Reading archive 2026-01-02

Quest for a drug that lowers an artery-clogging particle nears finish line: A clinical trial will soon reveal whether lowering high levels of lipoprotein(a) can reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Behold, a Democrat who doesn’t preach from the Church of Progressivism: Rep. Jake Auchincloss has an exemplary way of talking about topics that resonate with centrist voters.

Trump says the job market is booming for U.S.-born. The data doesn’t show it.: Immigrants left the labor force in 2025, but U.S.-born workers aren’t enjoying a jobs boom, according to government data and economists.

He exposed myth of the South’s ‘Lost Cause.’ His death shook Richmond.: William J. “Bill” Martin, director of the Valentine museum in Richmond, died after being struck by a car Dec. 27.

These farmers are cutting pollution and fighting hunger — with bacteria: Mariangela Hungria won the 2025 World Food Prize for her work on microbes that feed plants nitrogen, allowing farmers to slash fertilizer costs and pollution.

Longtime MAGA ally Boebert lashes out at Trump over veto: The Colorado Republican said she hopes Trump’s action on a water infrastructure bill benefiting her district “has nothing to do with political retaliation.”

‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump: How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president's loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic [ed. note: she claims to hate the toxic politics but still embrace the toxic policy, but they are the same]

What America Might Look Like With Zero Immigration: The Trump administration's efforts to reduce the foreign-born population are being felt in hospitals and soccer leagues and on Main Streets across the country, with hints of what's to come.

Reading archive 2025-12-31

States made marijuana use legal. Now they should get it off the road.: There’s no breathalyzer test for driving under the influence of cannabis. But there are other options.

U.S. vaccination rates are plunging. Look up where your school stands.: Rocked by pandemic politics, the nation’s shield against infectious disease is shrinking. - "Public health experts argue the U.S. measles outbreaks show why easing vaccine requirements doesn’t always translate into better school attendance. As the South Carolina experience revealed this month, unvaccinated kids are missing school during quarantines, said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first term.

"'That is completely inconsistent with folks who say that their biggest concerns about covid were that we didn’t care about keeping kids in school,' he said."

LSU, a governor and a $91 million lesson in college football’s power: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has long used sports as a political cudgel, but nothing riles up his state like Tigers football.

In Russia, plans to cut mobile internet on New Year’s Eve draw fury: One Russian official called the outage “a break from the endless viewing of unnecessary videos” and urged citizens to deliver holiday greetings in person.

A tiny U.S. territory in the Pacific doubles down on a giant Chinese casino

Kennedy Center Honors ratings tank after Trump takeover: Hosted for the first time by President Donald Trump, the Kennedy Center Honors earned record-low viewership of a little over 3 million.

The quiet rebellion of Black men in quarter-zips: The preppy staple is getting a Black-boy rebrand.

Who needs an election? A bar owner falsely claims a seat already filled.: The man is claiming to occupy the most thankless political office in the city – advisory neighborhood commissioner.

Reading archive 2025-12-30

Byron Donalds faces racist attacks in Florida’s ugly GOP gubernatorial primary

How a landlord responded when tenants formed a union, stopped paying rent: In Kansas City, Missouri, where housing costs are rising at twice the national average, a successful rent strike at one building inspired another across town in what is poised to become a national movement.

As Russia’s war grinds on, its society is fraying: The Kremlin presents the country as strong, united and on an inevitable path to victory, but as peace negotiations drag on, Russian society is deteriorating. - "'Everyone still wants to take Odesa. It’s a common opinion: People want to go to Odesa on vacation again,' Gribova said. 'For us, this is a civil war between Russians and Russians who have forgotten a bit that they are Russians, that’s all.'"

The U.S. may have a secret weapon against rising electricity prices: Most of the year, grid utilization is around 50 percent. Could that be used to lower prices? - "When utilities build more infrastructure — more poles, more wires, more power plants — they also get to profit from those investments. They can’t make a profit from their operating expenses, the cost to keep the existing system running. 'If they were in the apple business, they get paid for planting more trees, not growing more apples,' said Amit Narayan, the co-founder and CEO of GridCARE."

Black-footed ferrets born in Virginia in cloning-research milestone: Eleven kits born this summer at a National Zoo facility are the descendants of ferrets cloned from decades-old frozen cells.

As rumors swirl after political killings, this GOP lawmaker draws a line: Minnesota state senator Julia Coleman knew both Charlie Kirk and Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman. She is fed up with the conspiracy theories around their deaths. - "Coleman sees conspiracies and misinformation trending more on her own side, the political right, but believes the problem transcends partisan loyalties. In Minnesota, traumatized legislators have stayed away from Hortman and Kirk conspiracy theories, and many have been speaking out against them, Coleman said."

