Trump’s Iran War May Mark The Beginning Of The End For Dollar-Backed US Empire
Costas Lapavitsas -Photo: SOAS University of London
03-26-2026 ~ Radical economist Costas Lapavitsas discusses the crumbling of the dollar-backed world system and what could be next.
In recent decades, imperialism has been somewhat out of fashion as a subject of analysis in academic circles. Yet in the past several months, President Donald Trump had reminded everyone that U.S. imperialism is indeed alive and kicking. In fact, imperialism never went away, as leading radical economist Costas Lapavitsas points out in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Lapavitsas, a professor of economics at SOAS University of London, warns us that the world is now closer than ever to world war and nuclear confrontation. His recent article in the New Left Review, “A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism,” outlines his recent research into the growing chaos of Trump-era U.S. imperialism and its potential catastrophic consequences for the world.
C. J. Polychroniou: Imperialism was a central concept in Marxist and radical thought throughout the 20th century, but to many, globalization seemed to have made it obsolete. Today it is making a dramatic comeback, not least because of Trump, whose territorial ambitions, revival of the Monroe Doctrine, and threats against Canada, Greenland, and Panama make him look and act like a 19th-century imperial adventurer. How does imperialism remain a characteristic feature of contemporary capitalism, and how does today’s imperialism differ from the aggressive expansionism of the great powers before 1914?
Costas Lapavitsas: Imperialism never disappeared. The classical Marxist theorists — above all, Lenin, Hilferding, Bukharin, and Luxemburg — established something that remains valid: Imperialism is at root an economic phenomenon, a historically specific way of organizing accumulation and surplus extraction at the world scale, backed by coercive state power. Imperialism is embedded in capitalism.
The forms and mechanisms of imperialism, however, have changed profoundly. The imperialism of the great powers before 1914 rested on territorial possession, colonial administration, and the direct extraction of resources and value. It sprang from the fusion of industrial and banking capital within national blocs competing for territory and markets. Today’s imperialism operates through an entirely different architecture. Global production chains dominated by multinational enterprises are paired with international banks and investment funds. They operate in a hierarchical system of production and finance anchored in the U.S. dollar. The system is exploitative and coercive but relies on payment mechanisms, collateral rules, and sanctions that enforce compliance without territorial occupation. Ultimate coercion, needless to say, depends on military power and naked aggression.
Trump is a symptom of this structure under stress, not its author. U.S. productive primacy has been eroding for decades while dollar dominance remains strong. That gap is now generating global political turbulence. The territorial gestures toward Greenland and Canada, the tariff wars, and the blunt transactional dealings with other major powers do not constitute a new imperial strategy. Rather, they are the behavior of a hegemon that can no longer reproduce consent and is falling back on raw positional power. Positional power without productive foundations, and without the institutional legitimacy that once underpinned U.S. leadership, is a diminishing asset.
Can global financial capital and capital accumulation alone provide the key to understanding contemporary imperialism in its totality?
No. This needs to be said clearly, because the temptation to reduce contemporary imperialism mostly to finance is understandable given the extraordinary growth of financial power in recent decades.
Contemporary imperialism rests on the structural pairing of internationalized productive capital and global financial capital. These two forms are distinct but mutually reinforcing. A hedge fund can manage $1 billion or $1 trillion from the same offices on Wall Street; a semiconductor plant cannot double output without years of investment. Production is rigid; finance is elastic. But they interlock. Global production chains need dollar liquidity to function; financial capital needs the profit flows generated by production to have something to draw on.
The U.S. state holds this pairing together at the level of the world market primarily through its command of the dollar as world money. It guarantees settlement, enforces contracts across jurisdictions, provides crisis liquidity, and defines what counts as money globally. This is the hinge of the entire system.
And behind everything stands military power as the ultimate guarantor. The sea lanes through which the vast bulk of world trade moves are secured by U.S. naval forces. Intellectual property regimes, semiconductor chokepoints, and undersea cable systems all depend on enforceable U.S. jurisdiction — backed, when necessary, by force. Finance, production, law, and military power form a single integrated imperial apparatus. To reduce imperialism to any one of these is to mistake a pillar for the building. Read more
How Will Trump’s Supporters React To Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?
