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Why New York Republicans Still Love Trump
Across the country, in the reddest of red states and districts, Republicans — clinging to what were once thought to be safe seats with a Blue Wave breaking — have a plan to eke out a victory in November: Avoid Donald Trump. More »
DoJ’s Doomed Pursuit of Cassidy Hutchinson
The Justice Department is virtually certain to try to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide and a key January 6 witness. And if Donald Trump’s prosecutors do attempt to abuse the legal process to pursue this particular political vendetta — one of many in this DoJ’s “Lock her ... More »
When Only AI Can See the Cancer
Pamela Jackson was seven months pregnant when she began to experience radiating, debilitating back pain. At first, she thought she might be in labor, but a stress test at the hospital proved the baby was fine. While Jackson was there, she vomited bile so was sent for a CT scan and an MRI without ... More »
Trump Is Locked in a Posthumous Feud With Abe Lincoln
This shockingly active rivalry has dragged on for years, though Honest Abe is both dead and better than Trump by just about every measure.
Mamdani’s School Plan Is Still MIA
Ten months into the Mamdani administration, education experts and reformers are not impressed.
The Problem With Facebook Was Facebook
In May 2020, Wall Street Journal reporters Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman published a major story about Facebook. They quoted internal research, documents, and ... More »
What Darializa Avila Chevalier Saw at the NYC ICE Shooting
Darializa Avila Chevalier was at a community meeting in Harlem on Thursday afternoon when her phone began blowing up with news that plainclothes federal immigration officers had just shot a man ... More »
Trump’s New Press-Secretary Pick Is Straight Out of Central Casting
Katie Zacharia is a Fox News regular and spokesperson for Trump’s social-media company.
Anthropic’s God Complex
Anthropic’s “constitution” for Claude, its large language model, contains a disarming pledge. The authors want AI to “be safe” and “a good person” who will “help people i... More »
With Livestream Killing, Hegseth Goes Full Barbarian
For a sizable majority of the world, capital punishment is a remnant of barbarism from an increasingly distant past. Its persistence in the United States is an example of the dark side of American exceptionalism. According to Amnesty International, the U.S. is
MLK Day Out, Trump’s Birthday In? All His Holiday Changes
Since returning to office, Donald Trump has been trying to flex his executive authority by changing Americans’ calendars. The president doesn’t actually have the power to unilaterally create... More »
Mamdani’s Real Test Is Curbing Antisemitism
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, like his predecessors, would like us all to pay close attention to numbers that show him to be successful and maybe spend less time on data suggesting things aren’t going so well. “Filling in 200,000 potholes, delivering universal child care for 2-year-olds, winning more tha... More »
The Social Reckoning Omits Way More Than Trump’s Name
There were signs of trouble for The Social Reckoning well before the film hit theaters this week. Some arose from the production itself; the movie required
J.D. Vance Went to Yale and Can’t Define Socialism
If there is any word found more frequently than socialism in 2026 Republican rhetoric, it’s unclear what it would be. That’s particularly true if you count deployment of communism as an interchangeable insult applied to virtually every Democratic candidate from sea to shining se... More »
The Craziest Details of the Kimberly Guilfoyle Donor Scandal
When Donald Trump named Kimberly Guilfoyle the U.S. ambassador to Greece in late 2024, the prevailing wisdom was that it had less to do with her diplomatic bona fides than it did her being the ex-... More »
Trump’s Vote-Buying Checks Are in the Mail
There is no better reflection of the purely transactional nature of Donald Trump’s politics than his love for buying Americans’ affections with cold hard cash. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was the country’s ... More »
Nobody Is Ready for the AI-Agent Flood
In September, small businesses around the country started receiving strange phone calls. “Hi, this is [Name],” they would begin before informing the recipient they were calling on someone else’s behalf. “I’ll be transcribing this call,” they would disclose, then launch straight into a request: “I... More »
The Battle for Kips Bay: Movie Fans vs. Big Medicine
Jack Greenberg, in his brown Merrells, white socks, and transition glasses working overtime on an unseasonably hot Friday afternoon in October, looks the part of a movie buff. On his phone, the 25-year-old programmer has the receipts to back it up. “I have all the math,” he says, pulling up a spr... More »
Mamdani Couldn’t Resist Attacking Israel in October 7 Statement
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s strained relationship with New York’s Jewish Establishment is not likely to improve after Wednesday morning. More »
Treasury Secretary Said to Spit in His Own Food When Angry
As Republicans facing down the loss of the House can tell you, the economy is not looking good for many Americans. Wages
Ken Paxton Is Kicking the GOP Lifeguards Trying to Save Him
There are three central things to understand about the embattled U.S. Senate campaign of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. More »
Is Everything Suddenly Possible for Democrats?
