As a former law professor, I know all about loopholes.
I trained students to find omissions and ambiguities in wording — a perfectly legal way to evade the clear intent of laws and agreements. After all, that’s what lawyers are paid to do. And, despite commonly expressed disdain when lawyers do this, that’s precisely what most clients want and expect when they hire a lawyer.
Fifty-six years ago, on July 20, 1969, the United States landed a man on the moon, culminating a decade-long race that showcased the ingenuity of America’s public sector, its universities, and its thriving private industry. The moon landing was a singular accomplishment in the history of humanity and a triumph of the U.S. innovation ecosystem. The United States’ unparalleled science and technology advantage, developed in large part through federally funded research and development (R&D); world-class colleges and universities; and its openness to the best and brightest from anywhere created not just the technologies that define the modern world but also many of the world’s most successful companies. Now, the Trump administration is dismantling America’s science and innovation lead. The impacts will be felt for decades.
The Trump administration has made drastic cuts to federal programs that protect the health of Americans, putting women’s health at particular risk. Job cuts described as a “bloodbath,” along with restructuring within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will dismantle programs that support women’s health, including those that focus on chronic and infectious disease, injuries, mental health, genetic disorders, substance use, and health disparities. These cuts will scale back efforts to prevent, treat, and discover cures for illnesses and diseases, including many that affect women’s reproductive health.
“My dedication was questioned.”
“Managers or upper management have looked down upon taking time off.”
“People think that maybe you’re not as invested in the job, that you’re shirking your duties or something.”
The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality among developed nations. Since 1987, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has administered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System to better understand when, where, and why maternal deaths occur.
In April 2025, the Trump administration put the department in charge of collecting and tracking this data on leave.
It’s just one example of how the administration is deleting and disrupting American data of all kinds.
President Donald Trump has said the “big, beautiful bill” he signed into law on July 4, 2025, will stimulate the economy and foster financial security.
But a close look at the legislation reveals a different story, particularly for low-income people and racial and ethnic minorities.
As a legal scholar who studies how taxes increase the gap in wealth and income between Black and white Americans, I believe the law’s provisions make existing wealth inequalities worse through broad tax cuts that disproportionately favor wealthy families while forcing its costs on low- and middle-income Americans.
Money has a gravitational effect on politics. A little can tilt campaigns and policy. A lot warps the democratic process like a bowling ball dropped on a bed.
So campaign finance laws show how much our leaders care about a level playing field. Strong ones reveal the flow of money and restrict the ability of the richest 1% to dominate the conversation. They keep the public in mind.
And weak ones? Let’s take a look at last week’s political headlines in Alabama.
About every other day in Alabama, a woman suspecting she is pregnant seeks abortion counseling at an Alabama clinic without knowing how far into the pregnancy she is. She may be a mother with three young children at home. She might be in an abusive relationship. Or perhaps she is a student who someday wants children — just not now.
Once a clinic nurse determines the approximate stage of the pregnancy, she will refer the patient to an out-of-state abortion facility where the procedure is still legal. Meanwhile, staff at the Birmingham-based Yellowhammer Fund would work to guarantee a financial contribution for her travel, hotel, and child care costs, if necessary, and cobble together funding for the abortion care from additional funding sources. Yellowhammer’s work is a lifeline for pregnant people in Alabama, providing grassroots support and resources when they need it most.
Those of us who follow Alabama politics had been awaiting late May like kids waiting for Santa Claus at Christmas.
We knew May 19 would be the golden opening date for candidates to begin making their announcements for governor and other statewide constitutional offices. Why? Because the law stipulates that candidates can begin raising campaign dollars exactly one year prior to the primary elections, which are set for May 19, 2026.
Ask someone what a calling is, and they’ll probably say something like “doing work you love.” But as a management professor who has spent two decades researching the history and impact of calling, I’ve found it’s much more than personal fulfillment.
