The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification; The Atlantic, June 11, 2026

David A. Graham, The Atlantic; The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification

"No event at the Kennedy Center in recent months has drawn as much anticipation in Washington as the removal of President Trump’s name from the building’s facade. The date and time of the performance are not yet public, but residents and reporters are on alert to watch workers pull down the letters that were hastily added in December, when the institution was ungrammatically rechristened “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Already, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reported last week, Trump’s name has been removed from the center’s website, as well as from “email signatures, email communications, letterhead, website, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, references in contracts, MOUs, and other agreements.” These are signs of the center moving to comply with a judge’s ruling late last month that ordered it to revert to its statutory name.

The re-renaming is a welcome win for the rule of law, but the precarious path ahead for the Kennedy Center is a useful metaphor for the United States in the Trump era as a whole. Removing Trump’s name is the easy part—a discrete step that a judge can straightforwardly mandate—but repairing the damage will be a much longer and more difficult process, assuming it’s possible at all."

American Library Association workers win their AFSCME union in overwhelming vote; AFSCME, June 1, 2026

 AFSCME Staff, AFSCME; American Library Association workers win their AFSCME union in overwhelming vote

"Employees of the American Library Association – seeking job security, stable benefits, better pay, more professional development, and a voice in the workplace – have voted to form their union with AFSCME.

The newly created American Library Association Workers United will be part of AFSCME Council 31 and represent more than 100 employees, mostly in Chicago.

“We’re happy to welcome employees of the American Library Association to our ever-growing union,” said Council 31 Executive Director Roberta Lynch, who’s also an AFSCME vice president. “Together in our union they will have a strong voice to advocate for themselves and their families, for the libraries and library workers they serve nationwide, and for every American who counts on thriving public libraries as a bulwark of our democracy.”

The National Labor Relations Board administered the election, and more than 95% of the votes cast were in favor of the union. The results were announced on May 27.

As they prepare to negotiate their first contract, the employees are focused on protecting the staff’s work, their well-being and the organization’s future.

AFSCME and the American Library Association were recently both plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed to protect the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from being dismantled by the Trump administration. After filing the lawsuit, AFSCME and ALA won a legal settlement that protected the IMLS and the grants it provides to libraries and museums across the country.

More than 50,000 workers at museums, libraries, zoos and other cultural institutions across the United States have gained a voice on the job through the AFSCME Cultural Workers United campaign — the largest of its kind in the nation. That includes a swath of Chicago-based institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago Public Library, and more."

A Note to Readers; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 4, 2026

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; A Note to Readers

[Kip Currier: As a long-time subscriber to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the note below arrived in my Inbox today: a new era for journalism in the Pittsburgh region and Western Pennsylvania.]

"The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which started The Baltimore Banner four years ago, takes ownership Monday of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to ensure that Western Pennsylvania maintains access to high-quality local journalism. We’re grateful to the Block family for its civic leadership over nearly a century and take seriously our obligation to serve the community with fairness and integrity.

As newcomers to Pittsburgh, we have been careful to fill the organization with top-notch journalists and business leaders from the old Post-Gazette. We'll rely on them to help us get to know this great city and region. We’ll also begin this spring hosting community listening sessions throughout the area to make sure we hear directly from you about what you need and want in your news organization.

Venetoulis was founded in response to the nationwide erosion of local news, with so many newspapers shutting down or being purchased by hedge funds with a single-minded focus on financial returns. We are driven, first and foremost, by a civic mission to bring trusted local reporting to communities that need it most. We’re also determined to create a successful model for local journalism that can be refined in Maryland and replicated here in Pittsburgh — and perhaps elsewhere in the coming years. Progress at The Banner suggests we are on the right path, with strong business growth, an expanding newsroom, and a Pulitzer Prize last year in local reporting.

