Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images Go ahead and laugh off Donald Trump’s immunity argument. He’ll probably lose, eventually, and you’ll end up being right. But it’s not as simple as gravely intoning that No Man is Above the Law, dropping the mic, and asking what we’re even doing here in the first place. There’s more to the immunity question than that, and Trump’s argument, though unlikely to prevail, isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the glibly dismissive, strawman takedowns would have you believe. Let’s start off with what we do and don’t know. We do know that civil immunity for ..read more

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer You’re sneezing a lot, and your eyes are watering. Maybe you have allergies, pets, or both. Perhaps you live somewhere with smog or in a region where the land is frequently and uncontrollably on fire. It’s 2024. You don’t really need to explain why you want an air purifier. But which one should you get? You narrow your request — your problem is seasonal allergies, you think — and type best air purifier pollen into your search bar. Google obliges and you scan the results. First up is an ad for an Amazon listing with a star rating attached. Next up is another ad ..read more

Photo: Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images Today in questions you never thought you’d ask: was the president’s uncle really eaten by cannibals? That’s what Joe Biden asserted — twice — while describing the circumstances of his uncle’s death during World War II while campaigning in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Biden initially relayed the story shortly after visiting Scranton Veterans Memorial Park, where his uncle Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr.’s name is listed on a memorial wall. “He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it ..read more

Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images A woman selected to be a juror in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan was dismissed on Thursday after informing Judge Juan Merchan that she had been identified in the press as a member of the jury. Prospective jurors have been told that their identities will remain anonymous during the landmark criminal trial of the former president. But the juror, who was seated on Tuesday, told the court that her friends had warned her that some identifying details about her had been made public. When she added on Thursday that she could not be impartial, Me ..read more

Photo: Matt York/AP When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion almost two years ago, the conservative justices used the phrase “democratic process” almost a dozen times between them to describe what would come next, suggesting that the court was merely handing decision-making powers back to the voters. After a string of victories for legalized abortion in elections across the country, Republicans are turning to a “democratic process,” all right — but it’s the one that took place in the 19th century. In early April, Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court ruled that a total ba ..read more

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images At a private donor confab in February, Donald Trump emphasized to a room full of wealthy loyalists that he would focus on cutting their taxes in a second term. The Biden campaign has used this promise against him, which is likely the key context to a new Reuters report that Trump is “is keen on a new middle-class tax cut should he return to the White House.” Generally speaking, trying to dissect one of Trump’s policy promises is a futile task. He has little understanding of economics or government and instinctively lurche ..read more

Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into milli ..read more

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images The sudden explosion of AI products has been, for the most part, a story told through software. Consumer AI is all about chatbots, media generators, plug-ins, and new features installed into apps that people already use. Over the past year, though, start-ups and bigger tech firms have been trying to figure out what an AI device might look like, and the first few attempts are hitting the market. There are the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which use AI for voice commands as well as translation and object recognition, available since late last ..read more

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George ..read more

Photo: Matthew Brown/AP Tim Sheehy, a Republican Senate candidate in Montana, is a Navy SEAL veteran who struck it rich opening an aerial forest-fighting company — solid credentials for a campaign. But as he gets closer to winning the primary nomination and setting up a competitive matchup with incumbent Democrat Jon Tester, one biographical detail has proved a persistent distraction: the bullet in his right arm. On the campaign trail, Sheehy has said that he was shot in the arm during a mission in Afghanistan in 2012. “I got thick skin, though it’s not thick enough,” Sheehy told voters at a c ..read more