In recent months, there have been growing concerns about whether 90-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has represented California in the Senate since 1992, can fulfill her congressional duties. No White House judicial nominees were able to be confirmed from February to May of this year, when Senate Republicans blocked an effort to temporarily replace the senator during her three-month absence due to shingles complications. After Feinstein returned to the Capitol, she told reporters she had “been voting” on legislation when she had in fact been absent. In late July, during a Senate Appropriations Committee vote, chair and fellow Sen. Patty Murray told Feinstein, who had begun to deliver a speech, to “just say aye” when voting. Some news outlets and Capitol Hill colleagues have raised concerns that Feinstein has trouble recalling what’s happening and is experiencing memory lapses, but Feinstein, who has said that she will not run for re-election in 2024, has not confirmed any age-related chronic health diagnoses.

Still, House Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents California’s 17th District, has been one of a few Democratic members of Congress openly calling for Feinstein’s resignation—a sign of serious reservations within the party. Being disabled, chronically ill, or having a temporary disability shouldn’t preclude anyone from holding office; the question is whether Feinstein is able to do her job with the kinds of reasonable accommodations disabled and chronically ill workers use every day. That is very much up for debate. 

Reasonable accommodations, which employers are required to provide under the Americans With Disabilities Act, are modifications that help disabled people perform their jobs as capably as non-disabled people. Those accommodations can include, among many other things, working a hybrid schedule, having a sign language interpreter, using a screen reader, or being allowed to sit while working. If someone can’t perform their job despite reasonable accommodations, it could be legal grounds for termination.

There are politicians with disabilities who are able to fulfill their duty to their constituents thanks to such accommodations. Take Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who, to accommodate symptoms caused by a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign, has used assistive technology like a closed captioning device to better understand people’s speech. Beyond gross jokes and memes (which Feinstein has also been the target of), media responses to Fetterman’s use of assistive tech show how little many know about accessibility—like NBC News reporter Dasha Burns, who interviewed Fetterman during that campaign, jumping to the conclusion that the senator didn’t comprehend what she was saying:

Burns’ Friday interview with Fetterman aired Tuesday. He used a closed-captioning device that printed text of Burns’ questions on a computer screen in front of him. Fetterman appeared to have little trouble answering the questions after he read them, although NBC showed him fumbling for the word “empathetic.” Burns said that when the captioning device was off, “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first pill specifically designed to treat postpartum depression, a common condition affecting mothers that can make it harder to bond with a new baby by causing severe despair, anxiety, shame, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts.

The drug, Zurzuvae, is designed to be taken once a day for two weeks after pregnancy—a much shorter period than currently deployed treatments, such as antidepressants or talk therapy, that are not specific to postpartum depression. Federal health officials said they hope the pill will encourage more new mothers to seek help for the condition, which affects an estimated 400,000 people annually. Left untreated, symptoms may go away on their own within weeks but can sometimes linger for months or even years.

The only other medication designed specifically for postpartum depression isn’t a pill and is difficult to get—it requires a 60-hour IV infusion at a hospital, can cause a loss of consciousness, and costs $34,000.

“Having access to an oral medication will be a beneficial option for many of these women coping with extreme, and sometimes life-threatening, feelings,” said Dr. Tiffany Farchione, the leader of the FDA division that approved the pill, in a Friday statement.

Zurzuvae was developed by Sage Therapeutics, the same company behind the IV treatment, and is produced in partnership with the firm Biogen. It is expected to be available after a 90-day review by the Drug Enforcement Administration, though the companies have not revealed how much it will cost.

On Thursday, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges that he orchestrated a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss. During the arraignment, Trump agreed he would not try to influence or intimidate witnesses or do anything else that might obstruct justice in the case.

But then on Friday, he posted a threatening message on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” Trump wrote in all-caps. Minutes later, Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign posted a one-minute video that names and shows the images of four prosecutors who are pursuing legal cases against him, describing them as the “fraud squad.” 

