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Presidents receive a lot of gifts from foreign dignitaries; they keep hardly any. Federal law bars government employees from accepting any gift from a foreign government valued at more than $390. The number derives from a 1966 law barring gifts above “minimal value” to halt the flow of luxury cars and prize horses from favor-seeking […]

On March 7, the US awoke to a fresh cache of internal CIA documents posted on WikiLeaks. They detail the spy organization’s playbook for cracking digital communications. WikiLeaks claims to have large portions of the CIA’s hacking arsenal in a series called Vault 7 (though the first information dump didn’t contain any of the code […]Read More

YouTube’s imminent US streaming service, YouTube TV, boasts more than 40 live-TV channels, a cloud DVR, simultaneous streaming across three devices at a time, and other perks for a rather reasonable rate of $35 a month. With the product, which is expected to launch before summer, the Google-owned video service joins others in offering so-called […]

Bethesda, Maryland A few days before Christmas last year, Haley Garland posted a photo of herself holding up her hand showing off a new engagement ring. “If there wasn’t enough sparkle in Nashville before we got here… there’s plenty now,” said the caption. The location on the photo was tagged as Marriott’s Gaylord Opryland Resort […]Read More

Something about Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes it worth returning to again and again—and it’s not the mom jeans and Cibo Matto cameos. As with any classic, the casual quinquennial binge-watch of the American show, which ran from 1997 to 2003, reliably rewards its viewers with new insights. Two decades on, its biggest theme—the battle […]Read More

At a rally in Istanbul on Saturday, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lashed out at the Netherlands, after Dutch officials banned a rally in Rotterdam in his support and revoked permission for Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu to address expatriate voters there. “They don’t know anything about politics or international diplomacy,” said Erdoğan, according the […]Read More

It’s an infuriating irony that the field of women’s fashion remains largely dominated by men. In 2015, New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted that fewer than 20% of the labels showing at Paris Fashion Week had female creative directors. Chanel? Karl Lagerfeld. Louis Vuitton? Nicolas Ghesquière. Yves Saint Laurent? Then, Hedi Slimane. Now, […]Read More

“I am so shrieking old,” wrote Canadian author Margaret Atwood in a Reddit “ask me anything” earlier this week. At 77, the author of the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is having a moment. The book’s sales have surged, likely due to what some call the “Trump bump” for dystopian literature, and a Hulu […]Read More

On Friday, the administration of US president Donald Trump requested that 46 Obama-era US attorneys submit their resignations. Replacing a former administration’s prosecutors is not unusual in itself. But one name on the list came as a surprise: Preet Bharara, the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Although Bharara was appointed by […]

“Disconnect” and “misunderstanding” are two words increasingly being bandied about by political scientists and news commentators to describe the state of social affairs in the US. In the era of president Donald Trump, college campuses are one of the clearest examples of the level of division around. A new study of 706 university presidents from […]

In 1990, SETI researchers first spotted Pan, one of Saturn’s 62 officially recognized moons, tucked away among the planet’s rings, but it would be another 27 years before they could see it up close. On March 7, one of NASA’s spacecraft, Cassini sent researchers at the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory of Operations (CICLOPS) in Boulder, […]Read More

For years scientists considered humpback whales to be some of nature’s biggest loners. That is, until observers started spotting throngs of these creatures hanging out in supergroups and feeding frantically en masse. It turns out that humpback whales, like humans, enjoy eating at parties. A study published in Plos One on March 1 reports the […]