Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

The dark reality behind Trump’s new anti-immigrant policies

Late on Thanksgiving Day, a holiday whose central fable is about the American value of welcoming strangers in need, President Donald Trump announced an intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.” It is not clear exactly how exactly this sweeping policy is supposed to […]

Your guide to the weirdest winter virus season we’ve ever had

This winter was already shaping up to be one of the strangest cold and flu seasons in recent memory.  With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government has been casting doubt on the value of vaccines in the months leading up to virus […]

Republicans ask the Supreme Court to gut one of the last limits on money in politics

There is a specter of inevitability hanging over much of the Supreme Court’s current term. It is unlikely that any legal argument could persuade the Court’s Republican majority to uphold bans on anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapy, for example, or to preserve the Voting Rights Act. These are issues where Republican judges have wildly divergent views from […]

What podcasts do to our brains

The most embarrassing thing happened to me recently. It was twilight, and I was walking my dog around the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood where I’ve been living for about a year. Then I heard a sound that I couldn’t place at first. I stopped in my tracks and then realized: Crickets were chirping.  It was my […]

People taking Ozempic are losing muscle mass — and it’s freaking them out

We’re used to seeing Serena Williams on our TVs, muscles flexing, smashing a tennis ball past her opponent. But in a recent 30-second commercial, Williams traded the racket for a GLP-1 drug injector pen.  Williams, whose most recent child was born in 2023, has become a spokeswoman in her post-retirement days for Ro, one of […]