I fed my dog vegan kibble for a year. Why the switch is now permanent.: Vegan pet food is gaining human and animal fans alike, as people look to reduce their household’s environmental impact and enhance their pets’ health. - "'As long as you’re feeding your pet a commercial food, you are doing right by your pet,' says Fox. 'This has been researched to death. All that research says that dog food is what’s best for dogs. It’s almost worse for cats, who have very specific needs.'"

Homeland Security seeks emergency demolition of historic buildings in D.C.: DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem, in a memo obtained by The Washington Post, said the buildings “constitute a present risk to life and property.” Preservationists contend no evidence of an emergency exists.

The Truth About Immigration That MAGA Doesn’t Acknowledge: American families rely on immigrants to take care of their children. - "In the first half of this year, Trump's ICE agency made twice as many arrests as it did under the Biden administration during the same period last year. These efforts seem to have created a chilling effect, making many female immigrants scared to show up for work. According to a report from the New America Foundation published earlier this month, the arrests were associated with a loss of about 39,000 foreign-born child-care workers. Meanwhile, 77,000 U.S.-born mothers of kids under 5 dropped out of the workforce."

Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are in trouble. - "The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.

...

"The blood of Confederate soldiers who would never own a slave watered southern fields because they saw slavery as the cornerstone of their social and economic order. The Populists failed to ameliorate the deprivation of the Gilded Age because white laborers who had more in common with their Black counterparts chose the psychological wage offered by Jim Crow over the literal wages that might be earned through brotherhood. The MAGA elite offers a similar fantasy today, though the number of Trump voters who will see a loved one deported or their paycheck dwindle will eclipse by orders of magnitude those who rub shoulders with donors in his new ballroom. 

MAGA's ruling caste will not be as overtly racially circumscribed as in the past. But we can trace its contours in the Trump administration's policy decisions and legal victories, and the Roberts Court's resurrection of the Antebellum Constitution. The path the justices are walking leads to Calhoun's paradise: an America where a class of stateless children can be denied education and medical care; where people of color must carry identification papers if they don't want to be harassed, detained, imprisoned, or worse; where workers can be subject to invidious discrimination without recourse; where the military points guns at the taxpayers who fund it; and where the official ideology of the state is vindicated by elections the ruling party cannot lose. It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.

‘It’s Very Controversial, but I Love Nick Fuentes’ The white-supremacist influencer cast a shadow over Turning Point USA’s annual gathering. - "Young anti-Fuentes attendees I spoke with also repeated the same sentiment about him to me: The Boomers don't get how much of a problem he is for the future of the right. 'It's true the Groypers are here,' Dimas Guaico, a 29-year-old advocate with Generation Zion, told me. 'I feel like a lot of the leadership here, including TPUSA leadership, haven't done enough to call Groypers out. Now I feel like it's too late.'"

There Were Two Charlie Kirks: A new book by the right-wing activist, who was murdered in September, has moments of seriousness, beauty, and cross-partisan appeal.

CBS and CNN Are Being Sacrificed to Trump: Media conglomerates want the president’s permission for mergers—and control of news outlets is at stake. - "The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants - Paramount and Netflix - will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize. 

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump's presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government's merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

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"The whole system, including the courts, can no longer be counted on to provide a buffer against Trump. Over the past several months, Trump has transformed once-independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission into extensions of his will. (And the Supreme Court is likely to lend its imprimatur to this power grab in the Trump v. Slaughter decision it will hand down next year.) Those agencies were created, exuding the ethos of the Progressive era, with a simple mandate: to make technocratic decisions that transcend partisanship. That is why they were required to be bipartisan in composition. Strip them of that independence, and regulatory approval becomes something closer to royal favor."

The Other Way the ‘Super Woke’ Left Discriminates Race and gender aren’t the only categories that determine who gets special treatment. [ed. note: this poor sad fucker]

Get Ready to Start Hearing About Aileen Cannon Again: The Florida-based judge is likely to once again play a central role in politics in the new year.

Reading archive 2025-12-29

The MAGA-fication of Nicki Minaj Once an advocate for LGBTQ+ people and immigrants, the rapper has repeatedly praised an administration cracking down on the same people, and the White House is returning the love. - "'Even Drake has his papers,' rapper Azealia Banks wrote on X in September, according to Complex, mocking Minaj for ingratiating herself to Trump. 'Even Cardi B isn’t a 40-year-old immigrant. … Doing dolphin tricks for the barbs in a country she can’t vote in is rusty babe.'"

