How decisions reshape people’s lives.
Explore the laws, government actions and institutional decisions that change the terms of everyday life. We explain what a decision does, who it reaches and what to watch as it takes effect.
HBCUs have welcomed federal dollars routed around Congress. The same executive power is now raiding homes and subpoenaing universities, and that should change how Black higher education thinks about its future.
Every election cycle, political campaigns spend millions of dollars trying to identify the voters who could determine the outcome. They purchase advertising, organize rallies, recruit volunteers and commission research to understand which communities might help deliver a victory. Yet in Ohio, one of the most consequential political constituencies has remained largely disconnected from the electoral process: hundreds of thousands of eligible Black voters who are not casting ballots.
The penalty, the largest ever against Meta, stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company says it will appeal.
The State Department tells Americans not to travel to Haiti for any reason. With Temporary Protected Status gone, the U.S. is sending hundreds of Haitians back to the same violence, and that contradiction demands a better answer.
The justices left in place a lower-court order that keeps hormone therapy and other gender-related care going in federal prisons, with Justices Alito and Thomas saying they would have let the administration’s restrictions take effect.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill keeps its access to federal funding after resolving a series of civil rights investigations. But the agreement imposes new limits on admissions, scholarships and campus programs, offering a clearer picture of how federal enforcement is changing higher education.
New Pew Research Center findings show broad confidence in election administration ahead of the November midterms. But Democrats and Republicans are increasingly worried about different threats, and trust in mail voting is declining.
Cannabis is now an accepted commercial product across much of America, yet Texas still criminalizes recreational possession. That contradiction is harder to defend when decades of enforcement data show Black Americans have borne most of the consequences.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the administration wants a regulated marketplace for peptides that remain unapproved and largely unproven. On the same day, TikTok began blocking searches for some of the most popular ones. The products are moving toward the mainstream before the science or the rules have caught up.
Since September, Donald Trump has appeared far more often in Democratic campaign ads than Republican ones. The gap shows two approaches to the midterms: one party is making Trump central to its argument, while the other is focusing on issues and its own candidates.
Imagine your child spends years earning strong grades, excelling on tests, and preparing for a competitive magnet school, only to discover that academic achievement alone may not secure a seat. For families in Montgomery County, Maryland, that uncertainty has become a legal battle headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices agreed to hear a challenge involving four selective middle school programs, where a lottery-based admissions system evaluates students partly against classmates at their own schools. The Association for Education Fairness argues that the changes were designed to increase Black and Latino enrollment at the expense of Asian American students. The school district maintains that its policy does not explicitly consider race.
More than 600,000 eligible Black voters sat out Ohio’s 2022 midterms. New reporting suggests the problem is more complicated than apathy. It involves economic pressure, broken trust and a political system that shows up in Black communities mostly when it needs their votes.
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