At Thursday’s debate, while Joe Biden struggled to put a sentence together, Donald Trump struggled to utter any sentence that wasn’t about illegal immigrants destroying the country.
Harsh rhetoric—and policy—on migrants and the border has long been a pillar of Trump’s political identity, but it used to slot into a much wider range of grievances.

This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine.
Each summer, like clockwork, millions of beech trees throughout Europe sync up, tuning their reproductive physiology to one another. Within a matter of days, the trees produce all the seeds they’ll make for the year, then release their fruit onto the forest floor to create a new generation and feed the surrounding ecosystem.

In 1956, the poet Elizabeth Bishop worried about the imprudence and absurdity of going abroad. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” she writes in her poem “Questions of Travel.

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Last year at Harvard, three Israeli Jews took a course at the Kennedy School of Government. They say that because of their ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin, their professor subjected them to unequal treatment, trying to suppress their speech in class and allowing teaching assistants and classmates to create a hostile climate for Jews.
Afterward, they filed a complaint with Harvard alleging a violation of their civil rights.

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Going into the first 2024 presidential debate, the Biden campaign’s goal was to draw a stark contrast between the president and Donald Trump.

In three decisions late this week, the Supreme Court upended American administrative law—the legal field that governs how government agencies interpret and implement legislation.
Administrative law is notoriously arcane and technical. But these cases will have enormous consequences for governmental functions as disparate as regulating pollution, guaranteeing safe workplaces, and administering Medicare.

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“Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers,” David Brooks wrote in The Atlantic this week. “Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan.

Congressional Democrats aren’t ready to demand that President Joe Biden quit his bid for reelection after a debate performance that was almost universally panned. But for the first time, some of them are taking the possibility seriously.
“The debate was a serious setback,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont told me by phone yesterday. “It’s up to President Biden and his campaign to demonstrate that they do, in fact, have the energy for another four years.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.
It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog told me, “nobody believes me.