Former President Donald Trump appears in Manhattan criminal court on April 19 for jury selection in his hush-money trial. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. | Curtis Means/Getty Images Trump insists that his jurors can’t be impartial. Don’t believe him. As the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Donald Trump got underway this week — with the former president accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments — one question has so far haunted the proceedings: Can the court actually select an impartial jury for one of the most polarizing figur ..read more

President Joe Biden visits the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant on September 9, 2022, in Johnstown, Ohio.  | Andrew Spear/Getty Images Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people. American workers’ wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now. Their nation’s economy, meanwhile, is the envy of the wealthy world: Since the Covid recession, the United States has seen nearly twice as much growth as any other major rich country without suffering significantly higher inflation. And economic analysts expect that America will continue to ..read more

Dev Patel as Kid in his directorial debut Monkey Man. | Universal Pictures Dev Patel’s action-packed directorial debut also takes aim at contemporary Indian politics. Monkey Man, a gripping, blood-soaked action film from first-time director Dev Patel, has garnered acclaim for its fight scenes — including, famously, when the main character cuts a man’s throat open by holding the knife in his mouth. Undergirding all this action, however, is also an attempt at commentary about growing authoritarianism in India, and how political leaders leverage both religion and police to maintain their power ..read more

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee about the fiscal year 2025 budget on April 16, 2024.  | Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images Senate Democrats put a quick end to Republicans’ political stunt. Republicans’ political impeachment stunt against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to a head this week in the Senate, with lawmakers in the upper chamber voting to dismiss the charges. On Tuesday, House Republicans sent two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the upper chamber, and on Wedne ..read more

At a protest in Rome in October 2023 calling for a ceasefire and aid into Gaza, a protester holds a sign calling for an end to “colonialism and displacement” in Palestine. | Simona Granati/Corbis via Getty Images The historical discussion at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Is Israel a “settler colonial” state? That charge has been the subject of fierce debate in recent months amid the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza after the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Colonialism is a system in which one people dominates another and uses the subjugated group’s resources for its own benefi ..read more

Unhoused people photographed in San Francisco in February of 2024. | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images Grants Pass v. Johnson could make the entire criminal justice system far crueler. It also tests the limits of judicial power. The Supreme Court will hear a case later this month that could make life drastically worse for homeless Americans. It also challenges one of the most foundational principles of American criminal law — the rule that someone may not be charged with a crime simply because of who they are. Six years ago, a federal appeals court held that the Constitution “bar ..read more

Jacob Chansley, also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” screams “Freedom” inside the US Senate chamber after the Capitol was breached by a mob during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Most of the justices seem to want to make it harder to prosecute January 6 rioters. The Supreme Court spent about an hour and a half on Tuesday morning arguing over whether to make it much harder for the Justice Department to prosecute hundreds of people who joined the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. It appears, after Tuesday’s arguments, that a maj ..read more

Tucker Carlson speaks in Florida on April 2, 2024. | Ivan Apfel/Getty Images Carlson mainstreamed antisemitism for a long time, and conservatives seemed not to care. Then he set his sights on Israel. The New York Times once described Tucker Carlson’s Fox News hour as “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” In the past week, allegations of bigotry involving his new show on X have come from a rather different corner: his fellow conservatives. The fight started April 9, when Carlson published a friendly interview with Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac. The pastor — who has reportedly ..read more

Activists for transgender rights gather in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 1, 2023. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images The Court mostly reinstates Idaho’s ban on transgender health care for children. The Supreme Court handed down a strange set of opinions on Monday evening, which accompanied a decision that largely reinstates Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The ban was previously blocked by a lower court. None of the opinions in Labrador v. Poe spend much time discussing whether such a ban is constitutional — although Justice Brett Kavan ..read more

Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media after a pretrial hearing on March 25, 2024, in New York City. | Justin Lane/Getty Images The trial on the least important topic may be the most important to the 2024 election. When former President Donald Trump was indicted in New York for falsifying business records last March, many anticipated that would be the prologue to the main event: charges over Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election. Yet the two election indictments — and another prosecution of Trump for hoarding classified documents — have moved slowly and been beset with delays ..read more