Alex Verdugo plays role of unsung hero in Yankees’ huge eighth-inning rally

Sabina Rosas, 33, of Brooklyn, was found dead in a guest room at the high-end Shou Sugi Ban House in Water Mill on Monday, according to police.

The Trump campaign insists comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s line about Puerto Rico at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City was ad-libbed. In the days since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City on Sunday by calling it “a floating island of garbage,” there’s been mounting evidence that this might be the rare gaffe that actually matters. The Puerto Rican community around the country is furious — and they happen to make up a huge chunk of the electorate in all-important Pennsylvania. All of which raises a question: What was the Trump team thinking? Why, why would they give an insult comic a platform to take shots at Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, and Black people? The obvious answer is that the kind of people who run Trump’s campaign find this kind of “edgy” humor funny. Trump’s team reviewed and approved most of his set beforehand, cutting a joke they thought was too much (calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “c*nt.”) Though they insist the Puerto Rico line was ad-libbed, the fact remains that they knew who Hinchcliffe was when they put him up there. But there’s a deeper truth here. The rising tolerance of outright racism in the GOP — often dressed up as a “joke” — reflects the influence of an energized and transgressive far-right youth movement in the party. And while that movement lends the Trumpified right a certain vitality, it also works to render it (even more) toxic to ordinary Americans. Historian David Austin Walsh recently coined a memorable term to describe this group’s rising influence: “the groyperfication of the GOP.” The term refers to the so-called Groyper movement, a loose group of young neo-Nazi internet trolls led by pundit Nick Fuentes. Groypers, the heirs to the alt-right of the 2010s, aim to push the boundaries of mainstream discourse rightward one racist meme at a time. They are obsessed with allegedly prohibited topics, like Holocaust denial or the purported link between race and IQ, which it seeks to make part of mainstream Republican discourse. Walsh notes that these groyper-adjacent ideas have real pull among both young Republican staffers and the conservative movement’s intellectual elite. At this point, there’s little doubt that this is the case: Fuentes famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; since then, has been linked to Republican Hill staffers and megadonors. Elon Musk personally reinstated Fuentes’ previously banned account on X/Twitter, where he currently has over 400,000 followers. There’s a certain joy in transgression — a thrill in feeling countercultural — that powers the online right’s pro-Trump activism. Yet the ways in which they transgress are toxic (and rightfully so). Exploring groyperesque ideas about, say, Black genetic inferiority only feels like an exciting transgression for, as Walsh puts it, a small group of “college-educated men with intellectual pretensions.” What these young white righties find smart or funny, most other Americans find abhorrent — leading them to miss how someone like Hinchcliffe would play among normies. Walsh compares this to the left’s well-documented “Latinx problem.” The term, widely used by elite Democrats until very recently, was an attempt to bend the Spanish language into gender neutrality. According to one study, some Latinos found “Latinx” so alienating its spread may very well have driven some into Trump’s arms — reflecting a disconnect between the ideological aims of elite Democrats, including elite Latinos, and how ordinary voters see the world. But I’d argue the so-called “dirtbag left” of the late 2010s is an even more direct comparison. Much like the Groypers, dirtbag socialists aimed to make social change through provocative humor and online aggression bordering on harassment. The “posting-to-praxis pipeline,” as they called it, indeed helped raise the prominence of socialism in American politics — winning converts among Brooklyn progressives and quite a few young professional Democrats. Except when the dirtbag left tried to throw its weight around politically, campaigning aggressively for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, they turned into a liability — seemingly costing him support at both the elite and grassroots voter level. Today, the dirtbag faction has minimal influence on either the Democratic Party or American politics more broadly. After October 7, 2023, some of the media personalities in the dirtbag universe could be found apologizing for and even outright endorsing Hamas’s violence — a position with almost no support among the general American population and one condemned by even the most left-wing elected Democrats. In both cases, the Groypers and the dirtbag left, you had an energized and radical youth-led faction that managed to be wildly successful within its own niche — but one that proved a political liability outside of its insular niche. Yet the two parties handled the two factions very differently. The Democrats’ extremist flank are, in fact, extremists: They only speak for a fringe of relevant party actors. As a consequence, the dirtbag-types faced real backlash when they tried to establish themselves as a major player in a party primary.  But in the Republican Party, the extreme is now the mainstream. Trump is the unquestioned party leader, and groyper-esque Tucker Carlson is its chief ideologue. There is no internal pushback against the ideological extremism among the party’s up-and-coming youth, because said extremism has already won the day. What’s popular among the party’s radicals is, increasingly, what the party chooses to do. No one is capable of telling young righties that what they find thrilling is electoral poison; that making tasteless jokes isn’t punkish transgression, but creepy, off-putting anti-social behavior. In fact, racist comedy is so normalized that it’s now given top billing at a closing-argument rally. And if the warning signs about Puerto Rican voters prove real, the end consequence of this radicalization could be electoral defeat. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

