Open Lending Reports First Quarter 2024 Financial Results

California lawmakers should support the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, a Superfund-style bill that would force big fossil fuel companies to pay for their damage to the climate. Otherwise, taxpayers will ultimately foot the entire bill.

"There can be no individuals up there with individual motives."

The Rangers aren’t just preparing to face a club that finished four points behind them in the NHL standings and is widely regarded as the team to beat in the East, but they’re about to have their hands full with an opponent that’s gotten closer to championship euphoria than most ever do.

GettyThe wiry-looking economist with no military experience who Vladimir Putin has chosen to serve as his new defense minister is apparently a lot closer to the murky underworld of Russian security services than was originally thought.Andrei Belousov was close to the late Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin—so close, according to a new report by opposition investigative reporting group Dossier Center, that the two were sometimes spotted “sitting with their arms around each other.”A source told the outlet Belousov, who served as first deputy prime minister prior to his rise to defense minister, oversaw Prigozhin’s activities. The two are said to have spoken to each other like friends and “their work meetings were reminiscent of family get-togethers with tea; they informally discussed all the issues, then nodded to the junior employees, who then compiled everything into a real report.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Investigators probing Matthew Perty’s death are reportedly still looking into how the “Friends” actor got a hold of the ketamine that was found in his system at the time of his death — and are trying to zero in on who is responsible for supplying him with the deadly drug. The 54-year-old actor, who long struggled...

It’s about providing good times and big moments — not necessarily delivering a championship.

Sean "Diddy" Combs' former head of security said he had witnessed the rapper being violent toward women, namely his exes Cassie Ventura and Kim Porter, "four or five times" — and that the shocking 2016 footage of him brutally beating Ventura did not surprise him.

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A Democratic agenda: Lose the filibuster, reform the court and revive Roe.

The names of witnesses will remain off limits to the public

In Georgia, incumbent Justice Andrew Pinson and Democratic former congressman John Barrow are running for the state Supreme Court in an unusually heated race.

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Yesterday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) took an unprecedented, reckless, and morally skewed action.

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The crash site — "waterlogged and filled with 80 years' worth of sediment" — is in eastern England, Cotswold Archaeology told CBS News.

The guide you need in your life.

Analysts who study the youth vote say that the president is in better shape with voters under 30 than many Democrats tend to think.

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Cut five words out of the existing law — and don’t call them mobile homes.

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Nine Egyptian men have been acquitted by a Greek judge of charges related to a shipwreck that killed more than 500 migrants. The judge dismissed the case.

Betting on the United States has been a terrific strategy.

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The Sarasota County Sheriff's Office said the body of missing swimmer Jose Daniel Venta Ciro, 23, has been recovered on Siesta Key, Florida.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is not running for reelection, addressed rumors that he might run for governor in 2024 as an independent.

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Live updates from the 2024 campaign trail, with the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries and more.

The men were accused of causing a shipwreck that killed hundreds of migrants last year and sent shockwaves throughout the E.U.

A State Department spokesman confirmed the U.S. was "asked for assistance by the Iranian Government" after the helicopter crash, but did not comply.

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We already have enough nepotism in our society.