The concept of calling has deep roots. In the 1500s, theologian Martin Luther asserted that any legitimate work – not just work in ministry – could have sacred significance and social value, and could therefore be considered a calling. In this early form, calling wasn’t merely a vocation or passion; it was a way of living and working that built character, competence, and social trust.
In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines. Nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a “face of pure evil,” complete with images of blood and gore.
Experts believe that the girls suffered what is known as a mass psychogenic illness, a psychological condition that results in physical symptoms and spreads socially – much like a virus.
Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption, and awareness training at record levels.
And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy.
In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. That’s more than triple the notices sent out the year before. It’s clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating.
The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a big win on June 27, 2025 by limiting the ability of judges to block Trump administration policies across the nation.
But Trump has not fared nearly as well in the lower courts, where he has lost a series of cases through different levels of the federal court system. On June 5, a single judge temporarily stopped the administration from preventing Harvard University from enrolling international students.
There are two elements critical to a functioning prison system. Security and hope.
Alabama doesn’t do well on either.
Start with security. At the most basic level, a prison needs doors that lock. This was a problem in at least one state correctional facility in recent memory. But security also means that staff and inmates don’t have to live under a constant threat of physical harm.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7.8 million Americans across the U.S. will lose their coverage through Medicaid – the public program that provides health insurance to low-income families and individuals – under the multitrillion-dollar domestic policy package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025.
That includes 247,000 to 412,000 of my fellow residents of Michigan.
Many of these people are working Americans who will lose Medicaid because of the onerous paperwork involved with the proposed work requirements.
Vance Boelter, who allegedly shot Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state representative, and her husband, Mark Hortman, on June 14, 2025, studied at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas. The group is a Bible school linked to the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
The NAR is a loosely organized but influential charismatic Christian movement that shares similarities with Pentecostalism, especially in its belief that God actively communicates with believers through the Holy Spirit. Unlike traditional Pentecostalism, however, the organization emphasizes modern-day apostles and prophets as authoritative leaders tasked with transforming society and ushering in God’s kingdom on Earth. Prayer, prophecy, and worship are defined not only as acts of devotion but as strategic tools for advancing believers’ vision of government and society.
In my lifetime, I’ve had the good fortune of having a handful of good friends.
Each of my four teenage daughters has many hundreds. At least that’s what they call every Facebook connection they collect like trophies. The list of those kinds of friends includes people they barely know, some they don’t know at all, and even some people they don’t like.
When congressional Republicans decided to cut some Biden-era energy subsidies to help fund their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, they could have pruned wasteful subsidies while sparing the rest. Instead, they did the reverse. Americans will pay the price with higher costs for dirtier energy.
The nearly 900-page bill that President Donald Trump signed on July 4, 2025 slashes incentives for wind and solar energy, batteries, electric cars, and home efficiency while expanding subsidies for fossil fuels and biofuels. That will leave Americans burning more fossil fuels despite strong public and scientific support for shifting to renewable energy.
In a totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship, government officials do not need the support of the citizenry to exterminate freedom of speech. That’s because there are no elections to worry about. The regime simply starts having its military and paramilitary goons start arresting critics, disappearing them in terrorist confinement facilities, torturing them, and then killing them. Everyone else understands. No more criticism of the regime.
In a democratic system, suppressing criticism is much more difficult owing to the problem of elections. If the goons of some democratically elected president begin rounding up critics, incarcerating them, torturing them, and killing them, the ruler runs the risk of being kicked out of office in the next election. There is also the risk of impeachment.
Congressional Republicans passed a radical budget and tax bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—on a party-line vote. Many of the plan’s key elements will increase families’ costs for health care, food, and utilities—such as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as terminating tax credits to produce more American-made energy—and are deeply unpopular according to recent survey data. Several provisions, however, remain less understood because they’ve received less media attention or were added during rushed negotiations that took place overnight and behind closed doors.
This article details several lesser-known provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that will increase costs and limit Americans’ ability to meet their basic needs; create a slush fund for Trump administration overreach; and waste taxpayer money.
Imagine three out of every 10 Americans owned a grizzly bear.
Not as pets. As protection.
