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When Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a new assault weapons ban in Virginia last month, it got almost zero national news coverage. Yet it amounted to an important milestone: It marked the first time in U.S. history that such a gun-control measure was passed into law by any state government in the American South.So it’s sadly fitting that passage of this law has been greeted by what you might call its very own nullification movement. That’s right: In a brewing situation that has gone largely overlooked, a number of county-based prosecutors in red areas of Virginia are publicly declaring that they will not enforce the new ban on assault-style weapons. This movement is taking shape as a direct, openly confrontational challenge to the authority of Spanberger and the Virginia legislature that passed the measure—and it only appears to be growing.“It is an abdication by MAGA elected officials of their duty to enforce the law,” State Delegate Dan Helmer, a Democrat who represents a northern Virginia district and co-sponsored the measure, tells me. The law bans the sale, purchase, and manufacture of many military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines of more than 15 rounds, among other things.At least nine of Virginia’s “commonwealth attorneys”—who are elected county-wide to serve as chief law enforcement officers—have now issued statements declaring that they don’t intend to uphold the new law. All the counties in question voted for Donald Trump in 2024 by lopsided margins—some by more than 40 or 50 points—and many are deeply rural.“After careful review of the legislation and existing Supreme Court precedent, I find the assault weapons ban signed by the Governor unconstitutional—and as a result, unenforceable,” Phillip Blevins, the commonwealth attorney for Smyth County, recently announced. Smyth, a rural area in the Appalachian southwestern corner of Virginia, backed Trump by 60 points.The stakes here are considerable. The law already faces legal challenges from gun rights groups. The groups and these prosecutors alike argue that assault-style rifles are in common use—and that banning them steps outside the nation’s historic traditions of firearm regulations—which under Supreme Court precedent, they say, renders Virginia’s law unconstitutional.But the prosecutors are taking this further. They appear to be suggesting they won’t enforce the law, beginning the moment it takes effect on July 1, even if the courts haven’t weighed in by then (while vowing to still prosecute violent crimes). Though some of them describe this as exercising prosecutorial discretion, it seems to mean something more: that as a general matter, people who buy or sell these weapons illegally may simply not face prosecution.Indeed, some of the prosecutors are even in effect arguing that the sovereignty of the people within these counties overrules the authority of the state legislature—which is also duly elected—and relieves them of any obligation to enforce its new gun-control law. Several sheriffs in the same counties have also declared their refusal to enforce it.So now what? Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, a Democrat, is warning these prosecutors that they must enforce the new measure.* “Commonwealth’s Attorneys are elected to enforce our laws, which is what we expect them to do when these laws take effect on July 1,” Jones said in an emailed statement. But his office hasn’t said whether it’s examining actions it might take against them or what actions, if any, are available.This appears unlikely to go away and seems all but certain to come to a head. Indeed, Helmer, the delegate from Northern Virginia, argues that this movement is not mere posturing—it amounts to a direct challenge to state legislative authority. “The context is a culture of lawlessness that pervades the Republican Party under Trump, and it’s extending down to Republican elected officials, who feel empowered to ignore the law,” Helmer told me. “Your duty, if you’re a commonweath attorney or a sheriff, is to enforce the law, and if you’re not willing to do that, you should resign.”Helmer also pointed to the state’s recent history of high-profile gun killings. “The largest mass murders in U.S. history—and also in Virginia history—have been committed either with assault weapons, or high-capacity magazines, or both,” Helmer, who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, said. If future purchases go unprosecuted, he argued, it could lead to more “mass killing in our communities.”Research suggests this is plausible. And efforts to act on assault-style weapons are aimed at curbing a whole range of violent crimes, not just mass shootings.Spanberger has yet to comment on the growing rebellion. But it creates an awkward situation for her. In coming weeks, she is expected to preside over a signing ceremony for the law. If nearly a dozen county prosecutors—and perhaps more by then—are simultaneously vowing not to enforce it, that seems to challenge her in a fairly brazen way.After all, Spanberger was elected statewide less than a year ago by a whopping 15-point margin, outperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin there by nine points. Though Spanberger lost virtually all the red counties that are now rebelling against her law, she outperformed Harris in just about all of them, making inroads in very tough political territory.In a sense, Virginia is experiencing something you might call “de-South-ification.” The state stretches from the growing, highly diverse, very populous suburbs in the north—which abut the urban areas of Washington, D.C.—down to diversifying Richmond in the southeast, even as its heavily rural southwestern tip reaches deep into Appalachia.Spanberger’s stratospheric margins in the heavily populated northern suburbs, combined with her overperformances in deep-red areas, suggest the state’s MAGA and rural strongholds continue to shrink in clout (though the election of former GOP governor Glenn Youngkin slowed this process). That those areas are resisting enforcement of the first assault-style weapons ban in the South neatly captures the bigger transitions underway.It’s notable that something similar is happening in North Carolina and even to some degree in Georgia. In North Carolina—the southern neighbor of Virginia—the eastern, urbanized, diverse areas are gaining in demographic clout over its rural areas, some of which also stretch deep into Appalachia. No question, North Carolina is well behind Virginia in this process. And Georgia is still extremely tough territory for Democrats.But as Ron Brownstein details, the basic story connecting all these states—and even to some degree Texas—is that their combination of diversification and urbanization continues to nudge them in a Democratic direction. Trump’s successes—his 2024 inroads with nonwhites and blunting of Democratic margins in diverse, populous strongholds—has led many to doubt that demographic change necessarily favors Democrats. But in some important respects, demographics do continue to help Democrats, though they’re obviously insufficient on their own.Spanberger’s overwhelming victory, the shrinking of MAGA clout in Virginia, and the rearguard resistance to enforcing her gun-control law in deep-red areas—amounting to a MAGA nullification movement of sorts—neatly capture all these deep tensions. The big outstanding question is: How will Spanberger navigate them?