When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about.
Few things are more satisfying for a certain type of college-football fan than a Notre Dame loss, and all the better if it’s an upset. So last September, when the Fighting Irish were in danger of losing to the University of Toledo Rockets, 16.5-point underdogs, I knew I had to watch. First I flipped over to NBC, where Notre Dame’s home games are generally aired. No luck. Even before I could Google it, my Twitter feed reminded me of the problem: I had been Peacocked.
We speak with one of the reporters who this week exposed the secretive Chicago industrial mogul who has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. The donor is Barre Seid, who donated all of his shares in his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to the nonprofit group run by Leonard Leo, who helped select former President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees.
Oklahoma plans to execute a person a month for the next two years, starting today. We get an update from Connie Johnson, former state senator and murder victim family member with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and speak with world-renowned anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. “Our death penalty is broken. It always was from the beginning,” Prejean tells Democracy Now! “I recognize that this is torture and an abuse of human rights.
“Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” a new short documentary from The Intercept, profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in student loan debt. It is directed by Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll, narrated by former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, and was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In a much-anticipated move, President Biden has signed an executive order Wednesday for student debt relief that could help more than 40 million borrowers by canceling up to $20,000 of their federal loans. Many advocates for canceling student debt say Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough, while Republicans decry the plan as “student debt socialism.
The newly effective laws make good on conservative promises to swiftly prohibit abortion in as many states as possible.
The Federal Reserve chair needs to convince markets he means business when he addresses the landmark conference of economists on Friday.
He said in a statement that he would leave his government post in December to “pursue the next chapter of my career.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
Primaries in New York’s redrawn congressional districts have led to heated battles within the Democratic Party that could have national implications. In the newly created 10th Congressional District, Dan Goldman, a conservative Democrat and heir to a multimillion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, is running against a diverse field of candidates that includes Mondaire Jones, Yuh-Line Niou, Carlina Rivera and Elizabeth Holtzman.
We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali.
Mexican authorities arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on Friday for his failure to conduct a thorough investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. This came a day after a truth commission formed by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the students’ disappearance was a “crime of the state.
A man was recently sentenced to prison for sending death threats to the top scientist and telling him he hoped he’d get a bullet in his “satanic elf skull.
Democrats in tough races aren’t praising Biden for acting on one of his campaign promises.
Laws that depended on the fall of Roe v. Wade are now in place in Idaho, Tennessee and Texas, which already had strict abortion restrictions.
It’s a big deal: An announcement from President Joe Biden forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt—$20,000 for Pell Grant recipients—puts a dent in the latest crisis of capitalism, but it’s the provision that freezes loan interest so that it can’t keep growing even as borrowers make their monthly payments that may do the most for ex-students suffering from predatory loan structures. As Sen.
Conventional wisdom says the party that holds the White House is fated to suffer midterm losses. It’s tough to come out ahead when the election is framed as a referendum on the sitting president, in a political system that guarantees no president can get his agenda through Congress unscathed.
President Joe Biden finally announced his student debt relief plan on Wednesday, and it exceeds the expectations of recent reports on his thinking. Biden will cancel up to $10,000 in debt for all student borrowers with incomes under $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples). That number had been widely reported. But in addition, Biden is cancelling up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients at the same income levels.
Aug. 24 is Ukrainian Independence Day. It also marks six months since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And now it marks the biggest U.S. military aid package since the war began.
President Joe Biden has made note of this occasion both by congratulating the Ukrainian people on their continued independence and by announcing a package of military aid designed to see that Ukraine stays a free and independent nation.
Republicans didn’t even wait for President Joe Biden to announce up to $20,000 in student debt relief before they started screeching about how terrible it would be for people who don’t have student debt and people who already paid off their student debt. The screeching has been going on for as long as debt cancellation has been discussed, but it reached a fever pitch as Biden’s announcement approached.
The Fox News host said “I didn’t have to take out loans” and called debt relief for people who did “disgusting.
The federal government’s challenge represents one of its most aggressive actions to preserve abortion rights.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Although today’s big news from the White House is about student-loan forgiveness, we should note that it is Ukrainian Independence Day, which usually passes unnoticed outside of Ukraine.
People who received Pell Grants to go to college can have $20,000 knocked off their balance.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekObservers disagree about law enforcement’s case against Donald Trump, the former president whose Florida mansion was recently searched by federal officials in pursuit of classified documents.
For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.
The report by House Democrats examining the pandemic says Trump officials sought vaccine approvals to sway voters before the 2020 election.
The transition from Monkeypox Inoculation Plan A to Monkeypox Inoculation Plan B has been a smashing success—at least, if you ask federal officials. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. had nowhere near enough of the Jynneos vaccine to doubly dose even a quarter of the Americans at highest risk of monkeypox, roughly 1.6 million men who have sex with men.
We remember the legendary historian, author, professor, playwright and activist Howard Zinn, who was born 100 years ago today. Zinn was a regular guest on Democracy Now! from the start of the program in 1996 up until his death in 2010 at age 87. After witnessing the horrors of World War II as a bombardier, Zinn became a peace and justice activist who picketed with his students at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and joined in actions such as opposing the Vietnam War.