The Federal Aviation Administration said that it was investigating a near miss between two planes at Boston Logan International Airport that happened on Saturday morning.
The episode happened at about 11:30 a.m., when Delta Air Lines Flight 2351 performed a go-around to avoid another plane that was taking off from an intersecting runway, the F.A.A. said in statement. The agency did not identify the other plane involved.
A go-around is a standard maneuver in which a plane aborts a landing, repositions and tries again. The F.A.A. said information around the episode was preliminary.
Data from Flightradar24, a flight-tracking website, showed that the Delta flight, arriving from Dallas, aborted its approach for landing as American Airlines Flight 3161, bound for Charlotte, N.C., approached from an intersecting runway.
The two planes were a few hundred feet apart, the tracking data showed. The Delta plane landed around 10 minutes later, according to the tracking data.
Delta said the flight crew received an advisory from an onboard system warning of potential traffic while the plane was descending and coordinated with air traffic control to perform the go-around. The plane landed safely and the passengers deplaned normally, according to a spokesperson for the airline.
The plane, an Airbus A319, was carrying 129 passengers and six crew members, the spokesperson said.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This was the latest in a string of near misses at U.S. airports in recent months. In April, an American Airlines regional jet flew dangerously close to an Air Canada regional jet after aborting its landing at Kennedy International Airport, according to the F.A.A.
The same month, the agency also investigated a close call between two Southwest Airlines jets at Nashville International Airport, in which an air traffic controller inadvertently directed an incoming plane into the path of a departing aircraft. The planes came within about 500 vertical feet of each other as the pilots reacted to onboard collision alerts, according to Flightradar24 and the F.A.A.

In the span of a single week, two deals reshaped the future of American media by concentrating something more valuable than content itself: control over how Americans find and consume it. As conservative billionaires effectively monopolize the future of content beyond cable, we are witnessing the corporate takeover of the American democratic square, rubber-stamped by a captured regulatory apparatus.
On Monday, Fox Corporation announced a $22 billion acquisition of Roku, the connected-television platform that sits inside half of all U.S. homes with broadband internet. Days earlier, Donald Trump‘s Justice Department waved through David Ellison’s $111 billion bid to merge Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery, giving the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison control over both CBS News and CNN. Paramount swiftly vowed to finalize the merger “as soon as possible.”
The scale of this quiet coup is staggering. For most of the past decade, the streaming wars were framed as a contest over content. Disney poured tens of billions into Disney+. Warner Bros. Discovery bet big on HBO Max. Paramount launched Paramount+ and nearly every major media company raced to create a direct-to-consumer service capable of competing with Netflix. Fox, by contrast, largely sat it out. It didn’t chase prestige television. It stuck with what it already had: news and sports. The deal would combine Fox’s news, sports and advertising businesses with Roku’s connected television platform. Fox says the combined company would become the third-largest television business in America by viewing share.
The Fox-Roku deal is not primarily about hardware. Roku still sells streaming sticks and smart televisions, but devices account for a relatively small portion of its business. The company increasingly operates as a connected-TV advertising platform built on an operating system that sits between viewers and content providers. That interface is not neutral. It is curated, ranked, monetized and constantly optimized using first-party data that tracks what people watch, when they watch it and how they respond to ads. In practical terms, Roku controls the television home screen. It can privilege its own content. Fox already owns Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming channel it acquired in 2020 for $440 million, which has grown into an advertising juggernaut accounting for roughly five percent of streaming viewership in the U.S. Now, with Roku’s operating system, Fox controls the discovery layer for every competitor streaming on that platform.
The billionaire takeover of our newsrooms is accelerating, and the political calculations behind it are flagrant.
For years, right-wing media dominance relied on the structural welfare state of basic cable. Millions of Americans with traditional cable packages have effectively subsidized Fox News through carriage fees, regardless of whether they watch the network. But that golden goose is dying. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number stood at a staggering 85 percent just a decade earlier. The cord-cutting revolution was supposed to democratize television, liberating citizens from corporate gatekeepers. Instead, it has laid the groundwork for an even more insidious form of control.
