Reading archive 2026-06-25

At this point, the Reflecting Pool deserves an Emmy: The scene unfolding on the National Mall is the must-watch show of the summer. It’s a drama. A farce. A whodunit. A murder mystery.

Why the South is the only U.S. region growing across every age group: Population across the region grew across all age groups between 2020 and 2025. But it was the only region with growing numbers of people under 18.

Everyone is worried about AI killing jobs. She’s testing a fix-it plan.: Former Biden administration official Gina Raimondo is leading a bipartisan effort to AI-proof the country’s workforce.

We’re dermatologists. Sunscreen isn’t the problem.: Every year, a safe-sunscreen guide sparks needless concern.

Supreme Court blocks thousands of suits claiming Roundup causes cancer: The ruling restricts one of the largest waves of product liability lawsuits in the history of the nation. [ed. note: 7-2, KBJ and Gorsuch dissenting]

Iran strikes cargo ship on U.N.-backed route in Strait of Hormuz: The attack comes after a spike in vessels using a new shipping lane set up by the U.N. and Oman.

RFK Jr. urged Iowa candidate to make deal to help GOP win House seat, per audio recording: The health secretary urged Iowa Libertarian candidates to drop out of key races to help Republicans keep control of Congress, according to interviews and a recording obtained by The Post. The effort highlights mounting GOP anxiety over the battle for the House.

Trump’s latest declaration of an emergency leaves GOP allies scrambling again: House Speaker Mike Johnson heads to the White House a day after the president canceled a signing ceremony for a housing bill, using it as leverage for elections legislation he deems urgent.

Burnham Is Britain’s Last Chance Before Farage: If he becomes prime minister, he has three years to fix the country.

New York’s Warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer: They aren’t the dominant force in their hometown.

Reading archive 2026-06-24

‘It’s PR, not the ER’: Gen Z is resisting the workplace emergency: As the workforce evolves, younger generations are rejecting a frenetic approach to work that can create undue stress and cross work-life balance boundaries. - "It’s a little morbid, Jiles said, but she thinks of something her mother told her: 'At the end of the day, if you pass away, they’re just going to post your position and talk about how nice you were,' Jiles said. 'Do what you can. Do it well, but that’s it.'"

With Cuba, Trump had better beware of what he wishes for: What obligation does the U.S. bear toward the impoverished island prison?

Rocked by the Iran war, the UAE sours on Trump: ‘We got played’: Across the Persian Gulf region, the president was viewed as a pro-business ally, but his decision to wage war on Iran and his erratic conduct have tarnished his image.

Another Top General Is Out at the Pentagon: C. D. Donahue, the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, is the latest in a long line of military departures. - "Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks. They include the well-regarded General James Mingus, a former Army vice chief of staff. 'It's interesting that the guy who says he wants to bring back the warrior culture is expunging the biggest warriors in the Army ranks,' one retired Army officer told us. 'This is not a war on woke. This is a war on warriors.'"

SpaceX Just Needs the Money: What this year of humongous IPOs says about the tech industry - "Historically, this combination of a wave of IPOs and a rise in existing companies issuing more stock has not boded well for stocks in the long term. In many cases, a big surge in stock supply overwhelms demand-and raises questions about whether markets are properly reflecting value or inflating a bubble. As the economist and hedge-fund manager Owen Lamont has written, 'When firms are selling, you should generally sell as well.' The volatility of SpaceX stock, which has tumbled for days, erasing nearly all of the gains enjoyed by the average investor, shows just how much uncertainty attends even the most hyped stock offerings in a risky industry."

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers: The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world. - "For now, using existing power sources more wisely, rather than building new ones, may be all the AI industry needs. Electrical grids are designed for periods of peak demand - cooling on summer afternoons, heating on winter mornings - but mostly they run well below maximum capacity. Researchers at Duke University have shown that if data centers reduced their electricity consumption during some of those peaks, it would free up enough electricity to accommodate the country's planned data centers for years. Google and xAI have already entered agreements to do so."

Reading archive 2026-06-23

A new subscription model could make rooftop solar as easy as Netflix: The end of federal tax credits for rooftop solar and flexible new subscriptions have changed the pros and cons of leasing versus buying.

