Nichole Ayers / NASA
Green and red displays from the southern lights (aurora australis) appear above the Earth, seen from the orbiting International Space Station, south of Australia, on April 21, 2025.Nichole Ayers / NASA
Lightning flashes among cloud formations above Indonesia, seen on June 22, 2025.

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Dear James,
I can’t seem to shut up at work, and I keep putting my foot in my mouth.
I am a naturally brusque person—a get-to-the-point kinda gal—but I am not a complete boor.

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The world of management is always wide open for new ideas and perspectives to make companies more efficient and profitable. Most business schools have semi-academic journals dedicated to offering up buzzy techniques that promise to streamline operations, improve accountability, and raise productivity by establishing tightly circumscribed protocols for workers.

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For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny.

Donald Trump is famously reluctant to commit troops abroad but salivates at the prospect of using them against Americans at home. That is the context in which one must understand his takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force; his deployment of the National Guard; and his threats to occupy other cities.
Trump claims that he is acting to quell a spike in violent crime.

In the summer of 2020, as demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest against the murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump directed the National Guard and officers from various federal law-enforcement agencies to patrol the streets of the nation’s capital.

A limousine makes its way down Pennsylvania Avenue.
J. D. Vance: I’m here in place of erstwhile host Ty Pennington to surprise a really deserving family with a total home makeover!
The limousine pulls up at the White House.
Vance: Incredible news: The family is the Trump family! Donald, the patriarch, is the monarch of what he hopes will soon be a small, backwater nation after he applies a combination of tariffs and mass deportations to its once-thriving economy.

If you are going to promise users privacy, then you really need to follow through. Tea Dating Advice, a service that advertised itself as a safe space for women to anonymously share information about former partners—to warn others about abuse and cheating—says that it is locked down. Users are not allowed to take screenshots, and the app says it verifies that its users are women.