Over time, you will notice some changes in the PG as we take vital steps to build an even more relevant, compelling, and sustainable news organization that, on its best days, will serve as something of a town square for this community. For example, as a nonprofit organization, Venetoulis does not endorse candidates or, as an institution, take positions on matters of policy. That means we will be ending the Opinion section, though we are committed to vigorously reporting on key issues so that you can be an informed citizen, and we will continue to have columnists. At the same time, being a nonprofit allows us to raise donations from the community, which has proven to be an important ingredient in Maryland for building a resilient news business. We’ll still be coming out twice weekly in print as well as delivering the daily e-edition. We’re committed, as ever, to local news, sports, and investigative work. And we’ll focus on upgrading the experience on the website and app to better appeal to the growing base of digital readers.

We are so excited to begin this journey — and we ask for your advice and honest feedback as we strive to make the new Post-Gazette best serve you and your neighbors. You can reach us at feedback@post-gazette.com."

Americans are down on AI. These two caricatures are to blame.; The Washington Post, April 28, 2026

Russell Wald

 and 

Sha Sajadieh

, The Washington Post; Americans are down on AI. These two caricatures are to blame.

"America is all-in on artificial intelligence. Americans are not. 

That is clear enough from domestic polling alone. But the 2026 AI Index, released this month by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, puts this skepticism into a global context. 

While the United States and China are nearly matched in their aggressive investment and economic stakes, they are worlds apart in public sentiment. About 84 percent of respondents in China say they are excited about AI, versus just 38 percent in the U.S., a gap with profound implications for how each country builds, adopts and governs the technology.

Public opinion does not merely reflect the AI debate. It decides whether democratic societies can govern the technology wisely, adopt it productively and distinguish between real risk and manufactured panic.

The U.S. now stands out with its distrust. Americans reported the lowest trust in their government to regulate AI responsibly of any country surveyed: just 31 percent. The global average was 54 percent. In Singapore, that number was 81 percent."

(Some of) The newest stuff at the Library!; Library of Congress Blogs, April 28, 2026

Neely Tucker, Library of Congress Blogs; (Some of) The newest stuff at the Library!

"Walk into the Library’s annual showcase of new acquisitions and the question always hits you right in the face: Where to start?

What about with this slim copy of Silver Surfer No. 1, the origin story of Marvel Comics’ “Sentinel of the Spaceways,” from the groovy year of 1968? How about this massive law book that’s more than 500 years old? The “Tombstone Edition” of a Philadelphia newspaper from 1765, which documented and amplified the American Colonies loathing of the Stamp Act and presaged the American Revolution?

There’s never really a wrong place to start. This year’s two-hour show-and-tell, held last week, brought hundreds of staffers and guests to look over intriguing displays of the Library’s recently acquired treasures, items spanning the nation, the globe and centuries of time. Many added to already impressive collections of historic figures...

It was a crowded, noisy, upbeat afternoon of discovery and explanation. Conversations buzzed and overlapped; staff experts and curious viewers leaned over display tables from opposite sides, heads together, talking loudly to be heard, gazing down at maps, manuscripts, records, artifacts and things you couldn’t have known existed."

Wife of LA Clippers owner and billionaire Steve Ballmer steps in to help save the future of NPR with $80M gift; Independent, April 19, 2026

Graig Graziosi  , Independent; Wife of LA Clippers owner and billionaire Steve Ballmer steps in to help save the future of NPR with $80M gift

"NPR received its largest-ever donation from a living donor this week when billionaire philanthropist Connie Ballmer gave $80 million to the media organization.

Ballmer — a former member of the NPR Foundation's board — told the Wall Street Journal that she poured money into NPR because “we need fact-based journalism, and we need local journalism.”...

"I support NPR because an informed public is the bedrock of our society, and democracy requires strong, independent journalism," Ballmer said in a statement on Wednesday. "My hope is that this commitment provides the stability and the spark NPR needs to innovate boldly and strengthen its national network."...

Her donation comes at an important time for NPR. Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending federal funding for public TV and radio organizations."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Saved From Closure by Nonprofit; The New York Times, April 14, 2026

Katie Robertson, The New York Times; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Saved From Closure by Nonprofit

[Kip Currier: What great news to learn that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will not be closing on May 3, 2026! Instead, one of America's oldest newspapers will continue through the non-profit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism. 

