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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 »