Marijuana Map Shows States Where Weed Could Be Legal by 2025

Nearly seven years after my mother's death, watching an abandoned bird find a new family in my Oregon neighborhood reminded me there's courage in moving forward.

Cities are frustrated by 911 calls from senior facilities to help residents off the floor or toilet. Some are now charging fees, but facilities keep calling.

Like many rural counties, Merced is losing deputies to jurisdictions that pay more. The shortage is so dire, Sheriff Vern Warnke is sometimes the only one available to respond to calls for help.

Police officers cannot detain someone on the street just because that person acts furtively to avoid contact with them, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

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A cascade of decisions that Folt made this spring around USC’s commencement and Israel-Hamas war-related protests inflamed tensions and opened wounds, presenting the most significant test of her tenure.

Is an endless supply of student loans pushing up tuition? Readers discuss reasons behind higher college costs.

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His comments sent me into a spiral. I was no longer sure of myself. I turned to friends to get their thoughts: What kind of salad was I?

Trump shows contempt for the rule of law and talks like a dictator. How is this spectacle supposed to woo undecided voters?

Facing a worsening housing crisis, the Hawaii Legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure that allows counties to phase out short-term rentals. Maui almost immediately announced efforts to transition vacation rental apartments into long-term housing.

Brightline West chooses Siemens Mobility as its preferred bidder to build a fleet of high-speed rail trains that will reach speeds of 220 mph.

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What are those blue things washing up on Southern California beaches? Velella velella, of course. Also known as by-the-wind sailors. They're kind of like jellyfish.

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College administrators hope that the end of the school year will diminish the protests, but the activists are making plans for the summer and beyond.

Just as women's reproductive rights are being restricted, a flurry of troubling reports about 'Ozempic babies,' egg freezing and more underscore the male bias in our healthcare system.

Investigators say a serial killer kept tokens of his victims in his home, including skulls, government IDs and notebooks that detailed his cruel acts against his female victims.

Where pro-Palestinian protesters on campuses across the country, from Columbia to UCLA, have been arrested, with some facing tear gas and stun grenades.

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A forensic analyst who works for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will resume testimony Friday in former President Donald Trump's trial.