Yes, we all know about the increasing possibility of a blue wave election in November. But the number and nature of states that could get caught up in this wave is becoming the stuff of Democratic dreams. Just in the last 24 hours, we’ve had two remarkable examples:
Trump’s Shameless Collaborators
As the bottom falls out of Donald Trump’s second term, I find myself trying to imagine what’s going through the minds of his collaborators during the endgame. Not so much the thugs, mad dogs, buffoons, and rabid ideologue... More »
Did Raw Sewage Get Jared and Ivanka Into Elite Country Club?
Nearly six years after buying a $30 million plot of land on Miami’s Indian Creek Village — an island also known as “Billionaire Bunker” — Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have finally been granted a... More »
Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Alito Is Gambling on Outliving His Critics
One of the many recent turning points in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court was something that did not happen a little more than a decade ago. Then-80-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a legal titan with a history of fighting (and defeating) cancer, chose not to retire with a Demo... More »
The Yankees Are Blowing It in the Most Frustrating Way
The New York Yankees’ defense is perfectly fine. It is! Every defensive metric in baseball ranked them as, at worst, average this year. They were 13th in defensive runs saved, 17th in outs above average and seventh in defensive eff... More »
Abdul El-Sayed Is No Longer a Risky Bet
Republicans looking for signs of hope that they can hang on to the U.S. Senate in November aren’t as optimistic as they once were about prospects for flipping Democratic-held seats in Georgia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. But you still hear them talking about flipping Michigan, as evidenced by t... More »
Chasing the Pope
In my more than 20 trips to countries around the world with the late Pope Francis, I never really knew what to say to him when he walked through the coach section of the papal plane, visiting the Vaticanisti like a flight attendant handing out peanuts. But when he made it to my middle seat as we ... More »
Why Letitia James Is the Wrong Choice to Prosecute the Cornell Case
While an alleged sexual assault at Cornell University has ignited intense public debate, this much is beyond meaningful dispute: Tompkins County district attorney Matthew Van Houten had to go. And alt... More »
‘I Don’t Think We’re All F***ed Anymore’
Kevin Roose has been explaining artificial intelligence to normies for many years. From his almost decade-long perch as a business-and-technology columnist and host of the podcast Hard Fork at... More »
Kash Patel Put a Ring on Girlfriend With SWAT Protection
Kash Patel’s 20-month tenure as the FBI director has not gone great. In the past year alone, he’s been criticized for partying in the locker room of the U.S. men’s hockey team, for allegedly
Why Don’t Colleges Just Ban Fraternities?
I got my bachelor’s degree at a little Division III liberal-arts college set bucolically amid the cows and corn of northern Ohio. We did have a football team, and a men’s dormitory that carried a general reputation as a place that women should avoid visiting alone, but we had no Greek life. Frate... More »
6 Midterms Takeaways With a Month to Go
We’re now past the one-month signpost for the 2026 midterm elections. Voting by mail is already underway in 21 states, and in-person early voting has begun in 14 states. Here are some quick takea... More »
Why Trump Is So Ticked Off About Daylight Saving Time
Trump is fixated on putting an end to biannual clock changing. But it seems posting Senator Tom Cotton’s cell number didn’t help his cause.
