This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here. Over the weekend, the Justice Department released yet another tranche of files from its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex trafficker who paled around with the likes of […]

There was an underrated storyline of the 2024 election, one that’s increasingly starting to resurface now, as President Donald Trump goes on a foreign policy crusade, threatening to upend longstanding geopolitical norms between the United States and our allies (*cough, acquiring Greenland, cough*): Gen Z really doesn’t want to go to war. In my work […]

Had William Foege been a military general or a CEO or a politician, his death on January 24 would have been bold-type, front-page news. Elementary schools and highways would have been named after him.  Instead, Foege’s passing registered the way the deaths of many public health giants do: as a quiet tremor among the people […]

A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story is playing out in the US economy right now. The stock market is at record levels, and the latest economic growth reading is above 4 percent, a boom-like scenario. But this positive tale has a dark side: there is virtually no hiring, and that has left many Americans […]

Did you notice something… weird on your social media network of choice this past weekend? (I mean weirder than normal.) Something like various people posting about swarms of AI agents achieving a kind of collective consciousness and/or plotting together for humanity’s downfall? On something called… Moltbook? Sounds important, especially when the post is written by […]