The Ellison deal deserves equal scrutiny and has received far less. The Justice Department’s senior leadership reportedly shut down the antitrust review before lawyers in the division could make their final recommendation — an intervention that is extraordinary by any historical standard. This allowed David Ellison, who took control of CBS only last August, to proceed toward ownership of both that network and CNN, giving him influence over what would amount to a Fox News-lite news operation at one outlet and a nominally centrist news outlet at another.
The billionaire takeover of our newsrooms is accelerating, and the political calculations behind it are flagrant. Ellison has spent months actively seeking to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration. The cozy, transactional nature of this new media elite was laid bare when Ellison, who held a lavish banquet for Donald Trump in April, was spotted rubbing shoulders with the Kushners at Washington’s elite Cafe Milano the night before a UFC spectacle on the White House South Lawn, streamed exclusively on his Paramount+. The warning signs are already there. Paramount reportedly refused to air an advertisement from the Freedom of the Press Foundation critical of its leadership and merger, citing a “conflict of interest.” That is what consolidation looks like in practice.
On one side, Fox controls distribution, data and a massive advertising engine. On the other, Ellison consolidates content production across multiple major networks. Between them sits a shrinking field of competitors, many of whom are financially weaker, structurally disadvantaged or dependent on access to platforms they do not control. The broader pattern is not subtle. Jeff Bezos still owns The Washington Post. Elon Musk owns one of the largest social media platforms in the country and has turned it into a right-wing echo chamber. Meanwhile, fewer outlets are willing to challenge power and have an incentive to avoid controversy.
Conservative billionaires are not winning the information wars because their ideas are more compelling. They are winning because they understand that in the attention economy, the chokepoint is distribution. He who controls the pipe controls the message. The Murdochs figured this out with satellite television. The Ellisons are figuring it out with streaming consolidation. And now Fox has figured it out with the operating system of connected television itself.

In a new analysis and in an interview with Fortune, the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) faculty director sketches an outer limit for U.S. federal debt and a political economy that heavily favors older Americans. His bluntest line may also be his simplest: “We do spend about 10x more per older person than we do per younger person. In total, we spend about 6x in aggregate on older people than younger people.”
This means means the average older person gets much more than the average younger person as a policy choice, but since there is a greater number of younger people, when you add up all dollars going to each group, the total to older people is “only” about six times. PWBM estimated in April retirees (adults age 65 and older) receive $2.7 trillion, equal to 38.6% of total federal outlays and 61.9% of age-assignable spending, while working-age adults (ages 26-64) receive $1.2 trillion (27.9% of age-assignable), and children and young adults (under age 26) receive $449 billion (10.3%).
Smetters added he works a lot on understanding the political economy of the U.S. and there’s just “a lot of incentive for every generation to try to pass a big bill to the next generation. The question is, how long can they get away with that?”
A 210% ceiling—and a 20‑year runway
Smetters and his team estimate U.S. federal debt cannot rationally exceed about 210% of GDP. Above that level, he argues, there is no feasible broad‑based tax on labor income that can cover the interest bill at the returns investors will demand. That figure is an “outer bound,” not a forecast: In his words, it is “really the upper limit,” not a target that markets will calmly finance.
The more immediate concern is timing. Under what PWBM labels “historical” excess health care cost growth—the pace at which health spending per person has tended to outrun the broader economy—the U.S. is likely to hit that outer bound within about 20 years, with a one‑in‑four chance of hitting it in just 14. In the model’s median scenario, the “closure year”—the last point at which policymakers can still restore sustainability with a feasible tax—is as early as 2045 if health care costs grow quickly, and 2051 under more optimistic assumptions.
“The assumption is that the financial markets are being set in a way where they keep believing that Congress will eventually get its act together up until the point where it’s mathematically impossible for that to be true anymore,” Smetters said. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘You know, when could financial markets unravel?’ And the answer is, well, that could happen today, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen whenever they stop believing that Congress will eventually get its act together.”
