Policy is where ideas become lived reality. This beat explains how legislation, regulation, and government decisions affect everyday people, institutions, and the economy.
North Carolina’s push to end parking mandates exposes how car storage gets priced into rent. Alexandria Sands reported for Axios Charlotte that North Carolina lawmakers are close to passing House Bill 162, which would eliminate off-street parking minimums for developers statewide. The state Senate passed the bill 44 to 1, sending back to the House…
The Supreme Court didn’t just rule on Louisiana. It rewrote the rules of the game. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and, in the dissent’s language, rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion struck down…
Democracy starts narrowing before voters choose when the cost of candidacy filters who appears on the ballot. Reuters reported in September 2025 that real median U.S. household income was $83,730 in 2024. Former Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn wrote in The Guardian that research by Nicholas Carnes found only 2.3% of Democratic candidates had worked…
The Court protected citizenship by birth, but the ruling also showed how belonging remains vulnerable when executive power treats identity as an administrative category. AP reported on June 30 that the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-3 decision, rejecting Donald Trump’s attempt to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to…
The split shows autonomous vehicle companies are moving from platform experiments to local operating control. Reuters reported on June 29 that Uber and Waymo ended their robotaxi partnership in Phoenix, closing a pilot that began in 2023 and had placed Waymo’s autonomous vehicles inside Uber’s ride-hailing and delivery network. Waymo said the vehicles used in…
The company’s new background check standards are the strongest in its history. They’re also arriving under legal pressure — and years after the harm was documented. Uber announced Friday that it is expanding the list of criminal convictions that will permanently disqualify drivers from its platform — and applying those standards retroactively to its existing…
A congressional resolution, an academic report, and SSC’s own reporting from Dubai are converging on the same finding: the creator economy runs on labor law that was never built for it. The creator economy is worth $250 billion globally and is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027. It provides income for 12 percent of…
When the bus doesn’t come, the job doesn’t start Newark sits at the center of one of the most transit-dense regions in the country. It has direct rail connections to Manhattan, a light rail system, bus lines running through its neighborhoods, and Penn Station as a regional hub. None of that infrastructure has translated into…
The company urged Congress to protect state oversight. Its own relationship with Washington tells the more complicated story. Reuters reported on June 10 that Anthropic urged Congress not to preempt state AI laws unless it passes a federal framework at least as rigorous as the one Anthropic is proposing. The position is substantive: Anthropic released…
More than 40% of rural hospitals are operating at a loss. Medicaid cuts just made the math worse. Chartis, the rural health analytics firm, published its 2026 Rural Health State of the State report in February documenting that more than 40% of all rural hospitals are operating at a loss, with 417 facilities identified as…