With a status-obsessed comeback book, the author of the fabricated memoir “A Million Little Pieces” attempts to rebrand.

Some Democrats are fighting to stop Trump's Iran war, but leaders like Chuck Schumer are quietly acquiescing or, worse, supporting an attack.

It’s on.

The Benin Bronzes were artefacts stolen during the UK’s imperial plunder of Benin, modern-day southern Nigeria.

But it’s also undeniable that there are aspects of reading at which A.I.s excel at a superhuman level. During its training, an L.L.M. will “read” and “understand” an unimaginably large quantity of text. Later, it will be able to recall the substance of that text instantaneously (if not always perfectly), and to draw connections, make comparisons, and extract insights, which it can bring to bear on new pieces of text, on which it hasn’t been trained, at outrageous speed.

The University of Florida student won an academic honor after he argued in a paper that the Constitution applies only to white people. From there, the situation spiraled. Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted. In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.” Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.” At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades. The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award. That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it? The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.” Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic. Image A tall, gray concrete building with rectangular windows and brick panels is visible behind two tree trunks in the foreground, with grass in front. After Mr. Damsky posted on X that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school.Credit...Jacob Langston for The New York Times Well beyond the classroom, bigoted and extremist views are on the rise and vying for mainstream acceptance, raising questions about whether principles of neutrality and free-speech rights are proper and adequate responses to the threats. X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, recently allowed millions of people to view Kanye West’s new song saluting Hitler when other platforms removed it. Vice President JD Vance criticized European governments’ efforts to ostracize far-right political parties, on the grounds that doing so violates principles of free speech. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At the University of Florida, the story of the book award took a dramatic turn soon after Ms. McAlister defended the decision to honor Mr. Damsky with it. It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school. He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion. Mr. Damsky’s hateful posts drew shock and fear in some corners of the university. According to Hillel International, the university has the largest number of Jewish undergraduate students in the country. Its student body is 48 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian and 5 percent Black, according to school data. A spokesman for the university declined to answer questions related to this article or to make any administrators available for interviews. But in emails to Mr. Damsky obtained by The New York Times, university officials wrote that his posts had made numerous students fear for their safety. The officials also cited another student’s claim that Mr. Damsky had described his paper as concluding “on a call for extralegal violence,” which Mr. Damsky denies. In an interview, Mr. Damsky said that he belonged to no organization or group, and that he did not pose a physical threat to anyone. He said he was being unfairly targeted for sharing his ideas, and blithely shrugged off the criticism. The disciplinary measures he faces could result in expulsion. He said he planned to fight them vigorously. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “You know,” he said, “I’m not, like, a psychopathic ax murderer.” Mr. Damsky said his ideas were well formed before he started law school, shaped by reading authors like Sam Francis, a white nationalist, and Richard Lynn, who argued for white racial superiority and eugenics. He grew up around Los Angeles and studied history at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he wanted to become a prosecutor, he said, after watching progressive-minded California prosecutors adopt policies that he believed were soft on crime. Many law students learned about his extremism last fall, when a draft of a paper he wrote for a different class was passed among students and faculty members. Mr. Damsky, who just completed his second year of law school, assumes that a fellow student shared it with others. Like his paper for the originalism seminar, it also argued the Constitution was written exclusively for white people. It went on to suggest that nonwhites should be stripped of voting rights and given 10 years to move to another country. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In January, Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University, began a stint as a visiting scholar at the school. It was not long, she said, before a number of Black and Jewish students came to her with concerns about Mr. Damsky. Image Carliss Chatman sits at a wooden table, looking forward, with two black mirrors and a plant in the background. Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University, began a stint as a visiting scholar at the school in January. “I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” she said.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times Ms. Chatman was struck, in part, by her own experiences at the school in contrast to Mr. Damsky’s award. She had proposed teaching a class during her time there called “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.” But administrators at the law school changed the name to “Entrepreneurship,” she said, before listing it in the course catalog. She attributed the change to Florida lawmakers’ crackdown on diversity-oriented language and themes in public education, a push that preceded the Trump administration’s broader war on progressive ideology. “I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” Ms. Chatman said, referring to Mr. Damsky, “but my class can’t be called ‘Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.’” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT As the spring semester got underway, word spread that Mr. Damsky had won the book award in Judge Badalamenti’s originalism seminar. Mr. Damsky’s paper includes arguments similar to those recently adopted by the Trump administration, including a call to “reconsider” birthright citizenship, and an assertion that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution.” It also argues that courts should challenge the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to vote for nonwhite citizens. Mr. Damsky concluded the paper by raising the specter of revolutionary action if the steps he recommended toward forging a white ethno-state were not taken. “The People cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,” he wrote, adding that if the courts did not act to ensure a white country, the matter would be decided “not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Chatman called Mr. Damsky’s arguments “anti-intellectual” and absurd: “We fought a whole Civil War that freed slaves and said ‘We The People’ now means everyone.” But it was the granting of the award that galled her the most. “We should not be giving awards to things that advocate for white supremacy and white power,” she said, adding that she believed the award had “emboldened” Mr. Damsky to begin posting the racist and antisemitic comments on social media. Image A blue banner with the words “Levin College of Law University of Florida” repeating on the left, next to a brick wall and a digital display showing “Class of 2025” and a blurry photo of a graduate. Mr. Damsky said he was scheduled to attend a disciplinary hearing on June 20.Credit...Jacob Langston for The New York Times Mr. Damsky’s argument that at least some of the framers meant for the Constitution to apply only to white people is by no means a new one. Evan D. Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University, notes that the argument can be found in the Ku Klux Klan’s founding organizational documents from the late 1860s. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Among originalists, though, this interpretation has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document. While Mr. Damsky’s papers were written in a formal style consistent with legal scholarship, his social media posts have been blunt, crass and ugly. A critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.” He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler. Judge Badalamenti, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, was one of two instructors of the class in which Mr. Damsky won the award. A member of the conservative Federalist Society, he has earned praise from both liberals and conservatives over the course of his career. The class was co-taught by Ashley Grabowski, a lawyer and Federal District Court clerk who, like the judge, is an adjunct professor at the law school. Ms. Grabowski did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Damsky said he assumed that it was the judge who graded his paper. He also said that the judge “is not a white nationalist.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I would prefer it if he was.” Students took their complaints to Ms. McAlister, the interim dean. She addressed the granting of the award to Mr. Damsky in at least two town-hall-style meetings, according to an email she wrote to students and an article in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper. In the February email, the dean wrote that the law school, as a public institution, was bound by the First and 14th Amendments, meaning that no faculty member may “grade down a paper that is otherwise successful simply because he or she disagrees with the ideas the paper advances.” Institutional neutrality, she wrote in her email, “is not agreement or complicity with the ideas that any community member advances.” “It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.” Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Image John F. Stinneford sits on a chair in a grassy yard, looking forward with lush green bushes and trees behind him. John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said he supported the idea of “institutional neutrality,” which instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.Credit...Jacob Langston for The New York Times If it were a good paper, he said, “you should put aside your moral qualms and give it an A.” A number of students disagree, but several declined to be interviewed on the record for fear that criticizing the school, or a sitting federal judge, would harm their future job prospects. One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers. Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer. “You could imagine,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview, that “having someone in your office who espouses those kinds of beliefs would cause significant mistrust in the fairness of prosecutions.”

The Massachusetts woman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter in the death of her police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe.

Trump’s $499 gold phone is only the latest ask of the Maga faithful to show their commitment in dollar terms

A Florida state judge was lobbying for a seat on the federal bench. After he sided with the president in a defamation case, Donald Trump gave him one. Ed Artau, now a nominee to be a district court judge in Florida, met with staff in the office of Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott to angle for the nomination less than two weeks after Trump’s election last fall, according to a new Senate disclosure obtained by POLITICO. In the midst of his interviews, Artau was part of a panel of judges that ruled in Trump’s favor in the president’s case against members of the Pulitzer Prize Board. About two weeks after the court published his opinion — which called for the overturning of a landmark Supreme Court case that made it harder for public officials to sue journalists — he interviewed with the White House Counsel’s Office. In May, Trump announced his nomination to the federal judiciary. Critics raised concerns about Artau’s impartiality at the time of the announcement, in light of his ruling in the Pulitzer case. But the overlapping timeline of that decision with his meetings with Senate staff and the White House Counsel’s Office has not previously been reported.

