A&G Shooting in Fairfield, Maine has a new employee who has caused quite a stir: His name is Kade, and he is a baby miniature zebu calf. He loves taking pictures.

Kristen Louelle Gaffney is uprooting her family from California to the South. One of the reasons is the state of the homeless crisis in California.

Ryan Garcia has always craved the spotlight and has used social media to attract so many eyeballs, becoming one of the most-followed athletes — not even just among boxers — in sports.

Look, no disrespect intended as Jalen Brunson and the Knicks begin their defense of Madison Square Garden against Big Bad Joel Embiid and the 76ers.

The dumbest institution in the democratic world might not have long to live.

"Tortured Poets" release on Friday showed one surprising fan theory to be true, much to the delight of Swifties everywhere.

Ron Filipkowski said Trump would be dreading testimony from Karen McDougal.

The deaths of actors, including Cory Monteith, John Ritter, Carrie Fisher and more, led to the characters they were playing on their respective shows to be written off.

4,000 workers at the Volkswagen facility are eligible to vote.

Plus, a “tortured” Taylor Swift.

Sports get competitive, and sometimes violent. There have been many brawls that have happened at games over the years, but these are a few of the biggest.

A Polish man was arrested on allegations of preparing to spy on behalf of Russia in a plot to take out the Ukrainian president.

The anticipation of gun violence shapes many aspects of today's schools, including physical layouts and budgets, despite little evidence that these policies work.

Proponents say students are more motivated to study data science than algebra. But this approach fails to teach kids essential skills and risks limiting some populations to certain courses.

A Trump foe's legal twist, a major media figure's pro-Biden 2020 tweet raising eyebrows and much more in this week's News Quiz. Try to get a perfect score!

What led to the shocking double murder-suicide committed by Danielle Johnson, an astrology influencer with a large online following?

Attacks on Metro bus drivers highlight dangers that operators face. Serious attacks on transit workers have tripled nationally over the last 15 years.

PetSmart contest gives entrants a chance to replace tattoos they regret with portraits of a pet. The company has partnered with a tattoo studio in Culver City.

Make your way to the fabled mountain community that's full of whimsy, beauty and neighborly love.

A flood of cheap Chinese electric car exports has raised the specter of another trade war with the U.S. And it has Tesla worried.

Pre-game before you head to Dodger Stadium or celebrate a win afterward with Tijuana-style tacos, natural wines, sake, arcade games and more.

A retired lawyer says relying on human stenographers for court reporting has serious drawbacks that new technology could address.

U.S. aid allows Israel to make reckless military decisions without bearing the full cost or consequences of its actions.

Taylor Swift's new studio album, "The Tortured Poets Department," draws inspiration from her breakup with longtime beau Joe Alwyn. What draws music fans to songs about failed relationships?

Los Angeles County Sheriff's detectives watched a four-person crew linked to thefts dating back to Feb. 13 pilfer more Scratchers in Arlington Heights. This time, however, the thieves' luck ran out as they were arrested, the sheriff’s department announced Wednesday.

HBO's adaptation of "The Sympathizer" reflects a distinctly Vietnamese point of view, and while reactions to the series differ, community members agree that it bolsters Vietnamese representation.

We chose our Ultimate Hollywood Bookshelf, and readers responded with the many, many titles we missed. Here are some of the best responses.

Can cities make it illegal to live on the streets?

The L.A.-born Pulitzer Prize winner takes on fame and domestic life, with surprising results.

The L.A. Times News Quiz this week: Do you know where the L.A. Sparks' top pick played ball, what's disappearing off Pasadena streets and what Google has threatened to do?

Liz Cheney embodies everything about the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation's award for political courage. One problem: She annoys Donald Trump.

To combat corruption in L.A. City Hall, Mayor Karen Bass should say she will refuse to endorse anyone under an ethics investigation.

Under the Obama-Biden foreign policy doctrine, an Iran so emboldened that it feels free to wage offensive war is not a bug—it's a feature.

