Intro An Amazon Echo on a kitchen counter, a Samsung television in a living room and a Flock Safety camera on a neighborhood pole all collect information about people who never signed anything. That raises a fair question: how is any of it legal in states that require everyone in a conversation to consent before...
Introduction Three years ago today, Hamas-led gunmen crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. In the days that followed, the U.S. House voted overwhelmingly to stand with Israel, and support for Israel’s right to respond was close to a bipartisan given in American politics. Few would have predicted...
Introduction In the span of four weeks, five stories tested what the American feminist movement actually stands for. The answers did not line up. On Sept. 4, a Massachusetts jury deadlocked in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother who strangled her three children. Hundreds of women had rallied outside the courthouse on...
A Fight That Crosses Every Political Map In January, the city council in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, voted 4-1 to deny a rezoning that would have allowed the Islamic Society of Tulsa to build a mosque. Nine months later and 1,400 miles east, the Muslim Center of New Jersey filed a federal lawsuit against Marlboro Township...
Introduction The federal government opened a new front door on Sept. 29, 2026. America.gov is an AI-assisted portal meant to replace the hunt across agency websites with a single place to ask a question and, eventually, finish the task. Two of the most common reasons Americans deal with Washington are getting a passport and updating...
Bailey Pennington borrowed $12,000 to go to cosmetology school. Pennington now pays about $150 a month on that loan and told The Christian Science Monitor that standing out in the field “doesn’t always work for everyone.” Under a federal rule that takes full effect next July, students in programs like that one could soon lose...
On the night of Sept. 27, more than 600 people walked out of Tapachula, the Mexican city closest to the Guatemalan border, and headed north on the Chiapas coastal highway, according to EFE. They call themselves “Fe y Esperanza,” or Faith and Hope. Most of them had left San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a week earlier....
Intro The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026, cleared the way for states to again use the Department of Homeland Security’s revamped SAVE database to check the citizenship of registered voters. The 6-3 emergency order paused a lower-court ruling that had found the expanded system violated federal privacy law. The ruling lands two...
Intro In one week this month, Europe’s leaders sounded a coordinated alarm. France, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania and Switzerland each warned their citizens of rising threats from Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron told party leaders, “No one is safe.” The warnings raise three fair questions. Are European governments fear-mongering? Are they laying groundwork to enter...
Introduction Nikole Hannah-Jones meant her daughter’s education to be an argument against leaving neighborhood schools. After a decade, it has become one of the strongest arguments for letting families leave them. In her Sept. 20 New York Times Magazine essay, she concludes that keeping her daughter in high-poverty Brooklyn public schools failed the girl, and...