When baby boomers meet the debt ceiling
Those dates line up uncomfortably well with the gradual fading of the baby boomer generation from positions of economic and political power. Asked whether it is a coincidence his 20‑year horizon roughly overlaps with the last years of baby boomer dominance in Congress and the C‑suite, Smetters was cautious but open to the framing.
He connected the budget choices to a broader psychology of ownership. In the Social Security and retirement space, he says, Americans routinely treat government‑funded benefits as if they were purely private property—even when taxpayers have put up most of the cash.
“We always stretch out what ownership is,” he told Fortune. “We like to think: ‘Yeah, If the government put in 90% and I put in 10%, I still want access to the entire account because I need to replace my roof and I have a good reason [for needing the funds].”
That mindset shapes the debate over Social Security, he added, where the main trust fund that pays retired workers’ benefits is projected to run dry in the early 2030s. Smetters noted his team was earlier than official forecasters in calling the “crossover date” when benefits would exceed revenues, and their depletion date—around 2032 for the main old‑age fund—has since been confirmed by the Social Security Trustees and the Congressional Budget Office.
Once the trust fund is exhausted, he estimated, the program can pay only about 83% of scheduled benefits, and that fraction erodes further over time. But he doubts that deadline will force timely action.
“The last time we fixed Social Security in 1983, we waited very close for bad things to happen,” he said. “Based on past experience, we’ve waited pretty long … to take action.”
Why easy fixes fall short
In the current political debate, that looming Social Security shortfall has collided with a parade of more exotic ideas, from Trump Accounts for newborns to proposals for some kind of “AI dividend” that would redirect tech profits back to the public.
Smetters was skeptical.
“People are excited about AI and think it’s going to lead to all this economic growth. People are just misunderstanding it,” he said. “Even if it does lead to more growth than we’re projecting, spending is going to go up with it. It’s not true that AI will simply increase the tax base without increasing spending.” His biggest concern, he added, is how many of us are “really misguided in our understanding of future progress, future growth.”
Behind the scenes, Smetters has pushed a less flashy but more radical idea: Shut down the costly tax deduction for 401(k) and 403(b) contributions, which he estimates cost roughly $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion in forgone revenue over 10 years in earlier work, and reroute that money into non‑contributory retirement accounts for low‑income workers linked to the earned income tax credit. Crucially, he said, people would not be allowed to deposit their own money in those accounts at all, precisely to avoid the political pressure for early withdrawals that has undermined past efforts to nudge workers into saving more.
The psychology that Smetters describes isn’t new; the great comedian George Carlin captured it decades ago with the line Jon Stewart calls one of his most profound: “My shit is stuff; your stuff is shit.” It also recalls the paradoxical protest sign from a Republican voter about a federal benefit: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”
Smetters’ version is if the government funds 90% of your retirement account and you put in 10%, you still feel entitled to “the entire account” because, as he put it, “that’s all mine. It’s not yours.”
A Liz Truss warning for Washington
If the numbers and the politics sound abstract, Smetters insisted the consequences are not. When countries bump up against their fiscal limits, he said, the damage goes far beyond the bond market.
“You get this radical reordering when a country is overwhelmed with debt,” he said, pointing to episodes ranging from Germany’s collapse in the early 1930s to modern crises in Argentina. Fiscal crack‑ups, he argues, make voters more willing to gamble on strongmen or untested extremes on the left or right.
He said he keeps returning to Britain’s short‑lived Liz Truss government as a cautionary tale, referring to the prime minister whose unserious financial plan saw her ejected from office in less time than it took a head of lettuce to wilt, as the British press savagely noted.
“I think we’re actually going to see financial markets try to discipline us long before we hit that limit,” he said of the U.S. debt path. “We could easily have our Liz Truss moment in the United States within the next five, 10 years.”
