Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee, said earlier today that he would side with Russia against NATO and encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to brutalize our allies. Not so long ago, many Americans—and especially most Republicans—would have considered anyone supporting such a view to be little more than a deranged and hateful anti-American fanatic.

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The Supreme Court is set to play a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential election, as it weighs former President Donald Trump’s appeal to appear on Colorado’s Republican presidential-primary ballot.

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“Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people,” my colleague Amanda Mull wrote last fall—and I’ll admit that just reading that line makes me feel a little stressed.

This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The stories have become horribly familiar: houses so overrun by bedbugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bedbug-detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains.

The early 2000s were an excellent time for romance. J. Lo married Marc Anthony. Vanessa Carlton vowed to walk a thousand miles for love. Ryan Gosling kissed Rachel McAdams in the pouring rain. And in Front Royal, Virginia, Chris Crowe flapped his arms to woo Walnut, a five-foot-tall white-naped crane.
Walnut was a graceful, strong-willed bird, if a tad antisocial.

That Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would fire his top general, Valerii Zaluzhny, was rumored for months, leaked and officially denied last week, and finally confirmed yesterday, when Zelensky replaced Zaluzhny with General Oleksandr Syrsky.
The leaks and denials seem to have reflected political maneuverings behind the scenes. Zaluzhny, who is charismatic and popular with both the public and the troops, is widely thought to have political ambitions.

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Yesterday was rough for President Joe Biden. A blistering special-counsel report cleared him of the threat of charges in his classified-documents case, in part because prosecutors expected that he’d present to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.

The last time the Academy Awards introduced a new category, back in 2001, it was very overdue: a dedicated Oscar for animated films. Since then, only one idea has almost broken through, in 2018—an ill-defined “best popular film” award that was triumphantly announced and then quickly shelved when nobody could really agree on what its parameters would be. Expanding the Oscars is always tricky, because there’s already so much hand-wringing about the length of the ceremony.

No medication in the history of modern weight loss has inspired as much awe as the latest class of obesity drugs. Wegovy and Zepbound are so effective that they are often likened to “magic” and “miracles.” Indeed, the weekly injections, which belong to a broader class known as GLP-1s, can lead to weight loss of 20 percent or more, fueling hype about a future in which many more millions of Americans take them.

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When you’re a parent who loves to read—or as the case is for me, happily, makes his living from reading—the first time you see your child become obsessed with an author is a genuine thrill. For both of my daughters, that author was Raina Telgemeier.