Prosecutors soon responded, using his his social media habits—and specifically his recent Truth post—as ammo. In a filing from late Friday lodged in a DC federal court, the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith (one of the prosecutors named in the ad) asked US District Judge Tanya Chutkan to impose a protective order prohibiting Trump and his lawyers from sharing evidence in the case with unauthorized people.

While Smith’s team did not explicitly argue Trump’s post constituted a threat, they included an image of it it as evidence of his tendency to post about “witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him,” saying it raised the prospect that he might improperly post information or documents shared with his legal team ahead of the trial.

If he did so, it “could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” prosecutors warned.

Late on Friday, a judge in Texas issued an pre-trial injunction limiting the reach of the state’s recent anti-abortion measures.

While Texas law technically allows ending a pregnancy in emergency, medically necessary situations, patients seeking care under that provision have been denied, as doctors fear fines, imprisonment, or the loss of their license for being involved in any kind of abortion. The judge clarified that a doctor can decide when their patient needs an emergency abortion, and held that the women who brought the suit with the assistance of the Center for Reproductive Rights had had a legal right to an abortion in Texas. Under the law, one plaintiff in the suit was denied an abortion and developed sepsis; another was forced to give birth to a non-viable fetus. Others opted to travel out of state for care.

Travis County district judge Jessica Mangrum also held that SB8, the state law that encourages Texas citizens to investigate and turn in people who seek or help enable an abortion, is unconstitutional because it violates a provision in the state’s bill of rights banning unreasonable fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Mother Jones‘s Pema Levy wrote about the law last year:

It allows vigilantes to piggyback on any cases brought under the bans and win civil suits with ample bounties. Vigilantes can also go after anyone involved in a suspected abortion without a prosecutor’s involvement, meaning that even in the state’s liberal enclaves where elected prosecutors have promised not to prosecute abortion cases, SB8 will allow individuals to become the enforcers… [U]nder SB8, scrutiny has been expanded and weaponized: When the law took effect, a Texas anti-abortion group set up a website for people to submit tips about abortions performed in violation of SB8 and promised to “do the rest.” The portal didn’t last, but it also wasn’t needed for the law to have its intended effect.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the case, Zurawski v. State of Texas, was the first brought on behalf of women denied abortions after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.

Former President Trump’s prosecution for alleged conspiracy wasn’t the only election meddling case this week.

Two Michigan Republicans were arraigned Tuesday on felony charges related to tampering with voting equipment in an effort to prove that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Matt DePerno, a former Michigan Republican state attorney general candidate, was charged with conspiracy and undue possession of a voting machine, while former Michigan state representative Daire Rendon was charged with conspiracy to commit undue possession of a voting machine and false pretenses.

On Thursday, another Michigan attorney, Stefanie Lambert, was charged with improper possession of a voting machine, conspiracy to improperly possess a voting machine, conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer system and willfully damaging a voting machine.

Perpetrators of the scheme allegedly brought five voting tabulators to a hotel room and performed “tests” on them. Some of the defendants claim that local election clerks willingly offered up the voting machines for testing.

The case bears some similarities to the one against Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who allegedly illegally obtained election information that wound up online. Peters unsuccessfully ran for Colorado secretary of state last year. DePerno’s Michigan attorney general campaign also failed, though not as spectacularly as Peters’. In Georgia, Trump attorney Sidney Powell—one of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators in the plot to overturn the 2020 election—reportedly oversaw a team that copied voter information from machines in Michigan and Georgia.

In 2007, Dr. Jake Kleinmahon left Westchester, New York, to move to New Orleans and attend medical school at Tulane University. Drawn by the opportunity to help rebuild the city’s medical system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he eventually became medical director of Ochsner Hospital for Children’s pediatric heart transplant, heart failure and ventricular assist device programs. He met and married his husband, Tom, a Michigan-born chemical engineer for Shell. They have two children, a 4- and a 6-year-old. But after years of building a life in New Orleans, the family is leaving the state at the end of the month over discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws coming out of the Republican-controlled legislature. 

