Two unrelated developments in American popular culture converged in the fall of 2025 and, together, revived a long-running argument about race, representation and the fate of diversity initiatives. In late October, Billboard reported that its Hot 100 chart had, for the first time since 1990, no rap songs in its top 40. Months later, the Los Angeles Lakers’ offseason moves...

ActBlue, the online payment processor behind the bulk of small-dollar fundraising for Democratic candidates and progressive causes, is at the center of a widening dispute over how it screens donations for fraud. Congressional investigators, several state attorneys general, and the platform’s own outside lawyers have raised questions about whether ActBlue’s internal controls did enough to keep out illegitimate contributions, including...

A decades-old assumption underlies American antitrust law: that competing companies are run by rivals with opposing interests. A growing body of legal and economic scholarship—and now a federal lawsuit proceeding in Texas—is testing whether that assumption still holds when the same small group of asset managers ranks among the largest shareholders of nearly every major firm in an industry. At...