During Koch-funded trips to mountain resorts, Trump judges huddled over a new strategy to advance “history and tradition” as the law of the land. On Oct. 13, 2022, a handful of the country’s most conservative federal judges gathered inside a wine cellar at a luxury ski resort in Deer Valley, Utah. The surrounding mountains were ablaze with yellow aspens, and the speaker addressing the room joked that the judges were already planning their afternoon hikes. Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts. But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.

Break out the popcorn.

The Supreme Court has rejected a Biden administration request to intervene and keep Texas immigration enforcement law SB4 on hold while it is challenged in lower courts.

This week in Austin, several musicians sought to show their solidarity with Palestine more explicitly at South By Southwest. Per Politico, five music labels and 105 bands and individual musicians—including over 60 acts from the U.K. and all 12 Irish bands originally scheduled to perform—opted out of the nine-day festival in protest of its controversial sponsors: The U.S. Army; military defense firm, Raytheon; and its subsidiary, Collins Aerospace, which has drawn recent protests for supplying weaponry used to kill and harm thousands of Gazans. Some of these artists, however, turned up in Texas anyway to make their voices heard on a different stage—a protest co-organized by the United Musicians And Allied Workers (UMAW) and Austin For Palestine Coalition.

You don't have to worry about Tarn Adams' millionaire status turning him corporate any time soon. At this year's GDC, the Dwarf Fortress maker came out swinging against a brutal climate of layoffs, cancellations, and general downsizing across the games industry, declaring that the executives responsible can "all eat shit." Just in case you needed a reason to like Dwarf Fortress even more. "Three to four years from now, what are [Dwarf Fortress] sales looking like?" pondered Adams in a chat with PCG, "What kind of decisions do we have to make [with] burn rates and all that stuff?" Considering the possibility of making those hard decisions some day down the line, Tarn wondered if the experience would give him "more empathy for the people that lay people off. "No, I don't fucking think so," he concluded. "They can all eat shit, I think they're horrible, and I think they're bad people." Which is a pretty definitive statement all by itself, but Adams continued: "These decisions, they don't sound practical. They sound like they're driven by greedy, greedy people trying to make some kind of venture capital thing work out.

The inside story of the magazine everyone loved to hate.

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers who pleaded guilty to a long list of state and federal charges for torturing two Black men will be sentenced by a federal judge starting Tuesday.

Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV lays bare the harmful workplace that Dan Schneider allegedly cultivated.

An alleged burglar was caught on CCTV stretching and doing yoga outside a bakery before she allegedly broke in and stole several items, including almond croissants. Police have charged a 44-year-old Richmond woman after Phillippa's Bakery store on North Street in Richmond was allegedly broken into around 3am on March 3.  CCTV shared by the business showed the alleged thief dressed in all black and doing several leg and body stretches in the car park before the break in.

China’s export surplus of cars and electronics helps the fight against inflation. But lower-priced Chinese goods threaten Biden’s hopes of boosting U.S. factory jobs.

Asbestos is found in products such brake linings and gaskets.

Yep, been saying this Trump lost. The revenge tour is almost 4 years old now

Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal — who pioneered studies of animal cognition while also writing best-selling books that helped popularize the field around the globe — passed away March 14, 2024, from stomach cancer. De Waal, Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology and former director of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at the Emory National Primate Research Center, was 75. From his groundbreaking 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes” to 2019’s “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves,” de Waal shattered long-held ideas about what it means to be an animal and a human. “One thing that I’ve seen often in my career is claims of human uniqueness that fall away and are never heard from again,” de Waal said in 2014. “We always end up overestimating the complexity of what we do. That’s how you can sum up my career: I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.”

Comics and cartoons can be used to entertain, educate and enlighten. In the case of the right-wing web comic creator StoneToss and his eponymous cartoon, they can also be used to spread racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry. Since 2017 StoneToss has been doing just that. It has an exceedingly wide presence among neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The easy-to-digest three- or four-panel comics are accessible vectors for spreading right-wing hate and, as we will show, real-world violence.

A startling rise in sea-surface temperatures suggests that we may not understand how fast the climate is changing.

On Aug. 17, 2019, a large group of protesters gathered in downtown Portland to confront the Proud Boys, who were rallying in Tom McCall Waterfront Park. By day’s end, Portland police arrested 13 demonstrators, most of them on the left.

Highly skilled firefighters are the last line of defense against wildfires, but that line is fraying because the government decided long ago that they’re not worth very much.

SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's space company and national security agencies. The network is being built by SpaceX's Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said. The plans show the extent of SpaceX's involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces. If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.

Thanks to government loopholes, rail companies haven’t been scrutinized by the Federal Railroad Administration for scores of alleged worker injuries and at least two deaths.

We can't arrest our way out of the overdose crisis