A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX. THE University of Austin is not in Austin. Not yet. It’s 200 miles northeast, in Dallas, on an office complex owned by Mr. Harlan Crow. “Old Parkland,” the complex is called. Crow, a conservative billionaire who recently made the news for funneling thousands of dollars in undisclosed gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas and his family, gives money to UATX, too. He also rents out rooms in Old Parkland to the nascent university, at what UATX founder Peter Boghossian called “a generous rate.” I would later encounter the rich Texan at several UATX lectures, squinting and smiling in preppy athleisure. Crow is a savvy investor, from a family of savvy investors. (His father, Trammell Crow, was thought to be the largest private landlord in the US.) He invests not only in real estate but ideology. He’s donated to the conservative magazine The National Review, conservative thinktank The Witherspoon Institute, and at least two powerful libertarian organizations started with funds from Charles Koch—The Institute For Justice and The Cato Institute. If Crow is putting money behind UATX, it can be inferred that he believes the school will promote the same values as other recipients of his patronage—privatizing social services, lambasting attempts to increase sexual and racial diversity in education and the workplace—and will lead to the same effect—maintaining power in the hands of wealthy white men.0

According to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law: “stochas­tic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideolog­i­cally motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpre­dict­able.’” Self-described stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, owner of the social media account Libs of TikTok, has become infamous for her viral harassment and moral panic campaigns targeting minorities— with an emphasis on vilifying LGBTQ+ existence. Since 2021, Raichik’s posts targeting advocates for and members of the LGBTQ+ community have been followed with a deluge of violent death threats (including lynching threats against the Los Angeles Unified School District). Children’s hospitals and school districts in the crosshairs of Raichik and her devoted fans have collectively suffered over 20 bomb threats so far, according to various law enforcement agencies. Detective Hanna Dvorak of the Coralville Police Department, who investigated one of these bomb threats against a junior high school in her city, told her superiors that “it appears this all stems from a post made earlier this week by Chaya Raichik and her ‘Libs of TikTok’ account.” Nowhere has Raichik’s influence been more visible than Oklahoma, where her anti-LGBTQ+ exploits earned her an official position on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee by controversial far-right Superintendent Ryan Walters. Under Walters’ leadership, Oklahoma has been aggressively working to ban books and education on LGBTQ+ issues in schools across the state, with Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond stating that proposed rules to ban LGBTQ+ books and content were “unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.” It’s been confirmed that Raichik’s posts have fueled multiple bomb threats against schools specifically in Oklahoma. Officials from Oklahoma told NBC News that they believe Chaya Raichik’s anti-LGBTQ+ culture warring “sparked threats in their localities with her posts on social media that digitally heckle people such as drag performers, LGBTQ teachers and doctors who treat transgender patients.” One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats. This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that "one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

A drugmaker’s feud with the DEA is exacerbating the ADHD meds crisis — at a rate of 600 million missing doses a year.

In a recent survey conducted by a panel of experts specializing in the American presidency, President Biden was ranked the 14th-best president, while his likely 2024 presidential opponent former President Trump found himself at the very bottom of the list.

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.

The state's highest court reversed a judge's dismissal of the case involving embryos destroyed by a wandering Mobile hospital patient.

Leaked emails from the organisers of the prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy suggest several authors were excluded from shortlists last year after they were flagged for comments or works that could be viewed as sensitive in China. In January the Hugo awards published the statistics behind the 2023 awards, which were held as part of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in the Chinese city of Chengdu in October. The data showed that the New York Times bestseller RF Kuang and the young adult author Xiran Jay Zhao were among authors who had received enough nominations to be on the ballot in their respective categories but were deemed “not eligible” by the award’s administrators, without further explanation. The news sparked consternation in the science fiction community, with many fans and authors expressing concern that the awards had been tainted by censorship. Now emails leaked from the 2023 awards committee appear to have confirmed those fears, with a member of the 2024 Worldcon committee resigning as a result. In an email on 5 June 2023, Dave McCarty, the head of the 2023 Hugo awards jury, wrote: “We need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It’s not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China … that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot or if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”

The marketing campaign for Madame Web, Sony's latest Spider-Man spin-off film, is a definitive guide on how not to promote a movie.

The owner of a Missouri-based technology business that was ordered to pay an ex-employee roughly $311,000 in unpaid wages, damages and legal costs was sanctioned Tuesday by an appellate court for briefing "deficiencies," including submitting fake cases generated by artificial intelligence.

A parental bill of rights signed by Ron DeSantis in 2022 is under renewed scrutiny after a school asked for parental consent for a guest speaker to read a book written by an African American.

