If you’re traveling in America, there are plenty of ways to get to where you want to go. Interstate highways make road trips possible. Planes let you go from one side of the country to the other in a matter of hours. But there’s one mode of transportation that still eludes the US: high-speed rail. Countries […]

Following their first meeting in Geneva in 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issued a historic joint statement stating their shared belief that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”  The maxim lived on. The Geneva summit turned out to be a key milestone in the beginning […]

One of the biggest mysteries that has emerged from the Trump-era Supreme Court is the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan.  In Milligan, two of the Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — voted with the Court’s Democratic minority to strike down Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional maps, ordering the state […]

“It was like a battleground,” Drew Harvell remembers. “It was really horrible.” She’s reflecting on a time in December 2013, on the coast of Washington state, when she went out at low tide and saw hundreds of sick, dying sea stars. “There were arms that had just fallen off the stars,” she says. “It was […]

A new kind of political battle is emerging between America’s parties — one centered on the composition of Congress and congressional redistricting. This process usually occurs every decade, after the US Census finishes its work and releases new demographic information that states use to reconfigure how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are […]