The EQB battery-electric, small SUV is improved and more compelling for the 2024 model year.

Is America's downturn merely another dip in a long arc of non-linear, yet essentially upward, progress? Or is it, rather, the first phase of steep and irreversible national decline?

Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?The legend of Columbine is fiction. There are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on April 20, 1999, and the story we all accepted back then. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly. A pair of outcast loners dubbed the “Trench Coat Mafia” targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Dwayne Fuselier, the supervisory special agent who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting H. L. Mencken in response to the mythmaking: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”The legend hinges on bullying, but the killers never mentioned it in the huge trove of journals, online posts, and videos they left to explain themselves. The myth was so insidious because it cast the ruthless killers as heroes of misfits everywhere. Fuselier warned how appealing that myth would sound to anyone who felt ostracized. Within a few years, the fledgling fandom would find one another on social media, where they have operated ever since.Around the world, Eric and Dylan are idolized as champions of “the nobodies.” Eric hated the nobodies. He mocked them mercilessly on his website and in his journal. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast, and neither was Dylan. Eric and Dylan made clear in their writings that they were planning the attack for their own selfish motives—certainly not to help the kids they ridiculed at the bottom of the social food chain.They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. They did not target jocks, Christians, or Black people. They targeted no one specifically. They shot randomly and designed their bombs to kill indiscriminately. That’s where “they” ends: Their polar-opposite personalities drove opposite motives. Psychopaths are devoid of empathy; Eric was a sadistic psychopath who killed for his own aggrandizement and enjoyment. Dylan was suicidally depressed and self-loathing. Eric lured him into punishing the world for the pain it inflicted on him, instead of punishing himself. Columbine was a suicide plan, but on “Judgment Day,” as they called it, Dylan would show the world the “somebody” we’d never seen.The Columbine killers have fans. Eric and Dylan’s adoring online following spreads across nearly every continent, and it’s growing across multiple platforms. In Russia, the government, which has been plagued by an explosion of both Columbine fandom and mass shootings, estimates that more than 70,000 members exist. They call themselves the TCC, for “True Crime Community,” and I’ve spent much of the past 15 years inside their online world. My book Columbine made me enemy No. 1 for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless murderers.In 2016, a young fan tweeted: “hey @DaveCullen block me or else i shoot my school.” She’d been ranting for hours, posting pictures of school shooters, and tweets such as: “It’s also something a lot of people need, To die....I wish i was dead...I LIKE VIOLENCE...I want to be killed in front of an audience. … I think someone failed to abort me (:”These teens are ensnared in an American tragedy that just keeps growing worse.I’ve tried to leave this story so many times, but this diagram haunts me, ruthlessly expanding like an unstoppable spider web, devouring all the lives and futures in its path. It demands that we address the cause—25 years too late. That web is made up of 54 mass shootings that have killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 500. And every gunman left evidence that they were inspired or influenced by the murderers at Columbine. The Columbine effect.Eric and Dylan’s bombs failed. Yet the legend made them heroic to their progeny and gave birth to their fandom. By the tenth anniversary, a small band of “Columbiners” had formed online. They gravitated to the TCC, to Ted Bundy, to the younger Tsarnaev brother, ‎to Dylann Roof, and to others—but Eric and Dylan are the megastars. The groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season.Most gunmen die in the act, so the 54 attacks itemized in the diagram are just the ones that we know of, and that were carried out. A 2015 Mother Jones investigation of Columbine copycats found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded. It identified 14 plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary and 13 striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted that they were competing with one another.All roads lead back to Columbine. The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, wrote in a school assignment that he wanted to “repeat Columbine” and that he idolized its “martyrs.” The Northern Illinois University killer marked a third generation, explicitly inspired by both Virginia Tech and Columbine. Sandy Hook was the fourth generation; Adam Lanza had studied all three. Six more school shooters later referenced Sandy Hook and Columbine. Five generations of fallout, all reenacting the original legend.Most early Columbiners were just curious teenagers interested in the criminal mind or in analyzing Columbine. Many still are, and their analyses are often useful. Many are angry about being tarred with the group’s reputation, but they have been outnumbered by new arrivals unabashedly calling themselves fans. Many use the killers’ faces as avatars, extoll