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For the past decade there’s been a debate, among people who don’t like Donald Trump, about whether he’s a fascist.
Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make. Minneapolis, where last week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.
The auto industry is headed back to where it should have stayed in the quest to put a cleaner fleet on the road: hybrids. Automakers are rapidly backing away from plans to fully electrify their offerings, due to an easing of fuel economy and emissions mandates by the Trump administration and continued resistance from consumers. But that doesn’t mean they are totally abandoning their green ...
In the days since the Trump administration has doubled down on its beef with U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, announcing plans to demote the retired Navy captain for reminding members of the military that they must refuse illegal orders, Kelly has done what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth probably hoped he wouldn’t: keep talking.
It’s been a bad year for the isolationist right. From Tehran to Caracas, President Donald Trump is flexing U.S. military might on the world stage. This clearly is not the foreign policy they expected when Trump returned to the White House.
Most Americans like to believe that this is a nation of laws, where justice is blind to power and status. But that is a bit of self-flattery. The truth is that as a country we have often found one reason or another to let the powerful escape the consequences of their actions.
There are good reasons to celebrate the downfall of the tyrant Nicolás Maduro, as so many Venezuelan exiles did when they heard the news Saturday morning. Not among those reasons: An America that seizes Venezuela’s oil assets while keeping what’s left of Maduro’s odious regime in place.
I watched the video of a mother being gunned down in her car by federal agents on a residential Minneapolis street and was told by my government to believe she was a domestic terrorist.
This month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago is scheduled to announce whether the hands of its famous Doomsday Clock will move closer to midnight. It feels like a safe bet that Armageddon is drawing nearer today than it has in a long, long time. The Doomsday Clock started almost 80 years ago, when physicists who developed the Bomb grew alarmed at its use ...
Despite early appearances, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela doesn’t seem to be a regime change operation. After all, America is leaving the regime, now headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power. As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.
Pics or it didn’t happen, as they say, meaning if you don’t capture a moment in photos or video and then share it online, what’s the point? We’ve written extensively on the growing societal obsession with phones and social media, specifically in regard to young people, pointing to both the short- and long-term harms this problem causes. Anxiety, depression, learning loss, isolation. But on New ...
America’s education system is in historic decline. According to the latest report card on 12th graders, students finishing high school have fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago.
In the days before Christmas, as measles, whooping cough and influenza continued to spread and surge across the country, the Department of Health and Human Services came perilously close to scrapping the nation’s long-standing list of recommended childhood vaccines.
Best. Political year. Ever. Amirite? For all of us who rolled into the year wondering “How much more chaotic could a second Trump term be?” 2025 did not disappoint.
I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”
Welcome to the 21st edition of the Sidney Awards. Every year, I give out extremely nonlucrative prizes, in honor of philosopher Sidney Hook, celebrating some of the best nonfiction essays of the year, especially the ones published in medium-size and small magazines. I figure this is a good time to take a step back from the Trump circus and read some broader reflections on life. The Sidneys are here to help.
This is the season when I customarily argue that the year just ending has been the best in human history.
As many readers know, I’m on a mission to see all my music heroes live before they depart the stage for good – and to urge you to do the same. This year, my message is: Hurry up, because the curtains are closing.
When pundits and media talking heads warn that the American family is in decline, what they’re really saying is that it looks drastically different today than it did even five years ago.
It’s fitting that the Oxford University Press’ 2025 word of the year is “rage bait,” because I’m convinced that’s the only way to describe the trend predictions for next year.