Kamala Harris indicated she'd be open to taking a cognitive test. Harris has also suggested that under her presidency, the U.S. will swiftly remove those in the nation illegally.

Invasive Burmese pythons have been linked to declines in the Florida Everglades’ mammal population.

U.S. companies that rely on foreign suppliers are preparing to raise prices in response to the massive import tariffs that former president Donald Trump promises if he wins.

Surgical robots controlled remotely by medics have been operating for nearly a quarter century. But in April, the Symani surgical system, which uses wristed robotic arms with seven degrees of flexibility, became the first FDA-approved robot for microsurgery. “The human body tremors when you do work, and [this tech] dampens the tremor,” says Mark Toland,…

Most electric toothbrushes either oscillate or vibrate. China-based Laifen’s Wave both oscillates (up to 60 degrees) and vibrates (up to 66,000 times per minute). With an app featuring three toggles controlling oscillation range, speed, and vibration strength, users can customize their brushing experience to a T. Manufactured the same way MacBooks get their curves–material is…

Some 2.5 million people in the U.S. develop a pressure injury, or bedsore, in hospitals every year. Bayesian’s platform uses AI to analyze electronic medical records and identify patients at risk of developing pressure ulcers, allowing for preventative care.

Laguna Health, a “conversational intelligence” startup with staff in Tel Aviv and New York, is working to improve telephonic interactions between patients and care managers—typically nurses—who assist patients after they are discharged from the hospital. Their AI system, Laguna Insight, reduces administrative overhead by summarizing key information about the patient ahead of calls, and offering…

By day, the petunias look like normal white flowers. In the evening, they emanate a soft glow that looks like moonlight. It feels like magic but is rooted in science: The startup Light Bio spliced the petunia’s DNA with that of bioluminescent mushrooms, creating the soothing glow-in-the-dark wonder. (The plants are commercially available via Light…

Cooker technology hasn’t advanced much in a century: current is passed through a nickel-chromium heating element to generate heat, which is blown around a unit. Enter South Korea’s Graphene Square, which has replaced the heating element with graphene, an ultra-thin, highly thermally conductive material made of carbon atoms. The rechargeable battery-powered device, which looks a…

Cooktop stoves haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. The Impulse Cooktop from Impulse Labs—founded by former employees from firms including Google, Meta, Apple, and Tesla—innovates with tech. The cooktop is powered by a 3kWh lithium ion phosphate battery that can run alone or alongside wall power. That extra oomph gives the induction stove…

Adding more space to your home can be tough. Whether it’s adding an in-law suite, guest house, gym or yoga studio, or creating a small rental, building an additional dwelling unit (ADU) on your property can come with months of disruption and contractors. Samara’s Backyard homes aim to cut out the turmoil. “We think that…

The creators of the famous Nugget, a modular couch that is attractive enough for the living room but comes apart into pieces made for climbing and fort-building, have created the product’s little sister: an equally attractive, play-encouraging ottoman. “Real furniture can be a Trojan horse for a toy,” says Nugget CEO and co-founder David Baron.…

Americans discard some 60 million tons of food annually, and only about 10% of U.S. households have access to compost collection. To help people dispose of food waste more sustainably, Mill Industries last year launched a kitchen appliance that uses a dual-grinding system—powerful enough to break down avocado pits—to turn food scraps into dry grounds…

A second Trump term would be dramatically worse for our communities than a Harris presidency.