03-25-2026 ~ School choice advocates calling the federal voucher program “free money” may be underestimating its political costs.
In September 2023, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stunned school choice advocates when he kicked out four private schools from the state’s school voucher program. The schools’ offense, according to the state’s announcement, was their “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” which were seen as “an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s [sic] students and the public.” The alleged “ties” were not explained in the announcement.
What was surprising about the announcement was that Florida has long been regarded as being “number one in education freedom” by school choice advocates, and its largely unregulated voucher market, along with those of other states, has been described as the “wild west of school voucher expansions.”
A report on the state’s announcement by WFTV explained that the governor’s decision was likely due to the for-profit owner of these schools, Spring Education Group, “controlled by Primavera Holdings Limited,” which is a reference to Primavera Capital, a private equity investment firm based in Hong Kong.
Spring Education Group is one of the largest operators of private schools in the U.S., overseeing more than 200 schools in 19 states. The company’s schools are considered prestigious and include Stratford School, LePort Montessori Schools, Nobel Learning Communities, and BASIS Independent Schools. In a written statement to WFTV, spokespersons representing the four Florida schools, banned from the voucher program, stated, “We are regularly acknowledged as one of the best private schools in our area and have a track record of delivering outstanding educational outcomes, which is why parents choose us. Our schools are locally run, abide by local, state, and federal laws, and do not have ties to any government or political party.”
Nevertheless, when the New York Post, a conservative tabloid owned by right-wing firebrand Rupert Murdoch, caught wind of this story from Florida, it reported that “[a] group of elite private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” operated by BASIS Independent Schools, were sold to Spring Education Group in 2019. “Primavera’s chairman and CEO is Fred Zuliu Hu, who has previously been named as a one-time senior member of the Chinese Communist Party.”
The article further said that “While BASIS schools tell parents in a disclaimer that its parent company, Spring Education Group, is controlled by Primavera, which it says, ‘is itself owned by Chinese persons residing in Hong Kong,’ the schools do not acknowledge the Communist link. Primavera dispute[s] that Hu is currently a Communist Party member.”
But concerns about Spring Education Group and Primavera continued to be a flashpoint among conservative lawmakers and advocates in other states.
In February 2024, Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote a high-profile letter to then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressing concerns about another company associated with Primavera Capital called Tutor.com. “Tutor.com is a long-standing provider of tutoring services to our service members and their families,” Cotton wrote, and its acquisition by “a Chinese-owned corporation,” along with the Princeton Review in 2022, concerned him. “Tutor.com collects personal data on users,” the senator said, “such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions.” That business arrangement, Cotton maintained, was akin to “paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Cotton’s letter quickly caught the attention of multiple right-wing advocacy groups. In March 2024, Parents Defending Education, a conservative astroturf organization that accuses public schools and universities of spreading “transgender ideology” and liberal “indoctrination,” issued a “non-exhaustive list of school districts that give students access to Tutor.com.” (In 2025, Parents Defending Education rebranded to Defending Education.)
The New York Post promptly amplified the concerns of Parents Defending Education, reporting that Tutor.com was assisting the Chinese government in “infiltrating American classrooms.” Picking up the New York Post’s conspiratorial language, another conservative group critical of public schools, Freedom in Education, “uncovered” evidence of Tutor.com facilitating “infiltration of Chinese spyware” in schools in Georgia.
By December 2025, it was no longer “clear” if Primavera divested from Tutor.com or still owned shares, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing media site funded by billionaire Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager and “major donor to Republican political candidates.” But, pointing to the connection between Primavera and Spring Education Group, the article stated, “There are also signs of [China’s] new approach to influencing elementary and high schools: just buy… [the schools]. … The expansion of groups like Spring Education into the American educational landscape comes as American youth are increasingly open to far left socialist economic ideology, as evidenced by the election of [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani.”