In 1970, the American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano began planning her final project, a large-scale work of performance art called Dropout Piece. It entailed Lozano’s leaving her successful career, withdrawing from the New York City art scene, and eventually moving to Dallas, where she lived until her death, in 1999. As a multiyear, lived action, Dropout Piece is ephemeral, impossible to display in a gallery. The only record of its inception is found in 11 notebooks full of Lozano’s neat, all-caps handwriting, in which she included ideas for the work as well as for other ambitious projects: “Investment Piece,” “‘No Movies’ Piece,” “Dialogue Piece.” One of these notes, from April 1970, serves as the epigraph to Hari Kunzru’s new novel, Blue Ruin: “Poverty Piece: Remain poor until the war ends.”When we meet Jason Gates, known as Jay, the middle-aged narrator of Blue Ruin, he is living like Lozano might have in Poverty Piece. He’s been sleeping in his car during the coronavirus pandemic and working as a grocery-delivery driver. He is also undocumented and, after catching COVID, was evicted from his shared apartment in New York City; he’s still suffering from long COVID. One afternoon, he pulls into the driveway of a gated upstate property and begins to wearily unload a trunkful of groceries, only to find that the woman waiting on the porch is Alice, an ex-girlfriend from his art-school days in London. Alice sees how ill Jay is and offers him a place to recover: a vacant barn on the other side of the estate where she’s been quarantining with her husband, a painter named Rob (another former art-school friend of Jay’s), and Marshal, a gallerist who has been renting the home from a millionaire acquaintance.[Read: What the gig economy does to a human]After Alice leaves Jay in the barn, imploring him to remain hidden because guests are forbidden on the property, he reflects that her “familiarity was a small miracle. It changed time’s straight line into a plane, a landscape across which, for a while, I could move in any direction.” Jay’s convalescence gives him time to trudge into the past. Twenty years ago, as a couple, Jay and Alice enmeshed themselves in the avant-garde art world of London, running a collaborative warehouse gallery space with Rob. When the gallery was sold, Alice sank into a depression and eventually left Jay, running away to Greece with Rob. One day, Jay returned from a lecture to find himself evicted from Alice’s apartment, unable to contact her, and stonewalled by his friends. Reeling from betrayal, he had no choice but to move on.Kunzru’s attention to how history haunts the present, on scales both personal and political, animated his previous two books, White Tears and Red Pill. Together with Blue Ruin, the three novels make up his own version of the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1990s Three Colors trilogy. Kieślowski named his three films Blue, White, and Red, after the colors of the French flag; they represent, respectively, the French Revolution’s ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Kunzru’s trilogy, meanwhile, is attuned to the history of the U.S. (and, to some extent, the U.K.). In White Tears, two white men accidentally reanimate the voice of a long-dead blues singer and become haunted by him, illuminating a wealthy family’s legacy of exploiting Black people in the South. In Red Pill, the unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with a cop show called Blue Lives, growing convinced that the program’s creator is “red-pilling” the American public by inserting alt-right propaganda into the show. In Blue Ruin, Kunzru turns his attention to visual and performance art, examining its intersections with issues of labor and consumerism. Through Jay, who has lived both as an artist and as an undocumented gig worker, Kunzru shows that these two lifestyles are perhaps not as different as they might seem, deflating the idea of art as a noble pursuit: Being an artist is just another job, and art is just another commodity.Much of this indictment of the art world occurs through Jay’s reflections on his past, present, and future as an artist. He is rigidly principled, even ascetic, bound by commitments to aesthetic ideas over material success. Jay loves painting, but he gave it up in art school because he felt that there was something “rotten” about the final product. He hated the medium’s “aura of luxury consumption, the knowledge that whatever you did, however confrontational you tried to be, you were—if you were lucky—just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with.” Trying to resist the commodification of his art, Jay started to make performance pieces. These culminated in a three-part series called THE DRIFTWORK, which explored the idea of his own disappearance from the art world, perhaps in homage to Lozano’s Dropout Piece.THE DRIFTWORK’s first piece, No Trace, had Jay obsessively cleaning his apartment and erasing his presence from the internet. In the second part, Return, Jay gave his ID, passport, and credit cards to three “artworld authorities” in Paris. He then sailed, covertly, across the English Channel, hid on a train to London, and met the authorities at an appointed time in the city to collect his belongings—a reference to the “clandestine crossings” of migrants. The third piece, Fugue, began with Jay burning his official documents, his belongings, and even the clothes on his own body, while standing in front of a gallery audience. He left the building naked and began a total withdrawal from the art world: After he walked out the door, the audience was told that “the performance was ongoing.”When we meet Jay, 20 years later, he has remained completely removed from the art scene—he has not entered a gallery or museum, does not seem to have even looked himself up online, since Fugue. He’s been living without ID or papers, joining autonomist communes, sailing on yacht crews, entering the U.S. without documentation, and, until the pandemic, driving for a ride-share service in New York City. So it comes as a surprise to Jay that, in his absence, Fugue has made him famous. He learns this when, having ignored Alice’s warnings, he goes on a walk around the property and is found by Marshal, the dealer who has been renting the property, who zip-ties him and holds him at gunpoint. Marshal sees Jay as a Black man trespassing on the valuable estate. But when Marshal realizes that he is holding Jason Gates, the creator of THE DRIFTWORK, the dynamic shifts, and he starts apologizing.Later that week, Jay comes to the main house for dinner and gets the chance to tell his story to willing listeners, filling in the gaps of his past two decades. He reflects that “someone or other once said that art is purposeful purposelessness. I was trying to make something less defined even than that, a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” With THE DRIFTWORK, Jay tried to undermine the borders not just between nations but also between life and art. But he has changed in his 20 years away, his exposure to precarity as an undocumented gig worker making his past reflections seem naive. “When I thought of my past as an artist,” Jay muses after dinner, “the person I saw didn’t seem outrageous or bohemian. Just the opposite. I’d believed that by making art I was swimming out to sea … Actually, I’d just been on my way to work, ready to spend another day at the office.”[Read: Six books that will change how you look at art]In Blue Ruin, the art world and its inhabitants are unmasked. Artists don’t live la vie bohème; theirs is a job like any other. Even work that promises to resist commodification still manages to uphold the status quo. Jay sees how art circulates as a product; he believes that a piece’s social critique is dulled when it is bought and sold. In response to these conditions, he refuses to be a part of the system. This stands in stark contrast to Rob, who has enjoyed enormous commercial success but only at a great cost to his artistic vision and integrity. The novel’s title, Blue Ruin, comes from a painting of Rob’s that was passed off as the work of a much more famous painter. This painter had hired Rob as an assistant and invited him onto the glamorous art scene. The price for this access? Rob’s silence when the painter took a canvas from Rob’s easel and sold it as his own. This is the consequence of material success in the art world, Blue Ruin seems to say: You can gain the whole world but lose your artistic soul.Even Jay’s withdrawal from the art world was, in a way, commodified by others—his absence was, after all, what made him famous. But Kunzru ends by imagining the artist’s ultimate power: refusal. Jay’s stay at the estate comes to an abrupt conclusion when Marshal calls the cops about an incident on the property. As an undocumented person in the United States, Jay is at risk. He packs up his car, says goodbye to Alice, and drives away. Is Jay leaving to start anew, to reenter the art world with a new piece? Maybe. But he reflects that his time upstate felt like “no more than a dream,” suggesting that his disappearance will remain ongoing. Jay has seen the smallness of the art world, the obsession with selling pieces, making money, getting famous. When he turns out of the driveway, the reader hopes he’s on his way to something more than just another day at work.

