GOP redistricting power grab may turn out to be dummymandering

GOP redistricting power grab may turn out to be dummymandering

Texas state lawmakers board a bus following a press conference at the DuPage County Democratic Party headquarters in Carol Stream, Ill., on Aug. 3, 2025. Scott Olson/Getty Images By Charlie Hunt, Boise State University The gerrymandering drama in Texas – and beyond – has continued to unfold after Democratic state legislators fled the state. The Democrats want to prevent the Republican-controlled government from enacting a mid-decade gerrymander aimed at giving Republicans several more seats in Congress. The Texas GOP move…

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The ‘greatest con artist in American history’ cashes in on the presidency. How much has he made?

The ‘greatest con artist in American history’ cashes in on the presidency. How much has he made?

David D. Kirkpatrick writes: At a press conference on January 11, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump explained for the first time how he would handle the many conflicts of interest that his business empire posed for his new role. His company, the Trump Organization, collected money from all over the world for luxury condos, hotel rentals, development projects, and club memberships, and he had made deals that put his name on everything from mail-order steaks to get-rich-quick courses. Could citizens trust…

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The excitement around AI chatbots is being driven by the people who stand to profit from promoting them

The excitement around AI chatbots is being driven by the people who stand to profit from promoting them

Mat Honan writes: My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something revolutionary. “GPT-5 is, above all else,” Grace concludes, “a refined product.” This is pretty much in line with my colleague Will Heaven’s recent argument that the latest model releases have been a bit like smartphone releases: Increasingly,…

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Avrum Burg: Israel is committing crimes against humanity ‘under the false banner of our Jewish identity’

Avrum Burg: Israel is committing crimes against humanity ‘under the false banner of our Jewish identity’

Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset, writes: There is no single definition that defines all who identify themselves as Jewish. Is Jewishness a religion? A gene? A culture? A nationality? A legal status? In the confusion of these overlapping and contradicting identities, modern Israel has forged its own unprecedented synthesis; a fusion of five elements never fully welded in Jewish history: religion, land, power, language, and sovereignty. The product of this Israeli crucible is a cultural mutation that dares…

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Glenn Kirschner & Lev Parnas: Trump is losing power and becoming more desperate to distract from Epstein

Glenn Kirschner & Lev Parnas: Trump is losing power and becoming more desperate to distract from Epstein

  Donald Trump is abusing the Department of Justice as his personal police to extract revenge against his enemies, silence his critics, and distract from the Epstein scandal. It’s not working. Wajahat Ali invited former federal prosecutor and Justice Matters host Glenn Kirschner to break down how utterly abnormal, inappropriate, and dangerous Trump’s abuse of the DOJ is, and why we cannot normalize his active steps towards authoritarianism. Later on, they were joined by former Trump fixer Lev Parnas, who…

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The FBI as we knew it is gone

The FBI as we knew it is gone

Asha Rangappa writes: In February, I wrote a piece for Substack called “A Battle for the Soul of the FBI.” That battle is (pretty much) over, and I’m sad to say that the FBI — at least the one we knew — lost. Weirdly, I’m writing this on the same evening that William Webster, the FBI’s third director, died at the age of 101, a little more than a century after the FBI’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover,…

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The Supreme Court has played a leading role in undermining democracy

The Supreme Court has played a leading role in undermining democracy

The New York Times reports: If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas, they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude. In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the…

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Palantir and other companies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenues

Palantir and other companies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenues

The Guardian reports: The tech, surveillance and private prison providers arming Donald Trump’s massive expansion and weaponization of immigration enforcement are running a victory lap after reporting their latest financial results. Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration’s crackdown on immigrants. “Well, as usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest about…

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The secret tactics behind Stop the Steal and other right-wing disinformation campaigns

The secret tactics behind Stop the Steal and other right-wing disinformation campaigns

Caroline Orr Bueno writes: A sophisticated strategy is playing out in plain sight that few outside of digital war rooms truly understand or even notice. It doesn’t require hacking servers or bribing tech executives. It doesn’t even break any rules. It simply requires understanding exactly how algorithms work — and turning them into accomplices. I call this tactic the Feedback Loop Coup. Last week, I introduced the concept of Reverse Algorithmic Capture — a tactic used to force platforms to rewrite their…

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Intellectual humility is linked to less political and religious polarization across the board

Intellectual humility is linked to less political and religious polarization across the board

PsyPost reports: A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology indicates that people who score higher in intellectual humility tend to show less political and religious polarization — regardless of whether they are Republican, Democrat, Christian, or atheist. This link held across different measures, including both self-reported attitudes and behavioral indicators of hostility toward ideological outgroups, and often remained significant even after accounting for the strength of a person’s beliefs. Intellectual humility refers to the recognition that one’s…

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This is what the British government calls ‘terrorism’

This is what the British government calls ‘terrorism’

The Guardian reports: More than 450 people have been arrested in central London at the largest demonstration relating to Palestine Action since the group was proscribed as a terrorist organisation. The Metropolitan police said they had drawn officers from other forces to help form a “significant policing presence” in the capital before the planned event, which was anticipated to result in large numbers of people being detained. By Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people had gathered in Parliament Square for a…

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The uncomfortable fact about the stock market’s historic run is that no one is sure why it’s happening

The uncomfortable fact about the stock market’s historic run is that no one is sure why it’s happening

Rogé Karma writes: Can anything stop the stock market? The U.S. economy recently weathered the worst pandemic in 100 years, the worst inflation in 40 years, and the highest interest rates in 20 years. Yet from 2019 through 2024, the S&P 500 grew by an average of nearly 20 percent a year, about double its historical average rate. Despite President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies, which include the highest tariffs since the 19th century, the market is already up by…

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Hegseth promotes abolition of women’s voting rights

Hegseth promotes abolition of women’s voting rights

The Associated Press reports: The man who oversees the nation’s military reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote. The extraordinary repost on X from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, made Thursday night, illustrates his deep and personal connection to a Christian nationalist pastor with extreme views on the role of religion and women. In the post, Hegseth commented on an almost seven-minute-long report by CNN examining Doug…

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Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

The New York Times reports: In 2023, as Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, prepared to plead guilty to U.S. money-laundering violations, he fashioned a crash course for himself on clemency politics, reading books about business tycoons who had received pardons, including Marc Rich and Michael Milken. Two years later, Mr. Zhao, a Chinese-born billionaire, is out of prison and mounting a pardon campaign of his own, backed by a sophisticated influence operation worthy of those…

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