Ro Khanna has a $1 trillion plan to fatten Americans’ wallets.The newly elected member of Congress, who represents Silicon Valley, has become a loud progressive voice on the Hill during his brief tenure there. The way he sees it, Democrats have failed by not offering families a r … | Continue reading
If 2016 was the year that populist protest triumphed in Britain (Brexit) and the United States (Trump), 2017 is shaping up as the year that political normality reasserts itself. Three events in three different Western democracies confirm that some of the familiar laws of politica … | Continue reading
As seen from space, Earth looks quiet, and a bit lonely, during the day. Our blue marble is interspersed with the lush green of forests, but that’s about the only sign of life. It’s impossible to tell anyone is home, especially anyone who thinks, and moves around, and builds thin … | Continue reading
The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have been no less rife with controversy and political infighting than his campaign. As the new administration settled into the White House, it unleashed a torrent of new policy plans and executive orders for the public to debate, pr … | Continue reading
President Trump isn’t getting a health-care vote to mark his 100th day in office, but he won’t be saddled with a government shutdown, either.The House voted on Friday morning to extend federal funding for another week past a midnight deadline as negotiators try to reach an agreem … | Continue reading
In 1995, a perfect piece of techno-alarmism was released in theaters, and America was never the same again. The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, predicted a world where your entire identity could be erased and re-written online, where hackers could create online backdoors into all o … | Continue reading
The World’s Coolest KindergartenAndrew Keh | The New York TimesHAMBURG, Germany—It was late Tuesday afternoon at the Pestalozzi Foundation kindergarten, and a few dozen children and their parents were hanging around past the normal pickup hour.There was no rush to get home, reall … | Continue reading
Arkansas executed its fourth death-row inmate Thursday night, marking the last of a series of executions the state carried out before its supply of the drug used for lethal injections expired.Although the drug used in Kenneth Williams’s execution was administered ahead of its Sun … | Continue reading
Marine Le Pen—the far-right populist-nationalist who has advanced to the second round of the French presidential election along with the centrist, internationalist Emmanuel Macron—might today be the 25th president of the Republic if France had America’s electoral system, accordin … | Continue reading
Sophia (Britt Robertson), the heroine of the new Netflix show Girlboss, is a fierce 20-something living in San Francisco, raiding vintage stores for her glam-rock wardrobe and telling anyone who’ll listen that adulthood is where dreams go to die and conformity is a prison. Carol … | Continue reading
President Trump says “[t]here is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.” The comments, which were made to Reuters in an interview, come two days after senior members of his administration, in a joint statement, tried to defuse tensions with … | Continue reading
As he approaches his hundredth day in office, Donald Trump appears to be suffering—once again—from an acute case of presidential status anxiety.In public, of course, he has labored to play it cool, strenuously insisting (and insisting, and insisting) that he does not care about t … | Continue reading
For the past month, WikiLeaks has regularly released secret CIA documents that reveal the breadth of the agency’s hacking tools. Some seem lifted straight from a spy thriller, like a tool that can turn internet-connected TVs into covert listening devices. The same could be said f … | Continue reading
Toward the end of the first episode of Catastrophe’s third season, Sharon sits down on a couch next to her husband Rob after confessing that she’s betrayed his trust. She asks a question: “What now?”Rob re-etches his magnificent block of a face, and what had been stoic rage at hi … | Continue reading
The nation’s capital is the only city in the country where the federal government gives scholarships to underprivileged children to attend private schools. The goal of the voucher program, of course, is to help ensure low-income youth aren’t tethered to their often under-resource … | Continue reading
Sheryl Sandberg’s new book is not an easy read. Well, in a sense, it is: The pages fly by. But the book is tough, full of the raw, painful emotions that followed the sudden loss of her husband Dave Goldberg when he was just 47 years old. What followed was, for Sandberg, a proces … | Continue reading
Terrebonne Parish is probably what people envision when they think about rural Louisiana. It’s chock-full of the swamps, fan boats, gators, and cypress trees that translate to postcards and movie backdrops. People speak Cajun French in public, and shrimpers and fishermen still ma … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingImmigration Woes: President Trump recently walked back his campaign promise to eliminate DACA, the Obama-era program that protects undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as kids. Yet a small number of DACA recipients have already been arrested, s … | Continue reading
Mucking up an interaction with Congress is a rite of passage for every new president—usually on health care, and especially for those with limited experience in Washington.The twin pitfalls for a new president are the same ones the great Tommy Lasorda described in his approach to … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump told reporters he “will renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement, after reportedly considering withdrawing from the pact. House Democrats threatened to oppose a short-term extension of government funding if Republicans press forward wit … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump is right: North Korea’s nuclear program is on a dangerous trajectory. But there is no quick fix. Nor is there an imminent threat, and it does not help to create the impression that there is one. A show of force, if carefully calibrated, can be helpful. But … | Continue reading
Many are familiar with the concept of “secular Jews,” people who choose to identify as Jewish despite being non-practicing, agnostic, or even atheist, because they see Judaism as a culture or ethnicity and not just as a religion. Almost a quarter of American Jews fall into this c … | Continue reading
Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Song and Story,” from our May 1992 issue, begins with a poignant scene between a mother and her infant daughter:The girl strapped in the bare mechanical cribdoes not open her eyes, does not cry out.The glottal tube is taped into her face;bereft of sound, she … | Continue reading
Republican leaders returned to Washington after a lengthy Easter recess with two discreet goals for the week: Keep the federal government from shutting down, and maybe, if they had the time and the votes, finally pass their bill to replace the Affordable Care Act.Congress being C … | Continue reading