The Inescapable Hasan Piker
By 8:30 p.m. on day one of the Socialism 2026 conference, Hasan Piker was tired and hungry and ready to leave. He had flown to Chicago from L.A. that morning, moderated a panel, interviewed an academic about her forthcoming book ... More »
MAGA Can’t Let Go of Tricky Dick
Nixon apologists have now spurred a Justice Department investigation of Watergate. But the Trump parallels they draw aren’t flattering to either man.
Mamdani’s 2K Is a Mathematical Mess
For 13 years, Kim owned a small preschool — six classrooms serving children ages 2 to 5 — in a still-gentrifying part of Brooklyn. Many of the parents were dual-income white-collar professionals, but in a city where a combined salary of $300,000 leaves families feeling cash-strapped, they often s... More »
GOP Saving the Unpopular Stuff for After the Election
Many eyebrows were raised by reports of a quiet word from the White House to the Justice Department concerning the pace of litigation aimed at restricting or even outlawing distribution of abortion... More »
Everything We Know About Tennessee’s Botched Execution of Christa Pike
Tennessee was poised to mark a grim milestone on Wednesday as the U.S. Supreme cleared the way for the execution of Christa Pike, a 50-year-old death row inmate convicted of murder in 1996 who would have become the first woman put to death in the state in over 200 years. But things quickly went w... More »
The Most Polarizing Parenting Essay Ever?
Lane Anderson lives in Washington Heights. She is white, her husband is Black, and together they have a biracial third-grader. For the past ten days, Anderson, who writes the Substack Matriarchy Report and is known to be outspoken on social issues, says her phone has bee... More »
How Low Can Trump Go?
He is now flirting with some of the worst presidential popularity measures on record, and this probably isn’t his rock bottom yet.
Nikole Hannah-Jones Worries You’re Missing the Point
The columnist on the misplaced backlash to her school choice story, recognizing her daughter’s agency, and why Mamdani should take on segregation.
The Post–Me Too Generation Gets Its Me Too Moment
“One of them fucking works at Wells Fargo,” a friend texted me. Another told me that her classmate from high school had known someone involved. I had read the messages from the Chi Phi group chat for the first time on the walk back to my dorm room after class — a blurry photo of Snapchat messages... More »
Elon Musk Rewarded for DOGE Debacle With ‘Warfare’ Gig
Remember the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a DOGE? A little federal agency run by Elon Musk? Made big claims about how it was going to save the government trillions of dollars yet turned out to be an unmitigated disaster that
These Yankees Might Actually Be Something Special
The last time the Yankees won the World Series, they were so, so old. In 2009, the team was led by Derek Jeter (35), Alex Rodriguez (33), Jorge Posada (38), Johnny Damon (35), Andy Pettitte (37) and Mariano Rivera (39). Five years later, the only one of those players left on the team was Jeter, a... More »
The Biggest Sign Yet That Democrats Will Flip the House
In the small world of election handicappers, the Cook Political Report is more or less the OG, in business for 42 years. Like most OGs, the publication tends to be careful about risking its reputation. It doesn’t flat out make projections of election o... More »
What Makes a Tradwife Quit?
Right-wing influencer Bernadine Bluntly had three children and a growing Instagram account by the time she started thinking about leaving her marriage. Instead she pressed on, she told the New Yor... More »
The FlyDubai Near Miss Was a Nightmare and a Miracle
The FlyDubai 737 MAX that almost crashed on Wednesday plummeted three miles in less than a minute and came so close to breaking the sound barrier that aerodynamic forces ripped off part of the plane’s rudder. In about a minute the plane would have hit the desert 250 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. I... More »
‘Super Intelligence,’ Trump’s Dopey AI Rebrand, Explained
Americans’ concerns about artificial intelligence have quickly escalated from “it might take our jobs” to “it might kill us all.” In September, top AI executives called for
Trump’s Midterms Convention Blew Up in Poor Ken Paxton’s Face
The GOP’s big bash in Texas was supposed to boost the state’s embattled Senate candidate. He privately told donors it actually hurt him.
