The future of American politics might be decided by whether young voters get most of their news through TikTok.  I don’t mean to single out the Chinese-owned vertical video app here. TikTok is a stand-in for a bigger phenomenon in modern American society: passive news consumption and incidental exposure, or the sense that news and […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration plans to claw back some $7 billion in grant funding for solar energy, its latest attack on renewable energy in the US.  What […]

Are you tired of hearing about the controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad? A remarkable thing about this latest culture-war dust-up is just how much people seem to resent its sheer existence. The whole thing feels, on its face, ginned up and silly. A mall brand decided to advertise its jeans by showing […]

When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk fed the US Agency for International Development into the wood chipper earlier this year, one of the lesser-known casualties was the shutdown of an obscure but crucial program that tracked public health information on about half of the world’s nations. For nearly 40 years, the Demographic and Health […]

In book world, the summer of 2025 is officially the summer of Substack. Over the past few years, Substack has been slowly building a literary scene, one in which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with one another. This spring, a series of writers — perhaps best known for their Substacks — […]