MINNEAPOLIS -- Immigration hearings in recent years often sounded similar, said Scott Roehm, senior director of global justice and accountability at the St. Paul-based Center for Victims of Torture.

“You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear an asylum-seeker explaining they were abducted at gunpoint by mass security forces, then dumped ...Read more

Newspapers report daily on the frantic efforts by elected officials to address America’s housing affordability crisis, including a recent story that President Donald Trump called Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to discuss the issue. Trump seems worried about how a lack of progress could be politically damaging. He should be.

A 2024 report by ...Read more

Less than three months ago we published "The Trillion Dollar War Machine," which chronicles and laments the enormous amount of money the U.S. was set to spend on “defense” this year – money that enriches special interests, but offers little real security to most Americans. Today, the federal government is preparing to double-down on this ...Read more

Society needs people to take risks. Entrepreneurs who bet on themselves create new jobs. Institutions that gamble with new processes find out best to integrate advances into modern life. Regulators who accept potential backlash by launching policy experiments give us a chance to devise laws that are based on evidence, not fear.

The need for ...Read more

Open a newspaper or scan an opinion section, and you’ll likely encounter a familiar storyline: American universities have become ideological factories, churning out graduates stamped with a single political worldview. Students are portrayed as disengaged, fragile, glued to screens and uninterested in real work or real relationships.

That ...Read more

Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet, has made another leap in its efforts to illuminate human biology: progress toward using AI to interpret the many still-mysterious chapters in the text of life.

DNA sequencing, once a gargantuan feat, is by now cheap and easy. Deciphering the billions of letters in that code, ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — We relearned something from the killings of two law-abiding citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis: There’s a limit to how many government lies the public will tolerate.

When government officials arrogantly persist in blatantly lying, the public just might turn angrily against the prevaricators.

Or ...Read more

There we were, last Thursday, focusing on Team Trump’s tragic immigration protest killings and those other inhumanities committed in the ICEland of Minnesota.

We thought we were watching the decline and fall of President Donald Trump at his worst. But what we didn’t know (and couldn’t imagine in our wildest conjuring) was that Trump was ...Read more

If you could safely implant a chip in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you?

Some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful technologists want that future, including Elon Musk, who recently said he would ramp up production of his Neuralink brain chips this year as part of a noble effort to ensure humans can keep pace with superintelligen...Read more

With news of multimillion-dollar lawsuits arising from President Donald Trump administration’s military incursion to apprehend Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, America’s drug problem remains front and center. The White House demonstrated it believes a military campaign against alleged drug trafficking from Venezuela is central to ...Read more

Before June, when the ICE raids first began in Los Angeles, Daniel Sosa had not been active in the immigrants' rights movement. A cannabis dispensary owner, he'd previously directed his political energy to fights around legalization and the implementation of California's onerous rules around weed dispensaries.

On June 6, however, the first day ...Read more

Mayor Zohran Mamdani must immediately reverse his policy of allowing homeless encampments to proliferate on the streets of NYC. Fourteen New Yorkers have already died on the streets amid record-breaking cold, and the encampment sweeps initiated by Mayor Adams could well prove a critical tool in averting any more needless fatalities.

With some ...Read more

Anyone who tuned into the middle of Sen. Eric Schmitt’s furious floor speech on Wednesday might have been momentarily confused at why the MAGA Missouri Republican was condemning those who “deploy organized mob violence to undermine the expressed will of the people when democracy doesn’t go their way.”

No, he wasn’t talking about ...Read more

The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, followed by the victim-blaming slanders from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, may finally have exhausted the public’s patience with the Trump administration.

We can only hope.

It bears remembering that, aside from the agents themselves, the crimes of ICE are the responsibility of amoral politicians ...Read more

No, you don’t have to vaccinate your children. That is, if you don’t mind watching them die.

That’s not precisely how Kirk Milhoan, a Hawaii physician who chairs the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, expressed himself the other day. But it’s the plain gist of the message he sent in a podcast interview that has ...Read more

The arrest of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, in connection with an anti-ICE protest that interrupted a church service in Minnesota, is a test for the American people. Well, some of us. Many of us already didn't like what we saw happening across the country. Many believed the un-American threats during the campaign and voted ...Read more

How do you find the missing?

If you do find them, how can you help?

Oakland, California, civil rights attorney James Cook has been on the ground in Minnesota for months figuring out answers to these question as he goes.

A fast-talking Minneapolis native who still lives in the Twin Cities part time, Cook is one of a handful of attorneys who ...Read more

When President Donald Trump called on Iranian demonstrators to “KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER THE INSTITUTIONS” in early January and pledged “HELP IS ON THE WAY,” I feared a shameful episode of American betrayal was about to be repeated.

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he had promised these brave Iranians, fed up with ...Read more

The census data just released brought fantastic news for us hale and hearty Midwesterners: We’re growing.

It’s true. Our mighty region, overlooked — and often looked down upon, particularly by our coastal compatriots — was the one region in the U.S. where all states saw population growth from July 2024 to July 2025.

The region’s ...Read more

American politics has become so nationalized that many people—especially students—no longer know where their participation ought to be focused. Every issue feels federal, every fight existential, and every outcome distant.

The result isn’t apathy so much as exhaustion: a sense that politics is something to watch, not something to ...Read more