Trump Critic Faces Probe Over $823 Bets on Biden Pardons
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is currently at war with state attorneys general over prediction markets and the question of
Vance’s Wild Senate-Takeover Plan Has a Big Flaw
For much of 2026, Donald Trump has intermittently demanded that the Senate enact the SAVE America Act despite Majority Leader
The Brooklyn Democrats’ Brawl Is Far From Over
After years of outwitting her opponents at every turn, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermel... More »
Evan Gershkovich’s New Normal
“Here, let me do it,” says Evan Gershkovich, taking a lamb kebab I was struggling to cut from its skewer. We’re at Kashkar Cafe in Brighton Beach, where the Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent has been coming with his Soviet-born parents since he was a kid growing up in New Jersey.... More »
Anthropic Warns AI May Kill Us All in $2 Trillion IPO Pitch
Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 4,000-word essay warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, estimating that a bot “swarm could be capable of taking over the entire i... More »
GOP Senator’s Failed Jack Smith Takedown Is an Instant Classic
Tuesday was supposed to be a big moment for the junior senator from Missouri. Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is considered a contender to be
Trump’s Campaign Schedule Is a Really Bad Sign for Republicans
For much of the 2026 midterm-election cycle, Donald Trump has maintained that keeping the MAGA base energized would be the key for Republicans seeking to keep control of Congress... More »
Trump Scores 98 Percent Approval (by Cherry-Picking Polls)
Trump shared 43 seconds of a CNN report, omitting the 13 minutes where Harry Enten showed his numbers have “plummeted into the ocean.”
The Supreme Court Won’t Be Trump’s Election-Theft Lackey
Donald Trump plainly intends to either win or steal the 2026 midterms. The man has never accepted an electoral outcome he doesn’t like, whether he’s won or
Jeff Zucker Relives the Good Old Days
On a recent September morning, Jeff Zucker is standing by the rink at Rockefeller Center checking his phone, looking like any other loafer-sporting 60-something. Only he basically used to run this place. “I’ve had a whole lifetime since I left here,” he says, “but this was 25 years of my life.” H... More »
How Trump Will Claim Victory on Election Night
There’s naturally a lot of speculation in legal and journalistic circles about what exactly Donald Trump might do to change, deny, or challenge the midterm losses his party is widely expected to suffer a little ... More »
Trump Woos Taxpayers by Wasting Their Money on Campaign Ads
Five weeks out from Election Day, things are not looking so hot for Donald Trump, or the Republican Party’s midterms prospects. Voters are focused on affordability, and the preside... More »
AOC’s Upstate Tour Looks Like a Preview of Something Bigger
It’s an unfortunate fact of life: In just a few short weeks, the 2028 election cycle will officially be underway. And judging by her recent travel schedule, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting a head start... More »
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Her Daughter Had It Out on Air
They had a poignant and at times tense conversation about parenting and school inequality on This American Life. Here are the most notable moments.
Are OpenAI Agents Going Rogue, or Is OpenAI?
