In the heady days after the 2016 election, a pair of political scientists, Valerie Bunce and Mark Beissinger, posed an unsettling question: “How might American democracy end?” Until Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, such a question felt, well, academic. The United States was the longest-running democracy on Earth; …
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This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. Before she fell in love with climate science, Kate Marvel dreamed of being a movie star. She was tall and blond and good with words and liked the idea of life on …
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Michael Reinoehl, the antifascist activist accused of the killing Aaron “Jay” Danielson in during a right-wing protest in Portland last month, was shot and killed by officers who were dispatched to arrest him near Olympia, Washington on September 3rd. Now an eyewitness is contradicting the federal account of Reinoehl’s final …
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This article was originally published on Grist and is republished here as part of an ongoing collaboration. Puerto Rico reversed its reopening last week after seeing a surge of new COVID-19 cases. While the rollbacks are similar to those in many parts of the U.S., one big factor compounds the …
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Our elections have been melting down. Disastrous, spectacular collapses have become commonplace in this unimaginable year already filled with a pandemic, record unemployment, and civil unrest. While the failures are complex and manifold, many have been predictable and similar from state to state. The patterns are clear. There are not …
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Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, was on his own. It was early April and COVID-19 infections were spiking. Hogan needed a dramatic increase in testing capacity if his state had any hope of tracking and slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus before it swamped the hospitals and …
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Top congressional Democrats and members of the Congressional Black Caucus announced a new bill to reform policing following weeks of national protests over police brutality. After first kneeling in silence to honor George Floyd, the Black man who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer two weeks ago, Democrats introduced …
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President Trump granted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s wish to rid his department of its top watchdog when the president fired Inspector General Steve Linick late Friday night. But the move has caused an uproar following news that Linick had nearly completed an investigation into the secretary’s involvement in fast-tracking …
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This story appears in the June 2020 issue of Rolling Stone. Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, flanked Donald Trump at the podium in the White House briefing room. It was February 29th, the day of the first reported U.S. death from the coronavirus, and …
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The COVID-19 pandemic has placed extra pressure on reporters and news anchors to fact check the president’s lies. Trump has stood at the podium in the White House briefing room and spread misinformation about potential treatments for the disease, the number and availability of tests, and his predictions for the …
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