* This piece originally misidentified Jay Jones.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development quietly released its annual homelessness report on Friday afternoon, 16 months after volunteers around the country carried out the 2025 homeless count. The news wasn’t all bad, in fact the data showed a small improvement overall. But these marginal gains elicited an odd response from the Trump administration, which opted to use the report as a vehicle to attack programs and policies that help both poor and unhoused Americans.Overall, homelessness dropped 3 percent to 745,652 people, according to the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. It’s the first decrease in national homelessness in years, following the 12 percent and 18 percent spikes that were reported in the 2023 and 2024 counts, respectively. The report, compiled from homeless counts done by local authorities around the nation in January 2025, reflects changes from the previous year. That means that this year’s report largely examines the changes that occurred during the final year of the Biden administration, not the first under Donald Trump. However, in its press release accompanying the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, HUD Secretary Scott Turner decided to talk about a different issue.“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Turner said. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.” The HUD announcement also took the time to note that homelessness is up 27 percent since January 2013 and that any decreases in the 2025 report were “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities.” The words “sanctuary,” “sanctuary cities,” or “housing first” do not appear in the report.The May 29 release of the report was a prelude to more attacks on housing-first policies—which, as the name suggests, prioritizes putting people into housing with low barriers, be it by building new units or funding rapid rehousing programs—as well as an increased focus on addiction and mental health issues, even though most Americans experiencing homelessness don’t deal with those conditions. On Monday, HUD released a revised plan for homelessness, pushing money to deal with drugs and mental health, which it calls the “root causes of homelessness.” In a statement, Turner again attacked housing-first policies, saying, “Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness.” It’s a drastic shift that moves money away from federally backed housing programs to a dubious new approach to the crisis that’s not supported by the data. All the same, it’s not a surprising move. Trump, JD Vance, and their allies have opposed housing first and other forms of assistance to people living on the streets or on the brink of homelessness for quite some time. Throughout the 2024 election and since taking power, the administration has repeated claims that homelessness is driven by addiction or mental health issues, linking homelessness to criminal activity and, by extension, a punitive policy approach. Other Republican politicians have taken up the rhetoric for their own purposes—Spencer Pratt, the reality-television heel currently running to be mayor of Los Angeles, has, in somewhat ham-handed fashion, deployed these talking points on the campaign trail.  This is all despite the fact that the report found some slight improvement in the overall homelessness picture. “So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a separate statement. “Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”The count itself is what is known as a “point-in-time” count. It does not reflect thousands of Americans who fell into homelessness over those 12 months for short periods of time due to disasters, financial strain, or other hardships but were able to get rehoused. Still, it is a window into just who is homeless in the United States: 266,320 were unsheltered. Approximately 155,750 of the total unhoused population is chronically unhoused. Veteran homelessness, which has been cut by more than half since a record high of more than 74,000 in 2010, dropped 1 percent in the 2025 count. That is a victory, but also a notable flatlining compared to the 8 percent drop in the 2024 count. Even in the Democrat-led cities the administration has gone after—and repeatedly accused of being overrun by crime and homelessness—the number of unhoused Americans went down. The 2025 count noted that Los Angeles’s continuum of care, in particular, saw the largest decline in chronic or long-term homelessness, down 2,394 over the previous year. The report specifically noted continuums of care, attributing declines to “additional projects opening, use of coordinated entry to move unsheltered individuals into affordable housing units, quicker placements into housing, increased outreach to transition chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing,” among other reasons. These are the same mitigation approaches the administration is now disclaiming as ineffective.The economy of Biden’s final year in office wasn’t particularly rosy. A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that nearly half of the country’s households didn’t make enough to make ends meet. Homelessness is a case of precarity and scarcity, and thousands of Americans remain on the brink of, or are even briefly experiencing, being unhoused.The release of the report was several months delayed. The fall government shutdown likely played a role, although a HUD spokesperson told NBC News earlier this year there was no set release date. But the 16-month wait leaves local authorities waiting for information that normally helps set policy. The extremely quiet release of the data is telling: The annual count