Emmanuel Pregnon found a mental toughness he hadn't known before, helping him become USC's most dependable lineman this season.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams mocked the media's questions about similarities between former President Trump and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, arguing they are out of touch.

A look at Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's stances on health care and what they've said about health care policy going into 2024 presidential election.

Voters make selections at their voting booths inside an early voting site on October 17, 2024, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. | Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images Vox reader Jason Taylor writes: Should voters be concerned about the possibility of Trump election deniers being in positions of power to count votes in Trump’s favor that he did not receive in the upcoming election? Thank you for your time and consideration of my question. One of the defining — and troubling — facts of our current political era is that the loser of the previous election maintains he didn’t lose it at all. To this day, Donald Trump refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a stance that many of his followers have gotten in line behind, including some who’ll hold positions of power in this November’s contest.  That has understandably spurred concerns like the ones you’ve raised about the current cycle.  Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Despite these troubling developments, however, election law experts say that voters should know ample protections are in place to bar election deniers from messing with the vote count or its eventual certification.  “There are multiple safeguards built into the process to prevent that kind of thing from happening,” says Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to voting rights.  What safeguards are in place for ballot counting? Let’s start with the process of counting ballots. “The count involves so many steps, so many layers of double-checking and supervision, that it would be virtually impossible to fake even a single ballot,” Evelyn Smith, an election worker in Michigan, told the Washington Post in 2020.  These safeguards include the presence of independent observers at ballot counts, post-election audits to verify the results, and rigorous record-keeping to keep tabs on voter participation.  This all starts with the submission of ballots. When people vote in person, poll workers keep a clear tally of how many people have voted, which is later checked against the number of ballots coming from each precinct. Similarly, when people vote by mail, election workers confirm that each ballot corresponds to a real person and keep track of how many ballots are coming in.  In most cases, the ballots are counted by machines, and those have to undergo their own rigorous “logic and accuracy” tests by election officials before they can ever be used.  Ballots cast in person are often tabulated on location at the precinct, and that information is printed out on a physical receipt and stored on a memory card. Typically, these results are recorded at the precinct, and both the receipt and memory card are also transmitted in a secure box to a central location.  Mail-in ballots are also tabulated at either a polling station or central location after being verified. In rare instances — usually in much smaller counties and towns — ballots are counted by hand, a practice that’s increasingly less common because it’s prone to errors and delays. When hand counting is used, it’s usually done in teams to reduce mistakes.  Regardless of whether ballots are counted by machine or by hand, independent observers, or members of both parties, are able to watch as votes are submitted and tallied, adding another layer of security. (These policies vary by state but most places allow some transparency into different steps of the process.) Such protocols make it difficult for potential bad actors to manipulate the count.  Many states have post-election audits as well to catch if something is amiss with the vote tally. In these audits, state or county officials will hand count a sample of the ballots in each precinct to spot-check for discrepancies. “Audits would find out if bogus votes were added to the real vote totals,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson University law professor and elections expert.  Candidates, as well as the two parties, are also able to lodge a complaint or mount a legal challenge if they believe there have been any irregularities.  What about election certification?  In recent elections, certification of the results has been another point in the process when some officials have caused delays or questioned the outcome.  Typically, certification is a routine part of any election and basically just involves county and state election boards verifying the results after they’ve been tallied. In 2020 and 2022, however, there were examples of officials and federal lawmakers refusing to do so. In 2020, the Wayne County, Michigan, Board of Canvassers initially deadlocked 2–2 when two Republican commissioners refused to declare Biden the winner. Following significant backlash, they eventually changed their votes.  Shortly after that, 147 federal Republican lawmakers infamously voted to challenge the election results during Congress’s certification process on January 6, 2021. Despite their objections, the certification was completed, and since then, Congress has passed updates to the Electoral Count Act to make the threshold for challenging the results much higher. In 2022, the Republican-led election commission in Otero County, New Mexico, also refused to certify primary results due to their alleged distrust in Dominion voting machines. The New Mexico secretary of state ultimately obtained a state Supreme Court order requiring the commission to certify, and they later did.  In past instances, local officials either relented or were ordered by a court or state officials to move forward with the certification of the results. Experts note that the same is likely to occur this time around if there are more attempts to delay or deny certification.  If state-level officials like the secretary of state tried to block a legitimate outcome from moving forward, the candidates and parties could similarly take the issue to court.  Experts note that they aren’t especially concerned that efforts to stymie certification would be successful, though they do note that bad actors could cause delays and confusion that might fuel misinformation.  “There is a potential for there to be uncertainty,” says UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen.  So, what should we be worried about this election?  The experts I spoke to broadly emphasized that they have faith in the election system. Despite this, Trump could still foment distrust much like he did in 2020 and gin up violence or unrest as a result.  That possibility, and a potential reprisal of the January 6 insurrection, is unfortunately its own concern.  “When people hear this kind of disinformation over and over and over again, it does lead to real harmful consequences,” Ramachandran told Vox.  All this is to say that one of the largest threats this election faces is many voters’ lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the outcome, even if counting and certification all go according to plan. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