Jessica Gunning as “Martha” in Baby Reindeer. | Ed Miller/Netflix With the Baby Reindeer fallout, the paradox of true crime as entertainment strikes again. As a medium, autofiction has long been a source of controversy, but rarely has an autobiographical work of fiction come with as many built-in issues as Netflix’s hit Baby Reindeer. The show, a seven-episode limited series from British comedian Richard Gadd, chronicles Gadd’s history of allegedly being stalked for years by an older woman, as well as his experience of allegedly being sexually assaulted by a male mentor. The show is a breakout word-of-mouth phenomenon, drawing more than 13 million viewers in its first week of release and over 22 million in its second. Audiences and critics have praised the series for its wild twists and comedic yet vulnerable glimpses into a difficult story. Yet the real draw for many viewers seems to be less about Gadd’s experience and more about the mystery afforded by his extremely transparent depictions of other characters — particularly Gadd’s stalker. Gadd and his fellow cast members have quickly tried to staunch the public reaction, which has now escalated to doxing and harassing private citizens believed to be the real perpetrators behind the show’s events. The series’ grim real-life side effect seems to be both an epic case of viewers missing the point (don’t stalk people!) and an entirely predictable outcome based on Gadd’s treatment of the story. Should he have known better, or should we? Baby Reindeer combines two narratives of extreme stalking and sexual assault Baby Reindeer combines two different autobiographical plays that Gadd, an acclaimed comedian, actor, and playwright, wrote and premiered to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Both shows depicted deeply disturbing events in Gadd’s life through a lens of intentional overexposure. The first, 2016’s Monkey See Monkey Do, was similar to Hannah Gatsby’s Nanette in that it subverted audience expectations for comedy and instead treated them to a harrowing confessional. Ultimately revealing the details of a long-hidden sexual assault, Gadd traces his subsequent trauma through an onstage psychological meltdown accompanied by a visceral sensory overload. The second, 2019’s Baby Reindeer, forms the backbone of the Netflix show. In the show, Gadd plays a version of himself named Donny. The fictional Donny has a random encounter with frumpy, middle-aged “Martha,” a patron at a bar similar to the one where Gadd once worked. This brief interaction allegedly led to an intense four-year period of stalking in which Gadd claims she sent him exactly 41,071 emails, 106 pages of letters, 744 tweets, and a staggering 350 hours of voicemails. Over the course of the show, Gadd digs into her past and learns he isn’t her first victim — she has a documented criminal record for stalking at least two previous families. The Netflix adaptation of the two storylines has plenty to say about criminal justice, mental health, and gender. Gadd struggles to get the police to take Martha’s stalking seriously, even as he battles his own past history of trauma and abuse at the hands of his industry mentor. Gadd’s social awkwardness and PTSD emerge alongside a lack of systemic support for male victims of sexual assault. These are all complicated themes. But the main appeal, at least for the most active audiences, seems to be the real-life mystery of it all: Who are the real people Gadd based his story on? Gadd’s clues about his alleged sexual assault were somewhat oblique, but led to difficulty for one prominent British theatre director who wound up contacting the police after fans began harassing him, convinced he was the sexual predator being depicted in the show. Gadd has since been working overtime to clear the man’s name, insisting that he’s not the perpetrator. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be,” he posted in an Instagram story. “That’s not the point of the show.” Things with the woman Martha is based on are perhaps even more complicated. In an interview with GQ, published shortly after the show’s April 11 release, Gadd claimed he’d made his stalker an unrecognizable character. “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself,” he said. It’s reasonable to assume Gadd knew whereof he spoke. After all, in Baby Reindeer, he portrays his stalker as a classic sexist and anti-fat stereotype: the lonely, socially awkward middle-aged woman with higher weight who channels her unhappiness into obsession. The first thing he tells us about her, before we’ve even met her, is that “I felt sorry for her.” It’s a trope we’ve seen countless times before from Misery to Matilda; for Gadd’s stalker to fit so easily into it, you’d think that his fictional depiction of her is informed less by reality and more by cheap Hollywood distortion. Yet Gadd seems to have left so many clear identifying details in the series about the woman Martha appears to be based on — particularly the one about her previous criminal history — that audiences turned web sleuths were easily able to identify her, journalists were able to track her down and interview her, multiple British and US tabloids doxed her, and she’s now considering suing Netflix. Media coverage of the frenzy has included a fair degree of shock and skepticism. Even the Daily Mail, never a stalwart champion of ethics, pointed out that several of the details of the show were all but taken verbatim from the stalker’s real history, and questioned “how such a deft storyteller could not have foreseen the Netflix effect which amplifies the fall-out that comes from blurring fact and fiction.” While the Daily Mail declined to out the woman, it did publish a lengthy interview with one of her previous stalking victims, Laura Wray, a woman who claimed Martha’s real-life counterpart harassed her for over five years, culminating in death threats and a false report to have her family investigated for child abuse. Wray’s story was very similar to Gadd’s initial impression of his stalker — they each felt sorry for her and engaged with her because they pitied her. And even Wray, while discussing how powerful she found the validation Baby Reindeer offered to stalking victims like herself, also marveled that the resemblance between Martha and her real-life counterpart was so “uncanny.” “It must have occurred to him that people were bound to speculate on who Martha is — and whether she’s done this to anyone else,” she said. “Martha” may be just as much a victim as Gadd himself Baby Reindeer argues that both Gadd and “Martha” are victims. “I can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all this,” Gadd told the Independent in 2019, in a profile pegged to the original stage production of Baby Reindeer. Gadd went on to stress that she was mentally unwell and that mental health support was a major theme of the play. It’s perhaps worth asking, then, why he chose to further victimize her through a depiction of her — in an internationally distributed Netflix series, no less — that apparently hewed so close to real life that it enabled her not only to recognize herself but for her other stalking victims to recognize her as well. After all, while Gadd can be forgiven for sticking close to his real life in the play, he had nearly five years to fudge the details and make it less likely that people would discover who she was. That he failed to do so could be seen as a form of targeted revenge. There’s a real and obvious cruelty in the strength of the resemblance between the pair; the woman Martha is allegedly based on has since protested that she’s not as unattractive as her double (played by Jessica Gunning), and that of the two of them, she’s the real victim. Indeed, it feels more than a little disingenuous that Gadd became mutually obsessed with her to the point of writing a hit play about her and then funneling that success into even greater heights of fame. To be fair, Gadd is by no means the first creator to confront the slippery ethics around true crime. Subjects from Amanda Knox to Vili Fualaau and the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims have spoken out about the ways that fictionalized versions of their reality have revictimized them. It could also be the case that Gadd simply underestimated the power of the internet, the power of fandom, and the lure of a real-life puzzle. Many modern fans view media, even autobiographical media, as interactive texts, games they get to play, full of mysteries they have to solve — even if the “mystery” involves real life. For some Baby Reindeer fans, the sleuthing was of the traditional variety; fans analyzed the contents of the fictional Martha’s emails and found Easter eggs referencing the TV show Lost. But other fans took things further; they seemed to be motivated by the part of Baby Reindeer where Gadd’s character turns the tables and begins digging up dirt on his own stalker. As of May 2, one Facebook account claiming to be “Martha’s” doppelgänger has more than 12,000 followers, and what seems to be her apparently inactive Twitter account has over 13,000. Whether or not Gadd anticipated the show’s runaway success, it seems clear that he could have at least anticipated that if he couldn’t resist Googling his stalker, neither could anyone else.

