The Latest

An Indian court told airlines to stop dumping feces during flights, and a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York stopped in Ireland so passengers could use the bathroom. U.S. Customs and Border Protection began asking certain foreign travelers for lists of their social-media accounts, and Korean Air said crew members are now permitted to use stun guns. Scientists said the discovery of a fossilized wing bone belonging to the prehistoric Tingmiatornis arctica suggests the North Pole was once as warm as Florida, and snow fell in the Saharan town of Ain Sefra for the first time in 40 years. Read more...

Lessons from the BP oil disaster

Idi Amin’s torture chambers

Greeting the holidays in an age of mass incarceration

Drinking in Trump’s America

In Austin, a woman was arrested for attempting to set fire to her home because her roommate was planning a party to which she was not invited, and in Achram, Nepal, a 15-year-old girl suffocated to death after she lit a fire in the small hut to which she had been banished for menstruating.^[29][30] A 66-year-old albatross named Wisdom laid an egg.^[31] Two female employees at a sex shop in San Bernardino fought off an armed robber by hurling dildos at him; an algebra teacher in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, was reprimanded for requiring that his 14-year-old students solve for the time it would take to send a nude photo; and two high-school freshmen in Omaha were charged with lewd conduct for giving their teacher turnovers frosted with their semen, which she then unknowingly ate. Read more...

Life and death in Duterte's war on drugs

James Marcus on Donald Trump, Austin Smith on the Green Bay Packers, Richard Manning on the water crisis in Flint, Jeremy Miller on the war on wolves, Jennifer Szalai on Zadie Smith, a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and more

A woman in Tampa, Florida, was charged with transmitting threats in interstate commerce after she sent messages such as “You gonna die” to the parent of one of the 20 children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, which she believed was a hoax created by the Obama Administration to promote gun control.

"In a certain way, the Democrats lost to Trump not through stupidity but through cupidity."

Illustrations of theater buildings in New York City, as they appeared between 1910 and today

The Presidential Inaugural Committee advertised two tickets to an “intimate policy discussion” with Cabinet members for between $100,000 and $249,000, and, for more than a million dollars, eight tickets to a “candlelight” dinner with an appearance by the president-elect. Trump met over dinner with Mitt Romney, who is under consideration for secretary of state, at Jean Georges in Manhattan, where they ate sautéed frogs’ legs, diver scallops with caramelized cauliflower and caper-raisin emulsion, a prime sirloin with citrus glazed carrots, and a chocolate cake. “What I’ve seen through these discussions I’ve had with President-elect Trump,” said Romney, who during the election was a member of the Never Trump movement, “gives me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us.” In Long Island, Trump attended a “villains and heroes”-themed costume party dressed as himself. Read more...

The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red

The privatization of Youngstown's public schools

Concrete barriers and metal barricades were installed around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York Police Department officials reported that the city is spending more than a million dollars a day to protect Trump and his family, and it was announced that the Secret Service may have to rent a floor of Trump Tower to create a command post for its agents. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed a petition to begin a recount of votes in Wisconsin, and said she would file similar petitions in Michigan and Pennsylvania, a move that Trump described as a “scam.” “I won the popular vote,” said the president-elect, who did not win the popular vote. Read more...

The leader, in 1969

Rudolph Giuliani and the politics of personality

"There is trauma in a slaughterhouse and some seeped into me."

Trump used his Twitter account to attack negative coverage in the New York Times, to criticize the television program Saturday Night Live for being biased and unfunny, to complain about audience members booing vice president-elect Mike Pence at a performance of the historical hip-hop musical Hamilton, and to promote a story about how he saved a Ford automotive plant that was, in fact, never in jeopardy of closing. An analysis found that “fake news,” or propaganda, websites generate more traffic on Facebook than major news outlets, and Oxford Dictionaries announced that the word of the year was “post-truth.” Read more...

Marine Le Pen in the age of Trump

Andrew Cockburn on the New Red Scare, Kiera Feldman on the right to choose in Rapid City, Fred Bahnson on feral faith in the age of climate change, and more  

"Mitterand remains an emblematic figure for President François Hollande, who is trying to attach himself to his predecessor as he tanks in the polls."

Donald Trump, a real-estate developer endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, was elected president of the United States. Following the election, the Canadian government’s immigration website crashed, the Dow Jones temporarily plummeted, two LGBT suicide hotlines reported a spike in call volume, and more than 4.3 million Americans signed a petition asking state electors to pick as president former candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by a margin of at least a million but failed to win a majority in the Electoral College. “The Electoral College is a disaster for democracy,” Trump tweeted in 2012. Trump appointed the editor of an alt-right news site as his chief strategist, and more than 400 hate crimes were reported across the country. Read more...

Liana Finck's commentary on a song by Woody Guthrie. See more...

Election night at the Midtown Hilton

An excerpt from George McGovern's diary.

At New York’s Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, where students have correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential race since 1968, Hillary Clinton won a mock election with 52 percent of the vote. Parents in Spain asked their children’s teachers not to assign homework, and more than 1,800 public primary schools were closed in New Delhi, where exposure to air pollution was said to be equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day. Read more...

An afternoon with the man behind the Republican Hindu Coalition

A 20-year-old woman in Texas was arrested after she rear-ended a police car while trying to take a topless selfie, a man in Arizona stopped to order food at an In-N-Out Burger drive-through window while being chased by police, and a 28-year-old man in Florida fell out of and then had his leg run over by his pickup truck on his way home from a strip club. Read more...

Seven militants are acquitted in takeover of Oregon Wildlife Refuge; Christopher Ketcham traces the history of the Bureau of Land Management