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If you were a college student in America a few decades back, chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story.

As Democrats debate whether to replace President Joe Biden, an ill-conceived argument for retaining him as the nominee is alarmingly common.
Its premise is that Biden has earned voters’ loyalty—as if the question that confronts Americans is what we owe an individual politician rather than what’s best for the country. No matter how one feels about Biden, that premise is deeply flawed.

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After President Joe Biden’s disastrous recent public appearances, he and his supporters are attacking media outlets for a double standard in coverage of him and his opponent. They’re right, but that double standard is structural and, unfortunately, will not end during this campaign.

For all the time The Bear spends gazing at its protagonist, Jeremy Allen White’s seraphic, tormented chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, I’m hard-pressed to say what its third season has imparted about him that we didn’t already know.

For more than 40 years in a row, Ford’s F-150 and its family of pickup trucks have been the best-selling vehicles in America. So when Ford released an electric version in 2022, the F-150 Lightning, it should have been a turning point for electric cars in the country—if not, that is, for the price tag.

Last July, I was living in Montreal when an emergency push alert from Canada’s environmental agency popped up on my phone, accompanied by a loud alarm. It had been raining ferociously that afternoon, and the wind was picking up. The alert warned of something worse—a marine tornado, which “are often wrapped in rain and may not be visible”—and ordered, “Take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”
I looked outside. The wind was howling louder now, and the sky was a strange gray.

Cars and trucks are the archetypal examples of industrial hardware. And automotive manufacturing historically has been all about finding ways to efficiently engineer and assemble metal, glass, and plastics into road-going vehicles with consumer appeal. But the big change in locomotion from the internal combustion engine to electric motors has shaken everything up.