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This week, Congress passed Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion in approved federal spending, including funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting.
In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights.
Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.
Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan.
They’re risky for the president politically—and for your own bank account.
The shoeless shuffle through security lines is finally over.
Riders don’t want buses to be free. They want something else.
Brian Goldstone on the unrecognized population of full-time workers in America without stable housing.
Chronic venous insufficiency is a common condition that can worsen over time.
The letter from President Donald Trump’s doctor details his new vascular diagnosis.
The expiration of shots the Biden administration promised to send comes after President Donald Trump cut deeply into foreign aid.
The health secretary has said repeatedly he wants to provide better care for Native Americans, but he’s yet to reveal how.
The most painful health care provisions in the new Republican law don’t take effect for years, giving lobbyists plenty of time to undo them.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.
Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the “godfathers” of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.
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Shortly after becoming president, as Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted.
When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show, in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show’s longtime venue his own.
Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as “Phase 1” of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019.
We speak to Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media, about the Trump administration’s drastic defunding of public media and its impact on tribal nations. Fifty-nine tribal radio stations and one tribal television station that depend on federal funding will be among the first to face possible closure, putting some of the essential services that public broadcasting provides, including warning systems for missing Indigenous women and girls, at risk.
We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna about his bipartisan bill calling for the full release of federal documents pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal charges for sexual trafficking and abuse, which is also currently backed by nine Republicans and every House Democrat. Khanna explains why he’s calling for transparency and accountability regarding the Epstein case, and how Trump is working to prevent the same.
We speak to a survivor of sexual abuse perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein and enabled by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. Teresa Helm was sexually assaulted by Epstein at what she was told was a job interview in the early 2000s.
A major rift has formed within Donald Trump’s MAGA base over his reversal of a campaign promise to release the “Epstein files” to the public.