The technical PWBM paper that underpins his concerns emphasizes the same point in more formal language, using a classic framework from economists Harold Cole and Timothy Kehoe: Even well before a country reaches its mathematical solvency limit, there is a “crisis zone” at intermediate debt levels where a shift in investor expectations alone can trigger a self‑fulfilling run. In that zone, markets don’t wait for the last dollar of capacity to be used up before demanding higher interest rates—or refusing to refinance government debt at all.
“What people don’t get is that when you have these financial collapses, it’s not just finance,” Smetters said. The problem the U.K. faces now, he said, is that they already have very high taxes so their “fiscal space” is quite limited in terms of what they can do now.
“That’s the problem with the baby boomer generation,” he added. “It’s going to be really hard to change benefits over time.” Sometimes when you have giant fiscal problems that keep going unsolved, year after year, “they can lead to really incredible changes in society that can be very disruptive, beyond just economics.”

America’s swelling debt pile bodes ill for the the US economy, Société Générale said.
In a recent note to clients, the European Bank flagged a concerning trend that’s taken hold in the US in recent years: the rise in household debt and the concurrent decline in household savings.
Total liabilities among US households swelled to a record $19.9 trillion at the end of the first quarter, according to Fed data, a sign that Americans are continuing to borrow and fund their spending.
Yet, the personal savings rate is hovering near a record low, shrinking to 2.6% in April, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The trend might be the result of the so-called wealth effect, a phenomenon where Americans spend more because they feel wealthier as the price of assets like stocks and real estate rise, Albert Edwards, a SocGen strategist and famed market permabear, said.
The market has soared amid the unrelenting enthusiasm for AI, with the tech trade making a red-hot comeback after stumbling earlier this year.
The problem is that, if one assumes consumers are shelling out more due to their rising wealth on paper, economic growth is increasingly exposed to the AI trade. Consumer spending makes up around 70% of US GDP, according to one analysis from the Boston Fed last year.
Measures of household income growth, meanwhile, have started to fall. Personal income excluding transfers contracted $16.5 trillion in April, down around $200 billion from its peak in 2025.
“The US consumer currently resembles the Wile E. Coyote character, running off the cliff and suspended in thin air briefly, before collapsing,” Edwards said, referring to the potential for consumer spending to see a sharp drop if Americans were motivated to save more, such as if stock prices were to take a beating.
“It doesn’t take a Fed PhD economist to tell us that if the US saving ratio (SR) stops falling, consumer spending will grow in line with income, which is falling. And woe betide the economy if the SR actually rises back to more normal levels,” he added.
Edwards also pointed to the declining efficiency of debt to boost economic growth. The credit intensity of GDP — a measure of how much debt is needed to boost GDP growth by a set unit — rose to 3.73 last year, the most debt needed to fuel growth in at least the last 70 years, according to an analysis from Bespoke Investment.
“This makes the economy all the more vulnerable should investors doubt the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow. Watch this debt-laden space,” Edwards added.

Picture your ideal night out. Does it involve long lines, slow elevators, choosy bouncers? Dress codes, cover charges, per-person minimums? Bland, watered-down or sugared-up drinks, possibly in plastic cups, costing north of $25? No? Then however strong the siren call of the rooftop drinkery inexplicably becomes all over again each summer, it sounds like you, in fact, do not want to go to a bar on top of a building. Because nice views aside, that’s often how the evening unfolds.
Yet so many of us keep riding that elevator to the top floor. Rooftop bars open in droves every summer, new ones joining the ranks each year. Media outlets and social media accounts rush to deliver yet another roundup of this year’s best. With all the hype, how do rooftop bars get away with being so unbelievably mid?
“Rooftop bars benefit from having a certain category of ‘unique offering,’ ” says Ben Potts, partner at Miami-based consultancy Unfiltered Hospitality. “It’s not exclusive to rooftop bars—if you’re on the water in a place that doesn’t have a lot of waterfront access, if you have a mountain view at the top of a ski lift—there are certain places that just because of their unique positioning, they’re endlessly busy.”