Also in December, another news outlet in the right-wing media echo chamber, Texas Scorecard, warned readers of Primavera’s connections to the Spring Education Group and its ownership of 13 schools in the Lone Star State. The article was published around the time Texas debuted a $1 billion school voucher program.
In other states, which like Florida have largely unregulated school voucher programs, state tax dollars are already flowing to private schools operated by Spring Education Group. In North Carolina, Spring Education Group operates eight schools, two of which are participating in the state’s voucher program (the other six are preschool-only programs, which are ineligible for North Carolina voucher money). Those two schools, Chesterbrook Academy Elementary and Middle School in Cary and Chesterbrook Academy Preschools and Elementary in Raleigh, received $106,778 and $49,475, respectively, in public funds in the 2024–2025 school year, according to state government reporting.
Yet, despite the conservative movement’s fears about Chinese communist influence in America’s education system, many red state officials and advocacy groups are opting into a new federal program created by the Trump administration that may lead to huge financial payouts to education companies like Spring Education Group and Tutor.com and, in turn, their private investors, including Primavera Capital. Read more
How Environmental Laws Are Shifting The Focus From Humans To Nature
Erika Schelby
03-25-2026 ~ Environmental laws are evolving from prioritizing human benefits to recognizing nature’s intrinsic rights; this is reflected in the small but growing number of countries that grant legal personhood to natural entities.
The need to protect populations from environmental harm or contamination is not new. Whenever human welfare was imperiled, those in power within most ancient civilizations passed laws to address these issues.
History is replete with examples of this. For instance, there is evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3000–1300 BCE) adapting to climate change, and early imperial China enacting protective laws, showing they were not “indifferent to environmental concerns.” In 2550 BCE, Mesopotamia achieved the world’s first water treaty between city-states—the agreement is now housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire excelled in engineering and passed legislation to support public health and hygiene. Aqueducts carried fresh water into the cities while the CloacaMaxima, a vast sewer system in Rome, managed wastewater.
Driven by industrialization and population growth, however, the ground realities have changed drastically over the last 200 years. Environmental issues demanded attention, action, and organization not only at the national but also at the international level. After years of preliminary work, especially by Sweden, the UN General Assembly convened the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which was attended by 122 countries. The conference aimed to make “environment a major issue” and was an event of groundbreaking significance, taking place during the Cold War and in an atmosphere of deep geopolitical tension. Unfortunately, the nations behind the Iron Curtain were unable to attend the meeting.
While the conference was a big step forward for international and legal cooperation, it remained entirely anthropocentric. The term refers to the Age of Humans, placing people and their needs at the “center of the universe,” rather than the natural world and other living beings, which are valued only insofar as they benefit humans.
A long, hard assessment 50 years later makes it clear that matters are not going too well for the environment and for all the planet’s inhabitants. Challenging the accepted point of view is the reality of the interdependence of all living and nonliving things on Earth and their right to exist and thrive. Nature and her ecosystems are increasingly being seen as having intrinsic value. These emerging views signal a shift toward ecocentrism, which is “derived etymologically from the Greek oikos (house) and kentron (center).” Ecocentrism is Earth law. It asserts that Earth is the home of all beings.
Through this article, we explore how and why a growing number of countries are granting legal personhood to nature, and why there is increasing interest in understanding the Earth system. Read more
How A British Overseas Territory Became The Largest Holder Of U.S. Debt
John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute
03-22-2026 ~ The Cayman Islands sits at the heart of a network of British financial jurisdictions. Together, they manage trillions in assets, influencing global capital flows and investment networks.
China, which was the largest holder of U.S. government debt as recently as 2019, has cut its holdings to the lowest level since 2008, driven by changing trade patterns, geopolitical concerns, and domestic economic pressures.
The Cayman Islands has emerged as an unlikely place to fill the gap. This small British overseas territory held $427 billion in U.S. Treasuries as of November 2025, making it the sixth-largest foreign holder. But a 2025 Federal Reserve analysis revealed that the total figure was actually closer to $1.4 trillion by the end of 2024—with some estimates reaching as high as $1.85 trillion—after nearly 40 percent of new treasury notes and bonds were purchased in the Cayman Islands after 2022.
