Excerpt: More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful un-elected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.

Excerpt: It’s not rhetorical to say Trump “murdered” these 14 people. It’s not a way of saying that I personally disagree with the way he chose to use military power—that his use of the country’s killing power seems to me to be disproportionate, or unwisely chosen, or unpersuasively justified. It’s not a claim that what the president is now doing is tantamount to murder, or morally indistinguishable from murder, or that it shares the practical characteristics of murder. Murder is the straightforward description of the relationship between what Trump said he did and why he said he did it. These 14 people were on boats that the president said were being used to smuggle drugs, so he killed them.

Excerpt: Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him:

There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Excerpt: His wife, Davida “Duke” Wallace, was also very nice. She introduced me to her knitting circle, which was six pleasant middle-aged ladies who were just sitting down for sweet tea and cake before they went back to their latest group knitting project. I was a little nervous when I saw that they were knitting a very large blanket that read GO BACK TO AFRICA, but they also served me a scrumptious lemon cake with raspberry filling. They even gave me the recipe.

Excerpt: At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America’s second-most-populous state, Texas. While it’s easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech.

Excerpt: “The art house cinema world was attached to the avant garde theater world, which was attached to the club scene, which was attached to the art galleries, and you had them all connecting in places like Intersection for the Arts, which had everything from poetry readings to political activism. Everything was just happening,” recalls Powers, who moved from the Weekly to the Village Voice to the New York Times. “And to navigate through that, the alternative weeklies were your map.”