Growing up, I expected to live the fast-paced life of a performer. I'm a Jersey girl with a New York City spirit. My dreams were set on being a principal actor on Broadway.
Indigenous communities have seen dramatic changes, from rescinding land-management policies that were more inclusive of Indigenous knowledge to reducing $1.5 billion in climate funding for tribal initiatives.
When you grow up in a place where everyone's known you since you were in nappies, you carry around hundreds of versions of yourself. Each person you meet has frozen you at a particular moment - the time you threw up at the school dance, your awkward phase when your voice was breaking, that summer you tried to reinvent yourself and failed spectacularly.
Starting next month, the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship will go down dramatically - a boon for people already shouldering the burden of paying for a major overseas move. Anyone wishing to formally shed their American citizenship is required to obtain a form called a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, and right now it comes with a whopping $2,350 fee. In April, that fee will drop by 80% to $450.
If you were getting pot in the late '70s or early '80s in this part of the country, there's a good chance it may have been coming from these guys. You've got these guys who served decades in prison for marijuana, and now they're getting out into a world where it's legal everywhere.
A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.
While remote work has expanded opportunity and demand for high-amenity, walkable communities, it has also intensified housing shortages in desirable regions. Zoning reform alone will not solve the housing crisis, warning that regulatory changes must be paired with coordinated public-private investment to deliver meaningful supply.
That local exodus is documented by Cornell-led research that mapped annual moves between U.S. neighborhoods from 2010 to 2019 in detail 4,600 times greater than standard public data. Called MIGRATE, the new, publicly available dataset revealed that most of those displaced remained within the affected county - moves not captured in county-level public migration data aggregated every five years.
It seems like every year we're introduced to a new regional American style of pizza that most people have never heard of, and it's easy to be dubious about how "authentic" these local delicacies are. But Ohio Valley-style pizza is very much a real, distinctive thing. Unlike most pizza, which is primarily defined by the crust, what sets Ohio Valley-style apart is that the cheese and the toppings both go on cold after the crust and sauce are already cooked.
The air feels heavier. And the struggles are changing shape. Beyond my office walls, the world is shifting, and my clients sense the tremors. The things they once trusted, global order, democratic norms, and even their own personal safety, no longer feel solid. They feel brittle, as if one strong wind could bring it all down. And what they're sensing isn't imagined.
I remember stepping out of Austin-Bergstrom Airport last July, and the heat hit me like opening an oven door. Not the dry, manageable warmth I knew from Southern California, but something thick and heavy that made my shirt cling to my back before I even reached the rental car. That moment was my first real hint that moving from California to Texas would be more than just a change of scenery.
He began by characterizing what I had written as "fascinating," which could have meant a multitude of things coming from a teenager. He then explained that his eighth-grade English class included recent discussions about immigrant pursuits of the American dream. Accordingly, one major takeaway from those conversations with his teacher and peers was that many people come to the U.S. because it is perceived as a land of opportunity.
The recent tensions between local authorities in Minnesota and the immigration enforcement agencies of the Trump administration, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are not merely the stance of rebellious cities or states. They are the latest manifestation of a dispute as old as the nation itself: the resistance of local power against a federal center that periodically attempts to govern by imposition. To interpret what is happening today in Minneapolis and its consequences as an isolated episode of immigration policy is to remain on the surface.
In what seems to be the most uniting moment since Chardonnay was invented, older white Republican women flocked to movie theaters this past weekend to watch Melania, the nearly two-hour-long documentary about the First Lady financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by accused sex pest Brett Ratner. The film allegedly follows her during the 20 days leading up to Trump's second inauguration in 2025, though the trailer basically just showed her wearing sunglasses.