Every decade or so, Washington rediscovers the federal gas tax. The last time a U.S. president seriously floated suspending it was 2008, when Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and gas had briefly crossed $4 a gallon. Congress ignored all three of them. The tax stayed put. Now, with pump prices...
When the most powerful person on earth also controls the largest nuclear arsenal in human history, the question of cognitive fitness stops being a matter of political opinion. It becomes a public health question. And in the spring of 2026, that question erupted into the open in a way that was hard to ignore. A...
A Quick Overview: On May 12th, President Donald Trump announced that he is “seriously considering” making Venezuela the 51st state of the United States, citing the country’s enormous oil wealth as his primary motivation. The statement comes roughly five months after a U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New...
Nearly 600,000 people handed over $100 apiece to pre-order a gold-colored Android smartphone bearing the Trump name, an American flag on its back, and a promise that it was built right here in the United States. Almost a year later, not a single one of them has received a phone. What many of them have...
Tens of millions of Americans haven’t thought about their passport in years. It sits in a drawer somewhere, maybe a little dog-eared, maybe close to its expiration date, and mostly forgotten until a trip is a few weeks away. That’s precisely when the complications begin. Right now, in the spring of 2026, new rules, record-breaking...
There is something almost philosophical happening at the borders and naturalization offices of the United States right now. The question of who gets to be American has always generated heat. But in 2025 and into 2026, the Trump administration has moved from political rhetoric to concrete, sweeping policy action in ways that are reshaping the...
Few economic policy debates of this era have generated as much noise, or generated as much genuine confusion, as the question of who actually pays when the United States raises its tariff rates. The White House has offered one answer consistently and loudly. Independent economists, trade researchers, and nonpartisan think tanks have offered a very...
Somewhere inside a 1,600-year-old mummy, tucked against its abdomen, lay one of the most famous poems ever written. The archaeologists who found it had no idea what they were looking at, not at first. They had opened mummies at this Egyptian site before. They had found ritual texts, magical formulas, sealed bundles of papyrus. The...
There’s a particular kind of pride that comes with doing something so routinely that it never crosses your mind to question it. You wake up, you go about your day, and the whole operation feels perfectly logical. Then someone from another country watches you do it, tilts their head, and asks why – and suddenly...
There are moments in American political life when the most consequential things get said not before committees or at press conferences, but on a late-night television stage. On a Tuesday evening in early May 2026, former President Barack Obama sat down with Stephen Colbert for one of the final broadcasts of a show that has,...
Something quietly changed at a Walmart in South Philadelphia in March 2026. Shoppers who walked into the store on Christopher Columbus Boulevard expecting to scan their own groceries found that the self-checkout kiosks were gone. Replaced by cashiers. Staffed lanes. A human being looking back at them from behind a register. For years, the story...
Something peculiar has been happening in the United States. Over the past three years, a quiet but growing list of scientists, researchers, and military figures tied to America’s most sensitive programs has been accumulating. Some are gone without a trace. Others turned up dead. The circumstances range from baffling to heartbreaking. And while no official...