Russia isn’t winning. Putin wants to fool you.: Putin’s hope is that U.S. will somehow convince itself that Ukraine can’t succeed. Don’t fall for it.

Russia’s economy keeps driving its war, but it could break in 2026: Problems in the oil sector, a possible banking crisis and consumer woes lie ahead for Russia’s economy as prices for Russian oil plummet over sanctions.

He mailed dozens of antisemitic letters. Volunteers helped track him down.: During a time of rising attacks, threats can’t be ignored, security experts, nonprofit leaders and community members told The Post.

JD Vance is ‘walking a tightrope’ on raging Israel debate within MAGA: At Turning Point USA’s conference, the vice president didn’t mention the topic that’s tearing the movement apart.

Heritage staffers quit amid latest strife at conservative institution: “Most of our staff, from our legal and economic centers, are departing immediately,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote in a Sunday night email to staff.

Ask a Vet: Is it ethical to buy a flat-faced dog?: French bulldogs and other brachycephalic breeds come with high price tags and, often, serious health problems.

White House threatens Smithsonian funds in sweeping content review: “American people will have no patience” for any museum that is “uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history,” read a letter from Trump aides.

Presenting The 2025 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many - "I find that LLMs produce sentences that are smooth, glib, poreless, smiling, somewhat like a beluga whale. But every busted sentence written by a human is busted in its own way. Each of these sentences is unwittingly an act of resistance against the onrushing techno-homogenization of language. The writer’s own haste, uncertainty, or sloth manifests itself in the syntax. Every time a person begins to write, they are taking a bit of their interiority and, through a wondrous act of inversion, making it legible to the external world."

Abandoning homeownership may be changing how people behave at work and home: What happens when a generation gives up on ever owning a home? New research explores the potential consequences, and what to do about it.

Burning wood emits more than fossil fuels. Here’s how to build a better fire.: A wood-burning fireplace isn’t great for the planet or your health. But there are things you can do to make your fireplace better.

The year Trump broke the federal government: How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy.

How Trump changed my mind on the filibuster: The Senate’s 60-vote requirement is an excuse for aggrandizing executive power. - "The filibuster functions as a brake on radical change when Congress is the center of the political system. When the president is at the center, the benefits are less clear. The costs also become more apparent because the filibuster, as an obstacle to legislating, becomes a pretext for presidential overreach."

New York's Congestion Pricing Is Working. Five Charts Show How

How Israeli covert activities in Syria seek to thwart its new government: Israel is suspicious of President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a longtime Islamist militant, and has provided weapons, intelligence and cash to militiamen at odds with his rule.

Why the Fed strategically absorbed some blows from Trump: Facing threats from President Donald Trump, the central bank opted for a low-profile strategy, juggling political pressures and the looming question of how far it can go to defend itself.

Trump’s farmer bailout caps tough year for loyal constituency: Red-state farmers continue to struggle under damaging inflation and the fallout of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, especially with China.

The old-world antisemitism in a Christmas pageant near you: Does the pope mean what he says about zero tolerance of hatred toward Jews?

D.C. customers face nearly 13 percent hike on gas bills this winter: Washington Gas customers in the District, Maryland and Virginia face increases in their bills.

The epidemic of toxic flattery is spreading: What do AI, Trump’s cabinet and the academy have in common? They aim to please.

Pipe bomb suspect admits targeting RNC, DNC headquarters, officials say: Prosecutors said Brian J. Cole told the FBI that he planted the explosives on Jan. 5, 2021, because he was frustrated with the U.S. political system. - "Brian J. Cole, 30, told investigators that 'something just snapped' in him 'because he was unhappy with the response of political leaders on both sides of the political aisle to questions raised about the results of the 2020 election,' according to the filing, which asks a judge in U.S. District Court in Washington to keep Cole in jail pending his trial."

 - "Studies have found that wolves in the Midwest and Canada not only keep deer populations in check, but they also alter deer behavior in ways that help prevent car crashes and save human lives."

Wolves, long feared and reviled, may actually be lifesavers

The real issue strangling America’s electric grid: AI data centers are being blamed for price spikes manufactured in statehouses and D.C. [ed. note: authors are industry hacks who ignore the health costs of coal plants]

Reading archive 2025-12-19

Offshore windfarms enhance function of coastal waters and diversity of aquatic life, say researchers - "Dr. James Tweedley from Murdoch University's Harry Butler Institute said the impact on fish and other aquatic life was, in large part, due to the rough surfaces of turbine monopiles providing a surface for sessile organisms (unmoving organisms such as barnacles and oysters) to thrive."