In early June, state lawmakers passed a series of bills, including so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation barring public school teachers from discussing gender identity and sexuality in the classroom; a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors; and a measure prohibiting school employees from using a student’s preferred pronoun without parental permission. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed the bills, but the Republican supermajority legislature has since moved to override the veto and enact the ban trans youth health care. The legislation, the governor said, “needlessly harms a very small population of vulnerable children, their families, and their health care professionals.” 

Mother Jones spoke with Dr. Kleinmahon on Wednesday about his decision to leave Louisiana and the potential impact of a “brain drain” on the state: 

On becoming a doctor: I knew I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was 4 years old. There are no doctors in my family, but I had an amazing pediatrician and he was such an inspiring and kind man. I admired the amount of knowledge he had and the way he treated me and the rest of my family with such compassion. When I was a teenager, I began volunteering at our local ambulance corps. I became an emergency medical technician. And then, after college, I went off to medical school at Tulane.

On practicing in Louisiana: During medical school, I had the opportunity to work in volunteer clinics where medical students saw the patients, and then they discussed the patients with an attending physician and came up with a plan for the patients. There were so many opportunities to do this throughout the city because of the lack of medical homes and primary care centers that were online at this point. So we were really able to make an impact in the medical system by having these volunteer clinics that patients only had to pay a very nominal fee for. The other part was that there still weren’t a ton of medical professionals who came back to the city after Katrina, so when I was rotating in the emergency room, I was doing things that medical students at other institutions sometimes don’t get to do, such as being involved in the trauma team, suturing up facial lacerations, and really inserting yourself as part of the team. Sometimes they were so short-staffed that they needed extra hands to help out.

More than 1,000 people have been arrested in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol. Now, the man who allegedly fueled the attack is one of them.

Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in a DC courthouse Thursday afternoon and charged with four felonies related to his actions in the lead-up to January 6. Trump’s third arrest in four months involves the most serious case against him, with prosecutors accusing him of three conspiracy counts, including defrauding the United States. Trump pleaded not guilty to all four counts.

Many have commented on the collective fatigue that news consumers might feel about the constant drumbeat of accusations against the former president. Even CNN, the poster child of the 24-hour news cycle, referred to Trump’s arrests as “routine” in a broadcast this afternoon.

But it’s important to remember that the federal government has not gone easy on the hundreds of people charged in relation to January 6. Anti-vax doctor turned insurrectionist Simone Gold faced 60 days in prison for her conduct on January 6, though she was released early. In June, an international underwear model who stormed the Capitol was sentenced to 32 months in prison. And in May, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy. Now, the ringleader of the entire operation—the man whom each of the convicted insurrectionists worshipped—is having his day in court.

Trump’s favorability ratings remain impressively high for someone with so many pending criminal cases, and Trump opponents fear that the latest charges could ironically bolster his popularity by creating the illusion that Trump is the victim of politically motivated prosecutions. Trump echoed this point in a statement after his arraignment. “This is the persecution of the person that’s leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary, and leading Biden by a lot,” he said, “so if you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him.” (While Trump is leading in Republican primary polls, he is neck and neck with Biden.)

Donald Trump has been indicted three times in four months. He faces charges in New York, DC, and Florida, with Georgia expected to join the list soon. Those cases, in local and federal courts, include 78 separate counts for crimes he allegedly committed in 2016, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

The most likely explanation for this litany of alleged crimes is that the former president is a criminal—a guy who concluded that he was above the law, broke laws with abandon, and now, without the presidency to protect him, faces a backlog of criminal consequences. The courts—jurors and judges—will ultimately decide his guilt or innocence if the cases make it to trial.

But for Trump and many of his fans, the rising pile of charges against him seems to be reinforcing the view that he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy aimed at keeping him out of the White House.

