ON MARCH 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party. The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsui

THE WORLD’S FIRST Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, b

YOU CAN TRACK QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore

TRUMP FRAMES IMMIGRATION as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In fact, the nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the f

IN EARLY APRIL, Sarah Moore got news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis “Vega” Moore, had been denied parole—again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. Vega, 45, has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and ar

AT LEAST A FEW times a week, when no elections are underway, the Maricopa County recorder’s office hosts tours of the Tabulation and Election Center, or MCTEC, a gray, one-story concrete fortress on the edge of downtown Phoenix where as many as 2.4 m

IT WAS DAWN and we were in Sunland Park, New Mexico, a few hundred feet from the border, watching the US government surveillance towers that watch all of us. They were positioned atop a bald hillside, taking in a constant stream of images from all an

ON JULY 1, Steve Bannon opened his podcast, War Room, with a brief programming note. “This is federal prisoner 05635509,” he said. “We are live from just down the road from Danbury prison.” Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser now serving four months for

THE DESERT AROUND Artesia, New Mexico, had cooled to a comfortable 79 degrees by the time local police officer Beth Hahn steered her black-and-white Chevy Tahoe into the parking lot of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It was just after 9:

IN 1986, Oxford University Press published The Uncensored War. An analysis by Daniel C. Hallin of media consumed in the United States during fighting in Vietnam, the monograph remains an important account of America’s first televised war. But a small

THE WEEK after former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, he retreated to Phoenix and the friendly stage offered by Dream City Church. It wasn’t Trump’s first appearance at the Pentecostal church, one of the largest megachurches i

ON A WEDNESDAY in early March, a lab scientist named Carlo removed a paper strip containing a dried blood sample from a plastic envelope. He inserted it into a contraption resembling a large hole punch, and I watched as a small wine-colored disc drop

THE OTHER DAY I asked ChatGPT about a political story I’ll never forget: “What was the 47 percent issue about?” Its answer: The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of

IN 2016, DONALD TRUMP vowed to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in office, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migran

THE BORDER PATROL’S jurisdiction isn’t confined to southwestern deserts or isolated northern checkpoints: Federal law empowers agents to board vehicles and vessels “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States,” whethe

THE NATIONAL BORDER Patrol Museum, which sits inside a squat building on a decommissioned bombing range on the edge of El Paso’s Franklin Mountains, has a musty and scattershot feel, as if one of America’s most troubled law enforcement agencies has j

IN FEBRUARY, as the state of Texas went to court to defend itself from an “invasion,” and a far-right convoy calling itself “God’s army” hosted anti-immigrant rallies throughout the Southwest, Fox News repeatedly turned to one of Donald Trump’s trust

AFTER MORE THAN 50 years on the list of the most dangerous illegal drugs in the United States, marijuana is due for a downgrade. In a historic shift earlier this year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) moved to change the drug’s designation u

IN EARLY MAY 2022, reproductive health researcher Liz Mosley was at a dinner celebrating her first day as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the news broke: A leaked draft of the Dobbs decision revealed the

LAST YEAR, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily

LAST SEPTEMBER, when the Biden administration canceled several oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it cited in its decision the expertise of the Native “original stewards” of the land. The move was the fruit of government-

THE CONVERSION therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to

ON A WARM January evening, mayoral candidate Wanda Arzuaga López makes her way through Juncos, Puerto Rico, visiting a neighborhood of 1940s-style casitas and breadfruit trees sitting behind chain-link fences. Joined by her campaign director and four

ISRAEL DECLARED its independence in 1948. That same year, the United Nations adopted the convention that defined genocide as a crime. The tension between these two “never agains” was there from the start. The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Rap

along the coastal 101 in brilliant blue, the bright May sky beginning to soften toward sunset. Chin Rodger felt a lift of optimism as she exited the freeway and arrived at a sushi restaurant tucked away in the tony town of Montecito, where she greete

IN LATE FEBRUARY, after Donald Trump had nearly vanquished the entirety of the Republican primary field, his spokesman, Steven Cheung, took aim at the one opponent still standing. “Birdbrain, are you a liar or just plain stupid?” he posted on X. “Bir

ALVIN TAYLOR still remembers the sight each day as he’d return from school, of more houses in his neighborhood being burned to the ground. He was about 8 years old when the fires came for his home. Fenita Kirkwood recalls listening, as a 9-year-old g

GROWING UP, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” the

IT’S HARD TO summarize the poignancy, vulnerability, and harrowing beauty of Another Word for Love, a new memoir by journalist Carvell Wallace that mixes vignettes of his hardscrabble journey from boyhood to middle age with ruminations on culture, fa