Grace writes the main column. She reads appellate opinions the way other people read novels, and she always checks the footnotes.
The photo that started the latest round is almost aggressively ordinary: a stand of University of Texas students in burnt orange, several of South Asian descent, cheering a fourth-quarter comeback against Ohio State. The Longhorns won 24-23 on Saturday. By Sunday morning, Bo French — the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad
AI policy
On Thursday night, in a ballroom in New York, Barack Obama told a room of Democratic donors that artificial intelligence is "moving very fast in private hands" and that if the party doesn't get on top of it, the technology "can be dangerous." He
Dan McKee had been governor of Rhode Island for five years, had no scandal attached to his name, and had done the ordinary competent things governors do — balanced budgets, cut ribbons, avoided the papers. Then he became the first sitting governor in eight years to lose his own party'
redistricting
Denny Hoskins spent Thursday morning explaining himself to seven judges who did not appear to be in a forgiving mood. Missouri's secretary of state had been ordered to appear before the state Supreme Court and account for why he should not be held in contempt, after he kept
redistricting
On September 2, a man named Steve Dakopolos stood on the Capitol steps in Jefferson City holding a stack of petition signatures, one voter among the thousands who spent a year collecting names to force a statewide vote on Missouri's new congressional map. Eight days later the Missouri
medical debt
It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a Barton County patrol car pulled into Joe and his wife's driveway in rural Kansas. Their grandchildren were dyeing eggs. The couple owed $4,561 from an emergency hysterectomy three years earlier, they had missed a court date on the collection
redistricting
The Missouri Supreme Court did not run for Congress, campaign for a seat, or submit itself to a single contested voter. Last week it paused the state's newly drawn congressional map anyway — the one the legislature passed this year to convert a competitive district into a safe Republican
federalism
Steve Dakopolos stood outside the Missouri Capitol on September 2 holding a hand-lettered sign, one face in a slow crowd that had been gathering outside that building since March. He had collected signatures in the spring alongside more than 300,000 other Missourians who wanted a vote on the state&
redistricting
Steve Dakopolos was still out there on September 2, standing in front of the Capitol in Jefferson City with a petition sign. It had been a year almost to the week since the rotunda first filled with protesters over House Bill 1, the congressional map Missouri Republicans muscled through in
redistricting
The photograph that ran with the story shows a man named Steve Dakopolos standing in front of the Missouri Capitol on September 2nd, holding a sign, in the particular late-summer light that makes every statehouse protest look like it has been going on forever. By then it nearly had. Missouri
separation of powers
By the first week of September 2026, none of the twelve annual appropriations bills has reached the President's desk, and the fiscal year ends in three weeks. This is not a crisis. It is Tuesday. The last time Congress passed all twelve on time, Bill Clinton was finishing
Social Security
My father kept his Social Security statements in the same drawer as his union card, and once a year he'd lay the new one on the kitchen table next to the old ones and do the arithmetic himself, out loud, distrusting the government's math on principle.