Trump was hit Tuesday with a four-count indictment alleging that he mounted three criminal conspiracies to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Even before the indictment appeared, Trump claimed that Jack Smith—the special counsel overseeing both that case and the prosecution related to Trump’s hoarding of classified documents—timed the new charges “to put it right in the middle of my campaign.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was even more specific, tweeting Tuesday that Smith released the indictment to “distract from” supposedly new allegations about Hunter Biden. McCarthy suggested that the timing of the charges was connected to a Monday poll showing that “President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent.”  

During a barbecue campaign event on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told New Hampshire voters that if he makes it to the White House, he will be “slitting throats on day one” in order to root out the so-called “deep state” lurking in the federal government.

“We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said during a three-day trip to the Granite State. The event comes as the DeSantis campaign attempts a high-profile reset amid disappointing poll numbers and a major staff reduction. 

The promise to the slit throats of people who essentially don’t exist—that is, unless you’re a conspiracy-addled Republican—aligns with the strategy the DeSantis campaign recently outlined in a confidential memo, which reportedly includes more attacks on the “deep state,” to convince donors that the Florida governor can still win this game. Now will his latest comments do the trick? Or is this simply more evidence of the governor’s infamous lack of social skills?

Whatever the case, it’s safe to say that these remarks fall in line with DeSantis’ authoritarian approach to governing, using the state to punish his perceived enemies, from Disney to whatever new item he’s declared as “woke.” As Harvard professor Steven Levitsky told my colleague Pema Levy, “That’s authoritarianism at its core. That’s what authoritarians do.”  

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Beverly Grimmett thought the kids magazines she saw stacked on a coworker’s desk this spring were perfectly innocent, until she picked one up. 

“My stomach turned,” Grimmett said. 

The guides were decorated in bright colors and cheerful cartoons, with titles like, The Kids Guide to Socialism, The Kids Guide to Our One Nation Under God, and, finally, The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change.

Grimmett, who works in construction project management at a six-person office in Norfolk, Virginia, had happened upon one of former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s educational ventures, a series called The Kids Guide from Ever Bright Media, the children’s publishing company he founded.

Not long ago, I was one of 22 authors honored at a fundraising dinner for my local library. It was a swanky affair, with a multicourse meal, a pair of emcees, and a photographer to capture the rare sight of authors in cocktail attire rather than the sweatpants and baggy T-shirts we tend to favor. Midway through the meal, a waiter placed a full bottle of wine in front of me. “Thanks for giving ’em hell,” he said. “Keep up the good fight.”

An emcee had just announced that my Stonewall Award–winning New York Times bestseller, The 57 Bus, was the 10th most frequently challenged book in Texas and the 35th in the United States last year, a fact that caused the entire room to burst into applause. Bottles of wine are a rare response to such news, but high fives and congratulations are common. Having my book banned is a badge of honor, people often tell me.

I appreciate the sentiment, of course, but it does feel a bit like being congratulated for getting kicked in the teeth by the neighborhood bully. I’m not actually giving the book banners hell, much as I’d like to. I’m receiving hell. We all are: readers, writers, teachers—everyone who cares about the freedom to read.

The American Library Association reports that more than 2,500 books were challenged in 2022, a big uptick from the already astonishing 1,858 challenged in 2021, which was already five times the number challenged in 2019. Last year, some 41 percent of challenged books were by or about LGBTQ people, and 40 percent were by or about people of color. The 57 Bus, a nonfiction narrative about two teenagers on either side of a high-profile crime, is a twofer: One main character is Black, the other nonbinary. The Tennessean reported just last month that The 57 Bus is now one of that state’s top five most challenged books.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The mother of a 24-year-old worker who died from heatstroke while working for a construction firm in San Antonio, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against his employer.

Gabriel Infante was working for B Comm Constructors in San Antonio, Texas, on June 23 2022, digging in the hot summer sun to move internet fiber optic cable, a job he had recently started with a childhood best friend while they were finishing college.