Newspapers are still essential sources for access to information. They also promote literacy, free expression, and informed citizenries -- crucial elements of functioning democracies.

Sadly, three print newspapers serving Northwestern Pennsylvania have ceased publication in the past two months -- Clarion News (1840), (Franklin's) The News-Herald (1886), and (Oil City's) The Derrick (1871); The Derrick is continuing as an online only publication.]

"The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had been set to shut down in May, will keep publishing after all. A nonprofit journalism organization has stepped up to acquire the newspaper, which has survived for more than two centuries.

The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which runs The Baltimore Banner and is financed by the hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr., said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the newspaper’s current owner, Block Communications, to buy the assets of The Post-Gazette and run it as a nonprofit. The transaction is expected to take effect on May 4, ensuring there is no gap in publishing.

The deal is a rare spot of good news for the media industry, which has endured waves of metropolitan and local newspaper closures and widening local news deserts around the country for the past two decades. A 2025 report by Northwestern University found that more than 130 papers had shut in the preceding year alone.

The Post-Gazette is one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, tracing its history back to The Pittsburgh Gazette, which was founded in 1786. It has been owned by Block Communications since 1927, and has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes. Its closure would have made Pittsburgh one of the largest metropolitan areas without a major newspaper."

‘Proactively fall in line’: Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly changed content after Trump returned to office; Politico, April 5, 2026

IRIE SENTNER, Politico ; ‘Proactively fall in line’: Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly changed content after Trump returned to office

Two former employees said they believed the museum was altering its content preemptively to avoid unwanted negative attention from the Trump administration.

"In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.”

The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his worldview. They also coincided with the administration’s efforts to remove content related to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal websites...

The museum pulled from its website a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” at some point after Aug. 29, 2025, the last time the page was captured on the Internet Archive. That page provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between American de jure racism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about “African American Soldiers during World War II” and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust,” among other topics.

It also linked to a 2018 video on the museum’s YouTube channel featuring a conversation between a Holocaust survivor and a woman whose father was lynched in Alabama. That video is now unlisted, meaning it does not show up on the USHMM’s YouTube page but is still accessible via direct URL.

Leaders at the museum also renamed a one-day civic education workshop designed for college students from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” In an email, obtained by POLITICO, between a senior staff member at the museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and a staffer planning the workshop, the senior staff member said the change was necessary due to “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.”"

AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear.; The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2026

Bernie Sanders , The Wall Street Journal; AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear. It kills jobs, equality, connection, democracy and maybe the human race. Congress must act.

"The American people are deeply apprehensive about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on their lives. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 55% of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, 70% think AI will lead to fewer jobs, and only 5% think AI development is being led by people and organizations that represent their interests.

In the midst of all of this deep concern about the future of AI, 74% of Americans think the government isn't doing enough to regulate the use of AI."

Exclusive: Trump's DOJ says he's not required to turn over official records; Axios, April 1, 2026

Alex Isenstadt , Axios; Exclusive: Trump's DOJ says he's not required to turn over official records

[Kip Currier: This is an appalling anti-democratic determination by Trump 2.0's DOJ. The post-Watergate Presidential Records Act of 1978 was enacted through bipartisan legislating, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, to curb government corruption and promote transparency, in the wake of actions by Pres. Richard M. Nixon and his administration. The Act codifies that presidential records are the property of the federal government, not the President and the Executive Branch, and are public records.

Democratically-elected officials must be accountable to their citizenries. The Presidential Records Act represents a vital means, among others, for holding Presidents and their administrations accountable for their actions by ensuring preservation of and access to their records by present and future generations.]

"President Trump's Justice Department has concluded that a federal law requiring presidential records to be turned over to the government is unconstitutional, a senior White House official tells Axios.

