Discussions

Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images The looming TikTok ban is barely a week away and the company is running out of time to do anything about it. On Friday, the Supreme Court heard last-minute arguments about the ban, with TikTok angling for an intervention or, at least, a temporary ruling to buy it a bit […]

Photo: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images Aerial firefighting is already one of the most dangerous kinds of aviation there is. Pilots must maneuver heavy, sluggish planes over rough terrain at low altitude, often amid severe turbulence and poor visibility. Now aerial firefighters battling the Los Angeles wildfires are facing an additional danger: illegal

Photo: September Dawn Bottoms Right now, as Los Angeles deals with a horrendous wildfire emergency, Donald Trump is just an extremely unhelpful critic of the people trying to save lives and homes. The torrent of abuse and misinformation he is spewing is unfortunate but not calamitous. But in ten days he will become once again

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux No one expected Donald Trump to kick off his second term by trying to Make Imperialism Great Again, but here we are. In the past few weeks, the president-elect has revived his effort to buy Greenland, threatened to retake the Panama Canal, suggested that Canada become the 51st state,

Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images For a good portion of the 2024 general-election contest, the big choice for voters was between a very old but very normal Democrat with a questionable record on inflation and immigration, and a somewhat younger but erratic Republican who never accepted his 2020 defeat and tried to overturn it with

Photo: Jabin Botsford/Pool/Getty Images How perfect that the Manhattan DA’s hush-money case against Donald Trump is about to end with nothing. This’ll be among the least suspenseful of all sentencings. Judge Juan Merchan has announced in advance — quite pragmatically, actually — that he intends to sentence Trump to an unconditional discharge. To translate that

Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images After a half-decade of litigation and delays, congestion pricing is now officially a reality for New York City. To drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street, most motorists will pay a $9 toll during peak hours and a minuscule $2.25 on late nights and weekends. This is, in some sense, revolutionary: No

Photo: Sinna Nasseri By the time photographer Sinna Nasseri reached Malibu on Wednesday evening, firefighters had been battling infernos for 36 hours. The wildfire that started in the nearby Palisades continued to roll down the mountains, stopped only by the sea. The Pacific Coast Highway had transformed into a graveyard of beachfront properties and burned-out vehicles.

Photo: Michelle Groskopf On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., photographer Michelle Groskopf arrived at the Pasadena Convention Center, where dozens of evacuees from the nearby Eaton fire had fled to safety. “The majority of the people had nowhere else to go,” Groskopf said. “There were homeless people, seniors, and families who had lost everything, people

Photo: Ben Curtis/AP Photo The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington on Thursday had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama