Salon

Trauma creates superheroes, we’re told. Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents’ murder and made vengeance his life’s mission. Superman survived his planet’s destruction. “Lanterns” opens with the shocking scene of John Stewart’s father, John Sr. (J. Alphonse Nicholson), aiming a gun at him and shooting an apple off his head when he was 10. Then he affectionately hugs young John (Cairo Cash Lee), who smiles up at daddy, proud he didn’t flinch.

My grandmother has always been a rattler. When I was a child, she gave me a book called “Gus Was a Friendly Ghost,” about a genial little ghost who makes grilled-cheese sandwiches and occasionally gives himself away by bumping around somewhere out of sight. Gus cannot help rattling. He is a ghost. It’s what they do. This is, more or less, my grandmother’s domestic mode.

Canadians have made it clear: They don’t want to become the 51st state. For the record, and despite the increasingly delusional geography lessons delivered by the Trump administration, actual Americans overwhelmingly agree. That’s without even dealing with the fact that Canada has 10 provinces and three territories, all with distinct identities, except perhaps for Saskatchewan. (Sorry! Joke!) So in the imaginary universe where this scenario plays out, aren’t we’re talking about 60 states or so?

It’s easy to see why Ken Paxton thought he could waltz right into the role of senator from Texas. Sure, the state’s Republican nominee and current attorney general is widely seen as one of the most corrupt men in politics, a man with so many scandals that even his fellow Republicans impeached him. (Sadly, the Texas Senate refused to convict him.) Still, Donald Trump won over 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024, despite the Jan.

Despite efforts to tout AI infrastructure as a boon to the American economy, as well as a home-field advantage to a country steeped in capitalistic aspiration, hawkers of this technology have failed to convince 70% of Americans that AI and its data centers are anything other than a hostile intrusion. To the public, they are monoliths that pollute the environment, drive up energy costs, strip people of their livelihoods and degrade the meaning of art.

It’s tempting to think that this tactic won’t work on the politically savvy people who pay attention to PAC names. But our research shows otherwise. To test the effects of deceptive PAC names, we conducted a controlled online experiment involving more than 650 participants recruited through Prolific, an online academic research studies platform. The sample was balanced by gender and diverse in age, though participants were somewhat more educated than the general U.S. population.

Dutch health officials are warning people about a potentially lethal new drug bearing a familiar face: President Donald Trump. The Trimbos Institute, a drug addiction and mental health organization in the Netherlands, issued a national “Red Alert” after several ecstasy pills shaped like Trump’s head were submitted to drug-testing centers and found to contain dangerously high concentrations of PMMA. “Absolutely do not use these pills,” the institute warned.

President Donald Trump is once again calling on the federal government to punish a news organization over coverage he doesn’t like — this time targeting NBC’s Kristen Welker for describing his recent political endorsements as having “mixed results.” In a lengthy Truth Social post Sunday morning, Trump attacked the “Meet the Press” moderator as the “Unpopular ‘Hostess’” of what he called “Meet the Fake Press” and accused her of deliberately misrepresenting his success in Republican primary races.

A Florida grand jury found that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money and used it for political purposes — but concluded it could not determine who was responsible well enough to bring criminal charges.

Every time a megacorporation does something that is so categorically, unequivocally, indisputably, jaw-droppingly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, all-caps “BAD”, one has to wonder: Haven’t the greaseballs in charge heard of a little thing called karma?