President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.
Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.
Poor, poor Mickey Barnes. The protagonist of the film Mickey 17 lives a grim existence as an “expendable,” a worker aboard a spaceship whose only job is to die repeatedly for the sake of human progress. Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, is subjected to lethal viruses, exposed to radiation, and asked to sit in a chamber of nerve gas, just so he can report on his own deterioration until he loses consciousness.
I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.
Neither of these companies needs to have its hand in another industry.
Nicaragua announced last week it is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, following a U.N. report that slammed the government’s human rights violations and warned the country was becoming an authoritarian state. The report by a panel of independent human rights experts adds to international pressure on the Nicaraguan government led by President Daniel Ortega and first lady Rosario Murillo, who was recently named co-president.
Republicans in Congress are pushing forward budget plans that would cut trillions in federal spending and give trillions more in tax cuts that disproportionately benefit corporations and the ultra-rich. This week, hundreds of faith leaders gathered on the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday on Capitol Hill to voice their opposition.
We speak with Democratic Congressmember Al Green of Texas a day after he was censured by the House of Representatives for disrupting President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. His dramatic protest came near the start of Trump’s record-long speech. In instantly iconic images, Green rose and shook his walking cane at the president on the rostrum, telling him “You have no mandate” to cut vital government programs. Green was ejected from the chamber.
I sure hope J.D. Vance hasn’t seen what people are doing to him on the internet.
Adam Chandler joins to discuss his book 99% Perspiration examining American ideals around work.
The Covid contrarian’s Senate confirmation hearing to lead the National Institutes of Health promises another airing of pandemic grievances.
An Idaho hospital is stepping in to argue that the state’s near-total abortion ban violates patients’ rights.
The outside group Indivisible said Democrats should hold their own town halls — and if Dems don’t, they’ll hold their own.
Trump’s FBI and DOJ dropped several ongoing investigations into threats against abortion clinics and issued a new memo signaling reduced enforcement going forward against such acts.
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.
Trump imposing new tariffs on top of broader policy uncertainty will mean a hit to growth. The question is how large of a hit it will ultimately be.
Lina Khan and her allies tried to remake antitrust law. Trump’s team is likely putting an end to that.
Look for a more emboldened president compared to the Trump of 2017.
Such challenges are the backdrop to the annual session of China’s parliament.
Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital.
In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put out a statement—the Great Barrington Declaration—calling for looser public-health restrictions in the face of the pandemic.
Leading the FDA has long been one of the greatest professional achievements in American health. At the start of every administration, doctors jockey for the role, hoping to steer an agency that regulates 20 cents of every dollar spent in the United States. To be the FDA commissioner who presides over the approval of a cure for a previously intractable disease, or who launches an investigation into a product that is sickening Americans, is to etch your name into the annals of modern medicine.
This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Severance, Season 2.
The promise of Severance is a seductive one: The titular procedure separates a person’s work self from the rest of their identity, granting them a literal work-life balance. Lumon, the biotech company that offers severance—which involves implanting a microchip into employees’ brains—markets it as a method to free oneself of difficult feelings or experiences.
Long live the king!
Down with the king!
President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.
Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.
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Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.
The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987.
This was supposed to be the college presidents hearing redux. It didn’t work out that way.
Amid ongoing chaos and outrage stemming from the Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, we hear a critique of USAID and the “humanitarian-industrial complex” from South African anthropologist Kathryn Mathers. ”USAID is very much a part of a system and industry that not only depends on global inequality … but in many ways produces it,” she says.