A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s left?That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in … | Continue reading
Two American service members based in eastern Afghanistan were killed Wednesday night during an operation targeting Islamic State militants, the Pentagon announced Thursday.The two service members, whose names have not yet been released, were killed in Nangarhar, an eastern Afgha … | Continue reading
Protesters have entered the parliament in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia following the election of an ethnic-Albanian lawmaker as speaker. Reuters described the protesters as nationalists angered by Talat Xhaferi’s election as the country’s first ethnic-Albanian speake … | Continue reading
In August of 2014, ISIS militants swept through towns near Mosul, Iraq, taking control and forcing thousands to flee. Among the towns was Qaraqosh, which was Iraq's largest Christian city with a population of 50,000. For more than two years, occupying ISIS jihadists tried to eras … | Continue reading
Around 45,000 years ago, in a Belgian cave, a Neanderthal died. As its body decayed, its cells split apart, spilling their contents onto the cave floor. Those remnants included the Neanderthal’s DNA, some of which stuck to minerals in the sediment. There, leashed to the very rock … | Continue reading
In our glorious new populist era, a trade war is politics by other means. For politicians like Donald Trump, who made his election a referendum on Americans’ sentiments about their global status, trade sanctions offer a convenient way to express a political ideology. But Trump is … | Continue reading
I first read Pablo Neruda’s collection of 100 love sonnets when I was 11 or 12, and I remember dog-earing the page of my library-book copy on Sonnet XVII. I hadn’t been in love yet, and didn’t have any real-life feelings with which to frame or understand the poem. Yet something a … | Continue reading
The term “alien” is used in legal contexts to denote those present in the United States who aren’t citizens. But some callers are using a new hotline launched on Wednesday for victims of crimes committed by aliens to report that they’ve been victimized by extraterrestrials.On Wed … | Continue reading
SEATTLE—Last June, Martin Chibwe, a computer-science major, graduated from Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, a liberal-arts campus with a hipster ethos that shuns letter grades and urges exploration (“We don’t tell you what to take,” its website promises). His comp … | Continue reading
In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared. Family farmsteads have given way to mechanized agribusinesses to sow genetically identical crops on a massive scale. In an era of climate uncertainty and immense corporate power, farmers, scientists, lawyers … | Continue reading
Being a billionaire means sometimes having a secret side-project big enough to necessitate an actual NASA hangar. That appears to be the case for the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, anyway.Brin is building a huge airship inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center, accordi … | Continue reading
In his 1980 song “Ashes to Ashes,” David Bowie sang of how his long-running character, the doomed astronaut Major Tom, was “hitting an all-time low.” Seven years later, Bowie found himself in similar straits. Never Let Me Down, his seventeenth album, was released in April of 1987 … | Continue reading
It’s when a fist bump unwittingly meets a high-five. It’s when Ben Carson tries, unsuccessfully, to walk onto a stage. It’s trying to introduce an acquaintance to someone else at a party and then realizing you don’t actually remember their name. It’s awkward, and like so many oth … | Continue reading
United Airlines pledged Thursday to reduce overbooking and pay travelers who volunteer to take a later flight up to $10,000 in response to an incident earlier this month in which a passenger was dragged off a flight.“Two weeks ago, we failed to meet that standard and we profoundl … | Continue reading
A few minutes before midnight in California, Cassini called home.The spacecraft had been out of contact with Earth for about 41 hours, its large antenna pointed away from its home planet. This happens a few times a week as Cassini collects data around Saturn, fills up its recorde … | Continue reading
The city of Springfield, Massachusetts, has had a serendipitous sequence of events supercharge its preschool-expansion efforts. Federal money came in just as local support for early-childhood education crested, and the closure of an early-childhood center created an opening for t … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, Ulrich Baer, a vice provost at New York University, published an op-ed in The New York Times defending student-activist efforts to shut down speakers at institutions of higher education like Auburn, UC Berkeley, and Middlebury. He urged readers inclined to defe … | Continue reading
The meanings we glean in conversation are often, maybe mostly, not found in the words spoken, but in how they’re said, and in the spaces between them. Tone of voice, and cadences created by shifts in speed, volume, and pitch, let listeners know whether “Nice job,” is complimentar … | Continue reading
—President Trump has backed away from terminating NAFTA, hours after a senior White House official said Trump would announced the U.S. would withdraw from the free-trade pact with Canada and Mexico. —We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Da … | Continue reading
Allergy season is upon us once more, and for many allergy sufferers, that means it’s time to pull two crucial items to the front of the medicine cabinet: 24-hour non-drowsy loratadine, and a neti pot—a teapot-like device used to flush the nasal passages with saline in order to cl … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, thousands of protesters gathered at Washington’s National Mall to advocate for an assortment of causes: action against global climate change, federal funding for scientific research, an empirical approach to the world and its mysteries. The protesters at the M … | Continue reading
The distinctive pattern of public reaction to President Trump as he approaches the end of his first 100 days in office is sharpening the choices facing Democrats over the party’s road to recovery.Though Trump’s agenda has unified Democrats in near-term opposition, clear fault lin … | Continue reading
Talk about an impressive political about-face. In the fight over whether the government funding bill currently under negotiation would include $1.5 billion for his Great Wall, Donald Trump went from intransigent chest-thumper to panicked back-pedaler in, what, six days?Starting l … | Continue reading
In October 1962, my middle school principal announced an emergency plan: in case of attack, those of us who lived within a mile would walk home.That is still the longest walk I never took; half a century later, I dream about it sometimes. It is like a faded, scratchy clip from a … | Continue reading