their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes about them. Sue Klebold said she was shocked by the volume of letters she received calling Dylan “heroic” and by the number of girls saying, “I wish I could have his baby.”How little these groupies know about the murderers they obsess over is ironic. They keep repeating the misreporting that was debunked decades ago, convinced it’s true because it has metastasized into TCC dogma. The TCC twists the story to recast the murderers as victims; and the dead, wounded, and traumatized as villains. The groupies didn’t start these myths; we in the media bear that shame. But the groupies are now the carriers, spreading the legend of Dylan and Eric to remote reaches of the globe.Seventy thousand is a tiny fraction of the adolescent population, but a magnet for a dangerous cohort of marginalized, disaffected, and hopeless teens—a major pool of aspiring shooters. Most TCC members outright say that they condone the Columbine murders, often in their profiles. They have turned Eric and Dylan into folk heroes, and they celebrate them as avenging angels. Adam Lanza obsessed over the Columbine killers and spent years immersed in these groups online. Then he murdered 20 little kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Here’s the twist: Most of the TCC members I’ve engaged with describe themselves as awkward outcasts desperate to fit in. The TCC embraces them. The TCC feels cool—Eric and Dylan are super cool—and so they finally feel cool. I find it heartbreaking to hear them describe the pain they endure at school and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric,” the fictional characters they’ve constructed. These kids are shocked when I tell them that other members of the TCC have told me the same—that they are putting on the same show, sure that all the others really mean it. Did Adam Lanza believe the posers? We’ll never know, but we can be certain that as you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!Lots of kids fantasize about killing. Two days after Columbine, Salon ran “Misfits Who Don’t Kill,” in which three people came clean about their youthful fantasies of enacting mass murder. The phenomenon was widely reported that week. But none of those people did anything, because they knew how horribly wrong acting out the fantasy would be. Inside the TCC bubble, the constant message is that if your classmates are tormenting you, killing them is not just moral —it’s heroic and noble.The TCC has a tell: Actual shootings unnerve them. Their posts grow quiet, respectful, and even mournful after some troubled young person heeds their call. I can gauge the change instantly, because the incessant harassment I get from them stops cold—for a week or two. Parkland was different: Six months went by before the taunts began trickling back in, and I haven’t gotten a death threat in the six years since. Why? I have no way to be certain about this, but my educated guess is that David Hogg, X González, and the rest of the March for Our Lives kids were suddenly cooler than the young shooters. And so much more powerful.Eric and Dylan weren’t powerful—their plan failed. They’d planned Columbine as a bombing, the primary terrorist tactic. They thought they were launching a three-act drama: The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the “fun” part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history. Eric complained in his journal that his “audience” would fail to understand. He got that right. He got everything else wrong.Every element fizzled. All of the big bombs failed. Eric and Dylan went down to the cafeteria in a last desperate move to ignite the bombs with gunfire and a Molotov cocktail. Failed. Experts on psychopaths say they get bored after their initial kills, and Eric had likely lost interest. His gun’s recoil had broken his nose, so he spent that time in acute pain. The cops refused to kill them in the blaze of glory that they’d described as their final curtain. The smell of all the blood and already decomposing bodies was overpowering. Out of options, each shot himself in the head.A more obscene and pathetic way to die is hard to imagine. Yet their fans have never confronted that ugly reality, because the opposite story took hold, making Eric and Dylan masterminds of the “worst school shooting in American history.”The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia—as well as knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia. In 2022, Russia designated the online “Columbine movement” a terrorist group. To comply with the ruling, my publisher required me to disavow the group in the Russian translation of Columbine. Mass murder inspired by those inept perpetrators is America’s most revolting cultural export.I know when the TCC colonizes a new region, because I start getting a barrage of taunts in a different language. It’s a social contagion. Researchers have described school shootings as the American equivalent of suicide bombings—an ideology joined with a tactic. The phenomenon is escalating and self-perpetuating.The Columbine groupies have no idea that they’re exporting a fraud. The media set this whole thing in motion 25 years ago. To untell a legend is a formidable task. It will be possible only when the media finally begin to convey how pathetic and gruesome the killers’ final moments were. The fans need to hear the ugly truth. Eric and Dylan viciously murdered innocent kids for their own selfish and petty agendas, and they died miserable failures.This essay is adapted by the author from the new preface to a 25th-anniversary edition of Columbine.