NASA employees have until July 25 to decide if they'll stay or go.

According to the FBI, a Texas man talked about killing christians on Roblox and searched for ‘are suicide attacks haram in islam’ on his iPhone.

For his efforts to expose this bigotry and a network’s efforts to hide it, Florida investigative report Tim Burke is facing prosecution.

I think the Post's slant on this story was "o the horror", so would be funnier, but I don't feel like digging for it.

Democrats recently ousted David Hogg from leadership after he criticized the party for complacency.

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of instant messaging app Telegram, plans to leave his fortune to the more than 100 children he has fathered. The Russian-born tech tycoon has revealed that his estate will be split between his six children from relationships and the scores of others whom he fathered through sperm donation. In a wide-ranging interview published Thursday in French political magazine Le Point, 40-year-old Durov revealed that he does not differentiate between his legal children with three different women and those conceived with the sperm he donated. “They are all my children and will all have the same rights! I don’t want them to tear each other apart after my death,” he said, after revealing that he recently wrote his will.

William Langewiesche died on Sunday. He was a damn titan. Langewiesche hit his stride in longform magazine journalism round about 1998, applying the concept of system accidents to the downing of ValueJet Airlines Flight 592, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 aircraft that had crashed into the Florida Everglades in 1996. Langewiesche had been doing international affairs essays for The Atlantic—those were also good, and he kept at this work for the rest of his career—but here was a story in his true wheelhouse. It's a great blog: Langewiesche, a professional pilot, had the aviation chops to comprehend the accident like few of his journalistic peers, but what grabs you about the best Langewiesche jams is his talent for stitching together a timeline of events, using as thread the little quiet things that might only be spotted by an expert, or an insider, or an ace researcher. Langewiesche was always at least one of the three, and for aviation stories he was all of the above, to say nothing of an incredible natural storyteller. It will not be possible for any human to surpass his knack for pulling out and organizing the details of NTSB investigations into a gripping, horrifying narrative. Most of his aviation stories, covering a solid 20-year period, felt not just like an event but like a definitive final examination of a piece of history. Two of my favorite Langewiesche jams are about maritime disasters. His retelling of the 2015 sinking of the container ship SS El Faro is an all-timer, pulling together and precisely ordering NTSB investigatory findings, telemetry data, weather reports, corporate history, industry best practices, maritime disaster protocols, biographical information, and absolutely gutting audio transcripts to provide a complete timeline of a tragic and entirely avoidable disaster. I have read his 2004 story about the sinking of MS Estonia, a car-passenger ferry that foundered in the Baltic Sea in 1994, at least 10 and possibly as many as 40 times. It's a bold, breathtaking piece of nonfiction writing, lean and relentless, befitting utterly the terrifying circumstances of the disaster it examines. I am going to pause the writing of this blog right this very moment so that I can go and read it again.

Friends and family of Moises Sotelo ‘disappointed and disgusted’ after respected fixture detained outside church

Calgarians were charged $65,000 to support an art project that allowed residents to listen to the gurgling waters of the Bow River, a funding watchdog says. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) is lashing out against the Reconnecting to the Bow project, a city-funded initiative that involved a hotline connecting callers to the sound of the Bow River at any time. CTF says the project was unnecessary and a waste of money. “If someone wants to listen to a river, they can go sit next to one, but the City of Calgary should not force taxpayers to pay for this,” said Kris Sims, CTF Alberta director, in a news release.

From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned Thursday. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year – that is 100,000 tonnes per minute – of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update. Earth's surface temperature last year breached 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term – our 1.5°C "carbon budget" – will be exhausted in two years, they calculated. Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand.

A short account of the 19 June killing of 16 people and wounding of 283 by police during a demonstration of women and children in support of a steel workers' strike.