is an important tool used to help guide housing efforts and funding programs—the longer it is delayed, the harder it is for communities to plan for their response to affordability and housing crises.The delay also means that the most “current” data is already out of date, in many ways. Because the count covers the last year of an administration that is no longer governing, it can’t account for any trajectory-altering effects of any of the new policies the Trump administration has pushed on housing or homelessness, nor does it show how tariffs and the government’s cuts to SNAP are hurting families and individuals relying on those programs to stay afloat. Even the 2026 count, whose final numbers are still months from being released, won’t reflect the ongoing economic strain of the energy shock and geopolitical disruptions of the war with Iran. It’s highly likely that the millions of Americans struggling to get by are dealing with worse conditions than any of our available data can reflect. But the administration is barreling forward with a plan of its own: Denigrate if not scuttle the programs designed to help people get back into housing quickly, while leaning back into depicting spurious and stereotypical symptoms of homelessness as the root causes. There is no telling when we might have a timely and accurate depiction of the homeless population again, but everything the administration is doing suggests that there will not be gains, marginal or otherwise, to celebrate.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have eased the way for states to enact more partisan gerrymanders. Now legislatures are racing to redraw their congressional maps in rare mid-decade redistricting efforts that may reconfigure the calculus of who will win the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the midterm elections this November.These endeavors were inspired by President Donald Trump, whose exhortations last year for Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in favor of his party kicked off a frenzy of tit-for-tat redistricting from both GOP-controlled and Democratic-led states, with Republicans in particular benefiting under the aegis of the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump has successfully challenged some of the GOP state legislators that stood in the way of his redistricting plan, supporting primary opponents more likely to follow his bidding.Legal experts worry that the end result of this partisan gerrymander scramble will be a reduction in fair representation in the U.S. House, with Republican voters in blue states and Democrats in red states less likely to have their voices heard. Moreover, Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters could see their political power considerably diluted—if not wiped out entirely in the red states racing to delete majority-minority districts.“By 2028, I think we are likely to be looking at a radically and maximally gerrymandered national map, in which blue states elect almost entirely blue delegations, red states elect just about entirely red delegations,” worried David Daley,  a senior fellow at the civic organization FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “It’s the kind of map we’ve seen before in this country. It’s just that back then, we called it the Union and the Confederacy.”Since Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps last year, several states have undertaken this process, resulting in new districts ahead of the midterms. These efforts could add up to a dozen or more new Republican House seats after the November elections. Although some Democratic states—notably California, the most populous state—have punched back, other efforts have been rebuffed. An attempt to redraw Virginia’s electoral map to add new Democratic seats in 2026 was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Republican- and Democratic-majority states will take up redistricting ahead of the 2028 cycle. (In their gerrymandering efforts, some Democratic-led states have argued that this is a temporary measure intended to counter Republican mid-decade redistricting.)Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government watchdog group that supports national redistricting reform, said allowing politicians to “choose their voters” would skew lawmakers’ incentives away from the constituents they purport to represent.“When politicians don’t believe that there is accountability, that allows for those politicians to advance either their personal interests or very narrow political interests—by the wealthy, the well-connected, corporations,” said Noureldin. As a result, he continued, Congress will become “less and less responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.”In April, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it much more difficult to challenge partisan gerrymanders that dilute the power of minority voters. Piling onto the preexisting map-redrawing efforts in states such as Ohio, Texas, and Missouri, additional GOP-controlled Southern states moved this spring to redraw their congressional maps with the goal of reducing the number of Democratic districts. This will result in reduced representation for Black voters.In early June, the Supreme Court paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, in an unsigned shadow-docket decision. This proposed map had been struck down by a lower court, which included two Trump-appointed judges. To Kareem Crayton, a vice president for the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy and voting rights, this decision demonstrates how the conservative majority on the court believes drawing maps to benefit Republicans is wholly divorced from how it might affect minority voters—who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.