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The Soviet Union promised equality among its republics, but repression, deportation, and Russification left political and cultural scars that still shape the region.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party turned an insult against unemployed youth into a national movement demanding accountability for an examination system in crisis.

Over the past 10 years, the birth rate in the largest country in the world has dropped by 30%. Russian experts cite many factors, including the decline of traditional values, economic instability, and even extremists. Let’s examine how the government promotes childbirth and punishes those who choose to remain child-free, the factors that undermine these efforts, and the clear, effective measures the state could implement to support existing families and encourage people to have children....

We’ve come far as a country, from role-playing Hollywood-level combat scenarios in Atropia to embedding artificial intelligence in virtual warfare simulations. The U.S. military leaves no stone unturned in preparing its soldiers for the uncertainties of war. But if “closing the loop” is what makes the system better, who remains outside to evaluate it? Shield AI’s recent acquisition of Aechelon Technology paints a picture of a future where, as Shield AI CEO Gary Steele remarked in a statement,...

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that President Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. In doing so, the Court overturned a 91-year-old precedent that had prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the federal government in nearly a century. Independent agencies were designed by Congress to function as a check...

A Rare Moment of Agreement Democrats and Republicans rarely find common ground on social, economic, or political issues. However, one topic stands out: the need for a Congressional stock trading ban. Both parties overwhelmingly support this initiative. According to the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, an impressive 86% of registered voters favor prohibiting members of Congress from trading stocks. This statistic comes with a margin of...

The last two weeks in the United States have seen nationwide protests against ICE, Donald Trump, and the actions of the DOJ within the last year. In those two weeks, students took to the streets in droves, participating in school walkouts, chanting, and claiming intersections and/or sidewalks in massive crowds. Although some in more organized manners than others, students have provided the bulk and blade of anti-ICE attention & action as of late. Local partisan groups have the choice to...

Look at the roster of the French national team. Then look at the history of French colonialism in West and North Africa. The connection between those two things is not coincidental. It is the entire story. France's ability to field one of the most competitive squads in the world in 2026 is inseparable from the migration patterns set in motion by its imperial history, the communities that formed in its cities as a result, and the young men who grew up in those communities dreaming of...

The Democratic Party has a Hakeem Jeffries problem. Not because Jeffries has done anything wrong, but because his position at the center of a fracturing coalition has made him the symbol of a debate that the party can no longer manage with careful language and calls for unity. Jeffries, if Democrats retake the House, would be the first Black speaker in history. Some members of his own party's insurgent wing are running against his allies and chanting at their victory parties that he is next....

After the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, Ukraine entered a brief sphere of relevance in global politics. The spotlight garnered substantial support from Western allies – primarily NATO and EU member nations, among others. Once the sensationalism of the event faded and the priorities of others shifted over time, the attention on Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine gradually faded. On February 24, 2022, the world’s attention suddenly returned to the post-Soviet country when a formal...

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330 million people...

We are raised to not think outside ourselves, to ignore the unhoused person asking for food, to avert our eyes at the sight of struggling families desperate for medical care. The United States and similar capitalist Western cultures have cultivated a mindset of “not owing anyone anything” and of watching out for yourself above all else. This seems to remain true in closer-knit groups like family and friends as well as in larger community bodies. We have created a culture where support and...

Everything you see can now be yours with the click of a button: every new shirt scrolled past on Instagram, every new food trend on TikTok. Social media and online shopping have built an algorithm of wanting, and the fastest possible way to satisfy it. Online shopping platforms push products toward consumers with little acknowledgment of the environmental cost on either side of the transaction. As with most technological advances, the focus stays on human convenience, not on what those...

From the earliest traces of humanity, our existence has been accompanied by creation: sculptures, paintings on cave walls, music, and stories. Art has been found on every continent with early human inhabitants, across nearly every style and medium imaginable. Yet humanity is often defined by its more practical inventions, as the agriculturists and the toolmakers. What about the artists? Storytellers Even before the invention of written language, humans were storytellers. Cave paintings were...

The electoral college is one of the oldest and most distinctive features of American democracy. Outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, it began as a compromise between giving the public a direct voice in choosing the president and preserving congressional power. Here is how the system worked originally, and how it changed with the 12th Amendment in 1804 and the 23rd Amendment in 1961. How the System Works Allocation: Each state receives a number of electors equal to its two...

Months ago, the Department of Justice quietly removed a 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice's public site. The study examined the political affiliations of domestic terrorism perpetrators and found that 84.4 percent of ideologically motivated incidents of political violence between 1990 and 2020, 227 out of 269 events, were carried out by far-right actors. The data suggested that the far right, a key base of support for President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement, had...

