Music: Nate Smith — ‘Big Fish’ ft. säje
‘The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city’
CNN reports: President Donald Trump posted a meme on social media Saturday saying that Chicago “will find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” as the city’s officials brace for an immigration crackdown. “I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the post reads. Trump signed an executive order Friday to rebrand the Pentagon as the “Department of War.” The post includes what appears to…
The Epstein cover-up is an affront to American democracy
Rebecca Solnit writes: Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known…
Trump’s attack on Fed Governor Lisa Cook is an attack on Black women
Anna Gifty writes: On August 20, news broke that Governor Lisa Cook is being probed for “mortgage fraud” by Attorney General Bondi. Since then, the president has issued multiple statements about his unprecedented plans to fire Governor Cook, and a criminal investigation of her has been officially launched by the Department of Justice. It’s clear one of the primary reasons the president wants to oust Governor Lisa Cook is because of his fixation on interest rate cuts. He sees her…
Trump breaks from RFK Jr. on vaccines: ‘Pure and simple, they work’
Axios reports: President Trump said he’s supportive of vaccines on Friday, breaking with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Why it matters: Kennedy has faced widespread criticism for his new vaccine mandates and staffing shake-up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Driving the news: Trump was asked Friday during an Oval Office meeting about Kennedy’s vaccine mandate changes, which include limiting which children are eligible for vaccines. “I think you have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated,”…
Trump’s former surgeon general calls for RFK Jr. to be fired
CNN reports: Jerome Adams, who served as US surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first administration, is calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be fired as controversy continues to swirl over his handling of vaccine approvals. When asked by CNN’s Victor Blackwell on Saturday if Trump should fire Kennedy, Adams said, “I absolutely believe that he should for the sake of the nation and the sake of his legacy.” Adams’ comments come after a…
A map to a place that no longer exists
Abdullah Hany Daher writes: In Gaza, the landscape changes faster than memory can keep up. Every neighborhood carries its own scars, some fresh, some already fading into dust. Places once familiar become unrecognizable overnight; streets you walked yesterday may not be there tomorrow. On this shifting ground, home is not just a structure. It is a fragile anchor to a previous version of life, one that can vanish without warning. Losing this place means losing the map inside you. I…
Scientists transform plastic waste into efficient carbon dioxide capture materials
University of Copenhagen: Chemists at the University of Copenhagen have developed a method to convert plastic waste into a climate solution for efficient and sustainable CO2 capture. This is killing two birds with one stone as they address two of the world’s biggest challenges: plastic pollution and the climate crisis. The work is published in the journal Science Advances. As CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere keep rising regardless of years of political intentions to limit emissions, the world’s oceans are…
Music: Nate Smith — ‘Magic Dance’ ft. Lionel Loueke, Michael League
The overwhelming evidence that the Supreme Court is on Trump’s team
Ian Millhiser writes: Last month, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dropped an inflammatory allegation on most of her colleagues. On August 21, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling order that required researchers, who claim that the Trump administration illegally cut off their federal grants, to navigate a convoluted procedural maze in two different courts. Jackson labeled this decision “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist.” Calvinball, an ever-changing game featured in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, “has only one rule: There…
Graphite, the Israeli spyware acquired by ICE
El País reports: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has reactivated a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded spyware company whose products can hack any cell phone. The agreement includes a fully configured software package, including licensing, hardware, training, and ongoing maintenance. The original contract with Paragon was signed in September 2024 during the Biden administration, but was put on hold after reports emerged that the technology, known as Graphite, had been misused abroad. Biden’s March…
Republican senators’ views of Kennedy are souring
The Hill reports: Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies. GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts…
Trump is claiming the authority to tell the military to summarily kill people
Charlie Savage writes: By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power. Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules. The police arrest criminal suspects for prosecution and cannot instead simply gun…
Renaming the Defense Department is a pathetic (and expensive) stunt
Tom Nichols writes: In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. That name was good enough for Truman, who served in combat in World War I and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And it was good enough for President Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander, who…
The multiple factions that make up MAGA
Asha Rangappa writes: It’s tempting to think of MAGA as a single movement, but it’s really a composite of several factions with parallel (and occasionally conflicting) agendas in play. That’s why it’s so hard to get a handle on what, exactly, is going on — especially when there are so many things going on at once. Ever since the Musk takeover of government in Trump 2.1 (where is he now, btw?), I have been meaning to map out the different…
Decision-making far more widely distributed across the brain than previously thought, study finds
Live Science reports: Researchers have completed the first-ever activity map of a mammalian brain in a groundbreaking duo of studies, and it has rewritten scientists’ understanding of how decisions are made. The project, involving a dozen labs and data from over 600,000 individual mouse brain cells, covered areas representing over 95% of the brain. Findings from the research, published in two papers in the journal Nature, suggest that decision-making involves far more of the brain than previously thought. The mammoth…