Twitter has ended a standoff with Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn one day after taking down advertisements containing her Senate campaign announcement video, in which she bragged about fighting “the sale of baby body parts.”
The war on wildlife is fast becoming a thing. This week, the U.S. government unleashed a flurry of activity that puts furry friends along with plants, fish, insects and a host of other species at risk.
Donald Trump can’t stop deleting his own tweets, and we’re not just talking about typos any more.
ATLANTA — “The South” describes a vast, diverse group of people, ideologies and cultures linked, sometimes exclusively, by soupy, sweaty summers. Georgia’s right wing government that recently attempted to pass an anti-LGBT “religious freedom” bill, its Paris Accord exit-supporting senators and Bible Belt location make…
A New York Times investigation offered some unnerving news on Friday. Not only was the hacking of electoral systems during last year’s election “more extensive than previously disclosed,” the paper reports, multiple sources say that nobody’s really examining the the attacks on a state or local level. The reasons why…
Today is the last day to submit comments on the proposal to kill open internet rules to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Good luck with that, though. The public comment period has been complete disaster from the start, and a new study funded by big telecom suggests that the record-setting 21 million…
There was something very telling about Marvel’s decision this past Monday to announce to The New York Times how its Secret Empire event would end. It felt like the publisher was trying to get ahead of yet more problems coming from the series’ conclusion.
When Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary biologist at MIT, started thinking about using genetically engineered mice to fight Lyme disease, among his first stops was a community meeting in the small Martha’s Vineyard town of Chilmark. Esvelt makes regular field trips to talk to the public about his work. If the potential of…
In 2005, at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., the National Association of Evangelicals was on the verge of doing something novel: affirming science. Specifically, the 30-million-member group, which represents 51 Christian denominations, was debating how to advance a new platform called “For the Health of a Nation
With more than 1.6 million members, AFSCME is the nation’s biggest union of public employees, and one of the most politically powerful—and now, one of the most threatened. We spoke to Lee Saunders, the president of the union, about trying to survive the “battle” of the vicious new Trump era.
Last week, a draft of a Department of Energy study on electric grid reliability leaked. Though its final version could change, it essentially found that an increased reliance on renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, have not made the grid less stable. Instead, electric grids are “more reliable today”…
In his new, obsessively documented mission to gather (and probably, in some way, monetize) the authenticity of Common People, Facebook’s putty-faced CEO is doing exactly what common people do: showing up to places uninvited, unannounced, and demanding absolute secrecy from strangers.
Suing people isn’t easy. Suing the President of the United States of America, however, is huge pain in the ass. But that hasn’t stopped a group of Twitter users from filing suit against Donald Trump. These free speech advocates were all blocked by Trump after tweeting things he didn’t like. Now they’re claiming this…
Do you remember Mark Pincus? He co-founded Zynga and led the burgeoning online games company as CEO until 2013 when he was replaced by then czar of Xbox entertainment, Don Mattrick. After returning to the company for a short stint in 2015, Pincus now has a new pet project: making the Democratic Party more like a Zynga…
A 23-year-old man has been arrested after his plot to try and assassinate the French President was uncovered by the users of a video game forum.
Supervillains have seized power many times over the past several decades. Sometimes they simply want domination, or they employ military might to eliminate those they hate or fear. Sometimes, it’s even worse. Our current government may not be hunting the X-Men (at least not yet) but it shouldn’t surprise you to learn…
The Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division is responsible for enforcing compliance with federal environmental laws. So to find that the fingerprints of coal lobbyist-turned-ENRD acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Wood are on an environmental-racism scandal is, actually, pretty par for…
Paul Niehaus is the cofounder and president of GiveDirectly, a direct cash transfer program rated as one of the most effective anti-poverty charities in the world. He is currently putting together the largest basic income experiment ever designed. We spoke to him about the politics and perils of changing how the world…
Claiming that evolution is “debatable, controversial, and too complicated for students,” Turkey’s board of education has decided to stop teaching Darwinian natural selection in its schools. The move has infuriated the country’s secular opposition, but it could embolden other countries to do the same.
