Favorite Local police departments use Flock cameras to track license plates. ICE uses Palantir software to track and round up immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war department uses Claude to bomb Iran. The U.S. government spends billions employing private corporations to obtain mountains of data — and the surveillance space is only getting more privatized…
Favorite President Donald Trump has refused to attend the ceremony at Ground Zero marking the 25th anniversary of the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center — reportedly because he wanted to deliver a speech, and the annual event has long barred remarks by politicians. Trump, a native New Yorker who has often employed…
Favorite People outside Turning Point USA’s headquarters commemorate the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 20, 2025, in Phoenix, Ariz. Photo: Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images Charlie Kirk will live forever — at least online. In the year since he was gunned down at an event at Utah Valley University, the Turning Point USA founder has…
Favorite A quarter century after the September 11 attacks emboldened then-President George W. Bush to launch the “war on terror,” many Americans might like to think they’re wiser than the politicians and pundits who unleashed a flood of anti-Muslim hatred and eroded civil liberties through warrantless wiretaps and racist deportation campaigns. But some of the…
Favorite President Donald Trump’s Justice Department took the side of tech giant OpenAI in its court battle with The Intercept and other media companies over the company’s use of others’ creative work to train its artificial intelligence tools. In a federal court filing in New York, the Justice Department argued that the U.S. has a…
Favorite Drone warfare, for many years, meant mostly one thing: a U.S. Predator drone, a missile-armed winged lawnmower in the sky, stalked a single target and then assassinated him. Or someone, at least. Top-secret Pentagon documents showed that 90 percent of those killed during one campaign in Afghanistan were not the primary targets, according to a…
Favorite It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently…
Favorite Fiction The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005)This is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. The hit from Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino, who died last month, puts a dark twist on a story about loyalty and the obligations that come with it. This was my…
Favorite Outside the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, a shrine of stuffed animals sits between the garden center and the pharmacy. There are teddy bears, elephants, and kangaroos with babies in their pouches. There is a Bluey plush toy — Kohen’s favorite cartoon — along with matchbox cars,…
Favorite Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, Democratic voters have expressed dissatisfaction with their party over what many view as an inability to stand up to the president and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction with the establishment has manifested in primaries in coastal cities across the country, where the progressive movement appears to…