Mullets, red hats, and American flag apparel have become shorthand for the American South in the popular imagination. Southern culture is too often portrayed as synonymous with cruelty and bigotry. Popular media tends to depict the region as impoverished and uneducated, classist stereotypes that go largely unchallenged because the South is also framed as cruel and therefore undeserving of the compassion typically extended to struggling communities. Southern Roots That image obscures a more...

Legacy admissions have become one of the most quietly debated features of American higher education. The conversation tends to flare up around Supreme Court decisions and admissions scandals, then fade. But the policy is still very much alive, and the students it displaces are real. The Where Legacy admissions exist in all states except California, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia. California and Maryland have enacted statewide bans covering both public and private universities,...

In an era of "uncs," "bums," and "goons," one term circulating among American teenagers stands out for its deeply political, and largely unknown, origin: "chud." The word began its life as the title of a 1984 horror film, "C.H.U.D.," an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers." From there, it was adopted by left-wing communities on 4chan as a derogatory label for right-wing individuals, before migrating into mainstream social media as a broader insult directed at anyone...

In June 2026, the same companies that just a few years ago were racing to add rainbows to their logos and drive floats through pride parades have gone quiet. No profile picture changes. No statements. No floats. The silence is not neutral. Corporate Pride People inside queer communities saw this coming. For years, the criticism of corporate pride sponsorship was consistent: the attraction to queer aesthetics felt transactional, a cash grab by companies that did little to materially support...

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That sentence has been interpreted by courts for over two hundred years. What is happening right now is not a repeal of that sentence. It is a quiet, systematic redefinition of what it protects, who it protects, and when its protections apply. Text from the First Amendment highlighting fundamental freedoms, including religion, speech, press, assembly, and petitioning the government for redress. In...

The Trump administration cut 1.1 billion dollars in federal funding from public broadcasting this year. NPR stations across the country are contracting or closing. PBS faces a similar reckoning. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and several other public-interest broadcasters have had their funding slashed or eliminated entirely. The justification offered by administration officials is that the government should not be in the business of funding media. That argument has a...

In October 2025, the Pentagon introduced new press guidelines. The guidelines required journalists seeking access to sign a 21-page policy restricting their contact with military and civilian staff, warning that reporting on information not officially approved could lead to consequences regardless of how the information was obtained or whether it was classified. Almost the entire mainstream press corps refused. The Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, The New York Times, and every major network...

On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He is the first Muslim to hold that office. He is the first Asian American to hold that office. He is also a democratic socialist who represents a district in Queens and who ran on a platform that most political analysts, as recently as three years ago, would have described as unelectable in a major American city. The significance of this moment does not reduce to identity, though identity matters. The first Muslim,...

Livestreams depict young men sitting in fancy cars and standing in bustling clubs, smiling awkwardly while steroids course through their bodies. If you turned the lights on, you would see red marks on their cheeks and jaws from hammers, the stubble barely starting to fill out their young faces. "Looksmaxxing" has entered the public zeitgeist as the newest form of self-improvement. Young men take extreme measures to increase their attractiveness, often pursuing dangerous practices with little...

The week of May 11 through May 17, 2026, produced a set of civil rights developments that, taken individually, each warranted serious coverage. Taken together, they describe something more alarming: a coordinated, sustained effort to weaken the federal government's role in protecting racial equality. Voting rights took a hit. DOJ enforcement activity against civil rights violations slowed. Immigration policing expanded in ways that civil rights organizations and international human rights...

In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Priscilla Villarreal, a citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who was arrested in 2017 for asking a police officer a question. That is not a metaphor. She was arrested for asking a question. Villarreal, who operates under the name La Gordiloca, published news stories about a border agent's suicide and a car crash after contacting law enforcement sources for information. Texas prosecutors charged her under a state statute that...

On May 19, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing banks to screen customers for immigration status. If you are undocumented, the federal government now wants your bank to know it. The order instructs financial regulators to identify signs that customers without legal status are opening accounts or obtaining loans. The Treasury Department is tasked with issuing risk guidance to financial institutions. An earlier draft of the order would have required banks to collect...

Across six continents, the legal machinery of the state has been turned against queer people. Understanding why requires confronting what law actually is — and what it has always been used to do.

Teen Vogue dissolved its politics team in November 2025, one day before a major election. The timing was not accidental. It was a statement, whether Conde Nast intended it to be or not, about which kinds of coverage are considered expendable when the business pressure is high enough. Teen Vogue was not just another youth publication. It was, for about a decade, one of the most consistently serious outlets in American media. It commissioned incarcerated writers. It published grassroots...

A protester in Kansas City marches with students from Crossroads Preparatory Academy in 2022. On Thursday, City Council repealed a ban on so-called conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “convert” LGBTQ+ minors to a heterosexual lifestyle. On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors violated the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was...

