The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.
As Zohran Mamdani prepares to become New York’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor on January 1, we look at the historic rise of the democratic socialist who shocked the political establishment. We spend the hour hearing Mamdani in his own words and look at the grassroots coalition that helped him pull off what’s been described as “one of the great political upsets in modern American history.
“Ozempic is about to be old news,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2023, just before an even more powerful obesity drug, tirzepatide, then best known as Mounjaro, was approved. Well, two years later, Mounjaro is becoming old news, too. A whole slew of next-generation obesity drugs are on the horizon, some already advanced enough in clinical trials to be looking as good as—if not better than—those already on the market.
Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then.
Every Thanksgiving when I was growing up, my family held a Wacky Tacky Talent Show so needlessly competitive that at least one kid inevitably cried. And on the same special tablecloth we used every year, we would list with a felt-tip marker what we were most grateful for: I’d write my dog and American Girl doll; my mother would write me and my sisters; my college-aged cousin would write her boyfriend du jour (there were many crossed-out names on the fabric).
Heather Haddon joins Emily Peck to discuss the current challenges and trends she’s reported on in the fast food industry.
Lawmakers want to close a so-called hemp loophole. They might blow up a massive industry in the process.
After US Airways left Pittsburgh high and dry, yinzers finally built an airport on their own terms—and it’s incredible.
Larry Summers’ appalling emails to Jeffrey Epstein aren’t the only reason not to like the guy.
From affairs with big-name politicians to a MySpace-era pop song, the journalist’s comeback attempt is hitting a few bumps along the way.
The president said an extension of subsidies that help people pay for health insurance “may be necessary” to buy time for a broader overhaul.
The second round of Inflation Reduction Act negotiation prices, which includes 15 brand-name drugs, will kick into effect in 2027.
GOP lawmakers knew subsidies were expiring and premiums would spike, but no clear, conservative alternative emerged.
The HHS secretary said in an interview he ordered the CDC’s website to acknowledge gaps in studies on vaccines and autism.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
A celebrity contracts HIV, the world finally pays attention to AIDS, and Jim Mitulski preaches to a community tired of people dying from it.
When a lesbian minister is physically assaulted, the church is galvanized. When it happens again, the city is galvanized.
A gay minister seeks healing with his family and his queer kin, even as he knows he’ll soon die from AIDS.
Democrats running on cost-of-living anxieties outperformed Republicans in Tuesday’s elections by greater-than-expected margins. The president chalked it up to partisan lies.
A recent poll found a majority of Americans feel they’re spending more on groceries than they did a year ago.
The Republican nominee has promised tax cuts and economic growth, but the numbers are fuzzy.
Trump’s strength with Republicans on the economy could prove to be a boon for the GOP.
Protests have erupted in North Carolina after federal agents arrested 370 people in immigration raids. On Monday, Bishop William Barber and other religious leaders gathered in Charlotte to demand an end to ICE raids. “What you have is a conglomerate of policy violence, and it’s deadly,” says Barber, who is organizing protests against ICE and Medicaid cuts across the country.
Zohran Mamdani will be taking office as mayor of New York in just five weeks. His transition team continues to make announcements about the new administration, recently unveiling a 400-person advisory group, broken up into 17 committees. Democracy Now! speaks with the incoming first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, on how Mamdani plans to implement his progressive vision.
During a controversial Oval Office meeting last week, President Trump defended Mohammed bin Salman when a reporter asked about the Saudi crown prince’s involvement in the 2018 murder of Washington Post opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “The man sitting in the White House next to President Trump is a murderer,” says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN, an organization founded by Khashoggi in 2018. To Whitson, Trump’s main motivation for cozying up to Saudi Arabia is financial.
Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.
Before an Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, yesterday shot and seriously injured two National Guard members who had been deployed by President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., military commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform.
Marquetta Shields-Peltier was just a toddler when her father, Leonard Peltier, was jailed in 1976. During our recent trip to Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, we spoke to Marquetta about the campaign to free her father and what it meant to see him released in February.