You can now utter James Bond’s iconic "Goldfinger" martini at the world’s first 007 bar in London’s Burlington Arcade.

Anthony Volpe hugged his mother Isabelle in the hallway outside the Yankees clubhouse not long after he delivered the biggest hit of his life.

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said. The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.

As the deadline nears to cast your vote for president, it’s important to know what’s at stake for your personal finances, from Social Security to taxes.

The body of a missing Georgia mother and TikTokker was found near the Walmart she was last seen at before she was reported missing last week, as police arrested a man in connection to her alleged abduction and murder.

A person wears a vest with a trans flag on the back with the words Not afraid during a memorial honoring trans individuals killed by gun violence held by Gays Against Guns on November 20, 2022, in New York City. | Alex Kent/Getty Images With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people.  A recent report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, per ABC’s report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks. The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary.  “Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.” Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two different media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.”  So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion.  But the fallout here isn’t voters distracted from the real issues. The fallout instead comes in an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while the negative messaging didn’t change viewers’ minds about Kamala Harris, it did significantly increase viewers’ negativity about trans and nonbinary people across all demographics.  In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions.  But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US.  That puts all of us in danger. Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality.  In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified gender dysphoria — the feeling of not being aligned with your presumed-at-birth gender — so that it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift toward accepting and understanding trans people.  The following year, Time magazine placed Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox on its cover, declaring that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.”  The backlash was almost instantaneous. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant religious group in the country, passed a resolution singling out trans people and stating, “[W]e oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.”  As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves.   And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a bathroom bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom.  The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history.  They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel. This strategy harks back to another era of fascism. It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women.  The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and most importantly a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By unifying around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amasses power and control at all levels of government. Trump has threatened repeatedly to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is reelected. And this, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.

Radio host Mauricio Cruz Solis was a "source of inspiration and a tireless voice in the service of our community," the station said.

The unnamed owner of the kangaroo clarified in the video that the animal's name is "Irwin, like after Steve Irwin."

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin accused the paper's billionaire owner Jeff Bezos of setting a "horrible precedent" over the decision to end presidential endorsements.

Photographs by Mike BellemeGaston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. Just a few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South threw its weight behind Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the high-water mark is Barack Obama’s 37 percent vote share in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s last campaign stops as he worked to juice turnout. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority-GOP city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside city hall.And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic field office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and revved up to hear from Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling—like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease—but it’s one of 29 field offices for Kamala Harris’s campaign across the state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by pouring energy into red counties, they can turn out a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters, and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.[Read: The surreal experience of being a Republican at the DNC]This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chair David Wilson Brown told me. He’d know: He ran two quixotic campaigns for U.S. House in the area. “We were thrilled when we found out that they wanted to base here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m thrilled that they’re paying attention here.”North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.” Volunteers making calls at the Gaston County Democratic Party headquarters, in Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic) In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost.For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by running up the score in cities. That strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works—and it has sputtered in Charlotte, as Politico’s Michael Kruse writes—it offers a single, narrow path to victory. It also all but relinquishes many more local races, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can keep squeezing more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte—I wanted to squeeze the turnip as much as you can, but I’m just worried that that doesn’t get” enough votes, McCorkle told me.So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.(One telltale sign of young liberals’ arrival: luxury loft apartments in a refurbished Gastonia textile mill, the site of labor strife in 1929 that led to the deaths of a labor organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing the mill’s old and new denizens share is a likelihood of voting Democratic.)Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a hipster deli and bottle shop I visited at the time. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal fight stemming from drag shows it hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama rally for Harris last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s owners, attributed that to cultural backlash.“We created a place that people were able to come and just see that it’s not just white, cis humans living in this town,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris stepped up to run. When Biden won, when Trump got indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people gather at the store and they kind of party, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that they’re happy about.”Back in 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and walking through downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I passed a cat café, an upscale head shop, and a hip coffee shop—exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar–themed artwork—that had all opened in the past year and a half. But nearly as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape changed to small farms, many with Trump yard signs.Not everyone who is moving to these counties is liberal, though. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states drawn by economic opportunities, better weather, lower taxes, and, yes, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep-blue cities, so they land in countrypolitan counties. They fit in with existing residents who are neither wealthy country-club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.Even so, some of these more conservative voters—generally white, college-educated, and better off—could swing Democrat, or at least that’s what the Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican residents of suburbs—sometimes offsetting the GOP’s advances among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is making a push for them too or, failing that, hoping they stay home and don’t vote for Trump.“There are a wide range of voters in North Carolina who maybe aren’t dyed-in-the-wool liberals but do not want—and in many cases reject—the kind of extreme politics Donald Trump represents,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’s battleground-state director, told me.The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial portion of the vote in presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary vote, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County, and 21.1 percent in Gaston County. If only a small portion of North Carolina Haley voters defect to Harris, it could swing the race. A polling place in downtown Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic) Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia, is at the top of that list. A former member of the county GOP board in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, he moved farther out seeking affordable housing. His politics have moved too. He’d supported Trump in the past but backed Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he’s a leader of Republicans for Harris.[Read: Trump’s fate rests on countrypolitan counties]“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really just sends a resounding You are not welcome in the Republican Party,” he told me. “There’s a lot of Republican women who are appalled by the felonies, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion towards women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that “soccer dads” were edging away from Trump for the same reasons.Some polls suggest a wider pattern of what Tucker has seen up close. A national survey released earlier this month by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to backing Trump, while 36 percent backed Harris.Potential voters are not the same as actual voters, though, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, the Gaston County Democratic Party chair, told me he hoped Democrats might be able to hit 41 or 42 percent of the vote there this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can do that, she’ll probably be inaugurated on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after I visited, a Harris sign outside the field office was ripped down—for the second time. Gaston County is still a tough place to be a Democrat.

Upon the release of their new "The Novogratz Chronicles" book, Gimme Shelter takes a tour of the couple's rehab of a dazzling downtown dwelling.

