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In 1957, the United States had its “Sputnik moment.”
Ada County is about to get its third major national-interest trial in a little more than two years. And while the county’s experience with the trials of Lori Vallow Daybell in 2023 and Chad Daybell in 2024 were valuable, the upcoming trial of Bryan Kohberger promises to be of even higher interest. And based on a recent media briefing call with District Judge James Cawthon, the Ada County ...
The recent Blue Origin space mission, and its all-female crew, faced widespread criticism for their rocket’s climate impact. Although the purported mission of Blue Origin is to “restore and sustain Earth,” a few minutes in space is known to release more planet-warming carbon dioxide than 1 billion people will in their entire lifetime.
In November, when “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiered Saturday on HBO – an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last month, “a feeling of nowness.”
When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him.
Amid the relentless chaos in Washington – tariffs, trade war, terminally rising deficits – at least one sensible idea has recently emerged: The federal government wants to free up more land to build homes. It’s a great ambition. The devil, as ever, will be in the details.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent found himself in an unexpected position Friday morning, facing a challenging question from – of all people – a Fox News anchor.
The Trump administration is working to secure the borders and deport criminal aliens from the country. So far, the very blunt criteria being used is that anyone who has broken any law, even something as benign as a speeding ticket, may place them at risk of deportation. Such a chaotic approach is creating anxiety not only amongst undocumented immigrants, but all visa and green card holders, ...
In late April, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expands the federal government’s power over local and state police. The order is a recipe for abuse. The return to the overt embrace of mass incarceration through expanded funding and other support for police and prisons, coupled with the divisive underlying rhetoric of law-abiding citizens versus “dangerous criminals,” is ...
If there is one lesson President Donald Trump is learning during the first four months of his second term, it’s that talking about peace isn’t the same as fostering it. In Ukraine and Gaza, host to two of the most intractable wars in the world, the president is striking out. The self-professed master dealmaker devoted considerable time on the campaign trail trumpeting his ambitions for a more ...
As soon as Cardinal Dominique Mamberti stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica and declared, “I announce to you a great joy: We have a pope!” the just-elected Pope Leo XIV of Chicago was bathed in both joyous surprise and rank misinformation. His past and present were mangled and fabricated online. You could even find what claimed to be a New York Times story about his being a founding ...
Boeing has a new reform-minded leader after years of turmoil, a resolved machinists strike and a new contract to deliver up to 210 widebody aircraft to Qatar Airways. The aircraft manufacturer’s future is looking up, despite uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff gambit. But not all is forgiven. A grim shadow over the company remains: the two 737 MAX8 ...
In his third phone call with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump once again bowed to the Russian leader over ending Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The great dealmaker let the Kremlin boss set all the terms. Trump’s mishandling of Putin was well summed up in an interview I did (before Monday’s Trump-Putin phone call) with the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, one of the ...
In his third phone call with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump once again bowed to the Russian leader over ending Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The great dealmaker let the Kremlin boss set all the terms. Trump’s mishandling of Putin was well summed up in an interview I did (before Monday’s Trump-Putin phone call) with the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, one of the ...
The budget bill that Republicans are currently trying to push through the House includes steep cuts to the two largest programs that help low-income Americans: Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Part of the rationale for these reductions, aside from making space for tax cuts, seems to be that using public money to help low-income people is wasteful and inefficient.
In the New York Times this weekend, Katie J.M. Baker described a fundraising pitch that the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that gave us Project 2025, made for a campaign to crush a subversive movement that threatens “America itself.”
It’s never a great time to purge millions of Americans from critical safety-net services. But if we are indeed barreling toward recession, as many economists predict, now is an especially bad time.
If you watch HBO’s “The Last of Us,” you see how a pandemic didn’t destroy the world – failure to communicate did. Trust collapsed. Institutions froze. And the people paid the price.
In 2022, after I wrote a column arguing that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection, I had a bunch of conversations and at least one cable TV debate with Democrats who thought I was wrong. I don’t remember there being much difference between what these Democrats said publicly and privately; I certainly wasn’t hearing off-the-record whispers about Biden’s decline. Instead, officials and pundits I spoke to seemed convinced that it would be crazy for the party to give up the advantages of incumbency, that a primary risked creating nasty fissures among various Democratic factions, and, most relevantly, that Biden’s legislative successes proved he was still up to the job.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the MAGA ideology is how often it fulfills the left-wing policy wish list. The latest example is a proposal for so-called MAGA accounts, which House Republicans are considering as part of their $4 trillion tax bill.
