Matteo Wong writes: On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was…
Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings. While the takeover has been framed as part of Trump’s broader purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, it is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the…
The New York Times reports: Some Israeli military officials have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks, according to three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave. For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming. But…
The Wall Street Journal reports: When President Trump tours the Middle East this week, he will be looking to secure investments in the U.S. from the world’s richest petrostates. His family businesses and close associates already have been striking deals in the region at a rapid clip. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the three countries on the president’s itinerary, stand out for their warm embrace of Trump Inc. In the past year, Trump-branded residential towers have been…
The New York Times reports: The U.S. welcome mat is rolling up — at least that’s how some international travelers see it, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, a global organization representing the travel and tourism industry. And the cost for that hospitality lapse will be high. The United States is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending this year, falling to less than $169 billion from $181 billion in 2024, according to the latest…
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write: President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again. His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data,…
NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…
Zack Beauchamp writes: Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse. Earlier this month, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “the concluding moves” of the war in Gaza. Called “Gideon’s Chariots,” the operation’s plan calls for the mass destruction of remaining buildings in Gaza and the “conquest” of much of the Strip by Israel. The more than 2 million Palestinian civilians would…
NPR reports: “The way we communicate is of fundamental importance: We must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images; we must reject the paradigm of war,” Pope Leo XIV said in an address to journalists Monday morning. He implored them to use communication as a tool for peace. Referencing Pope Francis’ message from the World Day of Social Communications in January, Leo said, “Let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred; let…
Chris Lehmann writes: Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019 lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of…
Ian Millhiser writes: Few organizations have profited as handsomely off of President Donald Trump’s rise to power as the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump announced during his first campaign for president — and boy did he deliver. Trump spent his first term filling the bench, including three seats on the Supreme Court, with the society’s luminaries. And yet, at a Federalist…
Politico reports: President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to take in dozens of white South Africans who were granted refugee status as his administration limits refugee admissions for the rest of the world. A group of 49 Afrikaners claiming to face discrimination and economic hardship in their home country arrived to the U.S. on Monday morning after being awarded an expedited pathway into the country by the Trump administration under a new program established earlier this year. But…
Support among young people for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply. J Studios/Getty Images By Jacob Mchangama, Vanderbilt University For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has…
Julia Belluz writes: The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes toxic chemicals in food are behind the U.S. explosion in rates of obesity and a range of other chronic illnesses. “A facade of normalcy has masked this meteoric rise in chronic disease, and we can no longer ignore it,” he said recently. He intends to rid the U.S. food supply of nine chemicals — all petroleum-based, synthetic food dyes — in as soon as 18 months. Mr. Kennedy has…