House appropriators want to move forward with a smaller set of spending bills before the end of the year, fearing the larger package preferred by the Senate will create a last-minute fight for Congress in January. Appropriators in the lower chamber are eyeing a three-bill “minibus” that they could put on the floor in December, […]
Eleventh-hour negotiations are delaying the release of Congress’s annual defense bill, a sweeping policy blueprint for the Pentagon that leadership hopes to pass in the next two weeks. The National Defense Authorization Act was slated for release on Thursday, teeing up a final vote before the end of the year. But that timeline has slipped […]
The original conception of a Saudi Arabia–Israel rapprochement was roughly akin to a blockbuster three-way trade in professional sports, with the United States significantly involved, as well as the oil-rich de facto leader of the Arab world and the Jewish state. Think the epic Feb. 2 NBA deal, when the Utah Jazz got 2025 second-round […]
Affordability was the biggest issue in the 2025 off-year elections. In various forms, affordability played a major role in the winning state campaigns of center-left candidates such as Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA). It also propelled a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, to the leadership of the largest U.S. […]
Utah‘s Republican-led legislature is set to convene a special session on Dec. 9 to review a judge’s ruling on congressional maps. The state’s congressional districts have been in legal limbo since 2018, when voters approved Proposition 4, which created an independent redistricting commission. The move comes amid a redistricting feud that has exploded into a […]
Tom Stoppard, who died on Nov. 29 aged 88, was the greatest living playwright in English. As a linguistic dazzler, onstage and off, Stoppard was a Wildean contriver of brilliant witticisms who also alchemized the heaviest of intellectual metals into the lightest repartee. Though his work indulged this English preference for making a joke out […]
The Walt Disney Company has released some of the world’s finest animated short films and movies for over a century, including Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts, Mickey Mouse‘s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, and popular films such as Fantasia, Snow White, and Pinocchio, as well as more recent releases, such as Frozen and Moana. Not […]
In Dealing with Feeling, the latest work of speculative fiction by Marc Brackett, the fantasy is simple: What if, at long last, we could tame the human heart? What if we overcame “the biggest obstacle to achieving our best selves” by developing “care and compassion for ourselves”? What if we could “gain control over our […]
If you had the displeasure of perusing through the social media site formerly known as Twitter over the recent Thanksgiving holiday, you’ve probably witnessed some of the least grateful people in America. Their X posts are some variation of the meme, “A factory worker used to be able to afford the middle-class lifestyle of homeownership, […]
A George Soros-backed boycott against companies supposedly “colluding with the Trump administration” apparently failed to see success on Black Friday and throughout the holiday weekend, which drew a record-breaking number of shoppers. The failed effort was spearheaded by the Indivisible Project, an activist group responsible for organizing a bulk of the on-the-ground “resistance” against President […]