We look into polling data that answers the age-old question: What is your favorite genre of music, and why is it classic rock?

The booming labor market is expected to extend a remarkable milestone in April, matching the last longest period of low unemployment on record.

Early voting begins May 3, with several competitive House races on the ballot.

Michael M. Santiago/GettyThe third week of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial will come to a close on Friday after a second week of bombshell testimony about what prosecutors claim was a scheme to bury salacious, damaging stories about him in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.The Manhattan courtroom on Thursday heard more from Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal—both of whom claimed to have had sexual liaisons with Trump (which he denies). Jurors heard about Davidson’s shock when he realized that he may have contributed to the success of Trump’s first bid for the White House, sending a dramatic election night text to Dylan Howard, the then-editor of the National Enquirer, reading: “What have we done?”“Oh my God,” replied Howard, who participated in the so-called “catch and kill” scheme at the Enquirer to shut down embarrassing stories about Trump. When asked in court what the exchange meant, Davidson explained that the pair had an understanding that “our activities may have in some way assisted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Director Jane Schoenbrun explains how their latest film was inspired by their own transition.

"By providing new opportunities for quality, affordable care healthcare, this rule will give DACA recipients that peace of mind and opportunity that every American deserves."

A photo of the "My Pillow Guy" looking the worse for wear has taken over social media, sparking jokes and memes. However, it's not all as it seems.

With bold runs, biting crosses and booming shots, Herrera has fit nicely into first-year coach Troy Lesesne’s proactive schemes.

Viewers praised her for the "truly rage inducing playlist" she subjected her neighbors to.

Russian troops have moved into a $100M US military base in Niger after the American contingent was ordered to leave.

Thursday's hearing covered claims Trump had verbally attacked Michael Cohen, formerly his personal counsel.

The beloved video creator began suffering from various stomach symptoms in 2022, before ultimately being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.

Social-media users spotted a link between Charlotte's new portrait and a controversial Mother's Day image from March.

Swing-state Republicans are running from the anti-abortion movement.

With tensions escalating and Republicans pouncing, President Biden finally weighed in and sought to increase the distance between himself and some of the more radical activism on colleges.

The first big pro-Israel counter demonstration was on Sunday in Los Angeles, home to large Israeli and Jewish populations. More are planned in the coming days.

Two Jewish students at Stanford University voiced concerns after a man was able to wear a Hamas headband on the northern California campus.

More than a quarter of protesters arrested Tuesday at Columbia and 60 percent at the City College of New York had no connections to the schools, the NYPD said.