Two rich Democrats were friends. Now they are spending millions to attack each other.: Wine mogul David Trone is spending big in a comeback bid as wealthy incumbent April McClain Delaney aggressively defends her seat.

What Brexit really gave Britain: Leaving the European Union has made British politicians more accountable for the U.K.’s problems, which persist.

Democrats’ Great Alaskan Hope: Mary Peltola, the Democrat most likely to win a red-state Senate seat this year, is largely unknown outside her home state. That’s not a coincidence.

First the Kennedy Center, Now the Smithsonian: How long can the museum system’s leader, Lonnie Bunch, survive?

Reading archive 2026-06-22

Pro-Israel and crypto money become central issue in Democratic primary Dark money — and complaints about it — have become the central issue in the 24-candidate field to replace Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland).

Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career: I obtained hundreds of confidential memos detailing politics and policy guidance for Gabbard from her years in Congress, then embarked on a quest to identify who was behind them.

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?: It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

World Cup visitors marvel at American food, from cheesesteaks to cheese slices: After going broke on tickets, there’s only one way for these fans to save a buck: cheap (and greasy) eats.

Who Is Andy Burnham, the Man Who Could Be Britain’s Next Prime Minister?: Charismatic, northern and exuding a relaxed optimism, Mr. Burnham is a contrast to Keir Starmer. His allies hope he could mend Labour’s relationship with voters. - "In 2022, after the last soccer World Cup, Mr. Starmer himself poked fun at his former colleague. In a speech to reporters, Mr. Starmer joked that Mr. Burnham 'got to see his boyhood team Argentina win the World Cup' but that 'it was a mixed bag because he also got to see his boyhood team France lose the final and his boyhood teams Morocco and Croatia lose in the semis.'"

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s: For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75 percent.

Why cyclists don't stop at stop signs and shouldn't have to: Stop signs in Toronto were designed to control cars, and don't work for bikes. Cities with balanced transportation systems don't have them. - "I learned in design school that The User is Always Right. It doesn't matter what you think you have designed, the user's behaviour tells you what your product or system actually IS.... A great example is how roads are designed for 70 km/h, but then signed for 30 km/h – and then we wag our fingers at the speeders. These drivers are behaving perfectly normally for the system. If you wanted people to drive 30 km/h, then YOU FAILED. The people are not broken, YOUR SYSTEM IS BROKEN.

...

"'Nearly everyone has jaywalked, rolled through a stop sign, or driven a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but most such offences face no legal consequences. Society also tends to see these relatively minor infractions that almost all people make—though they are unmistakably illegal—as normal and even rational. Bicyclists who break the law, however, seem to attract a higher level of scorn and scrutiny.'"

Boomer caregiving will wreck our politics We have maybe five years to escape gerontocratic capture - "We are not prepared — emotionally, politically, financially — for what it means to care for tens of millions of aging boomers while also trying to invest in the future for our children. 

"Consider the demographic trends. In five years, America will have more people over 65 than under 18. Americans over 75 are the fastest-growing age group in the country. The worker-to-retiree ratio has collapsed from five-to-one in 1960 to about 2.5 today. Nearly 70% of people over 65 will need long-term care.

...

"Even if you were willing to make the hard decisions, political incentives won’t allow it. Older Americans are growing in number and vote at much higher rates than the young. Many of us want to invest more in children, families, and fertility, but the boomer caregiving wave will pull spending and incentives further toward the old. Politicians will follow their most reliable and expanding voting bloc."

The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun: Do we need a 'Holy War' against the Thinking Machines? - "Magnifica Humanitas is valuable precisely because it does not make the vulgar mistake now being projected onto the fictional Butlerian Jihad. It treats the thinking machine neither as a demon nor a consciousness hiding inside the circuitry. Nor does it see AI as some rival species whose emergence must be met with holy violence. 

It simply asks whose vision of the human person is being elevated through the thinking machine. And it warns against the very concentrations of power and structures of domination that haunted Frank Herbert’s writing.

...