Of these location-as-a-theme bars, rooftop spots tend to be in urban areas. From tourists to office workers, people want that easy access to al fresco drinks and those vistas. The popularity of rooftop bars has grown with the rise of social media, as an increasing number of bar-goers prioritize good photo backdrops over all else. Many have become surprisingly willing to tolerate service snafus and mediocre drinks in a way they wouldn’t back down on the ground, just because it’s #magichour. But once you’ve done your photo shoot, shouldn’t there be a nice place to hang out, especially at those prices?
“Altitude cannot be the whole proposition,” says Bobby Carey, co-founder of Singapore-based hospitality consultancy Studio Ryecroft. “At their best, rooftop bars are some of the most cinematic rooms in hospitality. They give people a reason to look up from the table, feel the city around them, and turn an ordinary drink into a memory. At their worst, they become viewing platforms with a liquor license.”
The main issues for the majority of rooftop bars are the entrance and service chokepoints—from elevator lines to bar lines—the often subpar beverages, and the marked-up prices that are sometimes coupled with cover charges or per-person food-and-drink minimums. Some of these are inevitable. There are real challenges specific to running a sky-high bar.
Others are more cynical, or just plain lazy.
Even the best rooftop bars must endure limitations on the physical means guests have to reach them. There’s not much that can be done about elevator capacities. Potts says storage space can also be tight for some of these bars, making it hard to keep too wide of a range of ingredients handy.
Staffing is an obstacle, notes Meaghan Dorman, bar director of Dear Irving, an award-winning cocktail bar with three locations in Manhattan, one a rooftop: “True rooftop bars are very seasonal, so it’s hard to retain quality staff and set the standards.” Dear Irving is open year-round, so it benefits from growing a core team. A bar with a revolving door of employees who never settle in can translate to service never really hitting a speedy, efficient groove, and a team who can’t learn from guests and evolve.
Then there’s that rooftop-bar price math.
“The science of pricing on menus is a very interesting one,” Potts says. “It’s always some combination of the costs of the products itself and what your competitors are charging for similar products at their establishments serving a similar demographic.” There’s a bit of “Let’s see what we can get away with” here. A hotel with a ground-floor bar might charge $23 for a martini, but $25 at its rooftop bar. If they’re at capacity each night, they reason no one’s getting sticker shock and they try $27—then maybe $30. A “rooftop premium” can be as much as 25 percent. Carey points out this isn’t always just a cash grab, though.
“Rooftop spaces often carry high commercial expectations because they are trophy locations within a hotel or development,” he says. “They can also involve more complicated build costs, structural requirements, outdoor-grade furniture, weatherproofing, drainage, shade, wind management, security, [elevator] management, higher staffing, greater refrigeration pressure, more ice demand, and more volatile revenue because bad weather” can shut the bar down.
Fair enough. Still, Dorman says, the average bar guest is getting too savvy to tolerate too drastic of a gouge. People are willing to pay more for the total package: good views, good drinks, good service, good vibes. But many of them know what an Aperol spritz costs and draw the line at $30.
It should be noted that often, guests themselves are part of the problem, simply because they continue to line up for these bars, signaling that this is what they want from a night out. As long as an overpriced, jam-packed, blah bar is doing numbers, why would they invest in improvements? The “best rooftop bars” roundups keep sending tourists and office workers sky-high, the subsequent crowds keep editors commissioning those roundups, and so the world turns.
Then there are the guests who take advantage of rooftop bars. Studio Ryecroft designed the rooftop venue Paradise Lost at Siam@Siam Design Hotel in Bangkok as a “neo-tropical, dystopian sanctuary in the sky: pink and yellow canopy, Bangkok skyline, a slightly surreal holiday-at-the-end-of-the-world,” per Carey.