Police and rescue services used helicopters to lift people from their homes and cars.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s ex-husband Ryan Anderson has questioned her “strange” desire to get a pre-birth paternity test for her unborn child.

Australian police say they recovered more than 40,000 stolen limited-edition coins based on the hit children's animated series "Bluey."

Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty As Election Day approaches, anxiety is naturally rising over whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win. But there’s reason to be anxious about another prospect, too: just what Trump and his supporters will do if Harris wins narrowly. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. It seems clear he will try to deem any Harris victory illegitimate. Many expect he will reprise in some form his shocking behavior after the 2020 election, when he tried to overturn Biden’s win — and that his supporters may try in some way to help him. There are a number of new safeguards in place this time around making any such election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed, as Barton Gellman wrote in Time last week. A 2022 law reformed the vote-certification process, which may make it more difficult for Trump to procedurally overturn any results. Trump is no longer the incumbent president and can’t use the powers of the executive branch. And authorities are more thoroughly preparing to preempt a January 6-esque mob action. Yet though it may be procedurally more difficult for Trump to challenge the outcome this year, the risk is that procedure and legality will end up mattering less this time around — that, instead, Trump will bring us into a world where force and partisanship and the naked drive for power could well triumph over any remaining norms. Even an attempt at this could bring the country to a more dangerous and chaotic place — but it’s also possible, particularly in the event of a close race and a narrow Harris win, that it could succeed in restoring Trump to the White House, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has written.  For one, the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied since 2020, and has largely made its peace with defending the indefensible: Trump’s election denialism.  The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with positions giving them responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures, and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry it out. Since then, many critics have been purged from the party, while others have made their peace with Trump. Additionally, Trump’s team, along with a supporting web of Republican activists, has had four years to prepare to challenge the results again. Last time around, their effort was shambolic and improvised; this time, they likely understand far better where the pressure points are.  For instance, if Republicans hold the House, Speaker Mike Johnson could try to interfere with certifying the results – a fear intensified among Democrats by Trump’s recent public statement that he and Johnson have “a little secret.”  But perhaps the most ominous threat is that, this time around, there’s a widespread expectation in the MAGA world that Trump is sure to win (even though the polls clearly point to a very close race that could go either way). “Donald Trump’s surrogates, allies and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he’ll be re-elected president next week,” Zachary Basu of Axios reports, adding that this “is setting the stage for a wholesale rejection of a potential Harris victory by Trump supporters.” If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the fury and outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given Trump’s ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day. His supporters, already primed to believe in voter fraud, could mobilize more quickly and seriously around the belief that the election was stolen from Trump and that something must be done about it.  That means, unless Trump chooses to back down — unlikely, given his past conduct — the country could be headed to an even more dangerous place.  Fears of an enraged MAGA base Here’s one way to think about the risks ahead: Last time, 74 million people voted for Trump. But very few of them lifted a finger to try and help him steal the election. Trump’s 2020 election theft effort gained steam slowly and focused initially on legal and procedural efforts to overturn the results. Pro-Trump protesters, including far-right groups like the Proud Boys, began to pop up more in the closing months of 2020, in Washington, DC, and in state capitals, but scattered violence and intimidation tactics did little to impact the process of certifying the election.  Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” adding, “Be there, will be wild!” That proved sufficient to mobilize a little over 50,000 people, of whom about 10,000 came onto the Capitol grounds; of those, 2,000 or so made it inside the building. It was a traumatic day for the country — and yet it is worth noting that only a relative handful of the vast US population were involved. This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing his base’s resentment, using their fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate Republicans and election officials into embracing his lies. The conditions are there: Four years have passed in which “the election was stolen from Trump” has become Republican conventional wisdom — which means this year’s message would be, “Are you really going to let them steal it again?” Harris outperforming her polls would be treated as immediate, damning proof of a rigged election.  Trump also has a clear set of enemies at which to point his supporters, should he lose and refuse to accept that loss. In 2020, defining exactly who was stealing the election from him was more challenging — he was president, after all. This time around, he can blame the Biden-Harris administration and feed conspiratorial fears that “they” are stealing the election to keep her in power. Elon Musk’s ownership of X could help Trump better spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud. Dangerous lone wolves could be radicalized to violent action. The political context of the current Trump-dominated GOP may spur the party to depart further from the law or procedural norms, which would raise the chances both of system breakdown and violence. The sympathies for Trump among much of law enforcement and the military are also concerning in such scenarios — if the MAGA base really rises up, would law enforcement restore order?  Such scenarios may sound like absurd fear-mongering, more fit for a less stable democracy, but Trump’s utter lack of restraint and willingness to shatter democratic norms for power may mean those other countries have relevant lessons for us. The scenarios most likely to actually change the outcome are probably less about violence, and more that Trump will triumph in the procedural struggle — that he will get some Republican officials in the states or Congress, or conservative judges, to throw out state results showing a Harris win under bogus pretenses.  This would lead the country into uncharted territory. Would Congress pick a winner? Would Biden step aside and recognize its verdict, if it did? How such a crisis would be resolved is impossible to foresee. American democracy in the balance? There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad.  Despite many predictions in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, that event was not in fact followed by a new wave of far-right violence during the Biden years. The memory of aggressive federal arrests and prosecutions of the January 6 rioters — and state-level prosecutions of members of Trump’s own team — made clear that such behavior came with consequences, and memory of those consequences could deter future unrest (including from Trump himself, who would face renewed legal jeopardy in the event of an election loss).  Perhaps the American public, including the right, simply isn’t that engaged or fired up about politics and they just won’t care too much if Trump whines that the election was stolen. Or perhaps Trump supporters will simply not prove as likely to descend into political violence as liberals fear.   This month, the Washington Post asked dozens of Trump fans at rallies how they’d interpret and respond to a Trump defeat. Nearly everyone they interviewed believed the 2020 election was stolen from him and the 2024 election might be stolen too. But, per the Post, these Trump fans “notably did not express interest in a repeat of the heated rhetoric that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” Instead, they suggested they’d respond to Trump’s defeat with resignation.  The risk, though, is that Trump and the most hardcore MAGA believers will push for something different — that he’ll use every tool at his disposal to try to get back into power. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.

