WASHINGTON—Recommending that U.S. citizens exercise extreme caution if they plan to make the trip, the State Department issued a travel warning Wednesday for every American visiting Chili’s. “The travel advisory for the family restaurant specializing in American and Tex-Mex-inspired cuisine has been raised to level 3…
The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in a seditious conspiracy to disrupt the electoral count, the stiffest punishment to date to stem from the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. What do you think?
As LGBTQ+ rights continue to be eroded across the country, many transgender students have found themselves forbidden from attending their own high school proms. The Onion asked parents to explain why they support banning trans kids from school dances, and this is what they said.
WASHINGTON—Noting that neural networks have been trained on trillions of images of liquids and spoons, experts testified before Congress Tuesday to warn that AI could one day be smart enough to eat soup. “With the technology’s exponentially growing capabilities, it appears likely that our machine learning algorithms…
BRYAN, TX—As soon as she reported Tuesday to the federal prison camp where she is to be incarcerated, former biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes is said to have immediately defrauded the biggest, toughest inmate she could find in an effort to gain the respect of her fellow prisoners. “You’re getting in on the ground…
NEW YORK—Saying the initial projectiles often irreversibly shift the dynamic between driver and officer, a study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the first bullets fired by the police during a traffic stop consistently dictate how the rest of the interaction will go.…
KYIV, UKRAINE—Gazing wistfully at an old framed photo of the 53-year-old American, Ukrainian officials admitted Tuesday that the country had been in shambles ever since Hunter Biden left. “We don’t want your Abrams tanks or your Javelin missiles or your billions of dollars in aid—we just want Hunter back,” said…
Mark Billingham was taking a real risk writing this book. After two decades of turning one excellent crime novel after another featuring North London’s Tom Thorne, he’s now put that series aside (he says temporarily) and has created an entirely new series set in — of all places — Blackpool. He’s chosen to go with several well-worn tropes including the quirky hero (he keeps pet rats), the sidekick who is a perfect fit because she’s his opposite in every way, and a back-story involving the unsolved murder of the hero’s wife. This could have gone terribly wrong. But Billingham is too good a story-teller to get it wrong. Instead, he’s written an outstanding novel full of likeable (and unlikeable) characters and stories you actually care about. My only gripe is that book ends with a cliffhanger — of course it does — and we’ll have to wait a whole year to find out what happens next.
Melvyn Dubofsky wrote one of the great books about the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and followed it up with this short biography of the IWW’s most famous leader, ‘Big Bill’ Haywood. It’s a good, concise introduction to the life of Haywood, though one walks away from it wondering what exactly made Haywood into a legend. He moved in and out of the IWW and the Socialist Party, sometimes excelling at leading strikes, sometimes leading them into dead ends. He fled the US at a time when the government was busy jailing or deporting radicals (or worse) and wound up in exile in the Soviet Union. He seemed to be a brilliant administrator, which is interesting, as one imagines him more as a fiery orator than as an efficient office manager. Haywood presided over the militant union at a time of spectacular growth. Had the state not intervened to crush it, one wonders what might have happened. Recommended.