The lawsuit comes after Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a controversial bill into law on June 14 that prohibits local municipalities from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers. The bill nullifies ordinances previously passed in Austin and Dallas that mandated 10-minute breaks for workers every four hours. A similar ordinance was being considered in San Antonio before the state bill was passed.

According to the lawsuit, Infante began exhibiting heatstroke symptoms, including confusion, altered mental state, dizziness and loss of consciousness. His friend and co-worker Joshua Espinoza began pouring cold water over him, trying to cool him down. A foreman insisted Espinoza call the police, claiming Infante’s bizarre behavior was due to drugs, and the foreman pushed for a drug test when emergency medical services arrived.

In July 2022, the United Nations and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan helped broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative: A deal between Russia and Ukraine that the UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “a beacon of hope.” It allowed food and fertilizer exports from three Ukrainian ports—on the Black Sea, Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi—to be shipped to the rest of the world. Since the agreement was signed last year, 32.8 million tons of Ukrainian grain have been exported; more than half has gone to developing countries, including drought-ridden East African nations like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. 

This week, that deal ended. And it soon got worse. After pulling out of the deal, Russia attacked storage facilities in the coastal city of Odesa, reportedly destroying 60,000 tons of grain, according to Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi. Both nations say that they will now treat each other’s ships traveling across the Black Sea as potential military targets. 

The end of the deal, and the bombings, could be a major blow to the global food supply. As my former colleague Tom Philpott wrote in March 2022, the Russia and Ukraine war is being fought in the world’s breadbasket:

Today, Russia is a global wheat powerhouse, the world’s number-three producer of the staple crop, and its number-one exporter. Just as in 1768, much of its most productive farmland lies east of the Ukraine border, making it largely reliant on the same “black paths” (now covered in paved roads and railroad tracks) to reach markets. Ukraine, too, is a major wheat exporter, and has recently emerged as a corn powerhouse, too, supplying China and its booming meat industry with nearly a third of its feed corn imports.

What does it mean when a war of conquest descends upon one of the globe’s great breadbaskets in the 21st century? With trade routes embattled and markets roiled by Russia’s invasion, wheat prices have already shot up to their highest level in 60 years. This far exceeds the spike of the early 2010s, which led to bread riots in the Middle East that helped bring about the Arab Spring and the still-simmering civil war in Syria. “It’s a core food,” Nelson says, “and when you double its price, it just changes everything.”

There is much to admire in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on Friday. The directing, script, editing, sound design and acting are all extraordinary. Nolan deserves high praise for tackling this difficult and sprawling subject and raising questions about one of the most sensitive issues in our history, a raw nerve even today: America’s use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed at least 150,000 civilians.

Even in a three-hour movie, Nolan had to leave out a lot of vital material, in part because of his secondary focus on Oppenheimer’s infamous security clearance hearing almost a decade after he left Los Alamos. Still, his film omits or downplays several important—even crucial—aspects of America’s 1945 detonations that continue to haunt us today.

Notably, the new film barely touches on arguments that were expressed back then, not in retrospect, against using the bomb. Ditto the deadly radiation the new weapon produced,  and the secrecy that surrounded it—starting with the Trinity test, when a radioactive cloud drifted over nearby villagers who were not warned, and were then lied to about the fallout effects. This combination of lethality and secrecy would have extensive and tragic results in the decades after Hiroshima.

Nagasaki’s fate is also ignored, save three or four brief and rather forced mentions in the final hour of the picture. But Nolan’s most significant failing lies in not confronting—and in some ways sustaining—the popular narrative around the decision to drop the bombs, one that endures in government and media circles and among many historians, and is thereby reflected in public opinion polls.

That narrative holds that it was the detonation of the two bombs, and only that, which brought the Pacific war to an end. Simple cause-and-effect. The key scene in this regard in Nolan’s film, largely accurate, depicts the late-May 1945 meeting of the Interim Committee, President Harry Truman’s top advisory panel on the matter. One or two advisers question the necessity of deploying such a terrible weapon against Japanese cities, but their doubts are silenced by an officer who insists the Japanese won’t surrender otherwise, and a host of American soldiers will then have to die storming the country’s beaches. The panel is reminded of how savagely the Japanese have fought to the last man in other circumstances.

The Florida Board of Education’s new standards dictating how Black history will be taught in public schools includes a provision implying that enslaved African-Americans learned skills for “their own personal benefit.” The guidelines, approved on Wednesday, have come under fire from civil rights advocates who’ve called them “a sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.” 

“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history.”

Two of the most contentious inclusions in the Board’s current guidelines include:

State Senator Geraldine Thompson, who worked on legislation to designate scholarships for the descendants Occoee Race massacre, on Wednesday blasted the new standards for blaming the victims, according to the Washington Post.

The policies add to Florida’s ongoing war against educational material Gov. Ron DeSantis and his conservative allies believe are objectionable, including content in courses focusing on African-American studies. Since his gubernatorial campaign, DeSantis has made combatting “wokeness” a large part of his platform and has signed off on several pieces of legislation aiming to control the way racism and history are taught to young Floridians in public schools. Perhaps the most severe form of legislation came in the form of the “Stop the Woke Act” which prohibits schools from teaching anything that implies the existence of systemic racism.

Sometimes, my rage gets the better of me.

To bike into downtown Denver, I need to take a left at a dangerous intersection. Despite being labeled as “cyclist friendly” by Google Maps, the crossing has no discernible bike infrastructure. There is a left turn lane but no signal; at rush hour, turning is impossible.

So, I use the crosswalk.

I was recently doing just that—rolling through the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal—when a car taking a right turn pulled in front of me. The driver rolled down his window, shook his finger at me, and said: “Not where you belong.” I was taken aback. Not where I belong? In the fucking crosswalk? With no pedestrians around, at an otherwise impassable intersection?

When I am zipping through town on a bicycle, my body protected only by a plastic sheath around my skull, I know that it is a bad idea to argue with motorists But, whoops, I yelled back at him.

As a UC Berkeley graduate, I never thought I’d type these words, but okay: Go Wesleyan!

Wesleyan University, a small, elite college in Middletown, Connecticut, costs about $85,000 a year, including room and board and sundries. On Wednesday, it announced that, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action in higher education (and possibly elsewhere), it would finally ditch legacy admissions, the practice of giving a preference to applicants whose parents—and in some cases grandparents, siblings, and other relatives—attended the school in question. It’s a practice that amounts to affirmative action for children of privilege.

Johns Hopkins and Amherst also ended legacy admissions in recent years, and MIT ditched them more than a decade ago. (“If you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that,” one admissions staffer noted in a 2012 blog post.) But all of the Ivy League colleges, and the majority of so-called Ivy Plus schools (the traditional Ivies plus the likes of Duke, MIT, and Stanford) still use them. In fact, a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public ones gave an admissions boost to children of alumni, and sometimes to grandchildren and siblings. Children of faculty may also get special consideration, as they do at Harvard.

Legacy admissions, if it even need be said, are unfair, unpopular, and un-American—or at least run contrary to the ideals of the America we mythologize. I poked that alligator in an earlier piece about how the Ivies are grappling with their slavery ties. And whatever you think of affirmative action, legacy admissions look even less fair when you outlaw preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. That’s because the history of racial exclusion in US higher education ensures that the legacy admits at most elite schools, deserving or not, are dominated by well-off white kids. From that earlier piece:

Why do legacies persist? The optics, after all, are atrocious. “Back in the old days,” Matt Feeney wrote in the New Yorker after Amherst ended legacy admissions in 2021, “the rich kids probably liked having a few smart kids from the lower classes around, or at least conceded that they were necessary. The raw bookishness of the smart kids ratified the larger enterprise that they were all participating in—it was a college, after all. But now that the aristocrats are siphoning status from the meritocrats, the social bargain is starting to look like a bad one.” 

