Politics & Current Events

A Major Legal Victory Lil Durk was found not guilty on all five charges in his federal murder-for-hire case. The jury decided prosecutors did not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But He Is Still in Custody Durk is still in custody because he faces another federal case involving racketeering and gun charges. His

The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore A jury awarded Chris Brown’s former housekeeper $12.9 million after a severe dog attack. Breonna Taylor’s family received a $12 million settlement after her death. Compared with the $12.9 million dog-attack verdict, the numbers can feel troubling, even though the cases were handled very differently. Different Cases, Different Rules

There Was a Real Operation Behind the Screens There is something about the 2016 election that deserves to be understood without exaggeration because the documented facts are serious enough on their own. Russia’s Internet Research Agency, commonly called the IRA, ran an extensive social-media influence operation aimed at Americans. The organization operated from St. Petersburg

Lightning Is Not Quite What It Looks Like For most of my life, I looked at lightning and assumed the bright bolt I saw was simply crashing down from the sky. That is what the eyes seem to tell us. The science, however, is more complicated and much more interesting. In a common cloud-to-ground lightning

Before Def Jam Became Def Jam Before Def Jam became one of the most important labels in hip-hop history, there was a teenager from Queens named James Todd Smith. The world would come to know him as LL Cool J. He was still in his teens when he started sending out demo tapes and trying

You Can Become Almost Anybody Online The internet has made it possible for people to create identities that look convincing long before anyone checks whether they are real. A person can rent a luxury car for a weekend. They can pose inside a house they do not own. They can buy followers, alter screenshots, invent

Interest Rates Are Already About Us When the Federal Reserve raises or lowers interest rates, a lot of people hear the news and assume it belongs to Wall Street. It sounds like a conversation for bankers, economists, investors, and people staring at financial screens all day. That assumption can keep ordinary people outside a conversation

How Does the Biggest Song Get Nothing? There are moments in music when you look at an awards show and wonder how the numbers and the nominations can possibly belong to the same universe. One of the clearest examples came with The Weekend and Blinding Lights. The song became one of the biggest records in

Go Back to the Civil War Do you know how far back absentee voting goes in American history? To understand the modern argument, it helps to go all the way back to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was running for reelection in 1864 while hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers were away from their homes