Why it matters: The finding is an indication Trump will be reluctant to give all of his official records to the National Archives at the end of his term, as presidents have done for nearly a half-century under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

The law, passed in the post-Watergate era as a hedge against government corruption, states that every official record regarding a president's decisions or policies belongs to the U.S. government, not the president."

America's Newspapers emphasizes importance of protecting publishers’ intellectual property; Editor & Publisher, March 25, 2026

 Staff | America's Newspapers , Editor & Publisher; America's Newspapers emphasizes importance of protecting publishers’ intellectual property

"America’s Newspapers has issued the following statement in response to the comprehensive national legislative framework on artificial intelligence released by the Trump administration...

Specifically, the framework affirms that the creative works and unique identities of American innovators, creators and publishers must be respected in the age of AI. At the same time, it recognizes that artificial intelligence systems require access to information to learn and improve, and proposes a balanced approach that both enables innovation and safeguards the rights of content creators.

“America’s Newspapers strongly supports the administration’s recognition that high-quality journalism and original content are essential to the continued strength of our democracy and economy,” said Matt McMillan, chair of America’s Newspapers and CEO of Press Publications."

Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional; The New York Times, March 20, 2026

Erik Wemple , The New York Times; Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional

A federal judge tossed parts of the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets, saying they violated the First Amendment, in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times.

"A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets violate the First Amendment and issued an order tossing parts of the Defense Department’s policy, handing a victory to The New York Times, which filed suit in December over the restrictions.

Judge Paul Friedman, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also ordered the Pentagon to restore the press passes of seven journalists for The Times. They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security.

In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”

Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”

The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession; The New York Times, March 13, 2026

Deborah Pearlstein , The New York Times; The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession

"To fill those empty seats, the department has begun an increasingly desperate effort to recruit hires. (“Don’t be scared off by the transcript requirement,” a conservative law school reportedly told its students. “G.P.A. is not a strong factor.”) Even so, it seems too few lawyers are willing to take the chance. So the Trump administration last week offered up a different solution: a proposed rule that aims to shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations.

Such an arrangement would run afoul of a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which says that government lawyers are subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. The proposed rule would be challenged in court immediately if it ever took effect. It shouldn’t get that far, however. It would do much more than potentially give department lawyers a free pass to lie on the president’s behalf. It would severely limit the courts’ ability to offer any kind of independent check on the executive branch.

Rules requiring lawyers to serve as honest officers of the court have been adopted by every state and the District of Columbia. They serve a host of purposes, starting with the basic right to fairness. These rules are also critical to the independence of the courts, which depend on access to reliable evidence and accurate representations by counsel.

Such rules serve an especially critical function in constitutional democracies, which distinguish themselves from authoritarian regimes in part by insisting that truth and falsehood exist separately from whatever the government may assert...

The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power. And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth."

Trump Administration, in Apparent Reversal, Tries to Continue Fight Against Law Firms; The New York Times, March 3, 2026

 Michael S. Schmidt,Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, The New York Times; Trump Administration, in Apparent Reversal, Tries to Continue Fight Against Law Firms

The administration told a court on Monday that it was abandoning its defense of executive orders targeting the firms. But on Tuesday, the Justice Department appeared to abruptly change its position.

"The Trump administration indicated on Tuesday that it planned to renew its defense of executive orders that it had leveled against law firms, a sharp reversal a day after indicating that it would drop that fight in court, according to people familiar with the matter.

The situation remained fluid Tuesday morning. It was not immediately clear what legal strategy the administration would ultimately embrace or whether a court would allow the Justice Department to reverse course.

The Justice Department did not immediately comment. The White House declined to comment...

It was not immediately clear on Tuesday what had prompted the about-face. But one question that the administration’s decision a day earlier to abandon its cases raised was whether the deals it made with nine law firms would survive and whether those contracts — which were not made public — were considered unconstitutional given that the district court ruling would be final."

Trump drops attack on Big Law, but firms already capitulated; Democracy Docket, March 3, 2026

Marc Elias , Democracy Docket; Trump drops attack on Big Law, but firms already capitulated

"As pleased as I am with the outcome of these cases, this is not a story with a happy ending.