“This court seems way more attentive to the concerns of protecting power than they are to the Constitution’s attention to assuring that voters have their say,” said Crayton.The current race to gerrymander congressional districts is not unprecedented in the modern era. Republicans underwent a concerted effort ahead of the 2010 election to win state legislative majorities with the goal of controlling redistricting after that year’s census. Daley said that Republicans were able to successfully gain control of several state legislatures because “Democrats were fully asleep to the importance of this issue.”However, there was also a bid during that decade to push back against gerrymandering. Four of the nine states with independent commissions saw them established after the 2010 census. Support for independent redistricting particularly soared in 2018, when voters in five states approved reforms to make the process of drawing congressional and legislative maps less political.Experts say that a 2019 Supreme Court decision opened the door to the redistricting wars of the present moment. The conservative majority’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause found that federal courts did not have the power to police partisan gerrymandering. “Regardless of whether or not it’s wrong, they just said they wouldn’t address it, which just left a free-for-all. Now states each have their own standard which they’re governing themselves by,” said Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, which has challenged some of these new maps. “What we’re seeing now is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s choice not to have a national standard.”Leeper noted that racial gerrymandering is still theoretically illegal, even if the Voting Rights Act has been “severely undercut.” She added that it is still possible to challenge certain redistricting efforts on the state level in states where there are prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering; for example, the Campaign Legal Center is engaged in a lawsuit in Florida, where voters in 2010 approved an amendment to bar redistricting that favors one party. However, it does make state-by-state reform that much more difficult.In most states, the legislature draws congressional districts with the approval of the governor, although some require a supermajority to adopt a map. Nine states have independent redistricting commissions, which are intended to create electoral districts without undue political influence, but with consideration for fair representation and adherence to federal and state constitutions.“What we learned is that it is possible to have more fair redistricting. It’s possible to have groups of independent people who are representative of their states come together applying fair redistricting criteria, and the result is maps that are substantially more fair,” said Leeper. But she added that “in the absence of a national standard,” independent states may be less likely to pursue independent redistricting commissions in the future.Because the number of states that have independent redistricting commissions is so low, their impact on a national scale is relatively limited. It creates an “imbalance,” said Noureldin, where some states have fair representation while others are wholly partisan.“Independent redistricting processes in of themselves work, but only if everyone is using them,” said Noureldin. “If not, then they’re not actually working to achieve a fair map across the congressional landscape.”Supporters of anti-gerrymandering reforms agree that, with a Supreme Court intent on creating stricter scrutiny for racial gerrymanders, any truly effective action to change redistricting would need to occur on a national level. Some organizations advocate for more proportional representation in Congress, or reforms to the Supreme Court, although it’s far from certain whether these ideas could garner necessary support from lawmakers.There have been recent unsuccessful congressional efforts to address gerrymandering. In 2021, when Democrats held both the White House and both chambers of Congress, legislation that would have made it difficult for states to impose partisan gerrymandering came close to passage. Although it was approved in the House, it failed in the Senate, as the narrow Democratic majority was unable to end the legislative filibuster.If Democrats win the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2028, Daley believes that they should take the opportunity to end the filibuster and approve legislation to bar partisan gerrymandering on a national level. He noted that the 2030 census—which will precede another round of redistricting—will reflect a loss of population in several blue states and an increase in several red states, meaning that Democrats are slated to lose seats in the House to the Republicans’ gain. If they do not account for that future, Daley argued, it will become increasingly difficult to gain a majority in the years to come.“This is a much more effective long-term game for Republicans than it is for Democrats, and if Democrats don’t look ahead to what’s coming in the 2030 census and reform this, if given the shot in 2028, they’re going to be in the wilderness for a long time,” said Daley.Voter backlash to gerrymandering could counter some of these efforts to skew the game in their favor. It’s possible that Republicans in Texas and Florida, for example, could witness the “dummymander” effect, in which Democrats could flip a seat intended to favor Republicans because the GOP state lawmakers spread their supporters too thin across districts. Crayton also noted that Senate seats, which represent an entire state, cannot be gerrymandered. If there’s a president who supports gerrymandering reform, and a Congress willing to act, he argued that the lawmakers who support partisan gerrymandering could see greater fallout than they expect.“Gerrymandering works to a point. It has a lot of collateral damage. But at some point or another, the dam breaks,” Crayton said. “When it does, people are going to be a little dismayed,” he said, and the resulting reform might be “more sweeping than they would even imagine.”“They will have themselves to thank for it,” he said.

Male infertility is having a moment. A Gen Z–founded Silicon Valley start-up, The New York Times recently reported, wants to monetize “sperm racing”; the internet is full of advice on “spermmaxxing”; and last month Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. called the male fertility decline an “existential crisis,” claiming that in the 1970s, men had “twice the sperm count our teenage boys do today.” Last year he also asserted that “a teenager today has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man.”Unsurprisingly, the HHS secretary’s facts were off: The study he relied on doesn’t specifically mention teenage boys, about whom there is not enough data to support such a claim; the threat is not an “existential” one; and the point about 68-year-old men is just made up (fertility absolutely does decline with age, even if our gerontocracy doesn’t want to believe it).  