The recent Hugging Face hack, in which hundreds of OpenAI agents “went rogue” during a cybersecurity evaluation, spent days breaching an outside company’s systems, and hid evidence of wha... More »
It’s Not Just Peltola: How Congress Treats Its Serfs
When national media reports of a politician’s abusive behavior arise in the heat of a high-stakes election battle, it’s natural to wonder about ulterior motives and selective scrutiny. In the latest instance, the New York Times
America Last
Earlier this week, the Trump administration told Congress it planned to resettle up to 17,500 white Afrikaners in the United States over the next year. The project will cost an estimated $500 million, CBS
Supreme Court Voter-Roll Order Won’t Affect Midterms, But Look Out in 2028
People who rightly fear a last-minute Trump administration bid to skew the 2026 midterms may have had a moment of panic after seeing Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court order. One of these threats has been Trump’s efforts toward so... More »
Pretty Much Every Poll Is Good for Democrats Now
With a little more than a month to go before the midterms, Donald Trump is in full campaign mode — crisscrossing the country in the hopes of boosting federal and state candidates up and do... More »
Rise of the Red-State Democrats
Just 40 days from the end of midterm-election voting, it’s beginning to look like a cycle in which all things are possible for Democrats. Not too long ago, the idea of Democrats winni... More »
The Democrats’ Mad Scramble to Get AI Right
Just before his paternity leave last fall, Representative Greg Casar of Texas was given some light reading — less Goodnight Moon, more “good-bye, humanity.” “... More »
Mark Zuckerberg Brushes Off Meta ‘Pervert Glasses’ Uproar
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta hasn’t given people much reason to trust it. That may have something to do with how the company’s early offering, The Facebook, could be used for stalking classmates online and how, in the following two decades, it became known for
Trump Makes Xi Greeting As Awkward As Possible
When you’re an American president greeting an authoritarian leader like Chinese president Xi Jinping, things will always be a bit uncomfortable. And Donald Trump is in a particular... More »
Hasan Piker May Not Matter As Much As Republicans Want
To hear a lot of the chatter about the pivotal U.S. Senate race in Michigan this year, you’d think the election was more or less a referendum on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The fiery leftist with a large online following has campaigned for and with Democratic nominee
All the Republicans Backing Away From Trump
Throughout his tenure leading the Republican Party, there has typically been very little daylight between Donald Trump and party members, and when there has been, it’s often been a career-en... More »
White House Still Barring Reporters Despite Court Order
Less than a week since Donald Trump proudly announced that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would be banned from the White House, a federal judge reinstated the news organizations’ press credentials by granting a temporary re... More »
The AI Assistant Wars Are Coming
Almost as soon as chatbots could carry on a coherent conversation, AI companies started imagining a world in which people use them to do everything. For some companies, such as Google, Apple, or Amazon, A... More »
The New Book Democrats Hate — and Can’t Stop Talking About
Whenever Democratic political operatives gather to drink these days, they talk about three things: their chances in the midterms, who will be the nominee in 2028, and if they have read — or are in — “the book.” More »
San Francisco Sues Trump’s Truth Social Over ‘Insider Trading’
Last month, Donald Trump’s Truth Social started offering a new product to flash traders looking to make a buck: a $100,000-a-month subscription service that would give them early acces... More »
Trump’s Shoddy Ballroom Design Is the Real National Security Threat
The president reportedly shrugged off the original architect’s concerns that he was violating fire and safety regulations, saying, “I am the code.”
Trump’s Popularity Is Circling the Drain
Timing is everything in electoral politics, and the time has come for Donald Trump to give his party a lift if they are to preserve their control of Congress for the last two years of his pr... More »
No One Can Fix School Segregation Alone
On Sunday, Nikole Hannah-Jones published an essay in The New York Times Magazine about her most difficult parenting decision. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and her husband ... More »
Do Voters Care Whether Susan Collins Is Corrupt?
A new report alleging the senator may have traded pork for contributions could be a good test of public tolerance for self-dealing in the Trump era.
