In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds…

Minnesota State Senator John Marty was furious with the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling, so much so that he couldn’t wait until morning to fire off an angry email. “I am deeply disappointed to see this!” he wrote to an NCPG staffer one night in April 2025, after a Senate colleague shared the draft of an op-ed by Keith Whyte, NCPG’s longtime executive director and one of America’s…

Brett Neibling leaned against the door of his small office space, facing the array of computers and instruments that controlled several mechanical functions on his farm. The room was little more than an air-conditioned box, with scattered stools and a whiteboard on one wall. One of his farm dogs, a brown Labrador and known menace, idled outside the door.

His roughly 2,500-acre farm in Highland,…

It only took a brief aside between a right-wing pundit and a sitting governor to reveal the newest, weirdest front in America’s long simmering “war on alcohol.” The comment generated scant coverage from mainstream media outlets and went largely unremarked upon by the nation’s pundits. But when, on a podcast last March, the late Charlie Kirk told California’s Gavin Newsom that he no longer drank,…

Before Donald Trump’s recent military campaigns, Iran and Venezuela weren’t often spoken of in the same breath. But in fact, the countries share much in common. They’ve both been demonized as evil, as bad guys, formally designated as states that promote terrorism. They’ve both suffered under intensive sanctions that have damaged life for civilians. And influential advocates from both places have…

Hours after Renee Good was gunned down on a Minneapolis street by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent inside her Honda Pilot, Aurin Chowdhury, the council member for Minneapolis’s Twelfth Ward, told me the city was under siege. “We’re already in a mass, _mass_ militarized occupation,” Chowdhury said, referring to the thousands of armed federal agents who had invaded the Twin Cities a…

For half a century, FIFA’s leaders have dished out bribes and raked them in as they’ve cozied up—and handed the World Cup—to despots and murderous regimes all over the globe, from Argentina in 1978 to Russia in 2018. Even the generational scandal that led, in 2015, to multiple arrests on charges of racketeering and wire fraud couldn’t reform FIFA, which simply replaced its old way of doing…