Still, he’s correct on the big picture: Some indicators suggest male fertility is declining. Sperm counts and sperm concentration declined worldwide by more than half between 1973 and 2018, according to one major data analysis. Many other studies show similar trends, although there are dissenting findings, and the issue remains somewhat controversial. One in 20 men face reduced fertility—hardly a reason to put humans on the endangered species list, but a legitimate public health concern and an understandable source of anxiety for those hoping to start families. The issue has been preoccupying the right-wing manosphere for years, part of a collage of anxieties about masculinity that have fueled the rise of Trump. Sadly, Trump’s actual policies are poised to make the problem of male fertility decline much worse. While researchers may not know exactly what’s behind the sperm count decline, they have identified some significant factors. A large body of research shows that water, air, and soil pollution is a huge factor in the drop in male fertility. Among pollutants, several of the biggest culprits are heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates. Towards the end of his term, President Biden imposed new rules on coal-fired power plants, limiting their freedom to dump arsenic, selenium, and mercury into the groundwater. Those heavy metals affect male sperm quality by disrupting endocrine functions and altering hormone levels. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back that rule.Not content to allow polluters to poison the water, the Trump administration, with Congress’s help, shredded much of the Clean Air Act last year, significantly weakening dioxin regulation. Dioxins, too, disrupt the endocrine system, with devastating impact on spermatogenesis—the development of sperm cells into sperm capable of fertilizing an egg. Given the link between air pollution and male infertility, it is not surprising that wildfires, which have a horrendous impact on air quality, directly affect male reproductive health. Researchers at the University of Washington who studied male sperm counts in the wildfire-ridden years from 2018 to 2022, found that sperm count and quality declined consistently during every major wildfire year. Trump’s EPA has specifically rejected climate as a legitimate reason for regulating air pollution. That means that numerous Biden-era regulations intended to ease climate change have been rolled back, a policy trend almost certain to make the climate crisis much worse, and to make climate disasters like wildfires even more frequent. In addition, Trump’s anti-immigration, anti-DEI policies—burdensome bureaucratic paperwork requirements forcing agencies to show that they are complying with the administration’s bans on diversity hiring and immigration restrictions—are weakening our ability as a society to fight and prevent such fires, by complicating and delaying the grants localities receive for that purpose. His cuts to the U.S. Forest Service—thousands lost their jobs in the DOGE rampage, and another bloodbath is underway with a “restructuring” this year closing many regional offices and research facilities—are likely to make matters even worse.Then there is the administration’s lenient stance on pesticides, which 21 different studies over the last 20 years have shown reduce the sperm quality of male mice and rats. The Trump administration has angered even its MAHA base through its indulgent attitude toward pesticide manufacturers—particularly after it sided with Bayer, the maker of Roundup, in a Supreme Court case. Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup, is associated with reduced sperm motility, among many other health problems.“Forever chemicals,” so called because they are pollutants that persist in the environment and in our bodies for an alarmingly long time, also present a well-documented threat to sperm. PFAS, the most common type of these—found in drinking water, food, firefighting gear, and soccer fields, to name a few sources—disrupt hormones and endocrine functions and harm sperm quality, viability, and also ability to swim, which is called “motility.” Biden established the first-ever nationwide limits on PFAS in drinking water, a rule that the Trump EPA now wants to roll back.Then there are phthalates, plasticizers, and so-called “everywhere chemicals,” because they are everywhere in our households and daily lives. Researchers in the U.K. found that exposure to phthalates slowed sperm motility and caused the resulting DNA to fragment, an effect that worsened with each additional dose. The Trump administration did study the problem and announce a plan to regulate workplace exposure to phthalates—good—but troublingly, in a move widely criticized by scientists and public health advocates, announced that it wouldn’t regulate phthalates in household or other consumer goods.What’s curious about this apparent contradiction between stated concern and policy is that the pollution threat is no secret on the right. Kennedy and other MAGA-friendly influencers do correctly blame pesticides, endocrine disrupters, what RFK Jr. calls “the toxic soup” surrounding us all.  But they talk about it without acknowledging how Trump’s pro-polluter policies are exacerbating the situation. Instead, RFK Jr. and others in the manosphere concerned about male fertility want to let the government off the hook, turning men’s fertility into an individual problem. Some offer wacky remedies, like putting your testicles in ice water or refraining from ejaculating (as men did in Victorian times and seem to be trying again. That won’t work. There is no advantage in storing it up for later). Other solutions to masculinity concerns peddled in the manosphere are manifestly ill advised for those concerned about fertility, like taking testosterone, which has been shown to harm sperm. RFK and others also emphasize that leading a healthy lifestyle helps your fertility: good nutrition, exercising, reducing alcohol and nicotine use, and maintaining a healthy weight. That’s true! But such advice doesn’t address the significant environmental harms men are suffering at the population level—only cracking down on polluters can do that.Democrats wring their hands about young male voters, who swung toward Trump in the last presidential election. But Democratic politicians rarely talk about fertility concerns, which is odd because their record on regulating the pollution that most affects male fertility is much better than Trump’s, to the point that they could directly point to Biden’s policies as a contrast. Perhaps they don’t want to come off as cringe, as Democrats so often do when trying to communicate with either young people or men. But by not talking about it, Democrats risk ceding the anxieties associated with the issue to far-right Republicans, the very group guaranteed to make it worse. 