The United States is now ranked 64th in the world for press freedom. Not 64th in GDP. Not 64th in military spending. 64th in its ability to protect the people whose job is to tell the truth about power. Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index last month, and the findings are damning. For a country that has long held up its First Amendment as the gold standard of democratic values, slipping to 64th out of 180 nations should be a national crisis. Instead, it barely...

Graduating undergraduate students are terrified of the labor market they are about to enter. They fear the impact that AI will have on virtually every field, especially in the humanities and creative work. Despite the volume of student concern about the replacement of human talent, a significant number of high-profile educators and professionals remain either oblivious or indifferent to the alarm their pupils are raising. That disconnect came to an uncomfortable head this May. Graduations are...

Creatures of the night, stalking through stone-brick towns, clinging to trees, watching through windows. The story of the vampire is universal, shifting between different themes and appearances to adapt to each culture and era. "Vampire" is a broad term with only one true requirement: the consumption of blood. Other supernatural abilities usually accompany this trait, but they are negotiable. The blood never is. Early iterations of what we now call vampires appear across the world, though the...

Two people I knew in high school earned Associate's Degrees before they ever received their diplomas. Today, one is at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley, each on track to graduate at least a year ahead of their classmates. Neither spent a dollar on most of their credits. Both were admitted as first-years. This path offers a cheaper, fast-track through college than AP tests. It gives you a significant and directly transferable credit boost while making your college application stand out. If...

Records are flying off the shelves at thrift stores. Printed polaroids are taped to bedroom walls. Zines line the aisles of local bookstores. Gen Z has developed a genuine appreciation for physical media, a sensibility that felt lost in the early days of the internet and digital downloads. The old desire for efficiency has been replaced with something different: a need for tangible, personal memory. Today's teenagers and young adults want something they can hold, not just scroll past. The New...

Public media is not just background noise. It is the news infrastructure that serves places no one else will.

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion in nine weeks. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil moves, is still closed.

It is not just an aesthetic. The cigarette is back as a prop, a statement, and a cultural signal, and the reasons why tell you something real about this moment.

The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into a private women's college for admitting trans women. Legal experts are baffled. The implications go far beyond one campus.

Seven Republican state senators in Indiana voted against Trump's redistricting push. Now $7 million in outside spending is trying to end their careers. This is what political loyalty looks like in 2026.

Cole Allen walked into the most press-saturated room in Washington with a shotgun and two pistols. The story everyone covered was the shooting. The story fewer people covered is what it means for journalism.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's majority-Black district as an 'unconstitutional racial gerrymander.' The timing, right before the midterms, is not accidental.

If you steal money from a homeless man’s basket, only to later discover he is the hiring manager for the company you’re interviewing with, you probably won’t get the job. And, of course, it’s not a very nice thing to do. But in a game where you can step outside your own body while still shaping the world around you, things are different. You probably still won't get the job, but you gain the unique ability to see how that choice affects the way people perceive you. You can witness how it...

Streaming was supposed to give us more. More stories, more voices, more risk. What it gave us instead was an industry that decided its audience couldn't be trusted. In the era of mobile devices and fractured attention, the way people consume media has shifted fundamentally, and the writing of film and TV has followed. Stories feel flat. Characters explain themselves out loud rather than through the quiet work of performance. Subtlety, it seems, has been declared a liability. Everything must...

You Were Never Supposed to Feel This Tired There is a kind of exhaustion that feels less like a bad night and more like a pattern. You wake up tired, move through the day tired, and instead of asking why, you correct it. The correction is almost automatic. Coffee. What is striking is not that coffee works, but that we rarely question why we need it to work at all. The fatigue is treated as normal. The solution is treated as routine. That is where the story begins. Capitalism Needed More Than...

Markiplier in an interview in NYC. The Beginning of His Journey On March 6, 2012, a college dropout from the University of Cincinnati named Mark Edward Fischbach launched his first YouTube channel. The channel name "Markiplier" is a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier. He originally planned to upload comedy sketches and action videos, but it was his lifelong love of gaming that drove his growth. His first breakout series was "Amnesia: The Dark Descent," which earned him roughly 94,000...

In the summer of 1969, the Earth felt like a very small place. While the world below was tangled in political unrest and social change, three men were sitting on top of a controlled explosion, waiting to be hurled into the dark. When the Apollo 11 mission successfully touched down on the lunar surface, it did more than win a race. It proved that the limits of human achievement are only as small as our imagination and our willingness to take massive risks. A Decade of Desperation and Discovery...

ICE, otherwise known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was established to protect communities. That purpose has been catastrophically abandoned. In recent months, ICE has not simply been detaining undocumented immigrants. It has been abusing detainees, separating children from their families, shooting innocent bystanders, and setting records for deaths in custody. This is not enforcement. It is terror. A Pattern of Violence In October 2025, ICE shot U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez...