Perhaps what was most significant in the debate at the US Supreme Court Wednesday morning, during oral arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—a major case over whether a state can unilaterally cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding—is what wasn’t said. Nobody in the courtroom argued that the doctors and nurses at […]

In early 2015, the California Department of Public Health identified a case of measles in an 11-year-old who had recently traveled to Disneyland. Within a month, at least 125 US residents were stricken with the disease. About a third of them had visited the Magic Kingdom theme park, many were unvaccinated, and the outbreak spread […]

Just a few months ago, Americans’ optimism about the economy was on the rise. The stock market boomed after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and measures of business confidence rose. But all the positive sentiment came with an asterisk: It assumed that Trump would not follow through on his campaign promise to dramatically raise […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Department of Transportation has ordered a review of federal funding for bike lanes and plans to target recent projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The move, outlined in a department memo […]

After all the public groveling and taxpayer-funded trips to Mar-a-Lago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams appears to have successfully prostrated himself to freedom. A federal judge on Wednesday permanently dismissed the wide-ranging corruption charges brought against him. “We can never allow this to happen to another innocent American,” Adams said shortly after the dismissal […]

In 2024, Brittany Charlton achieved what she now calls “one of [her] main career aspirations”: the launch of a research center at Harvard University’s medical school focused on LGBTQ health. Opening the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence had been a goal for Charlton, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public […]

Last Friday, the Trump administration canceled a contract that funded legal representation for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors who had crossed into the United States. In a memo sent by the Interior Department, dozens of non-profits were told to cease their legal representation work under the contract with the Department of Health and Human Services(HHS), and […]

I think The Pitt is the best television show I’ve ever seen. That’s perhaps not quite the paean that it appears—I mostly use the TV to watch sports, and there have been long periods when, following overlong exposure, I haven’t watched it at all. But this winter, I’ve been camped out with my wife at […]

Elon Musk has a simple diagnosis of what’s ailing America: It’s being destroyed by empathy. In a long interview with Joe Rogan, in numerous tweets, and possibly even in his sleep, Musk has argued that “empathy” is a “suicidal” trait that is a driving force behind civilizational extinction. It is time, he believes, for “the […]

For abortion rights advocate Lizz Winstead, her work has never felt more urgent. But her path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and eventually as the co-creator of The Daily Show, which redefined television by deftly combining comedy and politics.  “I kept getting increasingly unnerved […]

The request from child welfare authorities seemed harmless enough: Order a newborn drug test. Dr. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns and her hospital colleagues had done it countless times before. This time, however, the request gave the doctor pause. A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that […]

“Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me recently, as he warned about the potential fallout from the $25 million that the world’s wealthiest person spent trying to flip a state Supreme Court seat. In the first major statewide election since Donald […]

On Tuesday, MAGA Rep. Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet […]

Chris Milligan arrived in Myanmar in 2012 with a mandate: Help repair diplomatic relations with the southeast Asian country by reopening its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission.  By that point, Milligan had worked for the USAID for more than two decades—a tenure that included working on reconstruction in Baghdad following the Iraq […]

On Tuesday, in a series of emails sent at 5 a.m. Eastern Time, all employees—around 20—of the federal Administration for Community Living’s (ACL) Center for Policy and Evaluation were laid off. This follows the news last week that ACL, a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for key issues around disability […]

On March 17, Elon Musk appeared on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast and falsely alleged that Democrats were giving undocumented immigrants fraudulent access to programs like Social Security and Medicare to lure them to the US.   “By using entitlement fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk […]

On Tuesday, thousands of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta received early morning emails asking them to resign. The centers affected included those working on reproductive health, chronic disease, occupational safety, birth defects, smoking, tuberculosis, asthma and air quality, accidental and intentional injury, and prevention of violence and prevention of […]

In the nearly three years since the US Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion, grassroots abortion funds and advocates have facilitated care for thousands of patients living in states where abortion is banned, helping them find providers in other parts of the country, organize their travel, and pay some or all of the […]

For Donald Trump, TruthSocial, his unsuccessful and money-losing Twitter competitor, has mainly been a place to retreat to when banned from the former, and a megaphone to trumpet his many opinions on his enemies, golf, and the music of Paul Anka. But the company that owns TruthSocial, Trump Media & Technology Group, has also been […]

Rep. Andy Ogles has achieved a difficult feat: In a GOP House caucus known for sycophancy, the second-term Tennessee Republican has become President Donald Trump’s most cloying lackey. Since January, Ogles has introduced a bill to “Make Greenland Great Again,” moved to amend the Constitution so Trump (but not Barack Obama) can run for a […]