Eid al-Fitr prayers in India, trophy winners at the Boston Marathon, the burning of a historic building in Denmark, a wildfire in Kosovo, widespread flooding in Russia, a joyous water festival in Thailand, a music festival in China, and much more

President Joe Biden visits the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant on September 9, 2022, in Johnstown, Ohio. | Andrew Spear/Getty Images Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people. American workers’ wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now. Their nation’s economy, meanwhile, is the envy of the wealthy world: Since the Covid recession, the United States has seen nearly twice as much growth as any other major rich country without suffering significantly higher inflation. And economic analysts expect that America will continue to grow at double the rate of its peers for the rest of 2024. This growth will enhance an already robust economy. The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result. Nevertheless, US voters give their nation’s economy poor marks in surveys. In the latest polling from Civiqs, 61 percent of respondents rate the “national economy” as “fairly bad” or “very bad” — with 39 percent choosing the latter description. Other polls indicate that this widespread pessimism is preventing the public from ascertaining basic economic facts. For example, 74 percent of swing-state voters in a recent Wall Street Journal poll said that inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the past year, a statement that is straightforwardly untrue. Liberal pundits are generally keen to correct popular misperceptions of economic statistics, and they are ideologically invested in Joe Biden’s reelection. For these reasons, many have spent the past few months touting the economy’s objective virtues and bemoaning the public’s misguided discontent. Such commentary can make liberals sound complacent about the American people’s myriad economic challenges. And yet, although commentators should not ignore those difficulties, they also shouldn’t exaggerate them. Affirming the working class’s misperceptions of the Biden economy does it no favors. To the contrary, validating the public’s economic pessimism risks shifting American macroeconomic policy in an anti-labor direction. But this hazard is lost on many in the commentariat. In recent months, several pundits and influencers have sought to portray the contemporary economy’s champions as cosseted elites who’ve lost touch with reality. And their argument boasts superficial plausibility. After all, the Paul Krugmans of this world enjoy an exalted place in America’s socioeconomic hierarchy. The Democratic economists who sing the Biden economy’s praises in prestigious publications are generally much wealthier than the voters who lament runaway inflation in opinion polls. And sometimes, the former really do gloss over the more unfortunate aspects of Biden’s economic record. If you zero in on these omissions, the posture of these Democratic economists can appear unseemly: Where do these rich liberals find the nerve to tell working-class Americans that they should stop worrying about rising food prices and start loving the Biden economy? Countless self-styled populists have made versions of this argument in recent months. This X post from the author Carol Roth is a crude, but not atypical, example: “Paul Krugman doesn’t know any regular Americans, and so he and the rest of the corporate press mock and gaslight you while you struggle with your rent or mortgage, food and other living costs. Absolutely zero compassion or connection to reality.” And yet, although this brand of commentary is populist in affect, it may be contrary to workers’ best interests in practice. The signature strengths and weaknesses of the Biden economy — its low unemployment and elevated prices — are byproducts of one fundamental policy decision: Faced with the Covid recession, the US government chose to prioritize poverty reduction and full employment over minimizing the risk of inflation. Put differently, instead of forcing the nation’s most vulnerable workers to pay the inescapable economic costs of the pandemic through prolonged periods of material deprivation and joblessness, we spread those costs across the entire population through a temporary period of high inflation. This is not how the US government has traditionally responded to recessions. And it is an approach to macroeconomic policy that simultaneously centers the interests of the working class and promotes economic growth. Yet it is also politically vulnerable due to widespread misconceptions about how the economy works. If those misconceptions lead the electorate to punish lawmakers for prioritizing full employment, then macroeconomic policy will likely shift rightward in the future, and the next recession will take a needlessly large toll on America’s most vulnerable. What critics of the Biden economy get right To appreciate the pitfalls of anti-inflation populism, we need to first grapple with the strongest arguments for that outlook. The Atlantic’s Michael Powell helpfully assembles these in his most recent column, titled “What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation.” Powell argues that liberal commentators’ enthusiasm for the Biden economy betrays their class privilege. “The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself,” Powell writes, “is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous.” But “poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class” Americans aren’t so insulated from the harms of rising prices. Telling them that the economy is actually strong is both incorrect, in Powell’s view, and politically counterproductive. In making this case, Powell makes several strong points. First, and most compellingly, he notes that measures of “real wages” don’t take account of rising borrowing costs. Inflation has fallen sharply since 2022, but interest rates