“Early guest behavior was very image-led. We had people arriving with suitcases of clothes, changing outfits, shooting content, ordering one drink and leaving,” he says. The team refined their concept to target a more cocktail-driven guest, but many rooftop bars just accept this as reality. They expect people to show up, order one drink so they can snap ’grams, and bounce. It doesn’t feel worth it to put too much intention into the drinks or service.
The bars that refuse to embrace this fate and work to overcome those rooftop-related challenges are the rare destinations that are actually good. There are measures some rooftop bars take to try to weed out those camera-happy patrons—that’s where cover charges, per-person food-and-drink minimums, and dress codes come in. But Dear Irving is a unique example of what happens when a rooftop bar is simply treated like a street-level bar with the same attention paid to interesting cocktails, quality ingredients, and dialed-in service.
“Other than just being 21-plus, we’ve always wanted to be very welcoming,” Dorman says. “We specifically don’t work with promoters because we don’t want one night to be very different from another. We don’t have a dress code, and we have security on weekends but no bouncers.”
Dorman sees Dear Irving as being an ambassador to New York’s indie food and drink scene: They’re in Times Square, so have the opportunity to introduce tourists to interesting flavors. Dear Irving’s original location in Gramercy is acclaimed for Dorman’s creative cocktails.
Nothing got lost in translation when the concept opened 40 stories up. There’s a perfect Gibson, a Negroni riff with aquavit, an upgraded gin and tonic, etc.—all for $20 to $21. The glassware is in fact glass, not plastic, uncontrolled crowds don’t block the views, and nothing is sticky.
Illustrating just how much of an anomaly a thoughtfully executed rooftop bar is, and how stereotypically lacking the experience is at the vast majority of these drinking destinations, there is indeed a negative connotation attached to the “rooftop bar” label within the industry.
“Among serious bar people, rooftops often carry suspicion,” Carey says. “That reputation is not always fair, but it exists for a reason. Too many rooftops have been allowed to trade on their address, floor number, or backdrop.”
This gives some operators pause about whether they even want to call themselves “rooftop bars” even when they are very clearly on a roof.
“We thought about calling it a penthouse bar, but I thought that sounded oddly … too sexy?” Dorman says. “Ultimately, the rooftop term is good because it attracts people and businesses need people, but it’s also tough because we have to overcome those poor-quality-service expectations.”
In Manhattan’s Financial District, Overstory frequently gets grouped into rooftop-bar features. This is despite the fact it is literally not a rooftop bar—it’s near the top of a tall building and has a wraparound terrace—as well as its experience feeling worlds away from all that label conjures.
“My first reaction is a wince,” says Overstory bar director Harrison Ginsberg of those roundups. “When people refer to it as a rooftop bar, it does the space a little bit of a disservice. Overstory year-round focuses on the interior of the space and our elevated cocktail program. We never set out to open a rooftop space.” Despite the Infatuation’s claim that “the real reason to come to Overstory … is the huge outdoor terrace,” Ginsberg considers those views a mere extension of the memorable experience the bar fosters. It seems industry insiders agree: Overstory ranks on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Bars list, and its martini steals the spotlight from the terrace among true cocktail enthusiasts.
To communicate that Overstory is a world-class cocktail bar that just happens to have some stunning outdoor seating, too, the team focuses on the drinks and interior space, not views, on social media. The accolades the bar has received have helped attract more food- and beverage-seeking guests over those there to take photos and leave. Overstory did implement a $75-per-person minimum to put an end to that issue; Ginsberg explains this is to save spots for those who actually want to linger and enjoy the menu.
Whether you call Overstory a rooftop bar or not, it’s another member of the small club of excellent bars that conveniently offer gorgeous vistas. It’s proof you don’t have to settle for margarita mix and dirty outdoor furniture to take in the city skyline—but you do have to be picky. Look for the bars that don’t solely post those views on Instagram, and check menus out ahead of time.
“Dismissing the whole rooftop category is lazy,” Carey notes. “A great rooftop can introduce a much broader audience to better drinks. It can be commercially powerful, socially generous, and culturally memorable. It just has to be operated like a real bar.”