I’m guessing you have a pretty good idea of what Graham Platner was getting up to last week—fending off yet another round of allegations about his character. But what about Susan Collins, Maine’s incumbent GOP senator and the person almost sure to be Platner’s opponent this November? You probably didn’t hear a word about her. The only significant news story of the week in which she figured (aside from being mentioned in all the Platner stories) is that she cast her 10,000th consecutive vote in the Senate—a milestone, to be sure, but something of a double-edged one as it serves to remind voters that she’s been in the Senate since Christ left Chicago.This is just how Collins wants things. As long as the subject is Platner’s boozing and his ex-girlfriends, Collins may skate to reelection. So the key thing Platner has to do, assuming he wins tomorrow’s primary and stays in the race, is to maneuver things such that come October, the topic is Collins’s record, not his past.We’ll get to that record in a bit, but first, let’s deal with the Platner question. Two big stories came out last week. The first was about his sexting with several women in the early days of his current marriage. He married Amy Gertner in 2023. Early in the campaign, Gertner told an aide who was a friend about the messages, and the friend—now presumably an ex-friend—told a lot of people and shared some screen grabs with The New York Times. Gertner denounced the friend, Genevieve McDonald, and defended her husband and marriage. On that one, I think your average person would say, Well, if his wife doesn’t care, why should I?The second story was potentially more damaging and concerned Platner allegedly twisting the arm of a former girlfriend and slamming a door shut on her; also, that he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders,” according to The New York Times, which broke the story last Thursday. It’s disturbing, no doubt. It’s worth noting that this woman is, or was at the time, apparently a very committed conservative Republican—the co-founder of “Ladies for Kavanaugh,” which she formed to confront what she termed the “baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop [the justice’s] confirmation.” (One question the Times left on the table but that crossed my mind, and maybe yours, was how Platner could have said, “You are literally everything to me” to someone who, according to Newsweek, worked at the Heritage Foundation at the time.)Two other exes told the Times of similar treatment from Platner. On the other hand, “several” other exes (dude got around!) described him as “a fun and caring partner,” and some remain friends with him to this day. Platner denies all the physical stuff, so someone is lying.Personally, I don’t know what to make of the guy. I suspect he’s not telling the truth about his Nazi tattoo, and I’d bet you that he knew what it meant, but I also don’t think that makes him a Nazi. He has obviously lived a life that we would at the very least call picaresque. Balzac would have had fun with him. There’s also the question of, as it is often said in politics, what else is out there. Any good campaign—and Susan Collins does run good campaigns—knows to sit on the really bad stuff until after Labor Day, although campaigns can’t always control when things are disclosed, and anyway, all the revelations about Platner seem to be coming from establishment Democrats who are unnerved by his lefty swagger.There’s a lot we don’t know, and a chance we’ll find out all about it. I do, however, know these two things. One, Platner is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. Two, short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt. That may seem like a really low bar, and maybe it is. But I’m less interested in his personal life than I am in Collins’s public one, because that’s what really matters here.So let us now return to the question of Collins’s week. The Senate cast a bunch of votes last week. And Collins did what she always does when she’s up for reelection—she voted with the Democrats on the ones people pay attention to, and as a Republican on the others. There were a number of votes related to Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund. On most of those, like this one for example, she was one of maybe two or three Republicans (with Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, who are both retiring) voting with the Democrats. On other less highly visible matters, though, she went with her party and with Trump. Last Wednesday, the Senate rejected a resolution that would have overturned Trump’s rollback of Biden-era emissions standards for coal- and oil-fired power. She went party line on that one. The day before, she voted to confirm a federal judge for Kansas who, at his confirmation hearing, refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election. Ah, judges: This brings us to where Platner needs to direct attention in this campaign. Maine voters need to be reminded, to the tune of about $40 million worth of TV commercials, of Collins’s support for putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. “He has been an exemplary public servant,” she said at the time. She hoped that Kavanaugh would be a unifying force on the court (riiiiight), and most infamously, she accepted his assurances that he saw Roe v. Wade as “settled law.” She was either lying about that or was the only person in America stupid enough to believe him. Platner should ask her, repeatedly, which it was.Different voting studies place Collins’s record of supporting Trump’s initiatives at anywhere from 70 percent to 95 percent. Whichever the true figure, there’s bound to be material there. Platner needs this race to be about that voting record and all the stands for working-class Mainers that Collins hasn’t taken. I may have done some bad things, Platner might say; but one thing I haven’t done is spend the last 40 years helping pick the pockets of working-class people and transfer trillions of dollars to the very rich. (Collins has voted in favor of virtually every GOP tax cut bill over her career.)If Platner has Mainers thinking about that in October, and barring truly disqualifying new revelations, he can win. And the Democratic Party needs to stop submarining him. Imperfect as he is, there’s a reason his campaign caught fire. Democrats ought to try to learn from that, not squirm away from it.

