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Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images Presidential farewell addresses aren’t typically the occasion for regrets, and accordingly, Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech this past week was a more traditional mix of boasts over accomplishments and warnings about the crowd moving into the White House on Monday. But reports persist that the 46th president remains convinced […]

Photo: Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images If anything is likely to appeal to the latent nonpartisan instincts and benevolent feelings of federal policymakers, it’s the sights and sounds of widespread suffering in natural disasters, like the California wildfires. That’s why federal disaster relief, which is triggered by a presidential declaration from funds ultimately controlled by Congress, is

Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images In one of those why the hell not? gestures open to a president down to his last weekend in office, Joe Biden declared the Equal Rights Amendment ratified and thus the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.A host of feminists and Democratic politicians have been urging this step from the moment

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images On Friday morning, the Supreme Court finally weighed in on the imminent TikTok ban, which is scheduled for January 19th, the day before Donald Trump once again takes office. The decision was unanimous and, after a public hearing earlier in the week, unsurprising: The law stands, and TikTok’s deadline remains

Photo: Paul Sancya/APPhoto Donald Trump produced two red-state Senate vacancies in and immediately after his 2024 presidential victory. The first was his own running mate J.D. Vance’s Ohio seat, which he had occupied for just two years before getting lifted into MAGA Valhalla by Trump last summer. And the second belonged to his secretary of

Photo: @BarackObama/X Michelle Obama was absent from Jimmy Carter’s state funeral earlier this month, and this week she announced that she’ll be skipping Donald Trump’s second inauguration too. So obviously, Michelle and Barack are … getting a divorce? There is a huge pile of evidence that Michelle Obama is skipping these events because she really

Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images For weeks it’s been clear that Donald Trump — a man who loves pomp and famously obsessed over the crowd size at his first swearing in — wouldn’t get the inauguration he wanted. Flags were set to be a half-staff to honor the late Jimmy Carter, the Senate won’t have his

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Soon in Washington D.C., a monumental event may transform American society in ways which are difficult to fathom: TikTok could be banned, banishing millions of (mostly) young people from their favorite social media platform. Nobody seems to actually want that to happen, including all those TikTok users, outgoing president Joe Biden,

Photo: Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Getty Images Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the 2028 Summer Olympics: All three, to different degrees, have been imperiled by the deadly wildfires still tearing through Los Angeles. All natural disasters are, in some form, political tests, and they aren’t always fair. No government can save every life when a hurricane rages,

Photo: Arthur Nicholas Orchard/Hans Lucas/Redux The New York Times Opinion section is negotiating the exit of columnist Pamela Paul, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Her impending departure is part of a handful of job cuts being made at the section. Last month, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who had been a