Though Biden's comment didn't fall on deaf ears, the silence has been deafening from Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats since he made them Tuesday.

They are faceless. They are implied. They are the amorphous core of TikTok conspiracy theories. “They” are to blame for almost everything, according to Donald Trump.

Don't be afraid of EVs. They're easy to use and cheap to maintain, and they prevent you from being affected by refinery closures.

Karue Sell is restarting his pro tennis career at 30 years old, and finding success with the help of a lucrative YouTube channel, brand partnerships and a 35-year-old coach. Welcome to the ATP Challenger Tour grind.

The singer and songwriter with the Olympic-athlete-level voice talks about her second career as the self-appointed Queen of Christmas.

The observance offers a perfect moment to reset as we careen toward the holidays.

The Democratic National Committee launched a paid ad campaign in 25 swing state newspapers to make its "final pitch" to voters before the election.

Mikey Madison isn’t just another pretty woman in Sean Baker’s latest.

The “Frozen” musical at Olney Theatre Center checks the boxes of the Disney favorite, but struggles to find inspiration of its own.

A pungent, fishy odor has been wafting through the air by Los Angeles' shore this week, an unfortunate consequence of beautiful bioluminescent algae.

Presidential endorsements are statements of values and aspiration for the direction of the country. When we opine on so many other issues, why should we be silent when it comes to one of the most consequential?

Claudia Sheinbaum can do more than her predecessor to resolve disappearances and murders linked to gangs and past governments.

The Season 7 reunion episode of the dating experiment brings back D.C. cast members to discuss their experiences a year after filming.