"The burning question regarding AI is not whether the machines are evil. It is whether human beings will allow the machines to become instruments through which other human beings will concentrate power. A properly conceived Butlerian Jihad must target technocracy, not technology."

If Only Trump Knew What Vance Is Doing: If the president is infallible, there must be some other explanation for his Iran defeat.

The Democratic Base Is Angry: Is the party paying attention?

‘You Slap Me in the Face, I’ll Slap You Right Back’: Nancy Pelosi on gerrymandering, the midterms, and her 39 years in Congress

A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida: The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem. - "What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people-none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.

...

"'Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,' the historian Richard White, whose 2011 book about American railroads was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, told me. He put it the most succinctly, but I did not talk with anybody who disagreed with that conclusion."

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance: An underground intelligence network uses subterfuge and honey traps to direct drone strikes deep inside Russian-occupied territory. - "I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war's most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: 'I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him - suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street-and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.'"

Reading archive 2026-06-20

The Biden Verdict Is in. It Isn’t Pretty.

Ukraine Bombards Moscow With One of the Biggest Drone Attacks of the War: The attack, which shut down the capital’s airports for several hours, was part of an escalating campaign to bring the conflict home to Russians.

Farmers backed Trump. Now some say they’re losing patience.: Rural approval of the president falls to a new low amid rising bankruptcies and trade uncertainty, and some farmers accuse the GOP of making a hard business harder.

Flesh-eating maggot outbreak puts Trump administration response under scrutiny: The New World screwworm spread from southern Mexico to Texas in two years when the administration cut staff and funding.

A young mother couldn’t accept she was dying, until her grandpa appeared to her: A physician tells the story of her 28-year-old hospice patient and the transformative conversation no one else could hear.

A dying woman’s vision comforts her hospice nurse daughter: Kelley Clem has seen patients experience end-of-life dreams and visions but was still astounded when her mother had one.

The profound meaning and mystery of deathbed visions: As Shirley was dying, she kept seeing the grandmother she’d lost long ago.

Reading archive 2026-06-18

20 arrested in alleged drug trafficking operation near DC elementary school

All the Sad Hawks: Neoconservatives are struggling to reconcile their hopes for Trump with the failure of his Iran war. - "The defining trait of neoconservative thought is a near-boundless faith in the efficacy of U.S. military power. This faith caused the neocons to recoil in from the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A tougher president, they believed, would have used the threat of American might to make Iran accept much stricter terms.

...

"Meanwhile, the administration is attempting to make its supporters forget a decade of claims that Obama betrayed the country by handing 'pallets of cash' to Iran as it permits the country to recover billions immediately, by suspending sanctions, and possibly far more in 'reconstruction' funds that Iran views, not inaccurately, as reparations. The dread pallets seen in endless Fox News clips transferred $1.7 billion to Tehran, a minuscule figure compared with the $12 billion in unfrozen assets, not to mention the potential $300 billion reparations."

The feral hogs ravaging America could come to your home next: Money alone won’t win this bipartisan war. - "The federal government can regulate invasive plants, livestock disease and imported wildlife, yet it lacks jurisdiction over an invasive animal already established in the U.S. Current laws might curb interstate transport, but they cannot regulate in-state markets for feral hogs. 

"These markets exist because while some see the hogs as a problem, others see a revenue stream. Texas law allows people to sell live hogs by the pound at USDA holding facilities. Hog hunting occurs on game ranches in multiple states. These activities provide income on land that’s not productive for crops. It’s hard to coordinate eradication when some folks have incentives to keep the swine alive."

What Color Is the Reflecting Pool? An Investigation.: President Trump wanted an American-flag-blue Reflecting Pool. Instead, he got a swamp.

The Pentagon Might Win the Lottery: But even $1.5 trillion won’t solve its problems.

The Feel-Good Story of the World Cup Is Too Good to Be True: Some of the people celebrating American excess are not what they seem.

The Apotheosis of Donald Trump: On the president’s 80th birthday, it became clear that he has entered his decline.

Reading archive 2026-06-17

Late Stage Groceries the groceryslop is endless

D.C. police fatally shoot man on Metro bus after he allegedly killed a woman: Officials say the man fled on the bus after shooting the woman on a sidewalk.