Here is a bit of news involving Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that, unlike his antisemitic remarks and the unfortunate soundtrack during one of his appearances, didn’t exactly go viral. Earlier this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in a case against a California law that was passed last year to prohibit physicians from spreading misinformation about Covid. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a key figure in the fight against this law. 

It’s not hard to see why this wasn’t exactly headline material. The pandemic officially ended in May, but Covid news fatigue set in long before that. Yet this particular case is worth paying attention to because the people who oppose California’s Covid misinformation law have expanded their areas of interest. Their efforts could lay the groundwork to give contrarian physicians broad authority to go rogue on all kinds of medical issues, from the administration of routine childhood vaccinations to reproductive health, gender-affirming care, and beyond.  

To understand why, you need some context. In early 2022, California state assembly member Evan Low introduced AB 2098, a bill that would allow the state medical board to discipline doctors who promoted false information about Covid—say, by claiming that unproven treatments could cure or prevent the disease, or that the vaccines were dangerous. The bill garnered broad support from the healthcare sector, including from the California Medical Association, the state lobbying group that represents physicians. California governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law last September.

That level of support is remarkable since physicians don’t typically love being told that there are certain things they can’t say. But the law is quite specific in what it does and does not deem to be misinformation, as California physician Nick Sawyer recently pointed out in a MedPage Today op-ed:

In his signing statement, Newsom specified that the bill is “Narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.” He further added, “This bill does not apply to any speech outside of discussions directly related to Covid-19 treatment within a direct physician-patient relationship,” and that discussing emerging ideas or treatments, including risks and benefits, “does not constitute misinformation or disinformation under this bill’s criteria.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Tuesday that charges have been filed against 16 residents of the state for their roles in a fake elector scheme following the 2020 election. All 16 have been charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and election law forgery. 

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel said. The announcement comes just hours after Donald Trump revealed that he has received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Today, @MIAttyGen @dananessel announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Read more https://t.co/ODhkAQfXNP /1 pic.twitter.com/u5riNpTD5I

— Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (@MIAttyGen) July 18, 2023

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election in Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Trump and his allies worked to overturn the results of the election in the state, even though they hadn’t requested a recount.

Once upon a time, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina condemned racism. Now, not so much. What happened?

The presidential hopeful might be finding it difficult to make headlines in an increasingly crowded Republican primary field, but he’s still hauling in crucial campaign cash. The latest figures, unveiled last week, disclosed that his campaign has accumulated $6.1 million from over 53,000 donors in the second quarter of this year—ensuring his eligibility for the debate stage, alongside frontrunner Donald Trump, should the former president show up. Scott is also spending big, hoping to sway early-voting Iowans with a recent $6 million ad campaign titled “Winning.” 

“The radical left is indoctrinating our children, teaching CRT instead of ABC,” Scott says in the video, a phrase that has become something of a campaign catchphrase.

As Scott burnishes his anti-woke credentials on the campaign trail to compete with the more established culture warriors of the far right, I decided to scrutinize his views on race and how they’ve evolved over the years. In this video, I juxtapose Scott’s responses to two racially fueled tragedies: the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the 2022 Buffalo Massacre. These events elicited two completely different responses from the only Black senator in the Republican caucus, which prompted me to ask: What the hell happened in between?

My analysis begins in 2010 when Scott clinched a resounding victory in the US House of Representatives election against Paul Thurmond, whose father, Strom, was a notorious racist figure in the 20th century. Scott’s ability to win in a majority-white district set his political career on an upward trajectory, making him, in some respects, the Republicans’ primary spokesperson on race, or what I describe as the party’s “default DEI Guy”. After the Charlottesville rally, Scott was explicit in acknowledging America’s racial issues. But I quickly noticed a striking shift in Scott’s narrative following the racial tensions triggered by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020. In an email newsletter following the 2022 Buffalo Massacre, Scott stated, “America isn’t a racist country.”