The title of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, knowingly evokes vividly Technicolored Hollywood fantasies: There’s no place like Motherland; please pay attention to the man behind the (Iron) curtain. An Italian Swiss think-tanker, essayist, and high-end political adviser, da Empoli is fascinated by Machiavellian machinations. The book’s protagonist, Vadim Baranov, is a sorcerer skilled in the dark arts of propaganda and ideological brand management. The character is a thinly fictionalized version of Vladislav Surkov, widely regarded as the reigning trickster of twenty-first-century Russian politics, a “poet among wolves” with a direct line to the leader of the pack.Like his real-life model, Baranov is a lapsed artist with a knack for stagecraft. He’s a former avant-garde theater director turned reality-television producer who willingly sells out and takes over the stewardship of Vladimir Putin’s public image in the early 2000s, manning his post through the Kadyrov Pact and the dog days of Russiagate in the United States to the inception of the Ukrainian war. The culture warrior-to-apparatchik pipeline makes for a fascinating and disconcerting professional case study. Resentful of what he perceives as the decadent and desultory sophistication of his fellow intellectuals—and attuned to an ambient yearning among the masses to Make Russia Great Again—Baranov styles himself as an amplifier for a strongman’s vox populi rhetoric. Putin has a penchant for appearing bare-chested in manly poses, and Baranov uses that charisma as a blunt instrument to renovate the country’s dilapidated power structure.Whereas the world-weary Boris Yeltsin required propping up in public appearances, Putin towers proudly before the cameras. An avatar of vertikal vlasti, he stands at the peak of a top-down power structure predicated on the paranoid supplication of staffers and civilians alike. Baranov has no illusions about Putin’s hardwired authoritarian nature even as he works fast and furiously to conjure illusions for others. “There is nothing wiser,” he explains wryly, “than to bet on the madness of men.”On the page, The Wizard of the Kremlin excels as a twisty, fact-based picaresque about high-rollers gambling with matters of life and death, and hung up on the breakneck exhilaration of letting it ride. Olivier Assayas’s film version of The Wizard of the Kremlin is impressively faithful to its source’s speed and sprawl, as well as to its Matryoshka-like narrative structure. In the adaptation, with a screenplay co-written by Assayas and French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, an American academic, Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visits the wily, worldly Baranov (Paul Dano). They are, ostensibly, to discuss the work of dissident Soviet satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1924 dystopian novel, We—an acknowledged influence on George Orwell’s 1984—is a point of mutual interest. Like a lot of like-minded literary types, they first connected online, but Baranov wants to do more than host a Russian-lit book club. He takes Lawrence’s visit to his snowy dacha as a cue to methodically recount the phases of his sentimental education.One of Assayas’s specialties is capturing the heady sensations endemic to coming-of-age, especially for those striving to live la vie bohème; his best movies, including Cold Water (1994) and Something in the Air (2012), perch on the proverbial edge of 17. He’s thus in his sweet spot restaging Bara­nov’s salad days as a precocious, overgrown child of privilege. We get sweaty, shirtless punk-rock shows; salacious performance art interludes; rhetorical dick-measuring contests; bondage play and S&M theatrics; and, more centrally, decades-spanning situationship between Baranov and high-maintenance party-girl Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose luscious corruptibility—exemplified by her attraction to designer items and the men who subsidize their acquisition—has a symbolic dimension.Ksenia isn’t so much a character as an avatar of the hedonism unleashed by the thawing of the Cold War, and the film unfolds as an exploration of how these freedoms give way to ever-deeper and more insidious forms of repression. If Baranov is a wizard, he has also fallen under his own spell; his Rasputin-ish powers of persuasion extend to a form of self-hypnosis, whereby he grows steadily insensible to the consequences of his increasingly ruthless rhetoric.The writer Eduard Limonov once paid Surkov a backhanded compliment by saying he’d managed to turn Russia into a massive postmodern theatrical production, and the same could be said of Baranov. Glimpses of his earlier stage and television work hint at real talent and avant-garde nerve veiled by an increasingly expedient cynicism, and Assayas maps the process by which opportunism engulfs artistic expression. “Stop making up stories and start inventing reality,” instructs scheming oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who has recruited Baranov and his collaborators to Putin’s ranks. Berezovsky and his cronies are looking to consolidate their economic interests, and they’re betting on Putin as the man who can ram through their agenda (they’ll come to rue that decision). The group’s offer to Bara­nov entails things that any aspiring auteur would kill for: a big budget, access to the best equipment, and the means to reach a mass audience hungry for a mix of tradition and sensationalism.Baranov is just the man to cross those streams, as fluent in nineteenth-century literature as he is in MTV (Surkov once claimed to be fond of Tupac Shakur and Jackson Pollock), and he begins to do so readily, enabled by more relaxed attitudes toward Western tactics in the post-USSR era. He’s packaging his star client as a hybrid figure, a relic of the KGB with his eyes on a better future; “what interests me is power,” says Putin in the trailer, played by a dead-eyed, jaw-jutting Jude Law, coming through with a suitably cold and calculating performance—all coiled, tensile strength and unapologetic contempt, tinged here and there with judicious bits of ridiculousness (as when we see him jet-skiing and pumping iron like Arnold Schwarzenegger).Law’s ex–pretty boy status is slightly distracting; when Putin pouts that the Americans treat him like he’s the president of Finland, Law could be back in The Talented Mr. Ripley, whining that Matt Damon won’t stop crowding him. His British accent, too, is notable: When The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered—a bit unprepossessingly, considering its pedigree—at last fall’s Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, critics made much of Assayas’s decision to have all of the major characters speak in English without put-on Russian inflections; the critic for the U.K.