The First Amendment Doesn’t Care If Trump Gets Bad Press
When it comes to the First Amendment, Vice-President J.D. Vance is either dumb or full of crap, and he’s not dumb. Even as right-wing media outlets and
This Is Francis Fukuyama’s Last Book
Long before Francis Fukuyama was one of the world’s most famous political scientists, he was a New York City kid, living in a ninth-floor Stuyvesant Town apartment as the only child of a theologian and potter. More »
KFile Is (Still) a Politician’s Worst Nightmare
Last October, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski uncovered deleted Reddit posts that showed former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner discussing his Totenkopf shortly after Platner claimed that he had only recently learned that the tattoo on his chest resembled the Nazi symbol. It was a clas... More »
Trump’s Iran War Is Bombing With Republicans
President Donald Trump keeps projecting confidence about his ongoing war in Iran despite there being no end in sight as sporadic attacks have hindered one of the world’s most crucial shippin... More »
Trump Hates Communism But Likes Hanging Out With Communists
Republicans are incredibly invested in depicting their Democratic opponents as socialist or even communist extremists. They didn’t really have a choice but to go in that demagogic direction. The GOP... More »
Trump TV Is Finally Here, and No One Is Watching
A media boycott drove Trump to dabble in state TV. But instead of a network competitor, Trump TV is just a dinky livestream with abysmal ratings.
GOP Senator Demands Probe Into Don Jr.’s Shady Wedding Gift
If you were alive and lucid between 2019 and 2024, you know that Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party spent more than half a decade obsessed with the idea that Hunter Biden took advantage of his father’s position as vice-president to enrich himself with overseas deals. That obsessi... More »
The Key Difference Between Christian Left and Christian Right
“It’s like watching a dog eat a peanut-butter sandwich,” one irreligious progressive friend of mine said about the number of ministers of the Christian Gospel running for office as Democrats this year. “Fascinating, but a bit unnatural.” Yes, there is a living tradition (being continued at presen... More »
Trump Promotes War and ‘Super Intelligence’ at U.N.: As It Happened
It’s been quite a tumultuous year for this planet of ours, particularly when it comes to the impact of a single American president in the world. President
Wave or No Wave: Two Paths for the Midterms
Six weeks from the midterm elections (and a lot less than that from early voting, which is already underway in several states), experts and the politicians who rely on them remain d... More »
The City Council Speaker Who Bested Anna Wintour
Speaker Julie Menin of the New York City Council is leading me to a place in Central Park she says is very special to her. We’ve just left the Met, where Menin delivered celebratory remarks alongside the museum’s director and CEO, Max Hollein, at a groundbreaking for the Tang Wing, its future hom... More »
John Fetterman’s Party of One
The GOP’s first-ever midterm convention needed a Democrat. The two-night production at the American Airlines Center in Dallas in early September was built around the case that the Democratic Party has been captured by socialism, and the organizers wanted someone from inside the party to help make... More »
Troy Jackson, the Accidental Candidate
The buttons being offered at the door of an August meet and greet for Troy Jackson in Lisbon Falls, Maine, said PEOPLE OVER PARTY, which was the first clue that this was not a run-of-the-mill Democratic campaign event. The hall was packed: about 70 people jammed around a table piled with pizzas. ... More »
Trump and Mamdani Meet at Gracie Mansion: Live Updates
President Donald Trump will be back in his hometown today ahead of his big address before the United Nations General Assembly and other scheduled meetings with world leaders and Republica... More »
Press Finally Shows Some Solidarity After Trump White House Ban
When Donald Trump travels to New York on Monday ahead of a speech at United Nations General Assembly, he will not be accompanied by a television journalist from one of the five major networks that cover him daily. CNN was the designated te... More »
Big Crypto Is Trying to Block Democrats’ Senate Dreams
The crypto lobby is going after the once and maybe future U.S. senator from Ohio Sherrod Brown with a tire iron,
The Long Shadow of Biden’s Gaza Fiasco
The 2024 election season was particularly tumultuous in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed recalled on Friday. In his home state, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” in the presid... More »
The New World Order Is Here
In her annual address in France last week, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a proposal that would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago: a plan to make Canada the first “associate member” of the European Union. More »
The Chatbots Are Pivoting to Video
For nearly as long as I can remember, I’ve been working on a bicycle. Sometimes I need to fix one. More often, I’m just tinkering, or taking on an unnecessary new project to pass the time. All the while, I’ve been looking to the internet for help, which has given me a chance to observe its change... More »
Woke Was Never the Problem
The American commentariat has lived inside a state of suspended animation for at least a decade. To them, it is 2014, 2016, or 2020 or somehow all three at once — and wokeness is the only subject worth talking about. Democratic strategist James Carville has nothing to do but appear on TV so he ca... More »
Democrats Could Break Up a Lot of GOP Trifectas in November
While any gains are valuable to them, Democrats’ prime midterms objective is to bust up the governing Republican trifecta in Washington that has enabled ruthless one-party rule over the last two years. That means at a minimum flipping control of the U.S. House and thus denying the GOP the party-l... More »
Trump Is Still Living Every Week Like It’s Shark Week
Just when you thought there were bigger things to worry about than ’Is it better to die via electrocution or shark attack?
