In the middle of the night, on Sept. 30, a federal military-style assault was deployed on a civilian apartment building in Chicago's South Shore district. Without warning or warrants, residents of the complex, mostly U.S. citizens of color, many of them children, were forcibly taken from their homes, zip-tied, and detained for hours.

“They ...Read more

Artificial intelligence is killing Wikipedia.

The volunteer-run online encyclopedia just issued a stark warning: AI is exploiting the site’s data, siphoning off its traffic, and threatening its future. Contrary to what you were taught in middle school, Wikipedia is remarkably accurate. It’s used by doctors and professional fact-checkers. ...Read more

Headlines have been full of misunderstood and misrepresented claims about data centers.

If you only looked at this reporting, you would only see them as big, concrete boxes filled with computers that consume too much electricity and water. That picture misses the bigger story. For forward-looking cities and towns, data centers can be the ...Read more

A friend once complained to me that people would sigh and roll their eyes when she used a credit card to pay for her $3 coffee. This was about a decade ago, and I admit, at the time I silently judged her. What kind of psychopath, I thought to myself, forces everyone in line to wait for their coffee while her credit card transaction is approved? ...Read more

Gen Z calls itself the climate generation. We post infographics, hop on Lime bikes instead of calling Ubers, offset flights we still take for weekend getaways and stage walkouts with reusable bottles in hand. But somewhere between our climate optimism and the dopamine hit of another endless scroll, we became part of the problem we were left to ...Read more

Recently, in our roles with nonprofit groups devoted to protecting human rights and reproductive justice, we interviewed an advocate who supported a pregnant high school senior through the difficult process of getting judicial permission to have an abortion without involving her parents, known as judicial bypass.

The teenage student knew that ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One takeaway from last week’s elections: The role model for California Gov. Gavin Newsom as he runs for president should be New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Actually, Mamdani should be emulated not only by Newsom but by Democrats running for office anywhere.

Neither Newsom, of course, nor any candidate ...Read more

Even though their farms account for only 12% of the world’s farmland, they grow a third of the world’s food, and nearly 70% of Africa’s. They are smallholder farmers, many of them women, and they are facing the most severe impacts of climate change, yet they produce enough to literally feed billions. At COP30, the realities of smallholder ...Read more

At a hearing before the Supreme Court last week, a majority of the justices thankfully expressed real skepticism over Donald Trump’s bizarre and clearly illegal effort to utilize an emergency economic powers provision that doesn’t even mention tariffs to institute random tariff rates on pretty much every country in the world, shaking the ...Read more

Even a federal shutdown can’t keep the national debt from continuing to spiral out of control.

The nation’s debt now tops $38 trillion. It’s an unfathomable amount of money, so consider this: Every citizen’s share of that debt is more than $110,000. If you look only at taxpayers, the amount is more than $328,000.

Another way to view ...Read more

Could Tuesday’s elections and Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the legality of Donald Trump’s tariffs spell the beginning of the end for White House “truthiness”?

Late-night comic Stephen Colbert coined that term in 2005 to mean, in his words, “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what’s supported by facts.�...Read more

This spring, I couldn’t find my passport. Not quite sure what to do, I reported it as lost on the State Department website.

When you lose a passport, you apply as if you’ve never had one. Here’s the thing: I came to the United States with my family in the mid-1990s, and without a passport, the only proof that I’m a citizen is my ...Read more

A week before California's special election, Gavin Newsom made news by doing something practically unheard of. He told donors to stop sending money to pass Proposition 50.

It was a man-bites-piranha moment — a politician turning away campaign cash?!? — and amounted to a victory lap by California's governor even as the balloting was still ...Read more

Proposition 50 has passed, and with it goes the warm spotlight of never-ending press coverage that aspiring presidential contender Gavin Newsom has enjoyed. What's an ambitious governor to do?

My vote? Take inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who not only pulled America through the Depression, but rebuilt trust in democracy ...Read more

There’s significant evidence that the Biden administration engaged in a scandal on par with Watergate. Democrats hope you don’t notice.

At the end of last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released almost 200 subpoenas from the FBI investigation “Arctic Frost.” Former special counsel Jack Smith and his team ...Read more

President Donald Trump is testing the limits of law. Federal judges issue orders restraining him — on deportations, the use of military force or retaliatory lawsuits against political enemies such as James Comey and the press such as The New York Times— and he simply defies them. Lower courts continue to push back, but the pattern of ...Read more

One thing you can say about the president is that he likes to change things.

He wanted the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America, signing an executive order making it the official name for the federal government. He also signed an executive order changing the highest peak in the nation back to Mount McKinley from Denali. He renamed the ...Read more

When our family visits my mother’s glass-walled room overlooking the backyard and woods, we watch our unofficially “adopted” family of deer hang out in the grass and under the trees. My grandfather, who grew up in the city, was mesmerized by them. My father, coffee in hand, spent countless hours deer-watching before he died at 78. Now, ...Read more

I have spent my career caring for patients with chronic pain, dementia and other conditions that drain not only quality of life but also the healthcare system’s resources. Too often, I’ve prescribed medications that are costly and dangerous and carry high risks of dependency and death.

There is another option many of my patients already use...Read more

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful 272-word speech, later known as the Gettysburg Address, dedicating a new cemetery on the site of the bloody Civil War battlefield. While many schoolchildren used to memorize Lincoln’s speech, few of us today can get beyond “Four score and seven years ago …”

Indeed, in 2024, the ...Read more