Laurels and Darts

Rage-inducing machines, gambling slop, and big bad kids’ hockey.

A documentary that resonates, why the press needs to pay more attention to Truth Social madness, and an impressive investigation from the Post and Courier.

Filming the correspondents’ dinner breach, Brendan Carr’s offensive play, and a damning investigation from the Tampa Bay Times.

Powerful reporting from The Intercept on Lebanon, ghoulishness from Forbes, and the Miami Herald reveals the harms of gambling addiction.

Reporters and content creators team up in the name of accountability. Plus: A wild tale of misrepresentation out west; following the money in Pennsylvania.

Impactful reporting from the San Antonio Express-News; Fargo columnists fed to the wood chipper; profiling the Big Beautiful Bill’s ugliness.

Examining “crisis pregnancy” centers in rural parts of Texas that lack maternal care. Plus: Bad AI practice and CNN’s good reporting from the West Bank.

SFGate’s national parks bureau makes waves. Plus: AI slop on slop at Vanity Fair, and holding Grammarly’s CEO accountable.

Noah Shachtman lands at the Times, somehow. Plus: A strong start for a Substack looking westward, and a Banner week in Baltimore.

Plus, why we should let Trump go to voicemail, and great work from Charleston’s Post and Courier.

Devastation in Iran. Plus: The death of a refugee in Buffalo, and the military’s “simmering white Christian nationalism.”

A profile of El Mencho. Plus: An incredibly long State of the Union that no one will remember; history repeats, nastily, in Georgia.

Ann Curry reports from Sudan. Plus: Second-person scenarios, and AI mayhem.

A tool for parsing the Epstein dumps. Plus: Papers clash in the Deep South; a decades-long Florida waitlist.

Plus: Silence from the White House press corps, a weird AI gimmick, and a brilliant zine.