CULT OF JAMES

South Dakota announced a 44 percent increase in licensed Native American foster homes. The number went from 93 to 134 between July 2025 and February 2026. The state calls this progress. Here is the other number: 69 percent of South Dakota’s 1,719 foster children are Native American. Native people are 9 percent of the state’s population. That ratio — 9…

SpaceX is offering 30% of its IPO to retail investors. Three times the typical allocation for a mega-cap offering. Shares available through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab. One of the lead underwriters told Reuters they’d “never seen anything like” the expected retail demand. That’s the invitation. Here’s what you’re buying. Class A shares carry one vote each. Class B shares —…

SpaceX filed its S-1 on May 20, 2026. The largest initial public offering in American history. $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. June 12 listing on Nasdaq. The financial press called it historic. The prospectus calls it something else. A prospectus is a legal document. Filed under penalty of perjury. It tells you what you’re buying. This one does…

On Saturday, in a packed church in Catacaos, northern Peru, Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu addressed the Tallán Indigenous community. “We are here to ask for your forgiveness in the name of the Church,” he said. “We are late. We should have come 20 years ago, and we are truly sorry.” The Sodalitium Christianae Vitae was founded in Lima in 1971 by…

On April 23, 2026, a bulldozer scraped a fifty-foot-wide path through a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Sonoran Desert. The Las Playas Intaglio — 200 feet long, carved into the hardpan of what is now the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge — had survived a millennium of sun, wind, and monsoon. It did not survive a…

The phrase came from a Republican. Jim Bolin served in the South Dakota Legislature for sixteen years. When he described how redistricting worked in 2011 and 2021, he didn’t mention fairness. He mentioned the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “silent partner in the room.” There was, he said, “a strong feeling on the part of the Legislature that…

Seventy-one minutes. Beat Saber isn’t a game when you play it for seventy-one minutes. It’s not a warm-up. It’s not killing time before bed. It’s a decision to stand in a dark room and swing until the weight lifts — the other weight, the one that doesn’t show on a scale. 838 calories. That’s more than most people burn on…

In 1998, forty-six state attorneys general settled with the tobacco industry. The Master Settlement Agreement was worth $246 billion over twenty-five years — the largest civil litigation settlement in American history at that time. Tribes were not at the table. The settlement went to states. Over nineteen years, $425 billion in tobacco revenue flowed in — $148 billion from the…

The Ohlone people gathered acorns on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for at least 4,700 years. We know this because of the shellmounds — more than 425 burial sites ringing the bay, living cemeteries where ancestors were laid to rest in layers of shell and earth. Almost all of them have been paved over. The West Berkeley Shellmound,…

The Cherokee Nation was the first tribe to sue. In April 2017, before most state attorneys general had even convened task forces, the Cherokee Nation filed suit against McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart. The claim was specific: these companies violated sovereign Cherokee law by failing to prevent the diversion of pain pills to the black market, flooding…