Kirk’s widow endorses Vance as MAGA infighting rages: Erika Kirk told a Turning Point USA conference that she would work to elect JD Vance president in 2028, at an event in which MAGA divisions were on full display.

The NYC subway is drowning. Here’s how to save it.: Subway systems around the world are struggling to cope with flooding as the planet warms.

The source of your fish may change how many ‘forever chemicals’ you eat: Most of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad — and that means they’re exposed to a higher level of “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, through contaminated fish, according to a new study released Thursday.

Tech moguls close to Trump see the midterms as a path to long-term power: As politicians in both parties raise concerns about the impacts of AI, political groups backed by tech investors and Meta plan to intervene in midterm races.

Lawmakers criticize Trump’s bid to take over D.C. golf courses: Default notice issued to National Links Trust did not identify specific violations as required by the lease with the National Park Service.

Lewis George gains early momentum in D.C. mayoral bid with union support: Janeese Lewis George, the Ward 4 D.C. Council member, locked in endorsements from five labor unions Wednesday as the mayoral race kicks off.

D.C. auditor finds advisory neighborhood commissioner misused public funds: The auditor found that Salim Adofo, the ANC 8C chair who ran for D.C. Council twice, used government funds for politics and referred the case to the D.C. attorney general.

Trump’s pardons wipe out payments to defrauded victims: In addition to clearing prison sentences, the president’s clemency actions have erased millions in restitution payments. - "Found guilty of securities and wire fraud in 2022, [Trevor Milton] remained out on bond as he appealed his conviction. Last year, he and his wife donated more than $2.5 million to boosting Trump’s campaign. Milton has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong and has been promoting a documentary proclaiming his innocence.

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"Asked about the pardon, Nikola investor Steve Bush pointed out that Milton was represented during the trial by Brad Bondi, the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi. 'I mean, come on,' said Bush, 51, who lives in New Jersey and works at a rock quarry. He said he lost more than $50,000."

Reading archive 2025-12-18

The lasting impact of Trump’s federal surge on one D.C. neighborhood

Why U.S. and Chinese satellites are ‘dogfighting’ in orbit

Dan Bongino announces he is leaving FBI deputy director job in January: Bongino told colleagues more than a week ago that he would not be returning to Washington headquarters this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Jack Smith defends his cases against Trump during hours-long deposition: Former special counsel Jack Smith was giving a closed-door deposition to the House Judiciary Committee. He had asked to testify in public.

Fast, harsh, alone: Trump beams into prime time with uncertain results: Supporters said they’d never seen Trump like this before and wondered if he’d achieved his purpose of assuaging concerns about the economy.

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025 "Historians will study how bad this book is."

What I’ve learned by mapping the impacts of NIH cuts: The effects have been widespread but could have been worse — and may yet be - "NIH-funded research contributed to more than 99% of FDA-approved drugs between 2010 and 2019."

The Worsening Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East

Iran president says capital move now a necessity as water crisis deepens

Rare sight of mother polar bear adopting a cub captured by camera: A polar bear mother was seen with one cub in the spring — but by fall she had adopted a second, according to Canadian researchers.

Democrats will not release the autopsy of their 2024 loss: Party leaders hope to avoid contentious fights over the party’s failing as it attempts to reboot for the 2026 midterms.

Reading archive 2025-12-17

Moderate House Republicans join Democrats to force vote on ACA subsidies: The Senate has already rejected the plan, so the subsidies are still virtually certain to expire at the end of this year.

Killing the ‘brain trust’: How Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear scientists: A Washington Post-PBS Frontline investigation uncovers new details about Israel’s Operation Narnia — the assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists.

What started as a 31-day stay became a ‘nightmare’ for D.C. Airbnb host: A D.C. property owner said a woman stopped paying rent and claimed tenant rights to keep from being evicted.

‘You see this news?’: What Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer told friends after the attack: A patchwork of social interactions and a trail of online posts provide a view into Tyler Robinson’s life and his beliefs, a Post examination found.

White House rallies around Susie Wiles after candid interviews: The chief of staff told Vanity Fair that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” Bondi “whiffed” on the Epstein files and Vance’s pro-Trump makeover was “political.”

Trump administration admits to targeting blue states for energy grant cuts: Justice Department lawyers argue in a court filing that it is constitutional for the administration to withhold funding based on partisan politics.

Marjorie Taylor Greene says ‘dam is breaking’ within GOP against Trump: In a CNN interview, the Georgia congresswoman said Trump’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner was “classless” and that she didn’t see the GOP winning in the midterms.

The man who mistook his imagination for the truth: The disappointing reality of one of my (ex-)heroes, Oliver Sacks