have risen. And since Americans finance many of their purchases through debt, higher interest rates dampen the impact of slowing price growth. As he notes, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that when you account for borrowing costs, the public’s mood about the economy comes much closer to tracking objective changes in the cost of living. Second, Powell correctly observes that low-income Americans are much more vulnerable to sudden increases in the cost of food and energy than are more affluent Americans. The inflationary spike of 2021 and 2022 was indeed deeply bruising for a large swath of the US population: Most US workers suffered from declining real wages for nearly all of Biden’s first two years in office. Things have turned around since then, but many workers still have less purchasing power now than they did when Biden was inaugurated. And it’s understandable that others would have lingering resentments. Third, Powell rightly notes that the American economy remains riven by structural inequalities. Many households have never fully recovered from the 2008 foreclosure crisis. And the nation’s skimpy welfare state keeps many workers perpetually on the brink of financial crisis. Fourth, America is suffering from a housing shortage that makes homeownership unaffordable for the middle class and rent burdensome for many workers. But none of these points refute the core claims of the so-called “upper-middle-class left” — namely, 1) that national economic conditions are significantly better than most voters recognize and 2) that America’s Covid-era macroeconomic policies, while imperfect, were remarkably successful in mitigating the inescapable economic damages wrought by the pandemic. Powell never engages with the second point. Rather, his piece focuses on portraying the first claim as a delusion of the privileged. Yet his argument suffers from a fundamental flaw: When analyzing the impact of inflation on Americans’ finances, he repeatedly ignores the inextricable and countervailing impact of wage growth. Ironically, this exact error likely explains a considerable portion of the public’s economic discontent. Americans’ real wages are higher now than they were before the pandemic Early in his column, Powell writes that since 2019, America’s working-class has “weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power.” This is simply false. You cannot measure a trend in workers’ purchasing power over time by looking exclusively at changes in their costs. Since 1947, the consumer price index has risen by roughly 1,400 percent. If we applied Powell’s logic to that data point, we would conclude that Americans’ purchasing power had apocalyptically collapsed since the Truman administration. But of course, Americans are not poorer today than they were in 1947 — because since that year, the median US household income has increased byroughly 2,400 percent. Similarly, although consumer prices have risen 20 percent since 2019, the average hourly wage among nonmanagerial workers in the US has grown by 25 percent over the same period. Put differently, at least for Americans who don’t debt-finance their expenditures, purchasing power is higher today than it was in 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly how one should factor interest rate increases into this equation, since exposure to elevated borrowing costs varies so widely across the population. But it’s safe to say that, even considering the impact of higher rates, Americans have not lost anything close to one-fifth of their buying power since 2019, if they’ve lost any at all. Were that actually the case, inflation would be minimal because consumers would not be able to afford to bid up the prices of goods and services, and the economy would likely be in recession. Powell does eventually acknowledge that wages have been rising faster than inflation for a while now. But he minimizes this fact by suggesting that it is only true if you ignore food and energy prices. As an example of liberals’ out-of-touch optimism, he links to a report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), which found that nearly 60 percent of US workers enjoyed higher inflation-adjusted earnings in 2023 than in 2022. In Powell’s telling, the upshot of that report is “that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate.” He then suggests that this is a trivial fact because“core inflation” — which is to say a version of the consumer-price index that excludes volatile food and energy prices — is a poor gauge of household costs. After all, Powell notes, grocery and gas prices are “economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives.” Yet this whole line of argument is a non sequitur: The CAP report that Powell cites includes food and energy prices when calculating real wages. It does not argue that wage growth has “nudged ahead of thecore inflation rate.” Rather, the report shows that wage growth has outpaced inflation, full stop. (When I asked Powell about this discrepancy, he told me that he had not intended to link to the CAP report. I know from personal experience that adding the wrong hyperlink to a piece is an easy mistake to make — yet Powell’s column does not cite or link to any other example of liberal economists measuring real wages using core inflation.) It is true that macroeconomists tend to focus on “core inflation” when analyzing monetary policy. But this is merely because food and energy are globally traded commodities, the prices of which are influenced by myriad factors that have little to do with consumer demand in the United States, such as outbreaks of bird flu or geopolitical conflicts. In other words: Powell is right that core inflation is a poor gauge of the public’s cost burdens. But I’m not aware of any commentator who has used it for that purpose. The economy has real problems, but it’s still stronger than voters realize When you recognize that real wages are higher today than they