser and liaison.
It also reportedly included Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer, whom Hegseth commissioned last month as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
It’s unclear what level of security clearance Phil Hegseth or Parlatore may have, given their government roles, but Hegseth’s wife Jennifer, a former Fox News producer who was also reportedly a member of the chat, does not have an official government role. The Defense Secretary has been previously scrutinized for including his wife in sensitive meetings with foreign officials.
The chat also reportedly included two former senior advisers to Hegseth: Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick. Caldwell and Selnick, along with former deputy defense secretary chief of staff Colin Carroll, were fired days earlier, ostensibly after an investigation into leaks. The three issued a statement asserting their innocence and claiming they’ve been “slandered” while maintaining that they “remain supportive of the Trump-Vance Administration’s mission to make the Pentagon great again.”
The “Defense | Team Huddle” chat also reportedly included Joe Kasper, the Defense Secretary’s chief of staff who reportedly requested the leak investigation and is set to leave his post for a new role at the Pentagon amid the turmoil.
Why is the Trump Administration blaming disgruntled ex-employees?
Parnell, in his statement, criticized the Times “and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage” for “enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article.” The Times as well as CNN and the AP did not name their sources. “They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda,” Parnell claimed.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly similarly dismissed the reports, saying in a statement to the AP: “No matter how many times the legacy media tries to resurrect the same non-story, they can’t change the fact that no classified information was shared.” Kelly also blamed disgruntled ex-employees, adding: “Recently-fired ‘leakers’ are continuing to misrepresent the truth to soothe their shattered egos and undermine the President’s agenda, but the administration will continue to hold them accountable.”
Hours after the Times reported on the existence of the second sensitive Signal group chat, John Ullyot, who resigned as acting Defense Department press secretary last week, published a tell-all op-ed for Politico in which he painted a portrait of “total chaos” and “disarray” at the Pentagon under Hegseth.
Ullyot described Hegseth’s recent firing of Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll—“three of his most loyal senior staffers”—as “strange and baffling” and potentially just the beginning of a broader “purge.” He also suggested that the leak allegations against the three officials were unfounded. “Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door,” Ullyot wrote.
“The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president,” Ullyot asserted, warning that there may yet be “more shoes to drop in short order” and “even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.” Given Trump’s “strong record of holding his top officials to account,” he added, “it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
What are the reactions so far?
The fresh news of Hegseth potentially disclosing sensitive information in another Signal chat has already prompted sharp rebuke from some Democratic lawmakers.
Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Hegseth “must immediately explain” and urged the Defense Department’s Inspector General Office to include the latest allegations in its ongoing investigation of Hegseth’s mishandling of classified information. “If true, this incident is another troubling example of Secretary Hegseth’s reckless disregard for the laws and protocols that every other military servicemember is required to follow,” Reed said.
Sen. Andy Kim. (D., N.J.) posted on X: “I’ll say it again—Hegseth needs to resign. There was more than enough from the last Signal leak to show he is not fit to lead our military.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D, N.Y.) posted on X that Hegseth “recklessly used an unsecured app to discuss war plans with senior officials. Now we know he also shared those sensitive details with his family over Signal, even after being explicitly warned not to. Republicans must join me in calling on him to resign immediately.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D, Ill.) also called on Hegseth to resign, posting on X: “How many times does Pete Hegseth need to leak classified intelligence before Donald Trump and Republicans understand that he isn’t only a f*cking liar, he is a threat to our national security? Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity.”
