On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s voting map on the basis that the state had illegally used race as a consideration when it created a new majority-Black district. Observers say the ruling could have major implications across the country for how future district boundary decisions are made under the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, ahead of the November midterms, lawmakers in several states have been redrawing their district maps to favor one party or the other, or are considering such reconfigurations.
Q&A: The political calculus—and actual math—of gerrymandering
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Brexit sent waves of financial volatility through European markets, reshaping how risk traveled between countries and exposing how tightly connected the continent’s financial systems had become, according to new research from the University of Surrey [...]
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A new study of online communities suggests that their interaction dynamics can amplify small, local imbalances in opinions, rapidly turning initially mixed-opinion communities into highly-polarized ones—even without the algorithms and homogeneity-seeking behaviors typically blamed for [...]
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Many scholars have studied the effects of colonial management on terrestrial resources, but what about the effect of colonialism on bodies of water? A new article in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science [...]
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The global financial order has entered a new, shifting and disruptive era of nationalism and these changes lay bare the difference between the haves and have nots, according to a new study by Charles Darwin [...]
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“Mercy,” a film released in January 2026, depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in the near future: a city riddled with violence, homelessness, and civic disorder. California’s response is to set up the Mercy Capital Court, [...]
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A Florida law designed to prevent gun violence by temporarily removing firearms from people at risk of harming themselves or others is used unevenly across the state, according to a new study. The study, published [...]
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Eighty-one years after Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in a Berlin bunker, a viral video on TikTok shows an AI-generated vision of the Nazi dictator standing in Antarctica, shoulders broad and face smiling, [...]
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Hostage-taking by nation-states is emerging as an overlooked consequence of the more unstable and dangerous world that’s been created by the fracturing rules-based order. In an increasingly might-is-right system of international relations, malign actors have [...]
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Everyone on Earth takes a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue [...]
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More than a third of Americans have lost relationships with friends, family members, romantic partners, or others due to political differences, according to a study. Mertcan Güngör and Peter Ditto examined survey data from thousands [...]
