The Supreme Court Is Not Supposed to Have This Much Power

The Supreme Court Is Not Supposed to Have This Much Power

By Nikolas Bowie & Daphna Renan The Atlantic It’s June again—that time of year when Americans wake up each morning and wait for the Supreme Court to resolve our deepest political disagreements. To decide what the Constitution says about our bodily autonomy, our power to avert climate change, and our ability to protect children from guns, the nation turns not to members of Congress—elected by…

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How the NRA Evolved from Backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to Blocking Nearly all Firearm Restrictions Today

By Robert Spitzer The Conversation The mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, just 10 days apart, are stirring the now-familiar national debate over guns seen after the tragic 2012 and 2018 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida. Inevitably, if also understandably, many Americans are blaming the National Rifle…

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The Landfill of the Future

The Landfill of the Future

By Andreas McGuire Hakai Magazine The molecular disassembly line works like this: polluted air and water move through a series of tanks, slowly being purified along the way. Between the tanks, hidden from view, grids of submicroscopic, burr-like wheels snag molecules of nitrogen, water, carbon, phosphorus, and other useful elements. Once caught, these elements are sent into the next reservoir,…

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How the AI Industry Profits From Catastrophe

How the AI Industry Profits From Catastrophe

By Karen Hao archive & Andrea Paola Hernández MIT Technology Review It was meant to be a temporary side job—a way to earn some extra money. Oskarina Fuentes Anaya signed up for Appen, an AI data-labeling platform, when she was still in college studying to land a well-paid position in the oil industry. But then the economy tanked in Venezuela. Inflation skyrocketed, and a stable job, once…

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The Last Summer of Roe v. Wade

The Last Summer of Roe v. Wade

By Carter Sherman Vice Texas abortion providers sued to halt the law, but the Supreme Court didn’t stop the law from taking effect early Wednesday morning. Overnight, access to abortion basically evaporated. Then, in a 5-4 vote released just before midnight, the Supreme Court officially announced that it would not be blocking the ban, because the providers hadn’t made their case when it came to…

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A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders

A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders

By Charles Homans The New York Times Evangelical churches have long been powerful vehicles for grassroots activism and influence on the American right, mobilized around issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Now, some of those churches have embraced a new cause: promoting Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In the 17 months since the presidential election,…

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How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine

How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine

By Sheera Frenkel & Stuart A. Thompson The New York Times After President Vladimir Putin of Russia claimed that action against Ukraine was taken in self-defense, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative commentator Candace Owens repeated the assertion. When Putin insisted he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine, Joe Oltmann, a far-right podcaster, and Lara Logan, another right-wing…

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A New Germany: How Putin’s Aggression is Changing Berlin

A New Germany: How Putin’s Aggression is Changing Berlin

By Sudha David-Wilp & Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff Foreign Affairs Within a week, Germany has undergone a dramatic transformation, shedding its reluctant and dovish foreign policy and committing itself to drastically increase defense spending. The shock of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine spurred Berlin to send thousands of antitank and antiaircraft weapons to Kyiv. A country…

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Inside Mississippi’s Only Class on Critical Race Theory

Inside Mississippi’s Only Class on Critical Race Theory

By Molly Minta Mississippi Today Brittany Murphree was born and raised in Rankin County, Mississippi, one of the most Republican counties in one of the most Republican states.  She went to Northwest Rankin High School where she was the president of the school’s chapter of Teenage Republicans of Mississippi. She interned for Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, and her parents voted for Donald Trump…

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Transparency Laws Let Criminal Records Become Commodities

Transparency Laws Let Criminal Records Become Commodities

By Sarah Lageson Wired In April 2018, Adnan (a pseudonym) was wrongfully arrested in Newark, New Jersey, on the basis of an incorrect arrest warrant. A brief period in jail led to the criminal court judge dismissing the incident and moving to have Adnan’s arrest record expunged. A few days later, Adnan began receiving mysterious text messages from several “reputation management” companies that…

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The Constitutional Right We Have Bargained Away

The Constitutional Right We Have Bargained Away

By Carissa Byrne Hessick The Atlantic The Bill of Rights exists to protect individuals. It protects the right to free speech, the right to due process, the right to counsel, and the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, just to name a few. If a government official tries to deprive an individual of one of those constitutional rights, then the courts are supposed to intervene. But…

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How Child Care Became the Most Broken Business in America

How Child Care Became the Most Broken Business in America

By Claire Suddath Bloomberg Deanna Cohen was 20 years into a career in the music industry when she realized it wasn’t going to work out. On paper she looked like a success: She’d worked her way up from college intern at a record company to vice president of music programming at a national TV network. She’d married, had a daughter, divorced, remarried. Then, in 2008, at age 44, she got pregnant…

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Omicron: The Variant that Vaccine Apartheid Built

Omicron: The Variant that Vaccine Apartheid Built

By Matiangai Sirleaf Just Security In January 2021, Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS warned, “We are witness to a vaccine apartheid that is only serving the interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical corporations while costing us the quickest and least harmful route out of this crisis.” With the recent news of Omicron’s emergence as a variant of concern, these words and…

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How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer

How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer

By Raffi Khatchadourian The New Yorker On Thanksgiving morning, 1987, Rick Bart, a homicide detective in Snohomish County, Washington, got word that a pheasant hunter had discovered a body in a field beneath High Bridge, an overpass spanning the Snoqualmie River. Bart was preparing to spend the day with his family, but he went anyway. He was one of only two homicide detectives in Snohomish—a…

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Xi Jinping’s Terrifying New China

Xi Jinping’s Terrifying New China

China’s social media was briefly aflutter this fall about an impressive feat in the popular online fantasy game Honor of Kings. A player had completed a “pentakill,” or five kills in a row, but something just smelled wrong: The user in question was 60 years old, according to the verified account information—hardly the type to be an expert gamer. Even more mysterious, why was this person…

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Cases of Missing Trans People are Rarely Solved. A Married Pair of Forensic Genealogists is Hoping to Change That

Cases of Missing Trans People are Rarely Solved. A Married Pair of Forensic Genealogists is Hoping to Change That

By Erica Lentl Xtra They found Markham Doe among the evergreens on the east side of 11th Concession, in Markham, Ontario, on July 16, 1980. It was a humid, rainy summer day. Doe had been there for a year, or two, or three, investigators presumed. Here, on this stretch of rural road northeast of Toronto, thousands of cars zoomed past; no one had found them. Not until a motorist took a pit stop…

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After Crafting American Criminal Justice, Christians Keep Changing the Rules

After Crafting American Criminal Justice, Christians Keep Changing the Rules

By Chris Hutton The News Station In the 1640s, New England had a peculiar problem: “Something close to a bestiality panic,” historian John Murrin wrote. Teenagers were whipped, and at least four men — one each from the Plymouth, New Haven, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies — were publicly hanged after being found guilty. The peculiar problem plaguing the New England colonies wasn’t…

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