The capitulation of Big Law has done enormous damage to our democracy. Firms that were never targeted have stopped representing pro bono clients in voting rights and civil rights cases. Leaders in the profession are rarely willing to speak out. As everyday Americans challenge the illegality of Trump’s actions in the streets of our cities, large law firms remain notably absent.

No one who has paid attention over the past year will ever view the role of lawyers the same way again. Long after Trump leaves office, when we are cleaning up the rubble he leaves behind, the damage to the legal profession will endure.

That is why it is so important not only to remember those who stood and fought, but also those who cowered and gave in. For confidence to be restored, the leaders of the firms that made deals with Trump must be treated as pariahs in the legal world — just as the Ellisons will be in media and Sam Altman will be in tech. When the dust settles, we must be clear about who stood up for our democracy and who was willing to let it fall for personal gain.

I have been fighting — and winning — against Donald Trump for a long time. Yesterday, I was proud to see a hard-earned victory. But today, and in the days ahead, we must rebuild trust in the rule of law and our legal system — not only by celebrating those who did the right thing, but also by ensuring we never forget those who betrayed our cause."

Nine Law Firms Surrendered. Four Law Firms Won.; The New York Times, March 3, 2026

THE EDITORIAL BOARD, The New York Times; Nine Law Firms Surrendered. Four Law Firms Won.

"The four law firms that last year chose to fight President Trump’s illegal intimidation campaign have won vindication. Federal judges had already struck down Mr. Trump’s executive orders trying to punish the firms for representing or employing people he considered to be his political enemies. On Monday, the Trump administration abandoned its appeals of those rulings, accepting defeat.

The victories of the four firms — Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — are a triumph for justice and democracy. The executive orders that Mr. Trump signed early in his second term were based on the lie that the firms had done something wrong. In fact, their lawyers were merely doing their jobs. They happened to represent Democrats and liberal groups or participated in prior investigations of him. And his would-be punishments of the firms had the potential to damage them badly. The executive orders barred the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, activities that are a necessary part of many legal cases.

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president. The deals included promises to perform millions of dollars of pro bono work on behalf of Trump-friendly clients.

These nine firms all failed a high-stakes character test. Their leaders faced a choice between submitting to a bully and doing the right thing. The firms are not household names to most Americans, but it is worth listing them here. We hope that clients looking for fearless attorneys and law students deciding where to work will remember which elite firms were unwilling to fight back. Meekness is not a quality most people seek in a lawyer.

The first firm to fold was Paul Weiss, whose chairman at the time, Brad Karp, undertook what Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker described as a “desperate” campaign to reach a deal with Mr. Trump. The other eight firms were A&O Shearman; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Skadden Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher...

The four law firms that fought the White House read the situation correctly. They insisted on due process and relied on judges to protect their rights under the Constitution. The American legal system depends on due process. Nobody, not even the president, should be able simply to assert that a person or organization has behaved wrongly and then exact a punishment for that behavior."

Trump Administration Abandons Efforts to Impose Orders on Law Firms; The New York Times, March 2, 2026

Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times; Trump Administration Abandons Efforts to Impose Orders on Law Firms

The move amounts to a surrender in a clash that has led many law firms to submit to the president rather than face the threat of his executive orders

"The Trump administration on Monday abandoned its attempts to impose potentially crippling executive orders against law firms that refused to capitulate to the president, walking away from its appeal of victories the firms had won against the White House.

With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them.

The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind.

The battle over the executive orders had roiled the legal establishment and led many firms to submit to Mr. Trump rather than face the existential threat his directives represented. The orders barred the firms from government business and suggested that their clients could lose government contracts, spurring widespread panic in the legal profession."

Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary; Democracy Docket, February 18, 2026

Natalie Hausmann, Democracy Docket; Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary

"Olu Rouse clearly remembers the first time he voted.

He was a freshman at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), and he meticulously researched candidates before he cast his ballot at his on-campus voting site in the 2024 presidential primary election.