We’d share sidewalks with grim-faced men leading their bears by a leash. Stores would have signs reminding patrons not to bring bears inside. Those that didn’t would have many frightened customers trying to evade the enormous beast blocking the aisles.
A key element in the authoritarian playbook is the targeting of perceived enemies who can stand as a bulwark against political leaders amassing unchecked power. The second administration of President Donald Trump, since Inauguration Day, has been aggressively targeting a wide range of key civil society organizations—such as universities, law firms, media companies, nonprofits, and business leaders—in attempts to have them comply with a long list of demands that arguably undermine their constitutional rights. Organizations under threat have some reason to submit to the administration, especially as they face intimidating investigations into their free speech, restricted access to government spaces, and cancellation of federal grants based on their use of certain disfavored words, among others. However, huge risks accompany submission. And ultimately, too many civil society organizations failing to stand up to the administration’s unreasonable, coercive demands could hasten the degradation of U.S. democracy.
The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.
Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old woman from Georgia who had been declared brain-dead in February 2025, spent 16 weeks on life support while doctors worked to keep her body functioning well enough to support her developing fetus. On June 13, 2025, her premature baby, named Chance, was born via cesarean section at 25 weeks.
Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered multiple blood clots in her brain. Her story gained public attention when her mother criticized doctors’ decision to keep her on a ventilator without the family’s consent. Smith’s mother has said that doctors told the family the decision was made to align with Georgia’s LIFE Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and bolsters the legal standing of fetal personhood. A statement released by the hospital also cites Georgia’s abortion law.
Let’s be honest. Ethics is not for wimps.
It’s not easy being a good person.
It’s not easy to be honest when it might be costly, to play fair when others cheat, or to keep inconvenient promises.
Imagine finding out your friends hosted a dinner party and didn’t invite you or that you were passed over for a job you were excited about. These moments hurt, and people often describe rejection in the language of physical pain.
While rejection can be emotionally painful, it can also teach us something.
In the four months since he began serving as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made many public statements about vaccines that have cast doubt on their safety and on the objectivity of long-standing processes established to evaluate them.
Many of these statements are factually incorrect. For example, in a newscast aired on June 12, 2025, Kennedy told Fox News viewers that 97% of federal vaccine advisers are on the take. In the same interview, he also claimed that children receive 92 mandatory shots. He has also widely claimed that only COVID-19 vaccines, not other vaccines in use by both children and adults, were ever tested against placebos and that “nobody has any idea” how safe routine immunizations are.
Editor’s note: Americans may think they know a lot about the Declaration of Independence, but many of those ideas are elitist and wrong, as historian Woody Holton explains.
His book, “Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution,” shows how independence and the Revolutionary War were influenced by women, Indigenous and enslaved people, religious dissenters, and other once-overlooked Americans.
In celebration of the United States’ birthday, Holton offers six surprising facts about the nation’s founding document – including that it failed to achieve its most immediate goal and that its meaning has changed from the founding to today.
When presidents have tried to make big changes through executive orders, they have often hit a roadblock: A single federal judge, whether located in Seattle or Miami or anywhere in between, could stop these policies across the entire country.
But on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court significantly limited this judicial power. In Trump v. CASA Inc., a 6-3 majority ruled that federal courts likely lack the authority to issue “universal injunctions” that block government policies nationwide. The ruling means that going forward, federal judges can generally only block policies from being enforced against the specific plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, not against everyone in the country.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated a nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion and returned the authority to regulate abortion to the states.
The Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has vastly reshaped the national abortion landscape. Three years on, many states have severely restricted access to abortion care. But the decision has also had a less well-recognized outcome: It is increasingly jeopardizing access to contraception.
I have no inside sources in the White House.
I do not have access to military intelligence. Or any expert knowledge of the Middle East.
But I’ve spent my adult life watching American presidents try to bomb the region into peace. It never works.
Which leaves me wondering how Alabama’s senators, who on paper have better sources than us Goat Hill wretches, think that President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iranian nuclear facilities solved anything.
