The threat of litigation in countries without the United States’ high level of press protection can have a subtle but profound chilling effect on journalism and accountability. Australian legal commentators, for example, noted that the #MeToo movement faltered in that country after figures like actor Geoffrey Rush began suing the women who accused them of […]
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It’s poorly written and has Trump’s usual weird capitalization issues, but it is also a pretty compelling argument against a DeSantis presidential bid pic.twitter.com/9eVPZEYQhv — Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) March 22, 2023 DeSantis lays a glove on Trump; Trump responds by throwing the entire kitchen sink at him. DeSantis lays a glove on Trump; Trump responds […]
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In the case of FTX, Williams’s office moved rather quickly, filing a sealed indictment less than a month after the collapse of the company. For Williams, who has the résumé of someone who’s checked every box of meritocratic success, SBF could be the high-profile prosecution that elevates him from being simply another nice suit behind […]
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Over the years, evidence has piled up suggesting that these kinds of school takeovers are ineffective and that the primacy of standardized tests constrains schools to “teach for the test”—forcing teachers to achieve arbitrary scores to maintain their good standing. Meanwhile, the charter schools pitched as a remedy are often “intensely segregated settings,” according to […]
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The biggest reason why Musk is unlikely to transform Twitter into something vastly different than what it is today, however, is that it would defeat the whole point of owning it in the first place. Twitter is—in its own skewed, imperfect way—still the closest thing we have to a digital town square. Given its disproportionate […]
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The most curious part of the emerging Trump defense—that this is a politically motivated prosecution—is that no one, with the exception of Trump himself, bothers to deny that there was criminal wrongdoing. Most Americans do not trust Trump; a majority believed Daniels was telling the truth when she came forward five years ago. In the […]
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If we lose that basic measure of democratic accountability, and allow an intensely ideological Congress, led by members from California and Georgia and Texas and Florida, to exert pressure to decide what prosecutions a DA in New York City should and should not bring, we’re cooked. There’s a lot that’s imperfect about our justice system, […]
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It is easy to imagine that Biden sees his singular status in roughly the same way as did Eisenhower. While Kamala Harris is no Nixon, she also lacks anything like universal acceptance in the Democratic Party as a replacement nominee. As a result, Biden undoubtedly regards himself as the only Democrat who can prevent a […]
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For the book banners, this was never just about the books. The free public library as we know it in the United States, as a public good, as a hallmark of liberal democracy, was not always thus. The idea of a free library open to all is one that was long fought for and won […]
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Another source of friction is the laws red states are passing to prevent health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care anywhere in the U.S. One strategy used by states like Florida is to put an excessive statute of limitations and liability on doctors and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care or coverage. Their goal […]
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And then there is Silicon Valley’s culture—hyper-libertarian, hyper-capitalist, and hyper-self-confident. Government regulations are something to be avoided or ignored. Unions are verboten. Those who create companies are referred to as “founders” with an added touch of reverence, like America’s Founding Fathers or the villains from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When they create a new […]
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DeSantis, Walker, Pawlenty, Jeb—they all share the curse of an early constituency of would-be king-makers on the one hand and negative stage presence on the other. DeSantis has the charisma of a pair of cargo shorts. Journalists sizing him up note that he is anti-social (in Congress, he reportedly left his earbuds in to avoid […]
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Why is this important? While Biden and his fellow Democrats can’t do much in the way of passing laws with the GOP in control of the House, they can still spend the next two years setting an example. Collectively, everyone on the team should be seeking out opportunities to play Gallant to the Republicans’ weird […]
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Biden has never been a strong fundraiser, which adds a cost-saving rationale for delaying setting up a formal campaign. A president running for reelection cannot start off with a four-person campaign staff working out of a Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi. Once Biden officially declares, there immediately will be a hefty bill for staff salaries […]
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Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]
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Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]
