As I noted previously, the 2024 Trump transition has been remarkable not just for the breakneck speed of the nominations, but for the reckless choices they’ve made as well. While most incoming administrations would only just now be starting to roll out their first major nominees, Trump has been…

Scientists have discovered that H5N1, the strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus currently spreading in U.S. dairy cows, only needs a single mutation to readily latch on to human cells foun

WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party messed up in the 2024 election, says Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it needs a dramatic course shift t

Zeynep Tufekci Dec. 6, 2024 Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock By Opinion Columnist It started barely minutes after the horrifying news broke that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Bria

Subscriber-only Newsletter The Tilt Voting records suggest Democrats who stayed home were less likely to support her, with no equivalent drop-off in Trump support among Republicans. By Dec. 3, 2024 Ar

Origins A study of a 12,800-year-old skull of a toddler offers a glimpse at how early Americans found food, and how their hunts may have led to a mass extinction. An artist’s impression of early North

N is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate. The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous

It has been an extraordinary week for US politics – and a very depressing couple of days for those such as me who spent hours on the phone to people, trying to persuade them to vote for Kamala Harris

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how

In December 2023, Ndileka Mandela, the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, condemned the rich world for supporting a global system of ‘climate apartheid’. Speaking at the COP28 summit in the United Arab

Personal computers started out simple. So simple that you could just type in programs and run them, save them, and even give them to your friends. But over time, things got more complicated. A lot mor

In a few years, new tech will be hidden under a street on the UCLA campus: When one of the university’s electric buses drives down the road, chargers embedded under the asphalt will wirelessly send it

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best. One F

Jay Graber, Bluesky’s chief executive, said there had been some “growing pains” as new users flooded the site. Credit...via Bluesky The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users sinc

Meet the new Mac mini—for the first time in the last fourteen years, not the same as the old Mac mini. The latest iteration of Apple’s most diminutive Mac really earns that superlative in its newest i

My mom died at the end of June this year. I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I w

Posted on November 8, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi Why is it different? Because the version I was initially thinking to write would mostly have been yell-y, and while I certainly do yell-y well, at the

This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC's special coverage Wednesday. Across the country, people are still making sense of what happened Tuesday. It’s fair to say many Americans, myself included, feel i

In close races, nothing is more important than closing strong. And with four days to go, Donald Trump is most definitely not closing strong. Just look at the last week of his campaign: On Sunday, Trum

Why this is a climate election—even if that hasn’t been apparent on the trail By Andrew Revkin | November 2, 2024 The word 'Vote' around a sun yellow from smoke during the 2020 wildfire season in the

Posted on October 26, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi (Photo adapted from an official White House photo by Lawrence Jackson) This last week the billionaire owners of both the Washington Post and the Los An

Guest Essay Democrats Finally Did What Sherrod Brown Asked For. It Might Be Too Late. Oct. 26, 2024 Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times By Mr. MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica. To re

Gerardo Ramirez flew into Los Angeles from Mexico City on Thursday and was surprised to learn that he couldn’t easily access a rail line from the main airport of a major city — something he’s come to

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web S

It’s a deeply unhealthy habit of mine in late October every four years: Consume election polling like a lifelong cigarette smoker promising himself he’ll have just one more pack, one more ciggy, one m

I know of someone who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a child in the 1990s. When he turned 18, his insurance company notified him that his medication—a kind that

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Reporting Highlights More Bombs: Ambassador Jack Lew urged Wa

I was initially pretty captivated by Notion. Its flexible platform for note-taking, project management, and database creation seemed to offer everything I needed in one neat package. But two issues st

Carla Hall is a graduate of Howard University and a trained chef who has competed on Bravo’s “Top Chef” and “Top Chef: All-Stars.” Kamala Harris and I were in the same class at Howard University, but

For months, speculation has raged in Washington over the future of Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair and face of the Biden administration’s crusade against monopoly power. Overturning deca

When humans want to move fast—barring speed-walking competitions—we pick up our feet. But when birds need to get somewhere quickly, they tend to always keep one foot on the ground, leading to a strang

Prepare to be shocked: At around the time J.D. Vance started dissembling about Haitians eating people’s house pets, a Vance campaign staffer privately spoke with the city manager of Springfield, Ohio,

The Federal Reserve’s long-awaited cut to interest rates may prove a boon to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign as the presidential election enters the home stretch. On Wednesday, the central ban

It’s screen time. The Apple Watch is 10 years old. That’s an incredible milestone in the gadget world — and rarer still when it comes to wearables. Part of me thought Apple might pull out all the stop

Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”: 17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was so long ago that Field Notes hadn’t yet been

Subscriber-only Newsletter Jamelle Bouie JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target Sept. 14, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times By Opinion Columnist You’re readi

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every wee

When you think of a gas-guzzler, what comes to mind is probably a gigantic pickup like the Ram 1500 TRX, which gets a combined 12 miles per gallon, or a sports car like the Ferrari Daytona, which mana

Wild Places, Clean Energy The sites fight climate change and can help with another global crisis: the collapse of nature. But so far, efforts to nurture wildlife habitat have been spotty. A solar farm