Politics

This story was originally published by Grist and is republished here as part of an ongoing collaboration. On Tuesday morning, Representative Sean Casten from Illinois stood on the House floor with a poster of the album art for Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” propped against a display easel beside …

Americans will soon be able to self-select which gender appears on their passports, and among the options will be a “gender marker for nonbinary, intersex, and gender nonconforming persons,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced on Wednesday. “We will be updating our procedures to allow applicants to self-select their gender …

This story was originally published by Grist and is republished here as part of an ongoing collaboration. Picture this: two babies born on the same day, maybe even within the same hour, at the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. One baby, born to a Black mother, goes home …

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new $50 million fund to identify and address low-income neighborhoods and communities of color who have been disproportionately affected by climate change, pollution, and the covid-19 pandemic. The EPA said on Friday that the environmental justice initiatives will use allocated dollars from the Biden …

President Biden put an end to a Trump administration initiative that sought to kick three million people off food stamps, a proposal that would have deprived nearly one million children of free school meals. The previous administration and Republicans pushed for the change in 2019, claiming some Americans were taking …

Ken Newburger felt like he’d been blindsided. He knew a legal challenge had been mounted against the medical cannabis ballot initiative he’d worked on last year in Mississippi. He knew the state’s Supreme Court had taken up the case. But the argument against Initiative 65 was so nonsensical that Newburger …

For decades, various industries have weaponized American individualism, laying the blame for systemic issues at the feet of individual citizens. Tobacco companies wouldn’t exist without smokers, the story goes. Litter wouldn’t exist without us litterbugs. Cars wouldn’t crash if we weren’t such speed freaks. And, of course, climate change wouldn’t …

In a dramatic, and likely life-saving, reversal, the Biden administration has announced that it favors breaking patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines to speed their deployment in combating the global pandemic. The announcement came from the office of the United States Trade Representative, Katherine Tai who vowed to make the case …

The likelihood of D.C. statehood was served a blow on Friday when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) said that he opposes a bill that would make the nation’s capital a state. Manchin told Hoppy Kercheval of West Virginia’s MetroNews in a radio interview that a constitutional amendment was needed, not legislation. …

After the first day of President Biden’s two-day climate summit this week, one could easily have the impression that global leaders are very, very good people who take the climate crisis very, very seriously. Biden had summoned together 40 heads of state from all the most powerful nations of the …