Today, that voting site doesn’t exist. 

Rouse, now a third-year student, is just one of the thousands of students in North Carolina who lack easy access to early voting sites on their college campuses — even as early voting for North Carolina’s primary election is underway.

That’s because the GOP-controlled North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) last month rejected early voting sites at NC A&T, the nation’s largest historically Black college, and three other college campuses across the state: Western Carolina University (WCU), the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (UNC-G) and Elon University.

Student advocates and voting rights experts have warned that the board’s decision represents a major assault on student voting rights in the state. But it has since also catalyzed student advocacy efforts to get out the vote.

Brian Kennedy, a senior policy analyst for the nonpartisan advocacy organization Democracy North Carolina, told Democracy Docket that this newest blow is just one of several efforts to suppress the Black vote across the state and narrow student voting access in general across the country.

“I think we’ve seen the blueprint for what voter suppression across the nation can look like here in North Carolina,” he said.

The legal battle

Rouse was one of dozens of students present at the Jan. 13 NCSBE meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, during which Republican state officials refused early voting sites at the four colleges, which together serve around 47,000 students.

Despite the objections of students who sent a letter to the board and showed up in person to protest the decision, the board denied two new midterm primary sites at UNC-G and NC A&T and rejected two existing sites at Elon University and WCU.  

Several students from NC A&T, WCU and UNC-G, as well as the College Democrats of North Carolina, raised their concerns in a lawsuit* against the board."

I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.; The New York Times, February 14, 2026

 Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times; I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.

"At the end of the century, a journalism scholar published a fascinating comparative study of regional newspapers in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. “Papers of the 1960s seem naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” Carl Sessions Stepp, the researcher, wrote. Newspapers of the ’90s were “better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist and more informative and public-spirited.”

This sounds, you might think, salutary for the health of democracy. But it may have been precisely this move, away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation, that led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw.

“As news grew more negative and more critical, people had more reason to find journalism distasteful,” the media scholar Michael Schudson wrote in a provocative essay on the problem of assessing trust in journalism. “What people do not like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes or their home teams.” No one, famously, likes the bearer of bad news.

Thinking back to that dinner with Bezos, I realized that something similar had happened. He flattered my chosen profession, reassuring me that it was not a cynical undertaking but something much more noble. He told me, in short, what I wanted to hear — and won my trust. In the intervening years, Bezos has apparently decided that his flattery is better aimed at a very different audience: Donald Trump.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Bezos notoriously demanded that The Post spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, at great cost to the paper. After the election, he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and joined the row of plutocrats at the inauguration. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump, spent tens of millions more to market the movie and donated to Trump’s absurd White House mega-ballroom project. It’s certainly one way to win trust.

The Post’s loss is others’ gain. Its best-known journalists have streamed out the door, joining thriving news organizations like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Times. These companies’ success, built on aggressive and independent reporting, makes me wonder whether the hand-wringing about trust is misplaced. In this new gilded age, maybe we should set aside trust and — as Bezos himself once urged — embrace skepticism."

Meet Aliya Rahman, Disabled U.S. Citizen Assaulted, Jailed & Traumatized by ICE in Minneapolis; Democracy Now, February 9, 2026

Democracy Now; Meet Aliya Rahman, Disabled U.S. Citizen Assaulted, Jailed & Traumatized by ICE in Minneapolis

"We speak with Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who was violently dragged from her car by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis last month and detained at the Whipple Federal Building, which has become the epicenter of the government’s immigration crackdown in the city. Rahman says she repeatedly told agents she was disabled and had a brain injury, but they ignored her pleas for medical attention or other accommodation. “I was taken out of that place unconscious,” says Rahman, who describes lasting injuries and trauma from her detention. Rahman was not charged with any crime. “What I saw in that detention center was truly horrific.”

We also speak with attorney Alexa Van Brunt, director of the Illinois office of the MacArthur Justice Center, who says victims of ICE violence like Rahman can sue the federal government for violating their rights, “but they cannot sue the officers in their individual capacity.”"