We Almost Went to War With China Thanks to AI-Hallucinated Intel
The “AI-first” Pentagon almost tried to seize a Chinese ship after an AI chatbot convinced an analyst it was carrying nuclear components.
California’s Landmark Wealth Tax May Be Running Out of Steam
For years, progressives have longed to supplement progressive income taxes with wealth taxes that reach the vast inherited, invested, or even hidden assets that elude other revenue-rai... More »
Gavin Newsom’s 2028 Pledge Is More Calculated Than It Seems
The governor says he won’t run for president if Kamala Harris does. It may be less about deference than forcing her hand.
The ‘Political Disaster’ Looming for Democrats on AI
By now, the string of alarming recent headlines blur together: an Anthropic engineer who quit out of fear that his company was downplaying the possibly humanity-ending risks of its product. Swarms of
Don’t Tune Out Trump’s Midterms Sabotage
With less than 50 days before the midterms, every one of America’s 39,000 full-time journalists should be using their voice and platform to report on the possibility that this year’s elections could be stolen, subverted, or... More »
Polls Show Big Midterm Spike for Democrats
While there are plenty of race ratings and election forecasts weighing the odds of a Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, the single most reliable indicator ... More »
Imagine Trying to Convince Trump That AI Is a Serious Threat
White House aides are reportedly attempting to sway the president, who is publicly dismissing calls for AI regulation as a “hoax.”
Republicans Reject Trump’s ‘All About Me’ Midterms Strategy
For those Republican candidates still confused about their pitch to midterms voters, Donald Trump offered some specific instructions at last week’s GOP midterm convention: Make ... More »
How Much Pat McAfee Is Too Much?
On Saturday morning, ahead of the second college-football weekend of the new season, Pat McAfee was up to his old tricks behind ESPN’s College GameDay desk. He delivered a typically long WWE-style soliloquy gassing up the home team and the town they were broadcasting from (Austin, Texas,... More »
If Trump Can’t Have the Kennedy Center, No One Can
On Wednesday, workers in Washington, D.C., erected fencing around the Kennedy Center. After a federal judge rejected another attempt by President Trump’s handpicked board to etch... More »
Trump to Put MAGA Trigger Warnings Outside Smithsonian
Too many Americans are having their vacations ruined when they stumble into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and are confronted with information like “the Civil Rights Movement happened”... More »
Surprise: Trump’s AG Won’t Probe Don Jr.’s Oligarch-Funded Wedding Festivities
Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Vladimir Putin–linked Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev partially funded Donald Trump Jr.’s May wedding to Bettina Anderson, laying out hundreds of thousan... More »
Trump’s AI Cheerleading Put His Party in an Impossible Place
Congressional Republicans are rapidly running out of time to do anything that might preserve their control of Congress. Indeed, early midterms voting began this week in Idaho, Minnesota, South Dakota, a... More »
Gerrymandering May Not Have Done Republicans Much Good After All
Republicans undoubtedly prevailed in the gerrymandering arms race touched off when President Trump ordered Texas to redraw its congressional maps in July 2025, followed by additional G... More »
Why the AI Apocalypse Won’t Play Out Like The Terminator
Nate Soares, co-author of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, said he “hasn’t slept in days.” Since the tech world’s most apocalyptic fears that artificial intelligence could kil... More »
60 Minutes’s Big Premiere Saw Ratings Dive
The season premiere of 60 Minutes, the first new episode since the show’s tumultuous gut renovation by Bari Weiss, kicked off on Sunday night — and it was fairly we... More »
Mitch McConnell Is Alive and (Sort of) Well
The Kentucky senator went back to work for the first time in three months. Yet aside from a long smile and a wave, he was still barely seen or heard.
