California is often criticized for high electricity costs and slow development timelines. Rightly so: My electricity bill has doubled in a decade, and as a renter I can’t buy solar or batteries to cut the costs.

But critics confuse the real reasons for this problem. According to California’s utility regulators, our power bills are soaring ...Read more

In recent months, the Trump administration has terminated thousands of federally funded medical research grants, gutting $9.5 billion in critical health science efforts. More than half of those cuts — 1,246 grants worth $5.5 billion — targeted studies focused on LGBTQ+ health. These cuts don’t just reflect shifting policy priorities. They ...Read more

America is once again gripped by multiple political and societal crises. Most days in our local communities and in our wider public lives it can feel like we’re living through dizzying confusion, chaos, and division.

Acrimonious partisanship only deepens in Washington, DC, and our state capitols. Renewed calls for a third party are heating up...Read more

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes $100 million for the Office of Management and Budget “to pay expenses associated with improving regulatory processes and analyzing and reviewing rules.”

Following the Department of Government Efficiency initiative, this small investment won’t make many headlines — but it ...Read more

A few years ago I came across a profoundly unnerving historical photo: A lineup of terrified, naked Black babies cowered over the title “Alligator Bait.” As it turned out, the idea of Black babies being used as alligator bait was a beloved trope dating back to the antebellum South, though it didn’t really take off until after the Civil War...Read more

The same day President Donald Trump launched his AI Action Plan, his Energy Secretary Chris Wright pulled federal support for a power project with ties to renewable energy that could help that plan. Not coincidentally, Trump instructed Wright at his AI summit that he must say “clean, beautiful” before any mention of the word “coal” and ...Read more

One of the barriers to understanding the world is our fixation on sports thinking: Who is winning and who is catching up? This has long been true of politics — we focus obsessively on the race for the White House while ignoring the debt mountain that may bring the whole system crashing down. It is also becoming true of business. We tend to ...Read more

This editorial board is a firm believer in the importance of the Fourth Estate, which serves as a fundamental check on power. But we’re well aware many Americans have their doubts.

Trust in the press has been on the decline for years. In Gallup’s 2024 survey, only 31% of Americans said they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a ...Read more

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, admittedly struck the wrong note in a melodramatic video she put out after visiting Hiroshima, which was destroyed by an atomic bomb exactly 80 years ago.

“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” Gabbard said, “political-elite ...Read more

There is an ominous sense in the air in Britain — a sense that the country is headed toward the rocks and that the captain has no idea how to steer the ship. This feeling is vague — hardly the stuff of graphs or numbers — but vague feelings can sometimes tell us more about the future than the hardest economic statistics.

The two biggest ...Read more

Tae Heung “Will” Kim, a scientific researcher who has lived in the U.S. since he was 5 and who holds a valid green card, traveled to his native South Korea recently for his kid brother’s wedding.

But when Kim attempted to re-enter the country, immigration officials blocked him at San Francisco International Airport, taking him into ...Read more

History predicts that Republicans will suffer losses in next year’s midterm elections, and Democrats have made clear they will try to use President Donald Trump’s big, beautiful bill against the GOP. The progressive talking points about Medicaid “cuts” and tax relief for “billionaires” have been widely distributed to the faithful.

...Read more

Two scenes. Two storytellers. Two visions for a climate-altered American West.

On an overcast spring morning, I hopped a low metal fence off a lonely dirt road in the Nevada desert, following botanist Naomi Fraga. She assured me she’d done this before — these were public lands, after all. We were 100 miles east of Yosemite, out in the ...Read more

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month, on Aug 6 and 9, respectively, the danger of nuclear war is great and growing.

So far this year, five of the nine nations that possess nuclear weapons have been engaged in active military operations that could have, and might still, escalate to the use...Read more

Texas has the world’s 8th largest economy, with its sights on No. 7 France, and has been a model of strength and resilience for decades. Since the pandemic, it has had higher GDP growth and a lower unemployment rate than most states.

It is also, according to the personal-finance website WalletHub, the state with “the most people in ...Read more

Kamala Harris does not want to be governor of California, which has a whole lot of contenders (and some voters) doing a happy dance this week.

But with her announcement Wednesday that she is bowing out of a race she never officially entered, Harris has ignited a flurry of speculation that she's warming up for another run at the White House in ...Read more

Skeletal babies. Starving families shot down while waiting in line for food. Images and video of the famine in Gaza are now everywhere, and they’ve done in a few weeks what 21 months of war could not: squeeze empathy for Palestinians out of MAGA.

This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia became the first House Republican to publicly use ...Read more

Scott Turner was a Texas House Representative, now serving in the Trump Administration as the Secretary of U.S. Housing & Urban Development (HUD). In the Texas House, he talked about “being the best we can,” and espoused high standards for himself and his colleagues; however, in his current position, he has voiced no complaints or objections...Read more

Trivia quiz: What do Japan’s Fermentation Research Institute, Secretary of Agriculture Earl “Rusty” Butz and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan have in common?

Answer: Each, in their way, helped foster America’s widespread adoption of high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has vowed to ban. ...Read more

Thirty years ago, a pig named "Babe" trotted into my life—and my heart. He helped me see pigs not as ingredients, but as individuals. They love. They grieve. They dream. Their hearts beat with the same quiet tenderness we feel in a dog’s gaze or a cat’s purr. They are someone, not something.

"Babe" inspired me to go vegan, which felt like...Read more