While these figures suggest that the territory is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, the main buyers are not Caymanians or the government, but hedge funds. After the territory passed its Mutual Funds Law in 1993 amid the 1990s hedge fund boom, these vehicles began incorporating in large numbers, drawn by flexible regulation and low taxes. The Cayman Islands today is home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s offshore hedge funds.
Many have used so-called “basis trades,” borrowing heavily to profit from small price gaps between U.S. Treasury bonds and their future equivalents. The strategy has grown so large and opaque that it has triggered a Federal Reserve investigation.
Emergence and Evolution of a Financial Hub
The Cayman Islands has played a major role in global finance since the 1960s, operating as a center for tax evasion and asset parking. Mostly European banks trading in dollars outside the U.S., nicknamed Eurodollars, could lend these dollars beyond the reach of American regulations and capital controls. As the market grew, the Cayman Islands became a central place to store and use these Eurodollars.
Local Cayman lawmakers also passed financial laws to attract international businesses in the 1960s, including having no direct taxes on individuals, corporate profits, or capital gains, which helped cement the islands’ role as an offshore financial center. The legal system, based on English common law, offered clear rules, modern legislation, and independent courts. Packaged into a simple, finance-focused framework, it gave investors confidence and turned the territory into a quiet financial powerhouse.
Despite the Cayman Islands’ own elected government led by a premier, key powers remain with the United Kingdom. Final appeals in major cases are heard in London, while a governor appointed by the British monarch, on the advice of the British government, oversees internal security and coordinates foreign affairs with London. In theory, Britain can also intervene in the territory’s governance, providing a level of political stability valued by outside investors.
The Cayman Islands’ success has come from a “collaborative policymaking process that involved local leaders, expatriate professionals, and British officials,” according to a working paper by the University of Alabama, along with embracing financial trends. Home to more than 120,000 companies as of 2025, including thousands registered at the five-story Ugland House, hedge funds are just one of several recent financial booms. The parent company of Theleme Partners LLP, a hedge fund linked to former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, “lists the notorious Ugland House as its address. The small office is the registered home to approximately 40,000 entities,” stated the Good Law Project.
In 2022, the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX exposed billions in missing customer funds and became one of the largest financial frauds of the decade. Court filings showed that more than a fifth of its registered customer accounts were from the Cayman Islands—greater than any other jurisdiction—highlighting how easily new and risky ventures could be structured.
The territory also plays a central role in shadow banking. After banks pulled back from lending following the 2008 financial crisis, non-bank loans and financing surged, and many such funds have been domiciled in the Cayman Islands, such as Blackstone’s iCapital Offshore Access Fund SPC.
The Cayman Islands were also central to the 2020–2021 boom in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), which raised capital through IPOs to merge with private firms and take them public. Of the more than $100 billion raised in 2021, half of the SPACs were Cayman-incorporated. Rising interest rates and increased regulatory scrutiny slowed the expansion, but SPAC activity in Cayman has seen a resurgence since 2024.
It also sits at the center of China–U.S. capital markets. Because Chinese law restricts foreign ownership in certain industries, many Chinese firms list abroad via Cayman holding companies using variable interest entity (VIE) structures. This includes giant Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, whose ultimate parent company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
The scale is remarkable, with Cayman-registered investment funds holding more than $8 trillion in assets by the end of 2023, in a territory with a population of less than 80,000 people. Read more
Boomerangs Of Empire: Latin America As Colonial Laboratory
03-22-2026 ~ This special issue of the NACLA Report traces the returning and disseminating violence that is shaping the Americas today, from border militarization to algorithmic surveillance and the criminalization of dissent.
Masked federal agents kidnap a father as he waits to pick up his child from school. An ice cream cart is abandoned on the sidewalk, its vendor disappeared. A young man is arrested at his job and secretly transported to a terrorism confinement prison in another country. These stories are not from Cold War Latin America, but shared by immigrants—undocumented, asylum seekers, green card holders—living in the United States since President Donald J. Trump assumed office in January 2025.
