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May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.
In January 1865, not long after his march had reached the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held a remarkable meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke with a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that was to rise from the ashes of both.
In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest.
Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.
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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion.
The new documentary Shoot the People profiles the Nigerian British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. We speak to Harriman in New York City ahead of the film’s U.S.
The Department of Justice has intervened in a legal case involving the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, asking a Mississippi federal court to toss a lawsuit from the NAACP against Musk’s company xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX. The NAACP says xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of unpermitted gas-burning turbines in majority-Black neighborhoods to fuel its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.
World leaders are returning home from the annual G7 summit, having failed to address issues such as income inequality, climate change and territorial conflict, while entertaining the wealthy executives of the artificial intelligence and fossil fuel industries.
The United States and Iran have officially signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran. The 14-point agreement includes an immediate end to fighting on all fronts including Lebanon, an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iran and the full resumption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Inflation is on the rise, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem concerned.
Is the industry screwed?
Brendan Greeley offers up the surprising origin story of our favorite currency.
Guest host Mary Childs explains why index funds are bending their rules and giving investors little choice but to opt into the AI boom.
The people now running CBS seem really determined to undermine the best thing going.
The health secretary has visited four House districts with toss-up races in the last six weeks.
But inside the health department, workers say the dysfunction of the DOGE era persists.
Chris Klomp is working to boost morale and deliver results at the Health Department after a year of upheaval.
The American Medical Association has sought a working relationship with the health secretary. Members saw moral compromise.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
“We have to take care of ourselves because we can’t rely on one foreign partner,” Mark Carney said in a video address. “We can’t control the disruption coming from our neighbors.
President Donald Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., after a judge ruled its addition was illegal. The Kennedy Center’s board, which was handpicked by Trump, voted to add Trump’s name to the center late last year. The battle over the Kennedy Center’s name comes during a broader push by Trump to overhaul the institution, which is closed for “renovations” amid mass cancellations by artists.
The whiplash is jarring.
President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.
What if you took a folk figure or a popular comic-book character—someone beloved enough to be the star of, say, a Disney cartoon—and made a film that cast them in a dark, even antiheroic light? Call it the “grim and gritty” take, or perhaps the “untold true story”; it’s the kind of reimagining that has befallen several storybook figures on-screen, such as Peter Pan and Hansel and Gretel.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has a leading role in determining how gender-affirming care is provided.
In 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu draped buildings with giant banners that depicted him shaking hands with a grinning Donald Trump. Captioned with the words Another League, the posters presented Netanyahu’s ties with the American president as an argument for the Israeli prime minister’s reelection. No one else, Netanyahu’s campaign implied, could deliver the mercurial man in the White House.
That was then.
Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.
The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago.