In a brazen move, Republicans in Texas have set out to redraw the state’s congressional map — an effort to boost President Donald Trump and the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to respond in kind, gerrymandering blue California to give Democrats a lift and offset the Lone Star lunge for power.

That would ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif.  — In fighting President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom reminds me of actor Gene Hackman’s hard-nosed character in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Hackman plays a take-no-prisoners FBI agent, Rupert Anderson, who is investigating the disappearance of three young civil rights workers in racially segregated 1964 Mississippi...Read more

On July 11, the U.S. State Department imposed sweeping layoffs as part of a large-scale reorganization. Why should this matter to you? Violence is surging across the globe — 2024 saw the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in over 70 years. In our globalized world, instability affects us whether we like it or not.

This means now is ...Read more

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release of once-secret work documents has produced new clarity on what U.S. intel elites decided Russia did and didn’t do to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

She deserves our gratitude. Thanks to Gabbard’s decision to disclose a number of carefully redacted but readable work ...Read more

New York City’s election has gotten a lot of attention, and ranked choice voting is a big part of the reason why.

Heads turned when 33-year-old state legislator Zohran Mamdani knocked off Andrew Cuomo, a former governor from one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent families. The earliest polls for the mayoral primary this winter found ...Read more

There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.

In elementary school, "Good Times" was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter's portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his ...Read more

The unqualified director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is again proving her unfitness by claiming that former President Barack Obama and his administration engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” regarding the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In Gabbard’s retelling, based on some ...Read more

The nationwide laugh fest over the video of the kiss-cam couple ducking for cover at a Coldplay concert outside Boston — was that bad or good?

The video of the canoodling couple needed only minutes to go viral, especially after internet sleuths identified the pair as Andy Byron, then chief executive of the East Coast tech firm Astronomer, and...Read more

On hearing of the Continental Army’s pivotal victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, John Sinclair told Adam Smith, “The British nation must be ruined.” As Sinclair recalled, the author of The Wealth of Nations (published the year before) urged him to calm down. “Be assured, my young friend, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.�...Read more

Earlier this year, I glommed onto a trend that is sweeping women of a certain age in the U.S,: I became a woman who lifts.

Admittedly, describing myself as such feels like an overstatement of my fitness level. Seven months in, and I still can’t do a pull-up, while my dumbbell incline press tops out at 40 pounds. But I am a regular at a women-...Read more

Humans have always had an emotional relationship with predators. We both revere and demonize them. We buy more than 100 million teddy bears annually for our children, while 50,000 real bears are hunted yearly in North America. Cultural fables and fairy tales simultaneously vilify and celebrate predators — from “The Lion King” to the Three ...Read more

Amid a string of setbacks for clean energy — tariffs, the Trump administration, Tesla’s declining sales numbers— California officials delivered a big win last month, approving the nation’s largest solar-plus-storage project.

Planned for 14 square miles in Fresno County, the project will provide up to 1,150 megawatts of solar energy and ...Read more

What do a sausage maker and an insurance giant have in common? A growing concern about the divisions fracturing American society — and a willingness to do something about it.

At Johnsonville, recent research with The Harris Poll found that 82% of Americans agree there’s too much outrage in the country and wish we could “turn down the ...Read more

If a budget is a mirror of values, what does the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) say about America?

On July 4, President Donald Trump signed into law Congressional Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill.” If you held up the bill to a mirror, most Americans would probably say that what they saw in the reflection was anything but beautiful.

A ...Read more

A slew of Democratic attorneys general has sued the Trump administration over changes to Obamacare enrollment policies intended to minimize fraud. Shocker alert: Nevada AG Aaron Ford is among the litigants.

The new rules make modest reforms to the health insurance marketplaces established in response to the Affordable Care Act. Among the ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Chris Newman was carrying two bags when we recently sat down for breakfast at Homegirl Café in downtown Los Angeles.

One was a newish satchel holding his laptop and papers for the cases he's working on, which happen to involve some of the most infamous moments in the Trump administration's deportation deluge.

Newman was co-...Read more

A few years ago, I went hiking through a scenic forested area of Virginia, hoping for a few screen-free moments of tranquility in nature. I emerged from the woods with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and ehrlichiosis courtesy of tick bites.

Although I’ll be taking precautions during future such forays, there is one species I might not break out...Read more

While colleges across the nation are adapting their curricula to harness the power of generative AI, U.S. medical schools remain dangerously behind.

Most students entering medicine today will graduate without ever being trained to use GenAI tools effectively. That must change. To prepare tomorrow’s doctors – and protect tomorrow’s ...Read more

When the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” a theater piece for singers, dancers and musicians, was performed in the Opera House. Dignitaries included Rose Kennedy, Eunice Shriver, Sen. Edward Kennedy and his wife, Joan, along with artists such as Aaron Copland, Helen Hayes and Isaac Stern.

It...Read more