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President Donald Trump, who has trailed his Democratic rival Joe Biden in fundraising, has pulled back some of his television advertising in the crucial state of Florida in the final sprint to Election Day,

In recent days, Trump's campaign has reduced its advertising spending by about $2 million in the battleground of Florida but remains on the air in the Sunshine State

The former vice president and the Democratic National Committee have reserved roughly $6.8 million in advertising in the state, more than double the $2.9 million currently that the Trump campaign and the RNC are on tap to spend, the data show.

President Donald Trump thought he had hit the jackpot during the final presidential debate when his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”

“He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”

say his reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the electorate’s shifting views on climate change, but of how profoundly the issue has already shaped the presidential race

Over the last month, ever since the indictment of 13 men for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, the word “militia” has appeared in thousands of newspaper headlines and TV news reports.

But all of these headlines are wrong, and almost every instance of the use of the word militia by journalists—as well as politicians and even law enforcement—has been wrong. Why? Because there is no such thing as a legal private paramilitary militia.

“The use of the word ‘militia,’ when you are talking about anything other than a state militia like the National Guard, is just wrong. Using that term without putting the world ‘unlawful’ in front of it suggests there is some constitutional authority or legitimacy for their existence, which there isn’t.”

Before President Trump left Miami on Thursday for another long day on the campaign trail, he had a private meeting with a supporter with a big following among a group of voters his campaign has been courting all year: rapper Lil Wayne.

The Trump campaign, delighted with the endorsement, promoted it to its outreach list for Black voters. The effort is still a very long shot. Black voters are a reliable source of strong support for Democratic presidential candidates, and no rapper is going to make a big dent in that.

The campaign spent $20 million on radio and TV ads — including a Super Bowl spot — as well as door-knocking operations and opening 17 field offices in Black neighborhoods in swing stat

rumors began spreading among right-wing influencers and Trump campaign surrogates that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece in order to receive surreptitious help during the debate

If Joe Biden isn’t hiding anything,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Twitter, “why won’t he consent to a third party checking for an earpiece before tonight’s debate?”

“Secret earpiece” rumors are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become something of a fixture during presidential debate cycles, and part of a baseless conspiracy theory that tends to rear its head every four years.

while an end to the content boom may be hard on writers, directors and actors, it could offer viewers some relief.

Netflix and other streaming services sold the U.S. public on convenience and abundance

this came with a cost. Binge-watching and the content boom helped atomize American culture

Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)

The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.

‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.

As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks

to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.

In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace

in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?

We thus have the privilege of seeing a great civilization at its peak

How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters, and liberalized China’s society in addition to its economy? How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime now in place? How much more would the people of the world have learned from Chinese culture if they could travel there freely and interact with Chinese people freely over the internet? Without a draconian autocrat like Xi Jinping at the helm, would so many Chinese people be looking to flee the country? Would the U.S. and China still be friends instead of at each other’s throats?

The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close

t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”

something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.

As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images

Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union to a family of Jewish dissidents, spent nearly a decade in Moscow working largely on reality TV shows for a Russian entertainment channel. It turned out to be the perfect lens through which to see Putin’s Russia, where the Kremlin’s spinmeisters work hard to promote an image of a virile and infallible president vanquishing devious foes. It’s a place where people don’t say (and may not even know) what they really think and where sophistication means being in on the truth that most everything is potentially a lie.

“It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next,” Pomerantsev wrote. “So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mind-set that supported the U.S.S.R. and supports the new Russia now.”

something went wrong in Putin’s approach, and it wasn’t just the incompetence of his military, the bravery of Ukrainians or the intercession by the West. In a nutshell, the problem is this: A monopoly on truth can be sustained only through a monopoly on violence. Big Brother can tell the Big Lie only if he has the Big — and only — Gun. Otherwise, the lie inevitably falls apart.

despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.

In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.

In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.

the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it

I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation

Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”

Here is a nation and a leader willing to sacrifice so much for the principle of independence and the right to join the Western world. And yet, much of the West is jaded and cynical, apparently devoid of any such mission, cause, or sense of idealism anymore.

De Gaulle was not unique in articulating and fighting for an idea of his country. Many Western leaders during the Cold War had a certain idea of the West: Margaret Thatcher believed in a Europe whole and free; Ronald Reagan in a struggle between tyranny and freedom

A senior European defense official told me recently that the West needed to find a way to reimagine itself and its role in the world, to avoid slipping into the trap of either pretending that nothing has changed or concluding that nothing can be done about it—that, Merkel- or Obama-style, leaders must simply manage the fallout and avoid becoming entangled in it.

The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world.

I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.

it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.

Last fall, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the state's school board association saying public schools shouldn't have "obscene" books and called on certain books about gender and sexual orientation, among others, to be removed.

Texas is the latest state to introduce legislation concerning how controversial subjects including race and even the Holocaust are taught in schools.There have been over 122 such bills introduced across the country since last year.Books focusing on LGBTQ and racial issues that critics say are inappropriate for students are being banned across the country. Now, some librarians are joining together to protest those bans.

who advocate for students' freedom to read books. They came together in November 2021 in response to Republican Texas Rep. Matt Krause's request that schools inform him if they carry books that focus on LGBTQ and racial issues.FReadom Fighters started as a social media movement with the hashtag "#FReadom" in protest of Krause's request, and then blossomed into activism.

Indian TV anchors have long been critical of U.S. foreign policy

the criticism has also become more pointed since the election of Biden, a Democrat who is seen as more vocal about India’s alleged human rights issues compared with former president Donald Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has appeared on shows including Shivshankar’s India Upfront, Pande noted, but prominent Democrats are less often seen.

The U.S. government and media, Pande said, “are viewed as outside liberal forces that should mind their own business.”

Was high school as a total experience ever actually chill, as opposed to a zone of often ruthless hierarchy where hormone-addled half-adults rend and wound one another while they compete for dominance? I remember the answer: It was different before the internet, but it wasn’t chill.

in certain senses the world created by the internet has made high school safer than it was in my own youth, by separating kids from one another more than in the past, creating fewer opportunities for physical mayhem and nonvirtual stupidit

The problem with this separation, with the teenage retreat into the virtual, is that it appears to be deadening, dispiriting, alienating, driving kids to anxiety and depression

“Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today,” the historian Fritz Stern wrote. “As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism.”

I bring up Stern’s book because it nails the character of “revolutionary” conservatism—just the sort of politics Vance represents. The junior senator from Ohio believes “culture war is class warfare,”

has made it possible for him to claim to be a tribune of the working class in spite of a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO on “voting with working people.”