were in 2019 — a year when Americans gave their nation’s economy historically high marks — it becomes clear that Powell’s strongest arguments don’t add up to a rebuttal of the Biden economy’s boosters. Yes, low-income Americans have suffered the most from inflation. But they also benefited the most from the ultra-tight labor market of the early Biden presidency. Between 2020 and 2022, real wages grew by 5.7 percent for those at the very bottom of America’s income ladder. Yes, rising rents and home prices constitute a national crisis. But even taking housing into account, life has been getting more affordable for Americans over the past year as their real incomes have risen. And in any event, the primary target of Powell’s critique — the New York Times’s Paul Krugman — is well aware of the housing crisis and has called for policymakers to relax restrictions on apartment construction in order to address it. Yes, the US economy is profoundly unequal and unjust. But this was also the case in 2019, when wage inequality was even higher than it is now, and Americans strongly approved of the economy five years ago. So the existence of such inequities cannot by themselves explain the public’s mood. Finally, it is absolutely true that measures of real wages do not account for changes in borrowing costs. This is a significant limitation. And Powell is totally right that many liberal commentators have given it short shrift. But even the National Bureau of Economic Research paper that he cites notes that fully incorporating borrowing costs into the consumer price index still doesn’t fully explain the gap between objective economic conditions and consumer sentiment. More basically: If borrowing costs were completely nullifying the impact of real wage increases — and Americans’ purchasing power was actually falling — then we would not expect to see US consumers increasing their spending. Yet retail sales rose sharply during the first quarter of this year. Notably, if Americans’ spending habits suggest that they are doing reasonably well financially, their survey responses often indicate the same. In recent polls of Michigan and Pennsylvania voters, roughly 60 percent said their personalfinances were in “good” or “excellent” shape, even as a similar percentage declared the national economy “bad” or “not so good.” In the wake of the Covid crisis, inflation was the price of a pro-worker macroeconomic policy Economic commentators have no obligation to abet Joe Biden’s reelection. But they do have a responsibility not to exaggerate the contemporary economy’s weaknesses. And this is especially true if they wish their commentary to advance the interests of working people. The past four years witnessed a historic experiment in fiscal policy. Traditionally, recessions have brought increases in poverty and prolonged periods of elevated unemployment. But during the Covid downturn, poverty in the United States actually declined. After the Great Recession of the late 2000s, it took more than nine years for America’s unemployment rate to return to its pre-crisis level. After the Covid downturn, it took just over two years. These triumphs of economic management — and the elevated prices of the past three years — are inextricably linked. The pandemic simultaneously reduced the economy’s productive capacity and induced a sudden shift in consumer preferences: All across the wealthy world, socially distanced households shifted their disposable income away from in-person services and toward manufactured goods. Even in the absence of a public health emergency, the global economy would have struggled to accommodate this abrupt change in consumer demand. Add in pandemic-induced factory closures, and a gap inevitably opened up between demand for goods and their supply. We could have brought supply and demand into balance by throttling the purchasing power of the most vulnerable working-class households: If you condemn 10 percent of the workforce to unemployment and 20 percent of households to poverty, you’ll alleviate inflationary pressure, since fewer people will have the money necessary for bidding up prices. Instead, we chose to minimize the recession’s impact on the vulnerable to a historically unprecedented degree. A painful, but fleeting, period of high inflation proved to be the price of this decision. Unfortunately, most voters do not recognize the connection between the Biden era’s inflation and its low unemployment or strong wage growth. A new analysis of survey data by the Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva lends credence to an old hypothesis: People tend to attribute wage gains to their own efforts or their employers’ largesse — rather than to market dynamics — even as they blame price increases on government mismanagement. This is a potential problem for progressive macroeconomic policy. If voters will punish elected officials for presiding over inflation but won’t necessarily give them credit for engineering real wage gains, then Congress will have an incentive to err on the side of understimulating the economy during the next recession. Powell never explicitly criticizes Biden’s fiscal policies. The main upshot of his piece is that Democratic politicians should not try to persuade voters that the economy is good but should instead embrace populist rhetoric and deflect blame for high prices onto greedy corporations. This is reasonable advice for Biden and Kamala Harris. But public intellectuals serve a different function than politicians. Trying to make voters appreciate the connection between inflation and wage growth — or the fact that the United States has done a superlative job of navigating a worldwide economic crisis — may be a quixotic task. But it is not an inherently classist or condescending one. To the contrary, such commentary ultimately aims to help workers make more informed choices at the ballot box so that they can better preserve their leverage in the labor market.

