On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and […]

A Vox reader asks: If we have “separation of church and state,” why do we give religious schools tax exemption? How come religious schools get government funding? Why was Trump allowed to campaign on religion and publicly sell Bibles? Why does it say “In God We Trust” on our money? Why is “under God” in […]

The buzzwords “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are everywhere right now, but you can’t be blamed if you don’t quite have a handle on what they mean. The origins of DEI date back to the civil rights era — but recently “DEI” has been thrown around with regard to everything from plane crashes to Super Bowl […]

In about three short months, the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign aid, threatening millions of lives and livelihoods around the world. After initially pausing all US foreign aid spending for 90 days, President Donald Trump handed over the reins to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The damage as DOGE went […]

For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks and lockdown orders. Not me, though.  I was a young reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong in early spring 2003, when we started getting reports about a strange new sickness […]