Among the many dangerous actions President Donald Trump has taken, his push to force some of the country’s best universities into signing a sweeping federal “compact” ranks just behind his pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists.

The 10-part compact is a bizarre mix of bombast, authoritarianism, and a few unremarkable ideas buried like...Read more

When I landed in Northern California in October 2017 as a senior FEMA official, the sky was orange at noon. Entire neighborhoods in Santa Rosa and Napa were gone. Firefighters were still working on one ridge while evacuees filled shelters miles away. It was clear that California had entered a new era of fire behavior — faster, hotter, and far ...Read more

Consider a hunger policy director at a state Department of Social Services studying food insecurity data across the state. For years, she has relied on the USDA’s annual Household Food Security Report to identify where hunger is rising, how many families are skipping meals, and how many children go to bed hungry. Those numbers help her target ...Read more

New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in June’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor wasn’t just a political upset — it’s a historic echo.

Nearly 70 years ago, in a vast California district spanning Palm Springs to the Mexico border, a naturalized Sikh American named Dalip Singh Saund stunned the political ...Read more

The United States earned its independence by fighting a war to protest various indignities imposed by the crown, including levies that prompted the colonist slogan “taxation without representation.” Those at the United Nations seeking to implement a global money grab through shipping taxes might be wise to re-examine history.

Last week, the...Read more

Thanks to U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, we’ve finally learned something about what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol are doing in the Chicago area from the perspective of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol, which is helpful even if you don’t like what’s going on.

Todd Lyons, acting director, U.S. ...Read more

The U.S. Labor Department is sounding a stark warning that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has devastated the ranks of agricultural workers and now may threaten the food supply.

It’s bad news for farmers, who have already been buffeted by this administration’s tariffs, as well as for U.S. consumers, who sent President ...Read more

It’s a lot harder for a would-be rapist to harm women when he’s not in the United States.

Clark County prosecutors believe Carlos Nava is a serial rapist who has victimized more than a dozen women and underage girls. His crime spree began more than a decade ago. Prosecutors believe he frequently targeted prostitutes and assaulted his ...Read more

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has significantly increased its enforcement actions nationwide. This shift has seen the use of more aggressive and combative tactics by ICE, including entering dwellings by force and without judicial warrants— as instructed by the ...Read more

An estimated 7 million Americans turned out Saturday to peacefully protest against the breakdown of our checks-and-balances democracy into a Trump-driven autocracy, rife with grift but light on civil rights.

Trump's response? An AI video of himself wearing a crown inside a fighter plane, dumping what appears to be feces on these very ...Read more

When our son, Naser, was 6 years old, he wanted to be called Kevin, a perfectly reasonable Midwestern name. This seems to be a rite of passage with children, to name and rename themselves.

But our son was not to know the agonies we went through to name him, honoring our respective South Asian and South American cultures and balancing the ...Read more

As a species, humans possess a kind of superpower: the ability to survive on a remarkably wide variety of foods, allowing us to thrive everywhere from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic tundra.

Now, thanks to social media, our dietary range is being tested again. TikTok and YouTube have made stars of influencers who tout — often with the ...Read more

During the 2013 government shutdown I happened to be in Philadelphia, and I was surprised to find that the Liberty Bell — which sits in its own little room with big windows — was “closed.” You could stand there and look at it, but only through tourist-smudged glass.

This time around, the Liberty Bell Center and other buildings that are ...Read more

On Friday, the United States destroyed what the Defense Department alleged was a boat affiliated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group, using the Southern Caribbean to smuggle drugs into the country. The latest operation, which reportedly killed three people, is the seventh since the aerial campaign began in September. It ...Read more

Oh my god, you guys! Did you hear about that brat Katie Porter? Swear to God on a stack of holy Bibles, she is such a mean girl! She can never be governor of California! And she's not gonna make fetch happen, either!

All right, can we please grow up for a minute here?

Like a lot of ambitious politicians, Katie Porter, the former Democratic ...Read more

Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as its foundation, the administration of President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps in the name of merit-based admissions, with a stated goal of advancing a more meritocratic higher education system.

Not only has the administration attacked ...Read more

I was struck, no, dumbfounded by this: Debt funded all federal government spending in 2025.

The federal government plans to spend a total of $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 but only bring in $5.16 trillion in revenue. That leaves a deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion. The big four expenditures — Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, debt interest...Read more

We spend a lot of time talking about the problem of polarization in today’s politics. If you get right down to it, however, most of that happens, well, at the fringes — either end of the pole, if you will.

What’s more normal, in our experience, is for the average American to question whether either political party cares about regular ...Read more

Schemes of national governance are complicated and subject to generalization, but for the sake of argument, let’s put “democracy” at one end of a spectrum and “autocracy” at the other and consider the bright line that separates them?

There isn’t one. In fact, since 1997 the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale ...Read more

The price of gold has hit one record after another this year, and if the past is any guide, the precious metal’s wild ride means bad news could be on the way.

Gold is the doomsday prepper’s favorite commodity, a store of value for difficult times. In the 1970s, gold prices shot up alongside runaway inflation and the end of a system that ...Read more