The very wealthiest believe Trump will let them claim 100% of the cost on their returns. "I can save millions by waiting a few more months," one said.

Nadine Arslanian, 57, denies being part of a bribery and corruption plot with the New Jersey Democrat. Her husband nicknamed her "bubbles."

Ashok Kumar/TAS24 via GettyWith Taylor Swift fans already delirious with anticipation about the release of her new album, the singer proceeded to send them stratospheric early Friday by revealing that The Tortured Poets Department is a double album.Following the release of the new record’s first 16 songs at midnight, a mysterious countdown to 2 a.m. E.T. appeared hidden on her Instagram. “It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” Swift wrote in a post when the fateful moment finally arrived.“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs,” she added. “And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Test your knowledge of this week’s big stories.

Eighty-one years ago, brave Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw, Poland, put up fierce resistance to their imminent deportation to certain death in the Nazi concentration camp system.

The House Ethics Committee is questioning witnesses about allegations that Rep. Matt Gaetz used illicit drugs as a member of Congress, multiple sources tell ABC News.

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for April 19, 2024.

Soldiers and civilians alike hear the artillery and watch the news from Washington, preparing for what happens next.

Iran's military has no immediate plans Friday to hit back at Israel following strikes inside the country early Friday near a nuclear facility, a report says.

Rock, a German shepherd mix, was found wondering the streets. In less than a year, he's become a top narcotics K-9 at the Fort Worth Police Department in Fort Worth, Texas.