Why the Supreme Court Slapped Down Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Rules
The Supreme Court quite sensibly decreed 20 years ago that we shouldn’t mess with voting processes too close to an election. The justices have never told us exactly how close is too close, bu... More »
Colin Kaepernick Says ‘Woke’ Misses the Point
On August 26, 2016 — just before, well, everything — NFL.com reporter Steve Wyche and his colleague Mike Garafolo noticed that 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was not coming out of the locker room fo... More »
Trump Can’t Stop Backing Stuff Americans Hate
There was a time not that long ago when Donald Trump had earned a reputation as a populist, someone who bucked the political Establishment — or at least the Republican Establishment — by embracing policy p... More »
The Women Fighting for Fewer Rights
A decade into the Trump era, gender has become one of the most prominent and confounding stories in American politics. The conventional wisdom hasn’t changed much over time. In article after article, book after book, Trump is a strongman, beloved of voters who long for a patriarch; the villains a... More »
How Nick Shirley Became Republicans’ Favorite Poster
This July, a video appeared on the influencer Nick Shirley’s YouTube channel with Dr. Mehmet Oz outlining a supposed “Billion Dollar Fraud Scheme.” It was a strange choice for the head of U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The video features Oz roaming around Queens with the self-desc... More »
Property-Tax Cuts Are the GOP’s Favorite Affordability Fix
The Republican Party could not be much more poorly positioned on affordability concerns as the midterm elections approach. As the people running the country, Republicans are obviously vulnerable to persistent and even
Watching Football Isn’t American Enough?
On Sunday, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted a photo on X showing a group of brown-skinned University of Texas football fans celebrating their team’s victory over Ohio State. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French
AI-Doomsday Warnings Haven’t Derailed Anthropic IPO
In the span of less than a week numerous individuals within the world of artificial intelligence have warned that, unless major new guardrails and reforms are put in place, the human race may ... More »
Bettina and Don Jr. Bravely Defend Their Oligarch-Funded Wedding
According to the couple, reporting that Trump’s son let a close Putin ally secretly pay for his wedding is discrimination. And it’s NOT okay!
Republicans Are Losing Trump’s 2024 Gains With Texas Latinos
When Donald Trump reclaimed the White House in 2024 and Republicans won a trifecta by flipping control of the Senate, one story seemed to capture the moment most dramatically. That was the strong trend in the GOP’s favor among Latinos generally, and Texas Latinos in particular, with the rural and... More »
Donald Trump Couldn’t Do It Alone
Donald Trump was done on January 6. Republican lawmakers failed to overturn the 2024 election after the violence was quelled. Mike Pence did his job, confirming Joe Biden’s victory. Social-media companies locked Trump out, and even allies issued rebukes. Two weeks later, the 45th president jetted... More »
Why Everyone’s Talking About the AI Apocalypse
Last week, Anthropic employee and former OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from his job. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote on X. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could k... More »
Ben Shelton Is Just Beginning
He fell to Alexander Zverev in Sunday’s U.S. Open final, but has a plausible chance to win here in the future.
A Queasy Appreciation of Alexander Zverev
On a dreary June afternoon in 2022, the German tennis player Alexander “Sascha” Zverev was three hours and two sets deep into the French Open semifinals against Rafael Nadal. Nadal ... More »