-based film magazine Sight and Sound jeered at “the mild irony of having oligarchs speak in the jargon of Canary Wharf.” Yet given the underlying themes of globalization, it should be clear that such tactics are deliberate: “Making the film in English gave it something more universal,” Assayas told an interviewer about the film’s casting and dialogue. The use of the techniques from television to manipulate an entertainment-addicted public and puff up a strongman is hardly unique to Russia, after all.Like a lot of recent ruling-class satires, from Succession to The Apprentice, The Wizard of the Kremlin luxuriates in first-class textures—VIP sections and pri-vate yachts; inner-circle briefings and closed-door meetings—and Assayas does his best to communicate a wry skepticism toward his backdrops; Putin haunts his own boardrooms and offices like a Bond villain. Typically one of the most agile filmmakers around, Assayas only occasionally seems to lose his bearings while navigating the corridors of state power, largely because he’s covering a lot of ground. Even at 136 minutes, the film has to move quickly to accommodate the rollicking, globe-trotting plot. On the one hand, the speediness of the storytelling risks reducing significant events—like the possible false-flag bombings in Moscow used to shore up support for the Second Chechen War—to Wikipedia-thin plot points; on the other, it reinforces the idea of Baranov as an entertainer slinging tidy, crowd-pleasing narratives. He’s a master of playing both sides against the middle; he even stage-manages leather-clad radicals who play his own private pet dissenters. By the time he’s laying out his plan to use the Sochi Olympic opening ceremonies as a time-traveling victory lap through Russian culture, he’s become an embodiment of the idea that history is not only written by the winners, but also redacted, dumbed-down, and punctuated with exclamation points. Baranov calls his proposed show the “apotheosis of kitsch”; his shamelessness is not a black mark but a badge of honor. The line might also be a skeleton key unlocking Assayas’s own strategy here: deluxe, slightly stilted geopolitical kitsch doubling as satirical commentary on its own existence.It’s surely intentional that Law’s Putin barely develops over the course of the story: His almost cryogenic quality of physical and behavioral stasis is a by-product of the same malignant narcissism that propels his policies. What’s trickier, and more important, to reconcile is the terrifically accomplished, increasingly enervating redundancy of Dano’s performance, which grows stiffer as Baranov ages into complacency. His hollowed-out delivery is a feat in and of itself; it either reflects Baranov’s descent into a downward spiral of well-spoken sophistry—“politics is the only game worth playing,” he drones, as if on sinister autopilot—or a filmmaker and his star drawing a blank and calling it portraiture.That cipherlike quality makes sense insofar as Baranov is a vaporous, abstract presence in a movie that strives for tactile, ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity: the Adman Who Isn’t There. In this way, The Wizard of the Kremlin works as a less grabby and more rewarding study than a biopic like Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), which tried to earnestly psychologize Donald Trump’s Daddy issues and ended up playing—at least in stretches—like a po-faced Saturday Night Live sketch. Assayas doesn’t pretend to fully understand his antihero, much less to know better than him, and cultivates just enough bewildered distance in the process to give his film the sort of mystic-slash-metaphysical frisson promised by its title.He also alters the novel’s ending in a way that honors its exquisite bleakness while carving out a thin, jagged sliver of poetic justice. In the book, Baranov is resigned to a frosty exile, surveying the wreckage he helped to create (“there will still be something, but it won’t be humanity”). The movie provides a more decisive conclusion. The epilogue fuses ruthlessness and mercy, offering a sinister wizard a way out of his own private Oz; Assayas’s literal parting shot raises larger questions about crime, punishment, and who gets to play executioner.

Leaders of both parties in Washington and in state capitals are confronting AI before it becomes as omnipresent as vertical video.

The post A School Bus Killed a 5-Year-Old. The Crash Is Among Dozens Missing From the Bus Company’s Federal Safety Record. appeared first on ProPublica.

Donald Trump is desperately trying to salvage his gala commemorating America’s 250th anniversary after many celebrities pulled out. He let out a weird tirade insisting that he is telling them not to come, and also announced a paltry set of acts that’s downright humiliating. This comes after he seethed that he didn’t need other musical acts because he himself will be performing. Also, he’s bigger than Elvis! Trump’s plans drew savage mockery from MAGA influencer Matt Walsh, who ridiculed Trump’s organizers for inviting “washed up geriatric one hit wonders.” Walsh added cuttingly that this will now be a rally where “Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes.” We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who writes well about Trumpism and the American zeitgeist. We discuss how Trump-MAGA had their cultural moment in 2024, how they pissed it away to inflict mass suffering on the people they hate, and the deeper reasons MAGA is so toxic within the culture. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.