The kidnapped father was Juan José Martínez Cortes, taken while waiting in his car outside of Linda Vista Elementary School in San Diego. The paletero, Ambrocio Lozano, known to his beloved community as Enrique, became the subject of protests demanding his release. Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan gay makeup artist, was arrested in South Carolina and sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, where he was held for 125 days until his release as part of a prisoner swap between the United States and Venezuelan governments.
Mirroring the many accounts of state violence throughout 20th-century Latin America, similar events are now surfacing in the United States. As we witness these horrors in person and online, Aimé Césaire’s words in Discourse on Colonialism(1950) reverberate: “[O]ne fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” What Césaire once diagnosed as a colonial return now shapes the everyday, the imperial boomerang of our lived histories, our identities, of the stories and histories we wish to tell. It is this returning and disseminating violence, including its architectures, justifications, and resistances, that guides this issue’s analytical and historical content.
“Boomerangs of Empire and the Technofascist Turn” takes Césaire’s insight not as a metaphor but as a method. The imperial boomerang functions as a historical circuit in which tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. By emphasizing process over parallel examples, we push contributors and readers to consider why these systems of state repression have become models for replication. Our concern is not simply that U.S. policies echo past empires, but that repression itself has become a transferable technology: an experiment refined in the colonial laboratories of the Americas and now redeployed within the borders of the United States.
We asked contributors to probe what makes this moment distinct. Their collective responses converged on two themes. First, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and Military Industrial Complex (MIC)—braided through racialized logistics, infrastructures, industries, and algorithmic computing—now operate as a single apparatus that manages dissent, migration, and everyday life. Second, popular resistance, the response to methods of repression, emerges to protect those being targeted and reaffirm social rights. The essays that follow trace this machinery across borders and centuries, from border militarization and migrant criminalization to algorithmic surveillance and ecological extraction.
Césaire foresaw “the American hour” as an age of “violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” Our time demands that we meet it analytically and through activism. Naming this machine is a condition for interrupting it. In keeping with NACLA’s tradition, our editorial stance is double: to expose the architectures of technofascism and to foreground the counter‑methods that boomerang back as resistance. Read more
Scale Raises The Ceiling, But Fiscal Foundations Determine Whether Autocracy Or Democracy Prevails
Gary M. Feinman
03-20-2026 ~ When we think of premodern governance, we often default to an image of concentrated authority: imposing rulers presiding over intricately layered hierarchies—pharaohs, emperors, and kings whose power seemed inseparable from the territorial and demographic scale of the states they commanded. This imagery reinforces a widely held assumption in both scholarship and popular discourse: as societies grow larger and more complex, political authority naturally centralizes, producing autocrats whose power is both extensive and entrenched.
Yet the comparative evidence from the ancient world does not support this deterministic narrative. A new cross-cultural study of 31 premodern societies, published in Science Advances, complicates the presumed linkage between scale and autocracy. The research demonstrates that population size alone does not explain the degree to which elites consolidate authority. Instead, it highlights the decisive role of fiscal foundations—specifically, whether governance is financed through broad-based internal taxation or through external and easily monopolized revenue streams such as mineral wealth, long-distance trade, coerced labor, or warfare.
Scale Expands the Structural Capacity for Autocracy—But Does Not Determine the Outcome
The study draws on 40 archaeological case studies evaluated through standardized metrics of political hierarchy, bureaucratic organization, and citizen inclusiveness. Across these cases, population scale correlates only weakly with the concentration of power. Larger societies do indeed raise the upper bound—the maximum feasible degree of centralization—but they do not mandate that power be concentrated at that ceiling.
These findings challenge longstanding theoretical models in political science and anthropology that treat autocracy as an almost inevitable corollary of increasing complexity. Instead, the archaeological record reveals numerous large, sophisticated polities that implemented enduring forms of collective or distributed governance.