Photographs by Jennifer EmerlingBy the time Jennifer Emerling was 12, she had been to 22 national parks. In an interview with her local newspaper that year, the California middle schooler said that in addition to collecting shirts and stuffed animals from the parks, “I take lots of pictures.” Asked what she would do when she’d exhausted the list of parks to visit, Emerling answered, “Go see them again.” Top: Norris Geyser Basin, in Yellow­stone National Park. Bottom: A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone. (Jennifer Emerling) Emerling, now a professional photographer, never stopped taking pictures of national parks. For her series “See America First!” she retraced her family’s summer road trips. The resulting images convey a spirit of adventure and childlike wonder. Emerling’s compositions juxtapose the ordinariness of smartphones and sun hats with the majesty of the natural landscape. In one photo, visitors pause on the Old Faithful boardwalk, in Yellowstone, to capture the geyser’s eruption; in another, a woman holds a camera, but her gaze is fixed on the view across a crystal lake in Grand Teton National Park. Top: Jenny Lake, in Grand Teton National Park. Bottom: Glacier Point, in Yosemite National Park. (Jennifer Emerling) For all their whimsy and nostalgia, the photographs also invite serious reflection on the complexities of American tourism and its fantasies of an unspoiled West. The series takes its title from an early-20th-century marketing campaign to promote domestic travel among the wealthy via the railroads (the original, longer slogan was “See Europe if you will, but see America first”). “See America First!” can be read straight, as intended by the railroad boosters—or with an ironic twist, through the hindsight of history. To acknowledge the many contradictions of our national parks—­areas that were touted as examples of “undisturbed creation” at the expense of Native American territorial sovereignty; places that cultivate an appreciation of nature even though they have long been commercialized—is not to negate their beauty or power.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “American Beauty.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The End of the Golden AgeAnti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish, Franklin Foer wrote in the April 2024 issue.Franklin Foer’s article on the end of the Golden Age for American Jews makes an excellent and painful connection between the rise of anti-Semitism and the decline of democratic institutions throughout history. I was a child in Communist Romania in 1973 at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Some of my teachers made my life miserable in school simply because I was Jewish. My parents had to bribe them with American cigarettes to stop them from tormenting me. Three years later, my family and I defected to the United States. The U.S. was known around the world for its democratic institutions, and we wanted to get away from a country where anti-Semitism ran rampant.No one born here can imagine what it was like to be free, to be Jewish and dare to admit it. But that was America in the 1970s and ’80s. Today’s America frightens me: I’ve lived in an authoritarian state before; I understand viscerally what’s at stake in this year’s election. For the first time in 48 years, I think twice before telling people I’m Jewish.Monica FriedlanderCambria, Calif.I am a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor. I was born in Berlin in 1928 and observed the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. There is a world of difference between those days and the United States today. In Germany, anti-Semitism was sanctioned, even encouraged, by the authorities. Police officers stood by laughing when boys beat us on our way to school. The government passed laws forbidding us from owning radios, newspapers, telephones, even pets. The world knows how that ended: I was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. I think Franklin Foer’s article is a bit over the top.Walter L. LachmanLaguna Niguel, Calif.Although an interesting review of 20th-century Jewish entertainers and intellectuals, Franklin Foer’s assessment ignores the street reality.I was born and raised during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years. Growing up, I was given a bloody nose by other kids more than once on my way home from school. They shouted anti-Semitic slurs and attacked me for “killing their God.” When I served in the military, my roommate asked whether I had horns, and if it “had hurt when they took them off.” When I applied for a job at a prestigious law firm, I was told, “We do not hire your kind.”I went on to enjoy a successful career. But the underlying prejudice has always been present. The fact that we Jews have been entertaining and creative does nothing to eliminate the basic prejudice against us as “the other.”Benjamin LevineRoseland, N.J.The night before I read Franklin Foer’s article, a stranger tore my mezuzah off my doorframe. I was upset—but so was my non-Jewish roommate. In that, he was part of a broader American tradition: At the founding of our country, George Washington promised the Jews of Rhode Island, “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”The Jewish American Golden Age predates the 20th century, and has outlasted it. Not only has America been the best place in the