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It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her last novel, Americanah, to overwhelming acclaim. In the time since, she’s delivered a viral TED talk on feminism, been sampled by Beyoncé, been denounced by students for anti-trans speech, and denounced those students in turn for cancel culture. Now, at last, Adichie has finally released […]

Louisiana v. Callais, a case about whether Louisiana’s congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander, should be one of the easiest cases the justices have heard in many years. That’s because less than two years ago, the Supreme Court decided another gerrymandering case, known as Allen v. Milligan (2023), which by Louisiana’s lawyers’ own admission […]

The question of what happens if the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order has hung over the United States since President Donald Trump’s second term began. If that happens, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now, that long-awaited crisis may be upon us. On Saturday, Trump issued a proclamation claiming the authority to […]

Over the weekend, the stakes of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts reached a new level after the White House invoked an 18th-century legal authority to expand its powers. A federal judge attempted to block the removal of hundreds of alleged gang members, but the administration carried on with the deportations, arguing the order came too […]

What makes something an “American” crime? It’s a question that’s inadvertently surfaced in true crime entertainment lately.  The trend started with the twin pillars of O.J. Simpson television projects in 2016 — American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Ryan Murphy’s fictionalized account of the 1995 trial, and the documentary series O.J.: Made in America. […]

For a chance at a youthful complexion, you could slap rendered cow fat on your face, rub snail slime into your wrinkles, or get a salmon sperm facial right after a microneedling treatment.  You read that right: These are things actual people are doing. Influencers, celebrities, and everyday consumers alike are touting the youthful glow […]

Throughout his first term as president, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance that in his view allows other countries who don’t spend enough on their own defense to get a free ride on US security guarantees. His former national security adviser John Bolton has written that he believes Trump would have followed […]

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and […]

A Vox reader asks: If we have “separation of church and state,” why do we give religious schools tax exemption? How come religious schools get government funding? Why was Trump allowed to campaign on religion and publicly sell Bibles? Why does it say “In God We Trust” on our money? Why is “under God” in […]

The buzzwords “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are everywhere right now, but you can’t be blamed if you don’t quite have a handle on what they mean. The origins of DEI date back to the civil rights era — but recently “DEI” has been thrown around with regard to everything from plane crashes to Super Bowl […]

In about three short months, the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign aid, threatening millions of lives and livelihoods around the world. After initially pausing all US foreign aid spending for 90 days, President Donald Trump handed over the reins to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The damage as DOGE went […]

For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks and lockdown orders. Not me, though.  I was a young reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong in early spring 2003, when we started getting reports about a strange new sickness […]

Four years ago, Richard Hanania was a little-known right-wing intellectual, one of many posters building a brand with tweets and Substack posts attacking “wokeness” and other conservative bugbears.  But in the middle of 2021, one of his ideas took off. In an article called “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Hanania argued that many […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. What’s the latest? After canceling $400 million in federal grants for Columbia University last week, Trump officials sent a letter demanding the school make sweeping changes to its policies and […]

President Donald Trump has put millions of lives at risk by shutting down most of America’s humanitarian and development work abroad. After freezing almost all spending on foreign aid, the administration this week finished its purge at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), announcing that 83 percent of its programs are being axed. But […]

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for “free expression.” Six short years later, Zuckerberg’s company is trying to muzzle yet another whistleblower — one who happens to have written a book full of […]

The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.  It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”  Things escalated from […]

The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it’s starting the process of undoing 31 environmental regulations, including a ruling that’s foundational to US climate policy. But undoing any regulation is a cumbersome process, and with the climate rule in particular, the EPA may end up painting itself into a corner.  The big target here […]

From the start, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been extremely fragile. Since the agreement took effect in January, Israel has only escalated its raids in the West Bank, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians — the highest level of displacement there since the occupation began in 1967. And after the first phase of the […]

People have known for centuries that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. The short-term physical effects on cognition and motor function speak for themselves. The longer-term physical consequences of abusing alcohol — liver damage, jaundice, and cancer — have long been impossible to ignore. So why, in that case, has there been a widespread […]

Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the “personal assistant” realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at.  You can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude “order me a […]

Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, […]

In the past week, Donald Trump announced that he would buy a Tesla and advertised the company’s vehicles at an event that turned the White House lawn into a showroom benefitting his ally, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He also said that vandalizing Tesla cars — as some demonstrators have done to protest Musk — will […]

Candidate Donald Trump promised an economic renaissance. President Donald Trump is delivering economic turmoil.  The US stock market, once the only measure of economic performance that the president cared about, has seen a significant selloff amid fears of an impending recession — and the US is underperforming relative to its global peers. Other indicators look brighter, […]