Teotihuacan in central Mexico, the highland Mesoamerican polity of Tlaxcallan, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America, and the Indus city of Mohenjo Daro all sustained political arrangements in which authority was shared, constrained, or diffused. These were not marginal or isolated societies; they were populous, urbanized, and deeply interconnected within regional systems of exchange and interaction. Their historical trajectories show that scale makes autocracy feasible, but institutions grounded in collective governance can prevent it from taking root.
The Fiscal Foundations of Power: How Elites’ Sources of Finance Shape What They Can Do
If demographic and territorial expansion do not by themselves produce autocratic rule, then what does? The study identifies a consistent pattern across world regions: the structure of a society’s revenue base is a powerful predictor of its political form.
In cases where states relied primarily on internal taxation—levies on households, land, markets, or internal trade—rulers depended on the cooperation of their constituents. That dependence generated pressures ensuring negotiation, transparency, and accountability. Fiscal systems rooted in broad participation created political incentives that limited the autonomy of the elite.
Conversely, when elites commanded external or highly concentrated sources of revenue—control over mines and monopolistic oversight of long-distance trade, slave plantations, or the spoils of warfare—they faced no comparable need for public consent. Independent access to wealth insulated them from local constituencies and weakened institutional checks that would otherwise constrain the exercise of power. With fewer fiscal obligations came fewer political obligations.
This relationship between revenue structure and political authority is not merely a feature of the ancient world. It reflects a durable principle of political economy: the narrower the fiscal base, the greater the potential for autocratic consolidation; the broader the fiscal base, the more likely governance will remain representative.
Institutional Architecture and the Maintenance of Collective Governance
The study also highlights the institutional mechanisms that allowed collective political systems to endure even at a substantial scale. Societies that resisted autocratic drift frequently developed meritocratic bureaucracies rather than patrimonial ones, emphasizing competence over personal loyalty. Their ceremonial life placed communal participation above elite spectacle. Administrative functions were spatially distributed rather than concentrated in a single monumental seat of power.
These organizational choices left visible material signatures—in settlement plans, public architecture, and the spatial distribution of administrative and ritual spaces. They reveal political strategies designed deliberately to diffuse authority and mitigate the risks of centralization.
Why These Patterns Matter for Contemporary Governance
The historical patterns identified in the study resonate strongly with present-day concerns. Modern states that draw heavily on concentrated or external revenue—petro-states, oligarchic extractive economies, and governments funded primarily through customs or administratively insulated trade flows—frequently confront challenges to maintaining democratic accountability. When governments do not depend on citizens for fiscal support, they often do not require citizens for political legitimacy.
Ancient examples mirror these contemporary dynamics. Autocracy commonly crystallized in societies where elites controlled lucrative trade corridors, mineral resources, or imperial plunder. Meanwhile, in cases where revenue flowed through broad-based internal taxation, governance tended to remain more participatory and constrained—regardless of the overall scale of the polity.
The implication is stark: democracy is not only a constitutional or ideological arrangement; it is fundamentally a fiscal one. A broad and inclusive tax base strengthens shared governance, while its erosion creates the conditions under which autocratic power can flourish.
Rethinking Democracy’s Origins—And Its Future
This research challenges the notion that inclusive governance is an exceptional or culturally narrow development. The archaeological record demonstrates that societies across the globe repeatedly devised political systems that were negotiated, accountable, and resistant to the concentration of authority. Complexity does not determine political form; fiscal structure, institutional design, and collective choice do.
Understanding this deeper history widens our conception of political possibility. It reminds us that democracy has emerged through multiple pathways and has sustained under diverse historical conditions—and that its durability has depended not just on shared norms or formal institutions, but on the fiscal systems that underwrite them.
By Gary M. Feinman
Author Bio: Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute. The material for this paper is derived from “The Distribution of Power and Inclusiveness Across Deep Time” by Gary M. Feinman, David Stasavage, David M. Carballo, Sarah B. Barber, Adam Green, Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, Dan Lawrence, Jessica Munson, Linda M. Nicholas, Francesca Fulminante, Sarah Klassen, Keith W. Kintigh, and John Douglass. (Science Advances, March 18, 2026.)