In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, a recently arrested spree killer is sitting handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unperturbed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the trooper’s state-issued Stetson. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” the trooper says.
We continue our look at the tragic deaths of two Black men who were killed while experiencing mental health crises. Award-winning piano virtuoso Herman Whitfield III died in 2022 after he was repeatedly tasered, handcuffed and pinned to the ground by Indianapolis police officers.
We speak with the uncle of Jordan Neely after a New York jury on Monday acquitted veteran Daniel Penny in the death of the beloved New York street performer on a Manhattan subway train last year. Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. The judge dismissed a more serious manslaughter charge. Penny will not face any prison time for the killing.
Nearly 200 Haitians in Port-au-Prince were killed over the weekend on the orders of a powerful gang leader who reportedly targeted elderly practitioners of voodoo because he blamed them for sickening his son. The massacre is the latest chapter in Haiti’s ongoing political crisis, with gangs now controlling much of the capital despite a Kenyan-led security mission to stabilize the country and support the U.S.-backed Transitional Presidential Council.
President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to abolish birthright citizenship, which he cannot do unilaterally because it is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But his rhetoric has still alarmed immigrant rights advocates who are concerned about Trump’s mass deportation plans and how they would impact mixed-status families. Trump and his “border czar” Tom Homan have both suggested deporting the U.S. citizen children of parents who are undocumented.
In a Maine town, one store was a lifeline—and right in the middle of the deadliest tragedy ever in state history.
These two diverging displays of womanhood online have a common source.
Athletes, coaches, and choreographers are facing the fact that they’ve been unintentionally breaking the law nearly every day.
A witness recognized the alleged killer at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
The president-elect’s advisers haven’t yet begun meeting with federal agencies, despite signing an agreement late last month allowing them to do so.
Brian Thompson was fatally shot outside a Midtown hotel.
The agency denied Triton Distribution’s application to sell flavored e-liquids.
Trump’s picks to lead the NIH and FDA were critics of health officials and their pandemic policies.
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.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
“Whatever’s coming next, I don’t believe at all that [it] would be worse than what we’ve been through, what we lived through,” says Syrian activist and filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab as she celebrates the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship to Syrian opposition groups. Al-Kateab, who was forced to flee her hometown of Aleppo with her family in 2016 and now resides in the United Kingdom, says the end of Assad’s rule has reignited the “dream of a free Syria.
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President-Elect Donald Trump is, in some respects, a family man. During his first term in the White House, his children regularly surrounded him, appearing in important meetings and at major public events.
Five weeks after the election, the president took his sharpest swing at Trump’s policy plans.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve been thinking about the woman who told me she’d heard that Kamala Harris “let in all the illegals who killed all those cops.”
I met her when a few of us from Pod Save America were knocking doors in Las Vegas the Sunday before the election. She was listed in the voter file as a 72-year-old registered Democrat who hadn’t voted yet, so we rang the doorbell and were greeted by a small Asian woman and a very large dog.
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Dear James,
A few months ago, I came out to my high-school friend group as bisexual. They were supportive and appreciated my request to keep it on the down-low.
In 1829, the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham invented a cracker made from coarse wheat that he believed would help restore American health. He lamented the “miserable trash” that made up the average diet, especially white bread, and thought his eponymous crackers would curtail masturbation, which he deemed deleterious to both moral and physical well-being. (As someone who condemned sweet treats, he would have seen the s’more as an abomination.
ESA / Webb, NASA, CSA, A. Hirschauer, M. Meixner
Day 10 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: the glow of hot, young stars. The James Webb Space Telescope captured a spectacular view of the galaxy I Zwicky 18 (I Zw 18). This galaxy, roughly 59 million light-years away, is typical of the kinds of galaxies that inhabited the early universe and is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy. Two major starburst regions are embedded in the galaxy’s heart.
New York prosecutors have charged a suspect with murder for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan on December 4. The suspect has been identified as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who was captured in Pennsylvania on Monday after a five-day nationwide search. Police say Mangione was found with a handwritten manifesto, which they have not released.