diaspora to be a Jew, but the scale of Jewish participation and inclusion is larger than many realize. The highest-ranking American armor officer to die in combat was the legendary Maurice Rose—a Jewish major general who died fighting the Nazis in Germany. Foer quotes Thomas Friedman saying that the Six-Day War made American Jews realize they could be tank commanders—but Jews have been tank commanders as long as America has had tanks.In Columbus, Georgia, where I live, shortly after the October 7 attacks, the mayor and city-council members attended my synagogue. People from all over the country reached out to express their sympathy and support. A friend stationed in Syria checked in after Iran launched missiles toward Israel, concerned about my Israeli family and how I was dealing with American anti-Semitism. America’s continuing warm welcome isn’t just anecdotal: The Pew Research Center recently found that Jews are viewed more positively than any other U.S. religious group.Anti-Semitism may be on the rise, but it is and remains un-American. My great-great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee, arrived in New York on the Fourth of July. According to family lore, he saw the fireworks and thought they were for him. In a way, they were. This July, I look forward to celebrating the Golden Age’s 248th anniversary.Jacob FosterColumbus, Ga.I was disappointed reading “The End of the Golden Age.” I think the Golden Age is now, as so many American Jews rise up to say “Not in our name.” We are recognizing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It’s time for everyone to recognize it too. Criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza is not anti-Semitism. American Jews and Israeli Jews will be safe when we can recognize the resilience and survival of both Palestinians and Jews and see how our struggles are interconnected.R. Toran AilishevaOakland, Calif.Franklin Foer interprets a survey—“nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they ‘wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state’ ”—to mean that they were saying they wouldn’t be friends with most Jews. I would challenge this interpretation.As a Columbia graduate, and as someone who can actually read the Yiddish on The Atlantic’s cover, I do not question the Zionist dream of a haven for Jews. But I question the need for a predominantly religious state, which I fear will inevitably lead to a theocracy, intolerant even of Jews deemed insufficiently Orthodox. Israel is headed in that direction.Elliott B. UrdangProvidence, R.I.We were surprised and dismayed that The Atlantic would publish Franklin Foer’s article about the rise of anti-Semitism without any accompanying articles discussing the concurrent rise in anti-Palestinian racism. Students who protest the brutal war crimes committed in Gaza or advocate for the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people are being silenced and persecuted. We hope The Atlantic will publish stories that highlight efforts seeking peace and justice for all. Right now, we need solutions. We need voices supportive of our shared humanity, not inflammatory rhetoric that will lead to further polarization and alienation.Samar SalmanAnn Arbor, Mich.Christina KappazEvanston, Ill.Franklin Foer replies:A writer’s deeply ingrained instinct is to want their stories to prove prophetic. In this instance, I desperately hope that I will be proved wrong. Sadly, in the aftermath of publishing this article, I have heard too many stories like Jacob Foster’s, of mezuzahs ripped from doors in the night. One of the most ubiquitous critiques of my story, echoed in R. Toran Ailisheva’s letter, is that my argument equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many mainstream Jewish groups take that stance, but it is not my contention. I explicitly stated that there are strains of anti-Zionism that paint a vision of life in a binational state, where Palestinians and Jews peacefully coexist. That vision strikes me as hopelessly quixotic, but it isn’t anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, criticisms of Zionism are rarely so idealistic. They are usually cast in ugly terms, depicting a dangerous Jewish cabal guilty of dual loyalties, betraying the hallmarks of classical anti-Semitism.Behind the CoverIn this month’s cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” Anne Applebaum examines how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places have sought to discredit liberal democracy—and how they’ve found unlikely allies on the American far right. Our cover draws inspiration from constructivist propaganda artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis. The angled imagery and ascending lines evoke the style of a Soviet propaganda poster, updated with liberalism’s new rivals.— Paul Spella, Senior Art DirectorThis article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Anya Taylor-Joy has been busy. The 28-year-old Argentinian-English actress shot to stardom in 2020 after a Golden Globe-winning turn as chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the record-breaking limited series “The Queen’s Gambit.” She has earned her stripes at the top of the call sheet working with directors like Edgar Wright (“Last Night in Soho”), done...

If Cohen could wave a magic wand to make those six players disappear without future financial obligations, would he?