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The president is the only person in the United States with the megaphone to speak to the nation and guide them through moments of tragedy.
On the first night of Hanukkah, I learned that Eli Schlanger, a rabbi I had known for decades, was gunned down at a Hanukkah celebration he had organized in Sydney, attended by roughly 1,000 people. When Eli and I were 16, we volunteered together at a summer camp for indigent Ukrainian boys in Odesa. The early mornings we spent watching the sun rise over the beach, as he spoke with quiet certainty about his dream of becoming a rabbi and building a Jewish community, are etched in my memory.
Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on December 15, 2025
On October 9, 2023—two days after the Hamas attacks on Israeli villages adjacent to Gaza—protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House to chant angrily about the Jews. The chant sounded to many like Gas the Jews.
A deadly mass shooting at Brown University left two students dead and nine others injured on Saturday. One student, Mia Tretta, had survived a shooting in 2019 when she was shot in the stomach as a high school student. Her best friend was killed in the shooting, and she had selected Brown University for Rhode Island’s strong gun control laws. Now she has survived yet another school shooting.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, one of Iran’s most prominent human rights activists, was rearrested Friday when Iranian authorities violently raided a memorial ceremony she attended at a mosque in Iran’s northeastern city of Mashhad. “She’s been seen as a huge threat to the Islamic Republic’s regime,” says Porochista Khakpour, Iranian American author and essayist. “They find her moral authority extremely intimidating.
At least 15 people were fatally shot during a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach this Saturday, and at least another 42 people were injured, marking Australia’s worst mass shooting in nearly three decades. Victims included a 10-year-old girl, two rabbis and a Holocaust survivor who died while shielding his wife from bullets.
Students for Life of America is pushing the federal agency to include an anti-abortion drug on its list of drinking water contaminants.
Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI so you can’t use Sora to make Darth Vader porn among other concerns.
Tim Wu joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on how our economy ended up under the collective thumb of Big Tech.
Even though that might mean you-know-who buys the studio instead.
The billionaire philanthropist has said his meetings with the late convicted sex offender were a mistake.
State health care exchanges say they have few problems with fraud. Instead of killing the subsidies, policy experts suggest fixing the federal exchanges instead.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
A celebrity contracts HIV, the world finally pays attention to AIDS, and Jim Mitulski preaches to a community tired of people dying from it.
In races across the country, Democrats focused on promises to make life more affordable — even as they offered contrasting approaches.
The White House plans to make affordability a key selling point for Republicans across the board as the 2026 midterm elections come into focus.
President Donald Trump will give a speech in Northeastern Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the first stop in a ‘tour’ where he will talk about affordability concerns, among others.
An online bazaar of freelance headhunters finds new recruits to fight Ukraine, emboldening Vladimir Putin at the negotiating table and scaring European leaders about what his growing army might do next.
Democratic lawmakers repeatedly called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign as they confronted her on Trump’s immigration crackdown during a heated House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday. We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who reiterated her call during the hearing for Noem to resign and announced that she would begin taking steps for her impeachment.
As the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown nationwide, President Trump is simultaneously creating new pathways for wealthy noncitizens to obtain U.S. visas. Earlier this week, Trump officially launched a program allowing affluent visitors to fast-track permission to live and work in the United States. For a $1 million payment, applicants can receive a so-called Trump Gold Card, which promises to speed up U.S. residency applications “in record time.
Award-winning Palestinian reporter Mohammed Mhawish, who left Gaza last year, joins us to discuss his new piece for New York magazine about Israel’s surveillance practices. It describes how Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza have been watched, tracked and often killed by Israeli forces who have access to their most intimate details, including phone and text records, social relations, biometric data and more.
As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dramatically reshapes U.S. immunization policy, we speak with Dr. Fiona Havers, a former top vaccine expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who resigned in June.
Last week, Kennedy’s handpicked advisers on a federal vaccine panel voted against universal hepatitis B shots for newborns, reversing 35 years of CDC guidance that all newborns receive the vaccine within 24 hours of birth.
MIT business professor Retsef Levi teaches about how health care decisions are made, but isn’t a doctor.
Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET on December 14, 2025
It’s long past time to stop saying “Anti-Semitic violence has no place in our society.” Outrage upon outrage confirms that anti-Semitic violence has a large and expanding place in Western societies—that it is supported by many, that it is tolerated by many more, and that it is often appeased or even enabled by governments fearful of confronting large and militant factions within their populations.
Last night, SNL weighed in on a modern annual rite: taking stock of the past year through data-driven retrospective lists. But the usual exercise in mapping one’s consumption patterns soon transformed into an uncomfortably real humiliation ritual.
