Cory Booker Promises to Grant Clemency to a Record Number of Nonviolent Drug Offenders
Sen. Cory Booker at a presidential campaign stop in New Hampshire in AprilSteven Senne/AP New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, whose presidential campaign has focused largely on criminal justice reform, just made a big promise to incarcerated people: If elected, he pledged Thursday morning, he would immediately initiate clemency proceedings for roughly 17,000 people in prison…
Want to See How Disinformation Could Play out in 2020? Just Look Overseas.
Employees from Facebook, Google, and Twitter are sworn in at a 2017 Senate hearing on Russian disinformation.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images After the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg notoriously dismissed the idea that Facebook had any role in the outcome as “crazy.” Experts were skeptical of his denial, and Zuckerberg officially ate his words the next year when…
Why “Jaws” Was So Terrifying, According to the Guy Who Co-Wrote It
Zanuck/Entertainment Pictures/ZUMA When Steven Spielberg’s Jaws premiered on this date 44 years ago, on June 20, 1975, it was a booming success: In the first weekend, it grossed $7 million—adjusted for inflation, that’s a whopping $33 million. The film would go on to inspire a wealth of pop culture moments: a Saturday Night Live skit…
Trump Has Gotten Bored With Venezuela
This is a helluva headline: It doesn’t say that Trump has “changed his strategy” or “lost faith in the opposition” or anything like that. It just says that he figured it would be easy peasy to get everyone to cave in to his bluster, and it wasn’t—so he doesn’t care anymore. And of course he…
Raw Data: Here’s What the Trump Tariffs Are Costing You
Here are quarterly tariff receipts over the past few years: Tariffs normally run about $40 billion per quarter. In the latest quarter, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, that was $35 billion higher. This amounts to $140 billion per year. These tariffs are paid by US companies that import goods and are then passed along to consumers…
Why Is Donald Trump Hellbent on Dismantling OPM?
Last year the Trump administration unveiled its plan to reorganize government. I think every president puts together a plan like this, and it was the usual collection of good ideas, bad ideas, and fantasies that would never get through Congress. One of the proposals was to reorganize the Office of Personnel Management. Part of this…