When you're a leading scientist who thinks Big Tech is chasing the wrong AI breakthrough, you probably won’t last long at a company desperate to catch up with the herd. Yann LeCun, a French-U.S. scientist known as one of the Godfathers of AI thanks to his foundational research on deep learning, is leaving Meta after 12 years to start his own ...Read more

After widespread defeats in last week’s off-year elections, Republicans should realize they made a bad bet by following President Donald Trump’s lead on mid-decade redistricting.

Desperate not to lose the House in the midterms, the president sought to rig the game. He pressured legislatures in red states to create new Republican-leaning ...Read more

The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case brought in an effort to persuade the justices to reconsider the court’s landmark 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges.

This latest decision is best read as a signal that the conservative majority has little interest in revisiting gay marriage, despite the call issued by ...Read more

Democrats just crumbled like soft-bake cookies.

The so-called resistance party has given up the shutdown fight, ensuring that millions of Americans will face Republican-created skyrocketing healthcare costs, and millions more will bury any hope that the minority party will find the substance and leadership to run a viable defense against ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s reelection stirred concern among many that constitutional protections, including the right to marry, could be put back on the table.

The Supreme Court put those fears to rest Monday when they decided to leave it well enough alone.

At issue was a petition from a former county clerk from Kentucky who had asked the ...Read more

Years ago, the BBC suggested in an interview with the Herald that a British murderer may have been falsely charged because someone linked to the case had Mafia ties.

That opinion was based on one fact: someone of Italian heritage was an innocent part of the case. It was a complete lie, and no law enforcement official ever suggested anything ...Read more

If there is one thing you can say about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, it’s that she’s handled President Donald Trump quite well so far. This was by no means a given; as Colombian President Gustavo Petro is learning the hard way, Trump’s personal relationships with foreign leaders can run hot and cold depending on the day and the ...Read more

Has there ever been a presidential administration more deeply defined by the personality traits of the sitting president than this one?

America knows President Donald Trump well: His innate lack of empathy toward the weak, most recently demonstrated with his gutting of foreign food aid; a long history of racism, from his days as a redlining ...Read more

The way that Congress makes decisions seems almost designed to produce government shutdowns. Senate rules require a three-fifths supermajority to close debate on most bills.

In practice, this means that senators from both parties must agree to advance legislation to a final vote. In such a polarized political environment, negotiating an ...Read more

New York’s mayor-elect—Zohran Mamdani—is a self-described socialist. Socialist! Like that’s a bad thing?

Mamdani’s critics, of course, quickly turned the word into a bludgeon. And if “Socialist!” didn’t carry enough weight, they used “Communist!”

But the demonization of the term socialist is misguided. If we think of our ...Read more

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be considering a terrifying new escalation of its mass deportation campaign. The Intercept, a nonprofit investigative media outlet, has reported on and obtained DHS documents showing that the department is considering the use of bounty hunters, who would be paid to track and verify the locations of ...Read more

In the middle of the night, on Sept. 30, a federal military-style assault was deployed on a civilian apartment building in Chicago's South Shore district. Without warning or warrants, residents of the complex, mostly U.S. citizens of color, many of them children, were forcibly taken from their homes, zip-tied, and detained for hours.

“They ...Read more

Artificial intelligence is killing Wikipedia.

The volunteer-run online encyclopedia just issued a stark warning: AI is exploiting the site’s data, siphoning off its traffic, and threatening its future. Contrary to what you were taught in middle school, Wikipedia is remarkably accurate. It’s used by doctors and professional fact-checkers. ...Read more

Headlines have been full of misunderstood and misrepresented claims about data centers.

If you only looked at this reporting, you would only see them as big, concrete boxes filled with computers that consume too much electricity and water. That picture misses the bigger story. For forward-looking cities and towns, data centers can be the ...Read more

A friend once complained to me that people would sigh and roll their eyes when she used a credit card to pay for her $3 coffee. This was about a decade ago, and I admit, at the time I silently judged her. What kind of psychopath, I thought to myself, forces everyone in line to wait for their coffee while her credit card transaction is approved? ...Read more

Gen Z calls itself the climate generation. We post infographics, hop on Lime bikes instead of calling Ubers, offset flights we still take for weekend getaways and stage walkouts with reusable bottles in hand. But somewhere between our climate optimism and the dopamine hit of another endless scroll, we became part of the problem we were left to ...Read more

Recently, in our roles with nonprofit groups devoted to protecting human rights and reproductive justice, we interviewed an advocate who supported a pregnant high school senior through the difficult process of getting judicial permission to have an abortion without involving her parents, known as judicial bypass.

The teenage student knew that ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One takeaway from last week’s elections: The role model for California Gov. Gavin Newsom as he runs for president should be New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Actually, Mamdani should be emulated not only by Newsom but by Democrats running for office anywhere.

Neither Newsom, of course, nor any candidate ...Read more

Even though their farms account for only 12% of the world’s farmland, they grow a third of the world’s food, and nearly 70% of Africa’s. They are smallholder farmers, many of them women, and they are facing the most severe impacts of climate change, yet they produce enough to literally feed billions. At COP30, the realities of smallholder ...Read more

At a hearing before the Supreme Court last week, a majority of the justices thankfully expressed real skepticism over Donald Trump’s bizarre and clearly illegal effort to utilize an emergency economic powers provision that doesn’t even mention tariffs to institute random tariff rates on pretty much every country in the world, shaking the ...Read more