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When “gain of function” is invoked in political debates, it usually refers to a small subset of research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and dual-use research of concern—which means research that can be misused, intentionally or accidentally. For the small sliver of virological research that examines what changes could make viruses worse for humans, there […]
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There are protests and letters and essays and podcasts all, essentially, saying that Israel has entered different, dangerous territory, threatening its relationship with Jews around the world—certainly with liberal American Jews—and its own status as a democracy. There is, and has been for decades, one story about American Jews and Israel, and that story goes […]
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Think about this. Fox’s Decision Desk was right: Biden won Arizona. And they were first. These cable networks are in insane competition to be right and first on election night. Fox was both. It did what cable news networks all want to do. And yet nearly everyone at Fox saw it not as a victory, […]
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“There’s no longer a gathering storm,” Steve Bannon told the crowd; “The storm is here!” Nah. It isn’t, not really. Last year at Orlando and then at Dallas, these speakers spoke in voices full of fire and brimstone. The Democrats, newly in power, had touched off the Marxist apocalypse. In response, CPAC’s bully-pulpiteers promised the […]
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I asked ChatGPT, the most famous of these chatbots, whether it counted as artificial intelligence. “As an A.I. language model, ChatGPT is indeed a form of artificial intelligence,” it insisted. “However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a fully autonomous, self-aware entity in the way that we might commonly imagine artificial intelligence.” […]
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Thanks to these inadequate directions, in January in Manatee and Duval counties, school officials told teachers to remove or cover their classroom libraries. The Manatee County teacher’s union advised its members to comply with the law. A Duval County teacher’s video of empty shelves went viral, and when DeSantis was confronted with it, he accused […]
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I read it like a sort of family tree drawn in waterways: all of us, (and our pets, wildlife, and livestock) who deserve fresh, clean water, not the devastation of environmental disaster. At the center of these maps are the people who never left. Further out lie the many children of Northeast Ohio’s exodus, the […]
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Justice Neil Gorsuch also raised a similar point. “What I think [the states] argue that is missing is costs to other persons in terms of fairness, for example, people who have paid their loans, people who don’t plan their lives around not seeking loans, and people who are not eligible for loans in the first […]
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In the face of these powerful forces, Gorski, motivated by his inner moral compass, had the courage to keep throwing stones. In April 2021, when celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky argued that vaccine passports “segregate people and strip them of their freedom to travel internationally,” his claim sparked a Gorski-Pinsky Twitter tiff. Gorski said that Pinsky […]
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Obviously, the Republicans won’t offer any transparency beyond saying they’re going to cut all that woke spending by the Pentagon. They never tell the truth about their spending priorities, because they really only have one, or I guess now two. The one traditional GOP spending priority is to do as little of it as possible, […]
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“Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools,” Greene added, almost as an afterthought. “I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not.” The rest of her Twitter thread is a caricature of the modern political divide. After a national divorce, Greene claimed, red states would be able […]
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Conservative legislators and witnesses claim desistance rates (i.e., youth ceasing to identify as transgender) of anywhere between 80 and 97 percent. But they deliberately ignore that this does not reflect the latest research. These numbers date back decades and are based on earlier versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, which allowed gender […]
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It took Morris, now a senior at Oxford High, a long time to find a sense of normalcy again. He said he often felt foggy or would disassociate due to his trauma. When he learned there was an active shooter at MSU the night of February 13, “I felt like I had been set back […]
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But another reason we are seeing a shift in the GOP’s Ukraine policy is simply that the party’s foreign policy has become so incoherent. At the start of the war, the party agreed on only one thing: The invasion wouldn’t have happened if Joe Biden wasn’t so weak. The implication—made explicit by Trump but not […]
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Twitter and its co-defendants took a more narrow view of JASTA’s language. It is generally indisputable that ISIS grew in size and scope in its early stages with the help of social media. But the tech companies denied any specific advance knowledge of the attack in Istanbul, which they argued meant they couldn’t have “knowingly […]
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