Comment on J.D. Vance’s MAGA-Moderate Tightrope

The annual United Nations climate change summits are always a little crazy: tens of thousands of delegates from every corner of the globe descending on a far-flung city for two weeks of heated discussions on the future of global climate policy. This time around the conference—known this year as COP29—is nothing short of surreal.

When Charles Yu was a writer for the dystopian sci-fi HBO series Westworld, he went to set one day and saw dozens of naked actors lying on the floor, playing broken shells of automatons waiting to be revived. “They’re literally bodies lying on metallic shelving—and that’s somebody’s job,” Yu remembers thinking.

(NEWLAND, N. C.) — The Cartner family had known since last year that one of their farm’s Christmas trees would be headed to the White House this winter. But then Hurricane Helene struck, unleashing a deadly deluge across western North Carolina, including Avery County, where Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm has stood for decades.

mdash; House Leader Hakeem Jeffries won reelection Tuesday as the Democratic leader, receiving support from his colleagues despite the party’s inability to win back majority control of the chamber in the November election. Jeffries of New York was chosen during an internal party vote of the House Democrats underway at the Capitol.

SEATTLE — Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are bracing for what is expected to be a powerful storm, with heavy rain and winds set to pummel the region and potentially cause power outages and flash floods. The Weather Prediction Center issued excessive rainfall risks beginning Tuesday and lasting through Friday as the strongest atmospheric river — long plumes of moisture stretching far over the Pacific Ocean — that California and the Pacific Northwest has seen this season bears down on the region.

Donald Trump is often described as unprecedented, but in winning a non-consecutive second term—thus occupying two numerical slots in the presidential order—he has a significant antecedent: Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president. For more than a century, Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House during the postbellum period, enjoyed the distinction of being America’s only president to serve non-consecutive terms.