In 2020, Oregon adopted Measure 110, a transformational change to the way drug possession and addiction were treated by the criminal legal system. Instead of incarceration and criminal charges, Measure 110 ensured that possession of small amounts of drugs was responded to with a ticket and referral to services. Since its passage, more than $302 million has been invested in addiction services and social supports, and more people are going to treatment. Despite the successes of Measure 110, however, Oregon legislators are threatening to recriminalize drug use in Oregon. The bill, HB 4002-1, would make possession of small amounts of controlled substances a criminal offense once again, reversing a revolutionary reform and returning to the failed policies of the War on Drugs. Reversing Measure 110 would be harmful to thousands of Oregonians, and would be a failure of leadership. Legislators claim they are responding to an increase in homelessness and public drug use — but recriminalization will only make those problems worse. Instead of resurrecting policies that didn’t work the first time, the Oregon Legislature should invest in proven strategies to prevent and treat addiction, reduce homelessness, and improve public safety, and should invest in treatment and housing, not incarceration.

Former CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves personally tried to influence a former LAPD captain, who had pledged his allegiance to Moonves and was leaking confidential information about a criminal investigation in which Moonves had been accused of sexually assaulting a former employee, according to new legal documents made public Friday by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. Moonves agreed on Feb. 5 to pay a $11,250 fine for violating the city's ethics code by "inducing" a city official to misuse his position in order to create a private advantage for Moonves. An attorney for Moonves in New York did not immediately return a request for comment. The former LAPD captain was Corey Palka, who, according to the ethics investigation, while serving as commanding officer of the Hollywood Division in 2017, personally provided Moonves with information about the LAPD investigation and the former Moonves employee who made the accusation.

Tennessee law prohibits women from having abortions in nearly all circumstances. But once the babies are here, the state provides little help. We followed one family as they struggled to make it. The same state that questioned Mayron’s fitness to care for her four children forced her to continue a pregnancy that risked her life to have a fifth, one that would require more intensive care than any of the others. Tennessee already had some of the worst outcomes in the nation when measuring maternal health, infant mortality and child poverty. Lawmakers who paved the way for a new generation of post-Roe births did little to bolster the state’s meager safety net to support these babies and their families.

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge imposed a $364 million penalty Friday on Donald Trump, his companies and some executives, ruling that they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth. Trump, who built his reputation as a real estate titan, also was barred from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years. However, the judge backed away from an earlier ruling that would have dissolved the former president’s companies.

The centrist West Virginia Democrat had been mulling a bid for the White House but will instead suck cocks in hell.

P. biforme is closely related to the albino strain, though it might give the cheeses a slightly different look and aroma. Perhaps your wheel of brie would be a bit more blue or gray, or slightly funkier. But this is something that consumers should embrace, Ropars said: a diverse mix of flavors, of smells, a resilient collection of bugs.

These numbers are legitimately shocking.

The Ethics Committee is investigating Gaetz—and has text messages between the congressman and a woman who claims she had sex with Gaetz at parties she was paid to attend.

The party is embracing the idea of the border as a bulwark against a savage horde. As it happens, that’s exactly how Israel talks about Gaza. Tempting as it might be to view Israel’s brutal campaign of elimination in Gaza as a failure of humanity to transcend the 20th century—a century marked, nearly from start to finish, by genocide—the war may well end up being the first defining conflict of the 21st. Israel, in both its foundational identity and its occupation of Palestine, is often framed as one of the last lingering artifacts of a bygone colonial age. But what we are witnessing in Gaza—a resource-deprived, stateless population pushed to the absolute limits of desperation in a violent confrontation with an advanced military power intent on excluding as many noncitizens as possible—is as likely to be a vision into the future as a reminder of the past. The conditions that Israel’s 17-year siege has imposed on the people of the Gaza Strip, many of whom are already refugees from previous rounds of Israeli aggression and expansion, will become much more common in the large swaths of the world at risk of severe ecological degradation. Climate-induced food and water insecurity, disease, and unemployment are expected to displace hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades. These refugees will be forced to seek entry into developed states increasingly mired, like Israel, in ethno-nationalism and other forms of jingoism. Chief among those wealthy countries sinking further into this sort of nationalist frenzy is the United States. Last week, Senate Democrats strongly indicated that the liberal wing of the American political establishment is woefully unprepared to face the future that the US—as both the world’s biggest imperial power and a leading architect of the climate crisis—has helped create. In an attempt to score a win ahead of this year’s federal election, Democrats proposed a piece of legislation that is, in effect, a laundry list of hard-line anti-immigrant policies demanded by Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress. In so doing, they conceded the right-wing framing that an increase in immigrants and asylum seekers at the southern border—already a real phenomenon—represents a “crisis” that requires a series of punitive solutions.

Navalny, 47, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, spent his final years behind bars as the Russian leader reshaped the country to rally behind his war in Ukraine.